Aussies gone Wild is Redundant: WYRMWOOD,THE ROVER

Horror festival favorite knockabout labor of love Aussie debut of brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner, WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) kicks off already at risk of becoming a bit too WALKING DEAD meets ballsy-wallsy Aussie dingo-aitcha-baby macho, with so much wobbly-booted whiplash camera movement, slow-mo blood splatter, mud flecks, grime streaks, diesel oil drips and spray paint (both dried and glistening) coating every makeshift black spray-painted football pad surface that pretty soon a little spot of cleanliness would go a long way, even if just for contrast. At times, with nary a wowser to bounce shit offa there's a bit too-much macabre laddie deadpan humor, but it all eventually locks into place and, once the momentum hits, you're thrice-buckled to the boosted ute, mate.

The main focal character point getting off the ground is Barrie (Jay Gallagher) who loses wife and child to the outbreak of contagious 21 Days Later-style madness early on, in a great 'fleeing in the middle of the night' sequence (you don't have to get bitten to turn monstro, but it helps). Meanwhile Barrie's twin sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) is busy in her art studio/garage in the wilds of wherever, spray painting a punkette pal when the contagion hits, and she and n Barrie--somehow genetically immune--spend most of the movie trying to find each other, a bit like the Gish sisters in ORPHANS OF THE STORM, but with one of them garnering--not a handsomely-headed French aristo--but telepathic ability to control the zombies, this thanks to inhuman medical experiments performed on her by a creepy dude in a yellow rain slicker hazmat suit inside a big truck trailer lab. If you're instantly reminded of Virginia Leith's head in THE THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE bonding with the unseen monster in the closet ("I am only a head, and you are whatever we are, but together we're strong!!") then you're a weirdo with a lifelong telepathic connection to the classics.

It's all well and gritty, but there's so much Pollack-ish overlapped grime layers to every surface it makes THE PROPOSITION seem like THX 1138. To be endured as well is the sadistic chod chaining Brooke up in back of his weird portable HOSTEL-esque truck, all rapey-vibed, but then just sucking brains out of her neighbors, etc. Just inconveniencing her would have been enough justification for his rending as far as I'm concerned, 'cuz Brooke rocks. You can read tomes of savagery switchpoint courage in her heavy eye liner-blackened thousand-yard ESP stare, and her big Zoë Bell-on-a-Dodge Challenger moment is one of the highlights of the junk cinema year. Not nearly enough aggro bingles, boosted cars smashing through the center of caravans in slow motion, or servo fireballs to warrant the ROAD WARRIOR comparison but that's okay. Just walk away. 

So what we're left with, then is more NIGHT OF THE COMET or old AIP-Corman budget-masking trickery, i.e. you imply the zombie attacks from other films are taking place at the same time your own movie is going on, subliminally drinking their big budget special effects milkshake. But I ain't whingin'. I'd rather WYRM be AIP-COMET honest than simply packed with CGI macro-calamity adding up to nothing, loudly. Plus: the whole doing experiments with the brains and blood of the immune and its cool jet black humor superhero side effect of the damned, centering on Brooke's torturously slow race against time trying to telepathically control tied up zombies into patiently cutting their way out of their straps and then doing hers, is all genuinely new to the genre, commenting perhaps on the nature of video games (as in learning the tricks of the controls) rather than just trying duplicate them, i.e. to duplicate movies based on games that were trying to duplicate movies in the first place, like RESIDENT EVIL, themselves copies of earlier movies, and down the rabbit hole until we're back at square one, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and then before that, the terror of children worrying their dad will turn into a monster again once he spends half his paycheck at the local tavern, like a Jekyll/Hyde fundamental human split we all still carry like an archaic memory of the days before we learned how to start our own fires.



