It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time to trick-or-treat or attend costume parties or seek out a local haunted house.  But for me, it’s hard to find a better haunted house than my plasma TV.

I was a bit of a fraidy-cat when I was a kid.  I used to sleepwalk after seeing scary movies, or if that didn’t happen, I would awake-walk into my parents’ room for a hug from Mom.   In order to confront that embarrassing—if amusing—childhood demon, I became a bit of a horror buff.  Hopefully my pain is your gain.

Five Movies to Watch This Halloween

“Return of the Living Dead” (1985)
In this “cult classic,” a group of punk rock-loving teens venture out to pick up a friend from his job at a medical supply shop in Louisville, Kentucky.  When a foreman opens up a military drum that was accidentally sent to the shop—which, oh-by-the-way has an UNDEAD BODY IN IT!!—all zombie-hell breaks loose.

The film is genuinely funny, has a couple of good scares, and a rockin’ soundtrack, but it also injected life into the genre because all the zombies run (fast!) and most of them talk.  Like this one:

Doesn’t she look familiar?  Check out this zombie from “The Walking Dead.”

The B-plot, featuring an Army Colonel on a mysterious, tedious, yet seemingly extremely important mission, is tied up brilliantly in the frightening, apocalyptic conclusion.

But what really puts this film over the top is that it features the best zombie of all time, Tarman.  Gruesome, evil, and with just the right amount of camp, the zombie that first exclaimed “BRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSS!!” before chowing down on the cerebral cortex of some young punk deserves a place in cinematic lore. (more…)

In light of the devastation to our civilization directly resulting from the collectivist policies of our ruling elite, there’s probably never been a better time to look at one of Hollywood’s best-loved genres – the end-of-the-world movie.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what films qualify for this category – one list of doomsday movies includes dozens of very different films, with plots ranging from the world blowing up to society suddenly changing dramatically into something unfamiliar, dystopian, and creepy.  A documentary about the last two-and-a-half years would qualify as the latter.

From the Cold War nuke paranoia of Fail Safe (1964) to the “Oh s***, it’s a comet” catastrophes envisioned by flicks like Deep Impact (1998), they run the gamut.  Sometimes society is teetering – think California – and sometimes it has fallen completely into the abyss – think Detroit.

But at their best, these movies show us something about ourselves and about enduring truths, challenging our intellects and asking vital questions about the nature of man.  But mostly they’re just cool and fun to watch.

And sometimes they are Zardoz (1974).  This is an utterly insane 70’s freakshow starring Sean Connery that can best be described as what it must be like to party with Anthony Weiner and Eric Massa in Thailand with an endless supply of bad Woodstock acid and a substantial NEA performance art grant.  Gotta respect any movie that offers the straight-faced line, “The gun is good, the penis is evil.”   (more…)

It seems a bit odd that my three main objections to a graphic TV series about flesh-eating zombies is that it lacks realism, that its characters are hackneyed, and that it has too few flesh-eating zombies.  After all, it’s hardly a genre most folks associate with realism or complex characters and not having zombies seems to miss the point.  Our hopes were so high, but AMC’s The Walking Dead sadly does lack realism, falling into the usual horror film trap of forcing its characters to do stupid things for no better reason that it is necessary to propel the plot.  If stupid were money, these characters would be George Soros. 

—–

And the characters themselves are – in the classic critique offered by a thousand screenwriting teachers – less characters than caricatures.  The first real redneck we meet is a racist loudmouth.  As is the second.  And the third is, so far at least, just a wife beater, though I expect he’ll end up hating black people too.  This is no surprise.  To people who write for the entertainment industry, if you live east of I-5 and south of the Mason-Dixon, you’ve got a sheet and a flammable cross in the back of your pick-up and you could someday grow up to be a revered Democratic senator.

Oh, and there’s not enough zombie action.  Instead of flesh-eating terror, we get scenes of budding survival suffragettes complaining about having to do the laundry.  Seriously.  The little band of refugees can’t be bothered to set up the most basic security for the undefendable position they’ve chosen to occupy, but these walking, talking clichés have plenty of time to bicker about gender roles while scrubbing Dockers. (more…)

With Hallowmas upon us, I thought I would go over the reasons why I consider zombies to be the greatest monsters yet invented, a sort of grand synthesis of all of the best elements of previous fright-mongers. See if you agree, and offer your own opinions and counterarguments in the comments section below.

