13 Eerie (2013) - 2/4

When will pompous professors learn to stop dragging their students out to monster-ridden islands in the middle of nowhere? 13 Eerie is another one of those. He’s a professor of criminology, in this case, and he’s staged a series of real corpses around an island with fabricated forensic evidence.  Just happens this island was a prison where human experiments were conducted. That wouldn’t normally be a problem. Might even add atmosphere. Except the experimenters decided to leave their horrible black goo in a poorly-sealed Sunny D jug on the edge of the only useable table within a mile. So when the stuff is swiftly spilled by the bumbling bus driver, only one thing can happen: mutant, undead prisoner attack! 

I toured to this scenic locale because it stars the peculiar and talented Katharine Isabelle. Katharine is a real trouper. She’ll take any script thrown at her. Something brilliant like American Mary (2012) or Ginger Snaps (2000). And she absolutely masters both of those movies: her performance is the real set piece of American Mary and it’s riveting. Or she’ll take secondary roles in movies like Ogre (2008) and Hard Ride to Hell (2010), where the script may have been written by a monkey high on Cap’N Crunch. Even in those movies, her unusual cadences that range from shrill to detached aloofness in the same sentence make her stand out as more interesting than most of what’s happening around her, whether it be a CGI rock troll or Miguel Ferrer as a demonic biker. She seems to devote time and thought into every absurd line she’s fed in these movies, to put in a serious performance in every ridiculous scene. At the same time, she always seems at an ironic distance from the subject, as if she’s watching the movie with us and making sardonic comments. I don’t get her. But I like her. That’s the enigmatic art of Katharine Isabelle. Now if only we can convince her to do nudity.

In 13 Eerie, Isabelle is probably at the most subdued I’ve ever seen her. Probably because she’s saddled with the stalwart role of the ‘final girl.’ She’s the top student in professor A-Hole’s class and doesn’t take kindly to being interrupted by mutant prisoners. Even when her lab partner is having a panic attack that there are zombies on the loose, she just wants to gather forensic evidence and get her A+. Not gonna happen.

The zombies look like alligatormen in orange jump suits. Other than that, they’re just zombies. They crash through walls, grab humans, and begin eating. 13 Eerie is gung-ho about the gore, with some Fulci-throwback slow-eating scenes. I personally find that kind of zombie carnage irritating. Seeing and hearing people eat is unpleasant on the best of occasions. Good thing they’re getting shot in the head by Isabelle and Brenden Fehr.

 
There are very few surprises in this movie. The locale is a very monotonous series of cabins and greenery. The character interactions are either panic, forensic piddling, or arguing with the a-hole professor. The monsters do exactly what you’d expect. They fuck with the best and die like the rest. Survivors go home, mom bakes them a pie—probably. The whole forensics thing has no relevance other than getting them to the island. The best part of the movie is Katharine Isabelle, and even she’s hampered.

Deadheads (2011) - 3/4

Deadheads is another heartwarming zombie horror comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead and the legions of other heartwarming/hearteating zombie comedies. If you're sick of zombie comedies, as I am, Deadheads will still please you, because it is a genuinely charming and funny movie.

Mark wakes up to find himself a zombie in the middle of an outbreak. He's one of the few zombies that can actually think and talk. A smart zombie. Or smombie, if you will. (But why would you?) He teams up with another smart-zombie, Brent, a slacker doofus who just wants someone to hang with. They acquire a pet stupid-zombie, Cheese, and an old war vet with a TMI problem. Together they try to find Mark's girlfriend and help Mark perform his last planned action before death, propose marriage to her. Unfortunately, the usual anti-zombie elements are in place, like a black guy with a shotgun and dudes in hazmat suits.

The characters' personalities are established quickly and they're immediately likeable misfits. These are zombies you'd want to hang with so long as you had some Fabreeze nearby. Their misadventures consequently prove amusing. Goofy jokes that might ordinarily be groan-worthy work quite well. I particularly enjoyed Brent's constant movie references. I enjoyed spending time with these idiots and I wanted them to win.

I also found it amusing how much of Deadheads's structure is based on Star Wars. Cheese is clearly intended to be Chewbacca, down to some outright shot-references. While Brent ought to be Han Solo, the incestuous vibe had to go. So the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker roles flip between Brent and Mark. The girlfriend, Ellie, is Leia. Her dad is Darth Vader. Watch the movie and see how much the roles fit. I believe it was conscious on the part of the writer-directors, the Brothers Pierce.

Like Star Wars, Deadheads is a crowd-pleaser. It is self-consciously a crowd-pleaser. The douchebags are all really douchebags, the good guys are really good guys, and goodguyery will triumph over douchebaggery. Sometimes that's tedious and saccharine. Deadheads does it right. Cliches and spotty acting will quickly become negligible. This movie is a lot of fun and you will indeed be pleased by it. Watch it when you're depressed. It'll do you better than that whiskey in your sock drawer.