And then, just when it was getting so badass, it's over. Needing perhaps more crowdfunding to continue on into sequels. Well they should get it, as this WYRM may digest the same sources as all the other Romero-zombie rips but it spews some interesting mutations and manages to do quite a lot with actually very little, thanks to committed performances and Michael Lira's 'Stravinsky meets the Cramps at a John Zorn junkyard' score. I kept hoping for a didgeridoo in there, all low and alien and mean and maybe processed through flanger --it didn't come, but I still liked WYRMWOOD. So give it a squizz when yakka's got you stonkered and you need to rip a rollie and coldie, whatever that means. Shout's Blu-ray has an insightful Turner-Roache commentary, deleted scenes, and an array of helpful suggestions for doing your own damn movie--crowdfunding trailers, pitch meetings--a great little crash course in using social media to get your scrappy little horror-action movie off the ground. But more importantly, the Blu-ray has a full bore kickass stereo mix all but screaming for max volume and/or kickass headphones when the rest of the household is in bed, at peace, or at least fastened securely.

And the movie itself... ah yes, what is it the Aussies say about a nice buzz and low expectations? Nothing - because it's such a natural state for them they don't know any other way. And that is just one reason why we still love them, despite everything... by which I mean Yahoo Serious.

THE ROVER

(2014) Dir David Michôd

**

Ozploitation films set in the endless miles of Australia's interior, the harsh, alien, truly strange Outback, have--beginning in American minds with MAD MAX and CROCODILE DUNDEE and cumulating in the torturous WOLF CREEK--left many of us in the States terrified of ever going farther away than a few miles from the coast should we ever visit (and not too deep in the ocean either, cuzza shahks).  The Outback seems like a kind of apocalypse vanguard, a sampler of the future breakdown. Inhospitable and strange, its alien landscape sucks in whole swaths of 19th century schoolgirls, alien cities, floods, Colonial children following Aborigine kids on walkabout and outdoorsy killers. Everything runs wild there, and insufficient petrol reserves or manpower to police and power the whole damn wasteland area keeps it as lawless as a pre-Earp Tombstone. A movie so grimy it makes WYRMWOOD seem clean, THE ROVER is set in some near future where gas, guns, and cars are worth killing to steal, and the best the cops can do is lumber along down the endless highways in the direction of the criminals, driving through the parking lots of any motels along the way, occasionally shooting someone or getting shot in turn. Why do they even bother?

Robert Pattinson plays a contorted half-starved young snot who for some reason rocks a Southern (as in the USA) accent and hooks up with a John Lurie-esquely taciturn rogue (Guy Peace) who has such a homicidal fixation on recovering his stolen car that you just know some Iowa State Quarterly-esque twist is coming. The film's seedy impoverished mise-en-scene suffers from being too earnest and downbeat, ala THE ROAD rather than THE ROAD WARRIOR and what's worse, this collapsing civilization works by some seriously inconsistent rules. A small arms dealer is dumb enough to take a lone wild-eyed customer to a secluded room, hand him a gun and ammo and then tell said nutball to give the gun and ammo back if he can't pay. Another man wisely works behind thick walls with automat-style sliding doors for items bought, but when the nominal heroes need gas, he sells them a five gallon jug, which should be about enough to get them just smack dab in the middle of nowhere before they run out again. How these guys ever keep these vehicles going over these vast distances on gas cans designed to hold no more than a few gallons seems a little vague --I wouldn't care but they're trying so hard to be realistic, though why I do not know. Out here in the perimeter there are no hospitals or AAA. A person could die by hitting his head on a rock after diving in a lake, and only Toni Collette would ever know you loved her (as in JAPANESE STORY). That's why we're at the movies, mate, to get away from dispiriting neorealist squalor of this nature, not get our noses rubbed in it.

Pattinson, hair cut lice inspection short, is one weird little freak here, and almost makes up the difference. His whole body taught and lean and crouched like his hamstrings were all shortened by a sadistic Gepetto, a runt of a litter born hunched up to deflect kicks, his big T-shirt barely fitting over his lanky, underfed trunk. But to me his role here is one more link in the chain that will one day show modern naysayers that--like his TWILIGHT co-star Kristen Stewart--he is one of the more underrated actors of his or any generation. Not that this makes THE ROVER any more pleasant of an experience. You know that moldy smell some old cars get, like a tent left too long rolled up in the basement? That dirty, moldy smell? Well, the whole damn movie smells that way. It's the most malodorous film I've "seen" since the recent Blu-ray of CONVOY, which also carried the gross sulphuric tang of hot asphalt and dust, diesel gas exhaust hanging breezeless alongside moldy naugahyde and motor oil.

