Guest Review - The Dead (2010)

Director(s): HOWARD J. FORD and JONATHAN FORD  

Country: UK

In a short piece I wrote several months ago for Videotape Swapshop on George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), I light heartedly remarked on the prolificacy, or over saturation, of zombie films within the contemporary horror canon as having become “ten a penny”. To elaborate on this comment, I would like to consider what might be perceived as a cyclical regression or perhaps the creative distress of the genre belonging to the Living Dead. This is to say that: since the late 70s, the undead in horror film have chewed on the bones of exploitation; groaned and wailed through the grue caked cityscapes of revisionism; shuffled down the path of post-modernism and found themselves back at the beginning of the nightmare – collected as a clawing mob outside the fortress of the High Concept. In a sense, the Morti Viventi sub genre has finally started to eat itself…

George A. Romero Poster Gallery

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) #1 - US poster

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD #2 - Italian Poster

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD #3 - West German poster

Masters of Horror: Homecoming (2005)

Dir: JOE DANTE
Country: USA

First Transmitted - 02/12/2005
Masters of Horror - Season 1, Episode 6

The majority of episodes that comprise the two seasons of Masters of Horror vanished, in my opinion justifiably, into a cultural limbo that is only navigated by the most hardened of horror veterans. By and large there was little of prominence here, not even the heavily scented whiff of nostalgia - the horror directors of yesteryear continued their depressing plunge into the patchy avenues of mediocrity. However there were two episodes in the first series that did manage to break the shackles of the restricted form and gain unexpected column inches and unexpected praise. A lot of column inches and controversy was reserved for Takashi Miike’s breakout episode Imprint. For those unused to Miike’s grotesque excesses the episode was startling. In my view Takashi Miike was the only director invited to take part in the series that is a true contemporary Master of Horror. Even though he rarely works in the genre, his films are infused with a sense of surreal chaos, of societal breakdown…the only unifying factors being bizarre sexual perversions and brutal violence. The other episode that attracted the attention of the critical mainstream was the Joe Dante contribution Homecoming. I happen too agree with Dante’s assertion that all horror films are political. But traditionally horror has utilised metaphor and allegory, few horror films possess the literalness of Homecoming. It is not open to multiple readings, Homecoming is a liberal/leftist attack on the Bush Jr administration and the illegal war in Iraq that was fought on the back of a lie.

The Horde (2009)

Dir: YANNICK DAHAN and BENJAMIN ROCHER
Country: FRANCE

aka:
La horde

French horror cinema is enjoying a period of unparalleled creative success, and it comes as no surprise to me that this coincides with a period of civil unrest in the country. Issues such as the economy, pensions, the retirement age, and immigration have seen citizens take to the streets in protest. There is a noble tradition of striking in France, a tradition that seems in large part to have the sympathy of the population (an attitude which is quite different in the UK for example) and this melting pot of political upheaval and uncertainty surfaces quite notably in the latest gore soaked French horror film The Horde. The Horde follows in the footsteps of Switchblade Romance (2004), Frontier(s) (2007), Inside (2007) and Martyrs (2008) in its unflinching portrayal of blood and guts and while it lacks the subtlety and intelligence of Them (2006 - for my money the most accomplished French horror film of this recent new wave) it makes up for this with its political overtones. Several of these major French horror films are ‘home invasion’ narratives, they offer a bourgeois vision of bland suburbia which is then shattered by the return of past events. The Horde situates its action in a rotting apartment block in Northern Paris, flipping the convention of middle class point of view to the perspective of rogue cops, violent gangsters, and the disenfranchised working class.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

