Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #64: Survival of the Dead (2009)

Oh! Who put this neck here?

The original Dawn of the Dead is one of my favourite films of all time. I've got a lot of respect for Romero as a filmmaker. But I can't follow him into his newer works.

The problem with Romero films (and they get progressively worse for this as he gets older) is that they don't seem to be terribly well-reasoned. As time as peeled away, he seems less and less interested in making sense and more and more interested in being unfunny. He likes to throw things away so he can have a silly scene now and again, things like logic, physics, reasonable human behaviour, consistent character. You kind of need these for movies to be somewhat believable and worth investing in. Not always, but usually. Normally this tendency is forgivable in a comedy, but that is dependent on your comedy not SUCKING. Unfortunately, as GenXMike pointed out to me, Romero has the sense of humour of a 70 year old man. Probably because he's 70. Somehow, this works to give him the comedic sensibility of a 10 year old boy.

I can never quite accept just how often people refuse to shoot someone they know, either friend or family, that is clearly a zombie. Now, I know that I can't quite say just how a person would react in a horrific and zombie related crisis, but to my mind, if people were faced with a 100 percent lethal and highly contagious plague that caused the infected to attack and kill the uninfected with abandon, they would have little trouble pulling a trigger. Society has collapsed. You can't let an infected person to touch you or your loved ones. You also don't want one of your loved ones to devour another one of your loved ones. Everyone in this film has seen what a zombie will do. You'll pull the trigger.

But we get an island community that's torn down the middle and fighting amongst themselves as to whether or it's kosher to put down the zombies that are clearly trying to eat them. It's the reasonable "We should make sure they don't kill us." people vs. the crazy "They're human beings even if they're dead!" people. The big ethical question is whether or not we should kill all the zombies or teach them to eat something that isn't us. Again, it's a no-brainer. Put down dangerous infected corpses or spend all of our time keeping them penned up and fed with fresh animals. Sarcasm will here be shown in bold. Gee! We best do the latter! I just can't bear to see these lovable shambling horrors killed!

Oi. Onto the characters. They're pretty annoying. Particularly the tech-obsessed emo teenager wearing his headphones around his neck (in a zombie apocalypse) and surfing the web on his iPhone. I guess society hasn't entirely collapsed. The kid seems to be a crack shot with a pistol for some reason. Then there's the embarrassingly horny lesbian soldier that can't keep her hand out of her pants.

The film wastes most of its time on a ridiculous feud between two Irish families, and all drama is weightless and forced. There is also, sadly, a serious lack of zombie action. When the zombies are there, they're actually pretty non-threatening. Now, I tend to prefer slow moving zombies to the modern fast type, so it's not that. It's the fact that you can apparently just push a zombie around and kill them gingerly. When a zombie does get someone, it's played up for its comedy so lamely that Romero is effectively de-horrorising his own genre. He's making zombies a joke, and I can only assume it's out of some kind of spite. Spite not for fans, but for something I can't quite place. Spite for the film industry? I have the sneaking suspicion that he has spite for filmmaking in general. That he hates the money and the teeth-pulling, so he goofs around on screen. Or madness over the fact that there are a great many 'of the dead' films and he owns very few of them. In the special features he seems absolutely exasperated about filmmaking, and laments about what a slog through horrible conditions his film productions tend to be.

So: Poorly reasoned. Not funny. Excruciatingly boring. Reeks of Canadian mediocrity.

Ryan Watches A Motion Picture #41: The Crazies (1973)

Get this hippy restrained!

Before checking out the remake I thought I'd give the George Romero original a shot.

Ugh.

It's annoyingly edited, and operates at a break-neck and confusing pace. Shots seem to be made up mostly of close-ups. You might see a cut to a close-up of a guy talking to someone, which then cuts to a close-up of a guy shouting at him from somewhere, which then cuts to a close-up of an arm picking up a gun, followed by a close-up of somebody running, or a car parking, or whatever. You don't see the motion that connects the images, which leaves you really disoriented.

The dialogue is delivered at ridiculous speeds as well - the moment one line ends someone else pipes up with another. And everybody's yelling at each other all the time. Conversation quickly ramps up into panic and anger, which makes the movie feel really emotionally forced and especially unjustified, since very little of the viral outbreak is actually seen for the first half of the film. It's pretty much just people yelling at each other in offices about what to do. No, wait, not what to do. It's not really conversation. It's more yelling out unreasonable reactions. Usually in the form of exposition.