If that's what good literature does, make me smell things I moved to NYC to escape, prithee, Mr. Michôd, to what end? There was never a doubt why the MAD MAX movies existed: for drive-in thrills. But whither our ROVER? For a few weird twists that would seem interesting only to someone who's too trusting of their grad school fiction teacher's opinion, afraid of admitting their own un-PC urges? Better there be a red-tinted desert /shotgun firing / ancient cinema flooded-with-sand odyssey like in John Stanley's DUST DEVIL (set in South Africa, but the vibe's the same) 'cuz it at least has a hot chick, tantric voodoo sex, and some metaphysical weirdness underneath the sand and blood surface. Whadda we got in ROVER? Just the kind of moody third-act character reversals that make Sundance screenwriting workshops roll over and play dead.

But one thing Australia did right, mate, was old Croc Dundee. The Jack Burton of the Outback. And if you go to the land down under where women  snow and men thunder, and they ask about me, how's old Erich the Rah-Shmerick doin', or what's Erich into these days, you tell 'em he's hunky doro and preaching the Crocodile Dundee (also Burt Reynolds) non-duality approach to self-defense in the face of evil, a philosophy that might have spared Billy Jack, Sgt. York, Luke Skywalker, The Quiet Man, and all those other game-as-Ned Kelly but pacifist dubbos a lot of soul-searching. Croc teaches that even going lemony berko on some shickered yobbo can go fair dinkum... by which I mean, the man beyond duality does everything with love, even a knockabout blue with a big smoke bounce. Just avoid wallies... in any language. Their mundanity reduces even the grimiest bonzo philosophy to a grandma souvenir-ready T-shirt platitude and crossing guard coloring book tie-in. If you doubt, just ask the Men at Work to make you a vegemite sandwich, and take cover.  

Milla Jovovich: God's Own Avatar (+ Laymen's Guide to the Resident Evil Series)

No modern actress has spent more time running in slow motion while firing guns backwards than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a neo-hippie musician with a small part in Dazed and Confused (1993), reflects cosmic levels of disillusionment. And I love her, from a safe distance. She's the female post-modern Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) slowly dissolving into CGI replication, from hauntingly gravitas-endowed folkie to warrior queen of the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of un-pixelated humanity with a world-weary sequel-after-sequel determination.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've secretly enjoyed them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings don't make the films better, but nor do they get any worse and sometimes that's better than being good in the first place. Having the violence spread between an array of intercut commercials is awesome too. Nothing beats seeing corrupt corporate goons machine gunning civilians / smash cut to the new Mitsubishi Turbo. The pulse of the afternoon advertising blocs entrains to the throbbing din of Milla's battles, creating a symphony of post-modernist random meaning generation.


Mee-la YO-vo-vitch, as her name is pronounced, plays a character with many clones and lives enough for an afternoon of multiple person play, and considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, that she keeps it all real and engaging remains quite a feat, especially considering English is not her first language, or French either. She was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin spreeng.'

I still listen to her The Divine Comedy-- a 1994 album, equal parts Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin, and purer than a crystalline decanter full of airy Scotch--but it came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands? I wish she would. The zombies have suffered enough, and my heart has too -- it needs her swoosh of a voice and 'tick-tock through the medieval graveyard' tromp pop to swain and swillow through the once-more wood.

She gave us only one other musical document, when she quietly plays and sings at a party and tries to light a joint and misses by a few inches to hilarious effect in Dazed and Confused (1993). That lighter may have missed the target but even with this small, mostly dialogue-free part. she established herself indelibly as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love, wherein the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, and it was a great echo of similar moments in films like Marianne Faitfhfull's a capella cafe "As Tears Go By" in Godard's Made in USA (1966).

Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves and talented Frenchmen take notice their muse hath come. First, there was Luc Besson, commencing with The Fifth Element (1997) to weave Milla into existence from a chunk of raw material into 'the perfect being' and allowing her to speak her own (self-invented) bizarre language. She made a great savior of the universe, we wanted her to save us and so felt guilty and ashamed when she found our dirty little genocides on the historical microfiche she scanned. People mainly remember the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified in it - she was more Pris than Rachel, and Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe we did and it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she continued the savior angle and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia. You can all but feel some Old Testament-style God rattling her ossicles with shouted orders like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy. I know the feeling: every third autumn I become a supernaturally enlightened Taoist monk crazy man: power flows through me and all is love and holy light. But that light has a price, it's difficult to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, but one must, otherwise they think you're merely manic. And one must not give away all one's money and possessions to the first needy homeless man along the road, lest the next one stab you when you can't provide the same for him. Milla gamely and bravely lets that same level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, commits fully and dangerously, which annoyed the unconscious and asleep critics, used to highbrow roles like Joan being played demure and ladylike and gimme an Oscar-ish. And Milla is too busy foaming at the mouth as the visions and auditory hallucinosis overtake her. For Milla, committing never means being placid or lady-like; she'd rather encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved by the novelty of her androgynous holy girl madness. The French, unlike Americans, have a great sense of humor when it comes to their own mortality, and they worship gamins in a way America still hasn't grown up enough to understand.

Many critics felt that this was Milla's vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. The turf is hers by right. For me, there was the sense that she's perfect for the role because of her courtly chaste love-inspiring beauty and grace, ala the loyalty she inspires as the perfect being in The Fifth Element. Messenger was the culmination of a slow build of global devotion. We were ready to storm castles in her name. On the other hand, the film couldn't help being a solid downer, with Milla's terrible bowl haircut and being sold out by the Dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution and everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for or what's going on. A third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic, replete with eye twitches and brown outs, it's hard to know whether to root for her, join the fight, or move to a different table and hide behind a menu. But her notion of God's intervention is so like an alien abduction that it's all looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show the royal court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the betrayal seems to come out of nowhere? The court stuff is a well-photographed bourgeois super snooze compared to Milla's wild jerky eyes and the awesome grey mud and blood.

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly love to contend that benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus have intervened at key moments in our history in order to keep the spirit of a free democracy alive. A Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going, there's the mysterious storm saving Washington DC from the British in the War of 1812, the surge of storm waves sinking the Spanish fleet for Elizbeth I, and Joan's spirit guide/life coach might well be the same weather-controlling Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such star child kept her ESP brilliance into adulthood, and was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials: MJ

The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued into a long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson. So while we're here, let's take a gander at the entirety of the RES series, bearing in mind the importance of rock bottom expectations and intercut car commercials:

Resident Evil 
(2002) **1/2

Before it slides into overtly first person zombie shoot-em-up number punching this first film offers an elaborate set-up that promises better things: the Umbrella underground facility is laid out in impressive vertical tracking shots; the uncertain allegiance of the 'Red Queen'--and her projected image of a young girl with an evil (i.e. British) accent--and her gassing all the employees to prevent spreading; Alice waking up in a bath tub with amnesia with a "property of Umbrella Corp." stamp on the inside of her wedding band and slowly remembering how she got there in little expository flashes; the impeccable Michelle Rodriguez as a SWAT team member; the laser grid slicing up SWAT guys, etc. Alas, it's important (to someone) the movie match the feel of the game, so director W.S. Anderson makes sure the Red Queen exposits like announcing the mission of each new Raccoon City level, and each new floor has a new monster or challenge. Anderson gets so hung up on perfecting the MATRIX-cam tracking Milla's slow mo kicks at mid-air pouncing zombie dogs that he forgets any kind of narrative momentum. Still, if Milla's kiss with Michelle Rodriguez had gone on for a few seconds longer, that film would be an enduring classic. Still, it's no worse the fifth time as it is the first.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse 
(2004) **1/2

Bonus points for picking up right where the last film left off, with the zombie plague spreading all through Raccoon City, and for turning one of Alice's old SWAT buddies into a giant killing machine programmed to keep the peace. There's a fascinating moment where this shambling freak massacres a whole SWAT team surrounding a strutting black dude (Mike Epps) who isn't even scratched because as we learn from the monster's video game-like monitors, he's unarmed and hence deemed a civilian, a wry statement right up there with the one in Angels and Demons, on how carrying a gun is much more likely to get you killed than save your life. The cast here includes Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, as a doctor who has a cure and will help our locked-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-gate heroes escape (these including cop hottie in black boots Jill Valentine played grandly by Sienna Guillory [below]) if they find his daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) who happens to be the source model for the Red Queen hologram. So there's layers here, people!