In a tribute to utter pointlessness I present yet another review of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I’ll get all those predictable words like seminal, legendary, and landmark out of the way now. No review of this film would be the same without them. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Romero’s film is seminal, legendary or a landmark, but that is probably besides the point. Three other adjectives do spring to mind though - amateurish, crude, and rudimentary. I’m not one to herd the sacred cows of the horror genre into the slaughterhouse just for the sake of it, but neither am I party to the sort of unthinking and mindless worship of a film on the say so of a bunch of ex hippy critics and academics who were around at the time of the films release. Histories are written retrospectively and its rarely mentioned for example that Night of the Living Dead was not a major success when it was first released. Instead the film languished for three or four years before it became a success on the Midnite Movie circuit. One version of history will have you believe that Romero’s film distilled all the anxieties of the day and was a white hot rebuke to mainstream American culture up there with Easy Rider (1969). The fact is all these qualities were drawn out of the film retrospectively. Therefore the much lauded allegorical dimension of the film was only appreciated when the time had passed. However Romero did have an effective metaphor for consumerism in his depiction of a zombie horde stripped of the mystique of voodoo.

[REC] (2007)

Dir: JAUME BALAGUERO & PACO PLAZA
Country: SPAIN

The history of Spanish horror is littered with compromise and censorship. In the 1960’s an all too brief liberalism towards the genre opened the way for filmmakers such as Jess Franco, Paul Naschy, Amando de Ossorio and Eloy de la Iglesia to explore the creative potentialities of horror, but this golden period wasn’t to last long. Horror came under increasing scrutiny from the imperious eye of the state, to an extent that the history of Spanish horror cannot be written without an awareness of the political culture of the times. This has given Spanish horror an allegorical dimension that has never really left it, a political and social consciousness that has endured up until the present day. [REC] is an excellent example of a horror film distilling social and political anxieties, but one which uses the signifiers of the zombie and reality television in order to give it trans-national appeal.

Nightmare City (1980)

Dir: UMBERTO LENZI
Country: ITALY/MEXICO/SPAIN

aka:
Incubo sulla citta contaminata
City of the Walking Dead

Like a great number of his contemporaries working within the blood soaked environs of the low budget/exploitation arena in 1970’s Italy, Umberto Lenzi is a director with a competent degree of generic utility. Lenzi is a journeyman filmmaker, a safe, if somewhat undistinguished pair of  hands. Lenzi offered some interesting and colourful contributions to the giallo genre which included Orgasmo (aka Paranoia, 1969), So Sweet…So Perverse (aka The Spider, 1969), and the beautifully titled Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972). His major contributions to the horror genre were three mindless and moronic entries into the cannibal subgenre - Deep River Savages (aka Man from Deep River, 1972), Eaten Alive! (1980) and the inexcusable cinematic excrement Cannibal Ferox (aka Make them Die Slowly, 1981). The result of these films is a cinematic legacy marked by sadism rather than proficiency, films lacking personality and any sense of stylistic coherence. A preponderance to rely on shock tactics has perhaps endeared Lenzi to cult film enthusiasts, but it takes very little effort to see that there is no depth to Lenzi’s cinematic offerings.

City of the Living Dead (1980)

Dir: LUCIO FULCI
Country: ITALY

aka:
Paura nella citta die morti viventi
The Gates of Hell

This intellectually challenged bloodbath has been given a new lease of life in 2010 thanks to the sterling efforts of British distributor Arrow Video. The treatment it has received from this company (including a blu ray presentation, and a 2 disc special edition) is far in excess of what the film deserves. This is the weakest link of Lucio Fulci’s loose ‘living dead’ trilogy; it lacks the saturated gothic surrealism of The Beyond (1981) and the claustrophobic eeriness of House by the Cemetary (1981), and only rivals those two films in its tasteless scenes of (mostly arbitrary) gore. This is a film that invents pointless subplots expressly for the purpose of an ultra-violent denoument - the drill in the head death of Giovanni Radice has to be one of the stupidest sequences in modern horror history. It gives the gore hounds something to jerk off too, but it is so peripheral to the story that it feels like its been edited in from another film. Fulci often gets a lot of stick for the nonsensical dumbness of his films, but surely much of the blame lies with the stilted and juvenile writing of Dardano Sachetti. Sachetti was the ‘brain’ behind many of the less sophisticated Italian horror films of the 70‘s and 80‘s. Although Fulci co-wrote this garbage, the film only comes to life when it functions in purely visual terms, and for that we must credit Fulci and his DOP Sergio Salvati.