I guess you could argue that the camera work and editing is meant to...well, make you feel as crazy and disoriented as the characters succumbing to the virus that drives them into delirium, but if that's the case, the techniques are used where they shouldn't be, and not used where they'd do good work. And the film actually abandons its style and slows down during the last third of the film, which just makes it all seem like bad audience emotion management.

Now Dawn of the Dead is one of my all-time favourite films, and I'm very fond of Romero. But he tends to be pretty hamfisted with his social criticisms, and this movie is no exception. The Crazies is a pretty barefaced hate-on for the Vietnam-era military, and ends up as a mostly hokey and cheap-looking anti-government piece. It works to depict a military and governmental disregard for the rights of civilians so complete that it's hard to take the plot seriously until you remember that Vietnam was a horrific and rights-shattering embarrassment.

I will say this in the movie's defense: it sports a very rare protagonist - a man who wears a mighty unibrow without shame. I've always been wowed by 70s films that weren't afraid to cast unattractive or strange-looking actors into their male roles. Unibrow's comrade has warts all over his boney face. It's incredibly refreshing.

So: Can't say it's worth the watch, but if you're curious about Vietnam-response films don't look this one over.

Pose Reviews A Movie. #10: The Crazies (2010)

In a word? Blech.

OK, maybe that wasn't really a word. But the sentiment is clear: I wasn't exactly crazy about The Crazies.

It had a strong enough start, I suppose. It didn't waste any time with character development, and dove right into the plot, which I liked. It even succeeded in being creepy at first, though I wouldn't say it ever entered the "scary" realm (which for my purposes I shall nickname, "scare-itory").

But then things started getting a little lame.

For starters, the 2010 remake of The Crazies relies way, way too heavily on "cheap scares." You know what I mean--those moments where everything is quiet, and then all of a sudden the MUSIC GETS REALLY LOUD AND A GRABBY HAND COMES OUT OF NOWHERE? Yeah, it was full of those. They even played the "cheap scare" card when good guys encountered each other unexpectedly--like, multiple times! Yeesh!

I'm really not quick to complain about the occasional "cheap scare" in a movie, but it seemed to be The Crazies' only strategy for reaching "scare-itory." And for a movie that doesn't have a whole lot else going for it besides its scare-factor, I don't really think it could afford to be a one-trick pony. Even if that pony is infected with a government-engineered virus that gives it zombie-like tendencies.

And that's the other thing that bothered me about The Crazies. The virus that spreads through the small town setting of Ogden Marsh, Iowa has extremely inconsistent symptoms throughout the film.

At first, it makes people dazed and confused (pardon the expression), and, let's just say "moderately homicidal."

Then shortly after, the victims get a little dozy. Dexterity goes down, albeit urge to kill goes up. This is where the pitchfork-dragging fellow from the movie poster makes his appearance, in the creepiest and arguably the only redeeming scene in the film.

But by the end of the movie, the infected types start to get clever. Instead of mindlessly dragging things around and stabbing, they are able to perform really complicated tasks, like sewing up their victims and strategically searching rooms for prey.

How is that possible?! The movie takes place over the course of a day and a half!

Of course it's silly to complain about the plausibility of a movie like this, but then again, if your audience transcends disbelief and is just plain confused, you've probably done something wrong.

I suppose my essential complaint is that not only does The Crazies bring nothing new to the horror-genre table, it botches and overuses conventions that have been sitting on the table so long they've gotten moldy. And although I haven't seen the original Crazies from 1973, let's face it--it’s bad news when a movie is a remake of a movie you haven’t seen, yet you still feel like you’ve seen it before. Only last time it was better.

Honestly, if you're thinking of watching this one, just sit down in front of your computer in the dark, put on some good headphones and watch the trailer for it on YouTube. It pretty much sums up the entire film, and you don’t waste two hours that you’ll never get back.

Like, ever.

Wendy's Films of 2010 #45: The Crazies (1973)

I've never been a horror connoisseur, in fact I'm known at GenX for my fervent dislike of the genre, but I decided to send caution to the wind and check out George Romero's fourth foray into the world of cinematic creations. Luckily for me, The Crazies isn't actually scary. At all. It's actually laughable how scary this film isn't. It's about a town that gets quarantined when a virus is leaked into the water system, and the whole population starts to go crazy. A select few, including the all American firefighter Clank and his nurse girlfriend Judy, manage to escape the quarantine and attempt to fight off the masked military men as some of their group go insane. The themes are cool, the incest, not so much.

I imagine this film is one for big Romero fans, though I'm sure its lack of zombies will hinder even the most loyal of viewers from enjoying it.