Bonus Points: Some of the big money from the first film's box office shows up in large scale scenes along the wall built to keep the contagion from spreading and there's some natty wall-climbing CGI demons, a motorcycle through a stained glass window, and a big final brawl between Umbrella's top two killing machines, flanked by cool troop helicopters, and an interestingly Teutonic corporate villain (Thomas Kretschmann). Anderson seems to figure out some of his own weaknesses and gives up trying to be the action movie Kubrick and the film opens up a result. Never underestimate breathing room, and enigmatically evil children.

Ultraviolet (2006) - *

Then, in between Resident Evil films, this...  The feeling of flop sweat pervades, with nary a single interesting fight or character or uncliche'd moment and every actor glazed over with enough slick CGI 'make-up' to cause viewers to wonder why they didn't go full CGI animation as they'd clearly feel more comfortable. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, a hack who clearly has some mojo magic that convinces money to throw itself at him (he also wrote the dismal Salt and wrote and directed the underrated but still pointless remake of Total Recall), more than anything this film, along with the Charlize Theron movie version of Æon Flux from the year before, serves almost to make W.S. Anderson Walter Hill by comparison.

Resident Evil: Extinction 
(2007) - ***

The contagion has spread all across the world by this installment - and Alice rides across the Road Warrior-inflected deserts of the American southwest in search of answers before coming to the rescue of a band of hearty young survivors (including Ali Larter) who in the film's best scene are attacked by a murder of zombie crows. Meanwhile a crazy industrial scientist spies on Alice from satellites and prepares his own magic invulnerable monster formula. It ends on a pretty wild cloning note, to become the best in the series up to that point, perhaps because it's directed by Russell Mulcahy, an Aussie behind such 'hits' as Highlander and The Shadow, and way more grounded and skilled as a storyteller and director of actors than Milla's husband, series overseer Anderson. Bonus points for a joint lit in a very moving moment by a SWAT survivor from the previous installment (Oded Ferhr) whose dimly smug smile annoyed me in the previous film but is finally put to good use in his moment of stoner triumph. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife
(2010) - ***

The series was on a roll now and Anderson steps back up to the plate, as if inspired by the lurch forward in quality delivered by Mulcahy in Extinction. It's inspiring to watch a director like PWSA slowly learn from his mistakes and criticism to deliver sequentially better work. Offering much more than the usual slow-mo 3-D shoot-outs and zombie hordes, there's a weird aircraft carrier finale involving monsters and freezer tubes; a hundred Alice clone attack on a Japanese corporation; a crash landing on a roof reminiscent of Escape from New York; cool trilobite-style gem-studded mind control devices; a gigantic axe-wielding monster, and detailed attention to continuing human story lines from the past films. It all adds up to the best entry in the series, not sure if it's still based on the video game by this point but if so, must be some game! I'll stick with the films, though, my wrists can't take too much excitement, too many years typing this shiite, and before that, Atari, and before that DOS programs for the TI-94A.

Speaking of age, after eight years of playing Alice for husband Anderson, and having born unto him a child, Milla actually looks substantially older and wearier than she did in the previous entry. Less and less are the CGI airbrushes able to disguise her slightly curled down nose, weakening chin, crow's feet. I mean this only as a high compliment. The younger girls here are airbrushed to near Maxim levels as part of Umbrella-Disney Corps continued process of filling in the Uncanny Valley with a billion CGI-make-up smoothings.