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

Dir: JEAN ROLLIN
Country: FRANCE

aka:
La morte vivante
Lady Dracula
Zombie Queen

The Living Dead Girl is a curious and unusually accessible entry into the filmography of the French master of the surrealist macabre Jean Rollin. In comparison to prior outings this is something of a bloodbath, and the camera is strangely unflinching in its presentation of the red stuff. It would seem that wider trends within the horror genre had finally forced Rollin in this direction, but fortunately his is able to accommodate this without compromising his strange, ethereal, poetic and arty vision. This time Rollin and his co-writer Jacues Raif conflate the mythologies of the vampire and the zombie to create a haunting piece which still retains a freshness, and would certainly have seemed refreshing in 1982. Instead of the grey faced automatons of Romero, or the rotting cadavers of Fulci here we have the stately vision of Francoise Blanchard as the eponymous reanimated corpse. Her dependence and hunger for blood creates a shattering moral dilemma for this corpse - because as she begins to slowly reclaim the sensations, emotions, and pleasures of life her slavery to blood begins to repulse her. Her addiction is all consuming and few horror films articulate with such poetry and despair the self-revulsion of an addict.

Two Evil Eyes (1990)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO & DARIO ARGENTO

Country: ITALY/USA

aka:
Due occhi diabolici

This uneven and insipid anthology horror film would have rightly vanished into the ether were it not for the fact that George A. Romero and Dario Argento collaborated on it. Romero and Argento had first locked creative horns over a decade before and the result was Romero’s enjoyable but somewhat overrated zombie opus Dawn of the Dead (1978). What a difference twelve years can make? The best days of both filmmakers were far behind them and this production smacks of opportunism and a kind of desperation to return to the good old days of the 1970’s. Even for 1990 this feels like something of a throwback and this hasn’t helped it to date particularly well. The slump in fortunes experienced by both directors would continue into the 1990’s and beyond. For Argento it has become a terminal decline, but Romero has managed to belatedly engineer something of a creative comeback - if only he would move on from the dead end of his zombie obsession - he might once again claim the mantle of being one of the most important makers of horror films.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

Dir: JORGE GRAU
Country: SPAIN/ITALY

AKA:
Non si deve  profanare il sonno dei morte
The Living Dead
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Don't Open the Window

The inclusion of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue on the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) hit list of Video Nasties illustrates perfectly the way in which the horror genre itself was being suppressed. The rhetoric that suggested these films were a new breed of vicious horror film that had dropped out of the skies on an unsuspecting public is refuted by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of this film. This is no more offensive than say Night of the Living Dead (1968) and certainly less cheaply exploitative than some of Hammer’s tackier films from the early 1970’s. It is easy to overlook the fact that a number of the films banned were produced several years before. In the case of this film a decade before the media hysteria that led to its brief containment. Part of the unfairness of this was that a very good film like Living Dead… was associated with garbage and not allowed to exist as it should; within its own generic niche. It is a testament to the strength of video censorship in the 1980’s that only a distinct handful of the films classified as Video Nasties have been able to shake off this scandalous tag and subsist without the political and cultural connotations that doom so many to the level of mindless trash. In recent years Living Dead… has been able to recuperate its reputation to a certain extent. Now the film is viewed as an efficient retread of Romero’s principle themes and ideas within a rural English setting. And like Romero’s film also has the wherewithal to include a level of allegory.