La Horde (2009) and Mutants (2009)

Mutants and La Horde are two French fast-zombie movies that follow the Romero format: hole up in a building for shelter and fend off sieging flesh-eaters while the survivors fester from within. Since these films are superficially so similar, I am reviewing them together.

La Horde (2009) - 3/4

Amongst the many zombie genre trends to come from the films of George Romero, one I've never been keen on is badassery. Badassery is common in American cinema, deriving from the Western, in which tough-as-nails gunslingers have to show one another just how tough they can be. The Italians made badassery so ridiculous with films like Django that Terence Hill and Bud Spencer turned it into comedy with considerable success in the Trinity films. Romero, like, but perhaps not to quite the same extant as John Carpenter, is influenced by these western tropes. The cockfight between Ben and Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, the bluster of the scientists and military personnel in The Crazies, the opening of Dawn of the Dead, and most extremely the entirety of Day of the Dead, all show these tropes. Day of the Dead is an apotheosis of badassery and its messiah is Captain Rhodes, who yells to the zombies eating his intestines, "Choke on them!" Captain Rhodes is really responsible for the profusion of badassery in zombie films. Rough, tough guys who are always ready to kick ass, zombie or human, and who never go down without a fight: that's a badass.

Since Day of the Dead, there is scarcely a zombie picture without a healthy dose of badassery: Army of Darkness, Dead Alive, The Undead, Romero's own Survival of the Dead, just to name some well-known films; there are also the multitudes of straight-to-video films that are assembled of crumbs from Romero's table. The latest in this trend is La Horde.

La Horde is ambitious, however: it doesn't want to be just another badass zombie film; it wants to be the badass zombie film. That's not to say the film is badass, as some synonym for epic, but that all of the characters are 90% Captain Rhodes, 10% unique personality. We begin with a team of rogue cops agreeing to storm a tenement and get revenge on the gangsters within for killing a cop. Not only are the rogue cops a collection of badasses out for blood, and not only do gangsters, much like western outlaws, get by on their badassery, but when they're put together, they must constantly strive to out-badass one another. Explosions from the city and the sounds of creatures from within the building interrupts their conflict and, wouldn't you know it, puts the cops n' crooks together to be a badass team of badasses.

I claimed not to be keen on badassery and I should say why. Let's go back to Romero. What makes Day of the Dead an inferior entry in the series than Dawn for many critics is that Day is emotionally exhausting. Emotional exhaustion is acceptable in a film that earns its emotions. But in Day the exhaustion is due to characters constantly throwing tantrums at one another, making threats, and "getting up in each other's faces." They're trying to get the dominant position over one another, to out-badass the other. These displays of power, a necessary part of badassery since no badass can give in to domination, are pissing contests; and pissing contests grow very dull and tiring when the bladder never empties, if you'll excuse the strained metaphor. Badassery is a social ritual within the group, symbolic action that is stylized, formal, repetitive and grows tedious very quickly because we sense the artifice behind it. It works best in small doses, like the saloon fight in Shane, or when played tongue-in-cheek like in Army of Darkness. If overused characters never have an opportunity to simmer down and talk reasonably; they can never be themselves: every moment is a tense moment of heightened emotion while they play the badass. Flourishes like the famous Rhodes death scene are very effective and the reason badassery continues to get deployed. However, filmmakers don't seem to realize that it must be used with temperence.

Dawn of the Dead works so well because once the characters get to the mall and have peace, they don't need to be badasses anymore. Even Day offers moments of respite amongst the three protagonists. La Horde offers no respite of any kind. The characters never for a moment stop struggling to prove what badasses they are. This brings with it a host of problems. Badasses often forget to think, for instance. In La Horde, these badasses never figure out that zombies must be shot in the head or indeed shot at all: There are two lengthy hand-to-hand fights with zombies that amount to choreographed fights with growling punching bags. These two scenes are kind of fun, if too protracted. A life-long viewer of zombie films, I just kept commanding them to just shoot the zombie in the head. With Romero's zombies, punching might work; but these zombies are inexplicably faster and stronger than normal humans.

We also get, as in Day of the Dead, the exhaustion. These characters are forever yelling at and threatening one another, pointing guns, getting face-to-face for slowly- and gravely-spoken "This is how it is" moments. With the life-threatening situation raging around them, one would think they'd set the badassery aside and focus on staying alive. Not so. They're all Captain Rhodes. For anyone who found the constant badassery in Ghosts of Mars tedious, La Horde will be found considerably more tedious. However, as with Captain Rhodes, this does yield some impressive moments, including a one-versus-dozens moment guaranteed to get anyone cheering. And in the midst of the tedious badassery, La Horde does manage to deliver some tense moments of zombie pursuit and exciting zombie action.