Despite wildly uneven, even cheap CGI and a dim grungy look (CGI is always easier when you don't have to worry about shadows or contrast), I give Afterlife high marks because it seems at times made by a John Carpenter fan, with a solid stretch of the action--from Alice's crashy rooftop landing onwards; low-key, naturalistic acting with Ali Larter, Boris Kodjoe, and Kacey Clarke to the from the ominous simplicity of some parts of the score to the idea of trying to escape from both a prison and a city rolled into one place: San Francisco. At one point I swear I could hear Kurt Russell hissing "Maggie, he's dead, come on."

BY NOW, 2010, the 'under siege' zombie narrative, with a ragtag dwindling group of survivors dealing with an external threat, was an inescapable cliche within the genre of horror, with the ultimate deadly serious and self-important Walking Dead series being the official last nail in the empty coffin. The arc of banding together with fellow survivors after the apocalypse is comforting to fantasy-retreated loners, of course, the types who watch these films over and over, and if Anderson doesn't quite get to the deadpan layered satirics of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers or basic rules of film (as opposed to PlayStation) at least he's really run with the whole insidious corporation angle until it hums almost meta. If you think I'm off the mark here, see if you can get a few minutes into Ultraviolet and Afterlife will seem like Citizen Kane.

Resident Evil - Retribution 

(2012) ***1/2

As with all the installments, RETRIBUTION continues immediately where it left off from the first, backwards in slow motion across the under-attack aircraft carrier until Alice wakes up from falling overboard and into a suburban idyll mirroring the one at the start of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. Herein Alice is married to Oded Ferhr and they have a deaf child who Milla must hide from the invading undead--seemingly on a loop--until she slowly realizes it's all part of a weird sprawling simulation-lab underwater lair. Explaining too much of the plot loosens it's 'anything can happen in billionaire corporate black box research, cos' vibe so I'll say no more except to recommend you see it with headphones blaring, at night with the lights off, on a big home screen, without your judgmental friends or lovers around, who are bound to snicker at the terrible video game upgrade exposition ("your mission: collect all the pink circles and escape to the surface--good luck!").

The story line manages the return of all Alice's allies and other avatars from past films: Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez and the always vaguely familiar Boris Kodjoe, not to mention the bad guy from the previous film is now on Alice's side and sends super spy Ada Wong (Binging Li) to her rescue. There are new monsters and old and I appreciate that Anderson has the good taste to make the simulations real, rather than just some Matrix or Sucker Punch bit of nullification and as with the third the idea of all the dead Alices from past 'simulations' adds an eerie metatextual edge, positing the viewer as just as much the evil Umbrella, bringing suffering Alice avatars into the world (3 for a quarter?) to vent your pent-up teen angst through. Milla seems game for these new roles within roles, though I'm not crazy about the leather bustle. Is Anderson abusing her like Welles did Hayworth for some imagined transgression? It just doesn't look comfortable, or particularly practical unless, like the western gunfighters did, you use belt holsters.

A bit like the Beckinsale-Wiseman Underworld series, there's a sense that the married director-star filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans, layer it with detail only multiple viewings will bring out, and not worry about pleasing the bored second stringer critics, already resentful they had to see this Friday afternoon in the multiplex (as I had to) instead of in a press screening (which films like this never give, smartly).

Thus it is perhaps that filmmakers like W.S. Anderson, who began as tired hacks with a formulaic video game-based franchise, become, in a sense, slowly improved, along with the digital technology they use, through a decade of experience, benefitting from the rare opportunity of getting to work again and again with their same people, needing to find new things to do to keep their fanbase intere$ted. And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but a genuine dangerous showdown. Keep up the good work, ladies!

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

The Fourth Kind (2009)

*

Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

***1/2

I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS! (more)

Faces in the Crowd (2011)

***

Milla witnesses a murder from the infamous 'melancholy slasher,' gets knocked out, and wakes up with face blindness; her husband is soon being played by an array of different actors, changing with each shot; her clique of cool girl friends don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!") but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror, and when you're as hot as Milla that's tragic, but even scarier is that if the murderer came into her house and said he was her husband she wouldn't even know he wasn't. And Milla expertly evokes that horror, showing the end result of a life in films that has not been joyous. She's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favorite avatar a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell mit you!

Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

BIG ASS SPIDER

2013 - ***

A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves him the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportion and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with the dopey Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting for rescue. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's fine, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed and as a result Boyar would be edgier. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.

WAKE WOOD

2010 - ***

Hammer is back with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the never-gets-old 'terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason' motiif. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title, and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her daughter go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Doesn't she know what will happen? Did no one tell her?! No they didn't. Pretty short-sighted of them! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some crowbar blunt force trauma, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

WOMAN IN BLACK

2012 - ***1/2

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll and, despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail--enough to suffocate any ordinary picture--Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping. A surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe is a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory to a dark decaying mansion in a remote, fearful hamlet. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit, but not some Disney type, she's a genuine fright. And if the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder while asking for directions and ordering a pint, and the sense of pacing is superb. Even if there's the usual stretches of our Harker-ian hero running around the dark mansion with a drippy candle, here it's done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing him whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a new force on the scene, poised to become the next Terence Fisher.

 DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS

1966 - **1/2

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this second entry in Hammer's Dracula series (or third counting the Drac-free Brides of Dracula), which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terrible non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to terrible color fading. Well, this new Blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out dullness that made it so avoidable. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a silly mess, depending on all sorts of idiocy (like a heroine who falls for the same trick twice, and never thinks to keep wearing the cross that saved her life mere scenes ago) to generate suspense. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again, so churlishly appears only 1/3 the way through, and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films), yet the vampire's got no problem at all strutting around a monastery. So he's fine in a house of God, just not if some atheist points out the cross pattern in the tiles on the floor.

Oh well, the Blu-ray is deliciously un-faded, with rich sickly gold yellows and cherry lifesaver red gels, a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle, laden with all those masonic triangle candle holders, shields and soft serve swirl columns that constitute Dracula's and nearly every other Hammer castle (which is not a dis- I prefer their sets to real castles which always seem moldy). It's good that it's gorgeous, in short, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back, slowly walking down halls, entering rooms, slowly pushing doors open, and never returning. So while Darwin chuckles from on high, we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. The yellow mist is cool, but still... both Hammer and Universal seemed to think audiences wouldn't buy a character killed in the last film if he didn't get magically revived or de-thawed in the next, as if we couldn't imagine say, a prequel. At least old Drac has good taste in brides as usual. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit: she finally undoes her prim bun and dour persnickety grousing manner, unleashing a wave of beautiful red hair, a gorgeous alabaster gold neckline and a truly English posh bloodlust, thus expressing within a single film the full breadth--from repressed bitter grouse to uninhibited carnal free spirit--of the English Woman, a force to be reckoned with!

The absence of Peter Cushing, though, is felt like a kidney punch.

VALLEY OF GWANGI

1969- **

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels wayy too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys, led by James Franciscus, stumbling onto a desert paradise, long hidden from man, that looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys --at one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!

And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen, but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert, since that's where the bones are found, which again betrays a contemptuous disregard for paleontology, since America's deserts used to be fecund jungles) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. Harryhausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus! A movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk... but taken all in all, it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost and that used goddamned puppets.

So yeah, I tried to love it for as long as I can remember (it used to be on TV a lot) but I still can't dig Gwangi and I with its recent TCM screening I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies--especially the burdensome cliche'd big-eyed local boy, 'one peso senor,' moppet that all monster movies set in Mexico, Italy, Greece, or Spain seem to insist on (as if to be in any sunny country is to be swamped in cute little scam artists--and it's not just that its sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's mainly because of the unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display, killing any of the ones that challenge their safety, and ensnaring the rest, thus proving the point that man destroys every thing he touches all in the name of a measly profit or science. Are we supposed to find Franciscus a hero for trapping the beast in an old church, currently under restoration but still clearly the pride of the city, and torching it. Gwangi screams and screams as Harryhausen captures his burning to death as the sacred edifice topples around him.