1. They’re anthropomorphic.

There’s all sorts of beasties under the sun (and moon), but in general I’ve always found that the creepier specimens are the ones which assail you while housed in a human body. Bruce the shark in Jaws, the Blob chasing a young Steve McQueen, or the wide assortment of killer piranhas, rats, and dinosaurs out there don’t hold a candle to things like vampires, werewolves, and zombies — monsters that retain aspects of their humanity even as they terrorize us with their doom-laden, inhuman fates.

2. They’re the living dead.

An adjunct to #1 above. Some monsters are nothing more than exotic animals, others demons associated with the netherworld of some ancient religion or mythology, and still others ordinary humans with a black nullity where their soul and conscience is supposed to be. All provide us with legions of good scares, and may they continue to do so! (more…)

#5: The George Romero Zombie Quadrilogy (1968–2005)

The fact that I have no idea how to pronounce “quadrilogy” certainly wasn’t going to stop me from whipping out a two dollar word in order to cheat all four of The Mighty George Romero’s epic zombie films onto this here countdown. And now, to the all-important instructions…

1. You gotta find a guilt-free day, and by that I mean a day where you can justify and live with the selfish decision to take the phone off the hook, close the curtains, lock the doors, give real life the high hard middle finger, and plant yourself in front of the television for ten-hours of hardcore movie watching (or as it’s known at my house: Every Day).  

2. This day should be scheduled as close to Halloween as possible and preferably take place when weather conditions outside are at their worst (those of you living in Los Angeles should wait for smog alerts or a race riot).

3. To keep interruptions to a minimum, plenty of refreshments should be close by and the catheter inserted thusly.   

You can’t watch just one George Romero zombie movie. It’s Halloween. It’s George Romero. It’s zombies. Yes, there’s the risk of an Awesome Overdose (especially at the sight of Dennis Hopper) but that’s why you have emergency procedures in place; someone trained to yell “CLEAR!” and kill the Bliss Buzz by reciting George Clooney’s Oscar acceptance speech.  But you have to give yourself this one full day to be completely immersed into the uniquely horrifying experience of living in Romero’s cleverly constructed and always entertaining zombie apocalypse, a world where the flesh-hungry dead walk the earth, anti-heroes become heroes, and there’s enough blood and guts to make Quincy vomit. (more…)

When you’re lucky enough to meet one of your lifelong icons sometimes you’re really not lucky at all. Damn these people for being human. Like a first date, I was more than a little nervous at the prospect of sitting for a media roundtable interview with one of my movie gods, George A. Romero, and the prayer went something like this: “Please don’t let him be a dick.”

Thankfully my prayer was answered…and then some.    

Romero, all 6’ 5” of him, wearing his trademark vest and ponytail, walked in the room a little early, pleasantly shook everyone’s hand and then announced he would be back at the appointed time but first had to take care of a nagging cough. Then, like a mischievous kid, the Horror Icon gave us a quick flash of his cough medicine:  a pack of Marlboro Reds stashed in his vest pocket.

A 70 year-old man smoking Marlboro Reds right in the heart of Health-Nazi Land?

Oh, yeah, George Romero was everything I had hoped for.

Before The Mighty George Romero came along film-goers had already been introduced to zombies and even what would famously become known as the Zombie Apocalypse. Before George Romero came along, there were horror films, even those that made you cover your eyes and afraid to look under the bed. Then, in 1968, a black and white, $114,000, indie shot-across-Hollywood’s bow changed everything. Audiences who had become accustomed to the delightfully creepy atmospherics of such Hollywood offerings as Universal’s famous Dracula, Frankenstein, and Wolf Man franchise certainly knew what it was like to be scared. But it would be “Night of the Living Dead” that for the first time introduced them to pure, unrelenting terror.