The Beyond (1981)

Dir: LUCIO FULCI

Country: ITALY

aka:
E tu vivrai nel terrore - L'aldila
Seven Doors of Death

Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond is a frustratingly divisive horror movie. It represents everything that is both good and bad about the horror genre. Part of the appeal of horror movies (to less talented writers at least) is that the plotting and characterisation can take a back seat to the stylistic creation of terror and suspense. It is perhaps the only genre that can entirely do away with linearity, cause and effect, logical character arcs, and still make some kind of sense. The purpose may not necessarily be to tell a story, but to create a physical and emotional response. If a horror film can achieve this (depressingly few do), then it has at least succeeded on one level. The Beyond works extremely well on this level. Critics of the film are right to dismiss it as senseless, irrational, and absurd. But it is vital that those who attack the film recognise that, partially at least, this film is a roaring success. But The Beyond is also not the masterpiece some horror fans would have you believe. The Beyond is one of several films appropriated by those with an agenda too acclaim Lucio Fulci is an auteur, something that is truly absurd. The reality is that this movie is both a great horror film and meaningless trash.

Zombi 2 (1979)

Dir: LUCIO FULCI

Country: ITALY

aka:
Zombie Flesh Eaters
Island of the Flesh Eaters
Island of the Living Dead
Woodoo
Zombie
Zombie 2: The Dead are Among Us

Over the years a lot of extraneous and superfluous baggage has attached itself to this low budget Italian horror production. It is a film that has always had a whiff of the taboo about it, its murky position in horror history assured as much by extra-textual events surrounding the film as it is by the merits of the film (of which there are many). Its production and release in Italy in 1979 was marred by legal controversy due to the efforts of producers Fabrizio De Angelis and Ugo Tucci’s to market the film as a sequel to George A. Romero’s hugely successful Dawn of the Dead (1978 - released under the title Zombi in Italy and certain other European countries). This was something which particularly aggravated Dario Argento who as co-producer of Romero’s film oversaw its dissemination in Europe. The film managed to overcome this first obstacle and went on to become an enormous commercial success in Europe and America.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

Dir: JOHN GILLING
Country: UK

This efficient and highly enjoyable Hammer film showed both the economic brilliance of Britain’s most successful independent production company and their willingness to experiment. The film was shot back to back at Bray studios with The Reptile (1966). Both films employed the same director John Gilling, the same technical personnel, and the same Cornish setting. The themes of both films intersect in interesting ways, and it is helpful to view both films as flip sides of the same coin. The setting is integral to both films, but probably more so to The Plague of the Zombies. The writer Peter Bryan is able to make the class dichotomy even more keener in a rural village riddled with resentment and superstition. And the insertion of a foreign menace in the shape of Haitian voodoo in an already polarised village aids the simmering tensions that Sir James Forbes (Andre Morell) and his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) encounter when they arrive to assist the local GP in uncovering the cause of an inexplicable outbreak of plague.

Colin (2008)

Dir: MARC PRICE
Country: UK

The British zombie film is a relatively recent addition to the myriad of subsets that make up the history of British horror. Prior to the break out examples 28 Days Later (2002) and Shaun of the Dead (2004), one has to travel far back into the mists of time to the heyday of Hammer horror and their sublime Plague of the Zombies (1966). Unfortunately British cinema is not in the privileged position where it can map out the generic landscape and instead has to respond to external commercial forces. This is why the relationship between a socially committed cinema that explores British concerns and the genres that often make a film a commercial proposition is one filled with a tension that causes headaches for culturally minded funding bodies. The British zombie film is a good example of these market forces at work, and whilst other examples have ably addressed cultural concerns and anxieties Colin is unique in its attempt to reconfigure the conventions of the zombie film.

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

aka:
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

After the grossly bloated and highly compromised dross Land of the Dead (2005), the ponderous symbolism and allegory of George A. Romero returns again for the fifth entry in a saga that began in the age of civil rights and Vietnam. Each subsequent instalment of Romero’s Dead series has addressed the cultural anxieties of the day. Diary of the Dead doesn’t let the series down - the allegorical backdrop to this film being the changes wrought on America by the ‘war on terror’, reality TV, surveillance culture and the overriding sense that without documented footage an event doesn’t exist. With this in mind Romero’s extremely low budget works as an advantage (it has to be noted that few filmmakers could switch from a $15,000,000 budget to $2,000,000 with such ease) as he incorporates public domain newsreel footage, and grainy internet documentary material.