Harryhausen is famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as in Twenty Million Miles to Earth, which also has the tiresome 'one peso senor' kid and a climactic scene where our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature -- a circus elephant, (also Harryhausen-animated). I love Howard Hawks, too, but have the same problem with Hatari!  I can't abide abducting animals and keeping them captive for no reason other than for a zoo or circus, or worse, medical experiments and/or forced labor, not any more. Hey, maybe we're growing more sensitive as civilization advances, so what was once normal and natural now seems unduly savage, and all the more callous for being so unconscious.

Luckily, that kind of empathy doesn't apply to Big Ass Spider/s, grasshoppers, plant or rock beings, and mantises --they never manage to earn my sympathy which is how I prefer it; the last thing I want from a giant monster film is to feel like I'm getting a PETA guilt trip. Even a genius like Harryhausen can't give a bug a soul, and for that I am truly grateful. It's this realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead to look away, look away, towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955) like the one man who finally realizes what matters in life... a giant spider... in love... with Mara Corday...

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)

Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD and the RNC

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. The heavy toll in run-over pets and children is a small price to pay when the alternative is welfare socialism! Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over, mutilated in war, deformed from disease, or otherwise unassimilable into the Norman Rockwell ideal it's only natural that you become abject and ostracized, shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room and spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all means, inevitably, all warts.

Boys do love trucks...

Like the bankrupting of Medicare and Social Security via ever-longer life spans, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet in this film way more so than in most all other adaptations of his novels: population control (here in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him again); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for a death which the doctors prevent); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. The graveyard bringing whatever you bury there back to life, but with a demonic streak of voracious homicidal ill will, makes a nice right wing nutjob analogy to sending your good Christian-raised kid off to college and having him come back an angry vegetarian pothead feminist.

All this deep red state subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtexts, simply because too many guys in suits would be watching, ensuring nothing controversial came back to bite them. Instead it seems like even the director wasn't paying much attention, so all the gooey truth stays intact, a bit like one of my favorite awful films Godsend, which is also about the horrid deals grieving parents might be willing to make in order to allay their grief. When there's nothing you can possibly to do to bring your dead son back, you can relax and know that--funeral expenses aside--no one's going to drain your bank account in for monkey's paw resurrection service. Since it's impossible to raise the dead, we can surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue swirl combine to help the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1). And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in Pet it's the culminating glory of seeing a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of midnight (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral service will give." - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comforts a funeral will give." Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals in order to halt the spread of this epidemic, but I say your deceased family comes first!" It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone, because we have to share that piece with our family. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from Mother's toes! Arabs are pulling out her entrails! The Asian markets are scooping up her brains. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent. One must make allowances for bloc baiting, but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice of our wishes, and avoid 'getting everything we want' which would mean either (for them) a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression or (for us), an overly permissive socialist Welfare State. Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight. We need to remember that the fight is just for show, that we need the fight, need the show, for balance. A total victory would mean the end of the match, and riots in the crowded streets, so drag on, lads, drag on...

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media, whose obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its mega budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, and PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so trenchant. We have the mom letting her daughter gut her with a trowel in Romero's first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from 'the man' and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch fighting for the idea that life is sacred even in death, that every dead baby has the right to crawl out of the earth and hunt its parents. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds, and which is why 99% of non-Romero zombie films suck so bad. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' story to the first two films: it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic, and society is still in the midst of its collapse. Two crotchety Irish-American landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain and train them to deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster girl for it all (above) is Kathleen Munroe, a hot Irish brogue-sporting lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat instead of peoples --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of this gorgeous black creature. It's a great, twisted National Velvet of the Living Dead moment. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely portraits and paintings which 'come to 'life' like the once-buried loved ones now unburied. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young even after their corporeal forms have long since turned to ash or moldering bones. There's a fine line between wanting to return to past glory and mere fear of death, and zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure, the frozen preservation of impermanent flux. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior dangers. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But, in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we, floating in the cheap seats, can live, even if for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern, bathroom breaks aside.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard who winds up abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove) with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own one day. The dead people in the photos are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted exhumation. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet, if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels --is that all there is? "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he still lacks the nerve to tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides are really angry at someone else, who's gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, and it can't bite back.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)