And ever since, no one’s looked back. (more…)

Hollywood’s problems are such right now that the only way they can make any money is through soul-killing popcorn films that everyone sees, no one likes, and fewer of us are buying on DVD. We are simply no longer willing to pay for any film that looks anything close to “serious.” But can you blame us? After a decade-plus of being relentlessly beat over the head with anti-American, anti-troop, anti-Bush, anti-Southern, and anti-anything that isn’t elitist Blue State and all things Meterosexual, if the trailer doesn’t contain a whole lot of explosions or some kind of romcom meet-cute, we just aren’t going to risk being insulted.

One way Hollywood might earn a smidgen of our goodwill back would be to lay off the American military. If these Hollywoodists were just a little flexible and willing to meet us halfway — if they were just willing to treat the American military with half the respect they show for a child-rapist director, there could be a mutual quiet area in this ongoing culture war that would benefit all of us. 

After all, how hard would it have been to make “The Crazies‘” evildoers — those who bully, terrorize, and murder the innocent civilians of a small Iowa town, something other than our military? There’s a whole world of bad guys out there but as our guys risk and sacrifice everything to liberate 50 million people they’ve never met in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they do God’s work in Haiti, I’m supposed to sit back and accept them being portrayed as no better than concentration camp Nazis? (more…)

The payoff for sitting through a dozen craptacular releases is that one movie where you actually say, “Damn, that was worth the $11.50 and the kidney I spent to see it.”  As a modern moviegoer, you must be an eternal optimist.  You must hope against hope that the trailer you liked didn’t contain every single good scene and funny joke in the movie, and that the reviewer who raved isn’t covering up some pinko agenda that’ll make you choke out on your Goobers. 

You have to believe that out there somewhere is an action movie director who knows what a tripod is.  That there is a young lead actor who has never starred in a CW television series about beautiful but sensitive teenage male models with supernatural powers.  That there is a comedy screenwriter who can imagine a “funny” situation not involving a bodily fluid.  That Michael Cera will one day play a different character.

In that spirit, a spirit of Pollyannaish hope in the face of overwhelming evidence indicating that Hollywood’s product will almost certainly continue to demonstrate that evolution is a two-way street, I present ten movies that are coming within the next six months that might actually be good – or at least not make me throw things at the screen and slap around the ushers. (more…)

Filmmaker George Romero has had exactly one good idea in his life: the original, 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead. Since then, he has been coasting on a reputation as a maker of smarter than average horror films. Although he has made some good movies since Night of the Living Dead, few of his films have above par for the horror genre, and the average quality of horror films in the decades since his breakthrough movie is a very low bar to surpass. 

In particular, Romero has revisited the zombie film in quite a few movies over the years, usually providing the press with some serious intellectual/social/political commentary his latest film is supposed to make. So it is once again with his new film, the Venice Film Festival entry Survival of the Dead. Reuters reports that Romero, age 69, said his new film deals with questions about when it’s right to go to war:  (more…)

The remake of Friday the 13th is notable only for its title; we have seen this stuff literally hundreds of times before, sometimes done better (whatever that means to you in this context) and sometimes done worse. This new picture is a remake only in the sense that it borrows the famous name, the setting and a portion of the premise. Nothing wrong with that approach, it’s just that when somebody appropriates all those elements, they also appropriate a measure of expectation, even obligation, to do something memorable, or so I thought. These filmmakers failed to do any such thing. Maybe they never intended to. Movies are a business, after all, and there’s lots of bank to be made just thrashing a franchise.

Horror movies are almost all remakes now, and they fall almost exclusively into two big categories: Remakes of Old US Movies, and Remakes of Asian Flicks. Both tend to fail at the same rate in being great or even passable entertainment, and that rate is approximately 100 percent. Last year’s The Eye and Shutter were all remakes of Asian originals and all were pretty much forgettable. On the US side—and again, sticking just to 2008—we got Prom Night (which I thought was pretty good, but not many other folks agreed), and fresh (sic) installments of the Saw and George Romero’s …of the Dead franchises. Overall, these too were weak, and so were the dozen or so others I could have mentioned. (more…)