another day. another movie.

Zombies used to be related only to voodoo, they were dead bodies, resurrected by witch doctors and the like to be mindless slaves. George Romero changed all that, without a conscious choice of his, the flesh-eating corpses he dreamed up in Night of the Living Dead came to be called zombies, and the mythology of the zombie apocalypse was born. Certainly, it was born in Night of the Living Dead, but it was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead that really made the genre what it is.

The recipe? Obviously, you start with a base of an undead horde of resurrected corpses intent on consuming the flesh of the living. Then, add some over the top gore, although by 1978 standards that gore couldn’t be all that realistic for both logistic and ratings purposes. Once you’ve stirred that in well, throw in a group of survivors working together for the purposes of surviving the apocalypse. Third, and this is the most important ingredient of all, you need to layer those ingredients with healthy amounts of subtext featuring commentary about the parts of our culture which make us real life zombies.

That’s the general formula, and it found its true birth in Dawn of the Dead. The zombie as we know it came into existence in Night of the Living Dead, there may have been a few poor attempts to recreate that during the early seventies, but Dawn of the Dead is the movie folks have been recreating in various forms and mediums ever since.

It’s certainly not a perfect movie, but it sure is a damned important one for the trajectory of what came after. The fact that without belaboring the point in the film, zombies are hording to the mall because their commercial worship in life formed such a neural connection that their instinct driven, undead brains continue to sense the significance of the place after death. It’s that sort of quiet, understated critique of ourselves that separates the wheat from the chaff in zombie-lore. This movie got the ball rolling in understanding the potential of the zombie genre to give us a way to play with the ways we destroy us.

There have been improvements and alterations, missteps and revolutions in the genre, but when you’re talking about zombies, it all comes back to this folks… it all comes back to this.

Finally, we get real werewolves, since Brotherhood of the Wolf wasn’t actually about werewolves at all.

Let’s keep this one simple.

The Good: Definitely the best werewolf transformation scene I’ve personally witnessed, especially taking into consideration that the film was made in 1981. I also really liked their mythology, they didn’t do much with it, but I liked the general werewolf rules here.

All of his crazy werewolf dreams were fun, original and unexpected. Always a good cocktail.

Also, I loved his visits from his dead friend, it was kind of like a warped Twilight Zone version of A Christmas Carol.

The Bad:

Maybe I was harder on this film because it is hailed and praised so highly, but the whole thing felt so abrupt. I never actually began to care about any of the characters, the lead performance was awkward and distracting, and it felt like they were trying to rush through the story much of the time. I’m in the minority in that opinion, so maybe I was just having an off night, and I certainly didn’t hate it, I just never felt connected enough to care about anything that was happening in the story… then BAM, it was over.

I’d be up for watching that transformation scene again though.

Movie #3 comes from France, and ostensibly it’s about werewolves. There isn’t much to say about it. It was pretty absurd. It had it’s entertaining moments to be sure, but it took itself really seriously, and tried its hand at so many genres that it seemed to have trouble ever nailing any of them effectively.

What would a series of scary[ish] movies, or life itself, be without some zombies?

The second movie we watched was our first new film, the 2007 Spanish zombie film, [REC]. Like Let The Right One In, this film was eventually given the Americanization treatment when it was made into the 2008 film Quarantine.

The film follows news magazine show host Angela, and her cameraman Pablo, as they follow firefighters on a call to help an elderly woman who is locked in her apartment. The film is seen entirely from the point of view of Pablo’s camera, which is used to good effect throughout the film. Obviously, there is more to this call than it originally appears, and it doesn’t take long for all gory hell to break loose.

The zombies in this movie were the 28 Days Later kind, not the Night of the Living Dead kind, with a little Exorcist thrown in for good measure. Since I am one of the seemingly few zombie fans who has no problem with fast zombies (they can be just as scientifically viable), the fast zombies weren’t a problem for me.

The film uses its concept to good effect, creating a tense, claustrophobic feeling throughout the film. The film is also really short, clocking in at only 78 minutes, which in one sense was disappointing, but in another sense, it was nice that they didn’t try to overstretch and ruin the whole thing.

Other than that, it was pretty straightforward. Nothing profound or groundbreaking, but more than worth the time to watch. It was definitely a fun movie-watching experience, especially with friends.