Zombie action and badassery aside, there is also a political component to La Horde that most outside of France won't get. France has a lot of riots. We all know this. The reason they have so many riots is that they've allowed loads of refugees, who could care less about France, to become citizens. These people do whatever they want, because France isn't their home and they have no respect for it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them and they're well-armed. These are the film's gangsters, all Africans or Czechs, now put alongside the cops and made to feel what it's like to be a helpless victim in a country they thought was theirs. The zombies' behaviour is holding up a mirror of sorts to these invaders, showing them how self-destructive it is to work against the country that gave them freedom and security. Not being from France myself, it's difficult to say exactly what is the political message, whether a plea for cooperation or rather an invective, even against the very badassery the pervades the film for tearing the country apart and leaving it vulnerable to much worse potential situations.

Mutants (2009) - 2.5/4

The perfect antidote to the ostentatious and egocentric behaviour that is badassery: love. Other-centered, self-effacing is genuine love. For at the center of Mutants is the necrophiliac love story between a doctor and her zombifying husband, who must resist the urge to eat and/or rape his wife with all his inner resources. They hole up in an evacuated hospital and she struggles to save him and get help while zombies and a band of badasses with guns get in her way.

Zombie love stories have been done before. Soavi's Cemetery Man is probably the most famous instance and a tough precedent to beat. Arguably, it has been overcome already with Yuzna's underrated Return of the Living Dead 3. Yuzna follows the trajectory of his couple's relationship through the zombification process and shows a fascination for the effect of the zombie infection on the thoughts and emotions of the infected member, Julie. She describes the agony and hunger of being a zombie, the way it changes her, and yet she never does abandon or harm her lover. Without any explicit mention from the characters, we can see that love can overcome the desire to eat brains.

Mutants isn't quite as sentimental as Cemetery Man and RotLD3. While the doctor and her husband do love one another, practicalities override affection. When her husband seems dangerous, she doesn't hesitate to chain him up and he doesn't hesitate to put a gun to his own head. Where RotLD3 culminates in a Romeo and Juliet moment, Mutants culminates in the stark realization that maybe infection wins and maybe what seemed to be love can be reduced to simple biology. There aren't many optimistic zombie movies, are there?

Unfortunately Mutants doesn't focus on the husband and wife relationship. As with so many of the recent French horror movies, Mutants seems afraid of allowing interiority and emotional space privilege over a barrage of external events. That's fine if the promise or hint of interiority is not offered, as in La Horde. Here filmmaker David Morlet tantalizes us with the necrophiliac relationship, but would rather give us a group of badasses with guns barging into the hospital and slapping the doctor around rather than allow more than a few minutes emotional development between the couple. Had these characters been in the film from the beginning, their presence would have constituted interesting dramatic tension. However, they only make entrance toward the end of a film with a meager 80-something minute runtime. We simply cannot care about them; they just distract from the more interesting matters. These characters are, of course, an excuse for zombie and human carnage. But we've all seen zombie carnage before. Zombie films need some new contribution, new idea to rise above the rest. Mutants had an opportunity to give that, but sadly failed to appreciate the opportunity.

Perhaps the film's attention defecit issues are simply a result of its cynicism. Practical reality, such as infection, zombies, idiots with guns, and the need for supplies do consistently override love. And if pregnancy is the film's symbol for love, a protective force throughout, the film's ambiguous final note may be the most cynical of all. If this is so, the film sacrifices not just its opportunity to investigate love in time of zombie apocalypse, but also some of its entertainment value: The inconsistency makes it difficult to enjoy the film's action, as it never sustains interest in anything, the relationship, the human conflicts, or the zombie-killing. Although what it does offer of each is competent and occasionally fascinating.

Survival of the Dead (2009) - 3.5/4

Throughout Romero's oeuvre, there have been two persistant themes. One is generational conflict and the other is the need for cooperation. In the Dead movies, it is cooperation that has been especially emphasized. I argued elsewhere(1) that one of Romero's major contributions to cinema is his expert and highly-realistic depictions of arguments. There are arguments in so many of his films because so few characters in his films are able to cooperate. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben and Cooper, the two alpha males, won't cooperate. In The Crazies, the townsfolk, the military, and the scientists all have difficulties cooperating with each other. It's perhaps most pronounced in Day of the Dead, where the soldiers and the scientists rarely cease yelling at one another. In Romero's films, only those capable of cooperation stand a chance at survival. Hence the few survivors of Day of the Dead. The zombies are a frightening and offensive contrast to bickering humans. However stupid, the zombies all share a single goal: eating living humans. They never interfere with one another. Humans, presumably, have a shared goal of survival; but, as is Romero's point, it never goes down that way.

Survival of the Dead is in the tradition of Romero's previous invectives against non-cooperation. The story concerns a small island where two Irish families, the Muldoons and the O'Flynns, have lived side-by-side, with a history of contention, for a good many generations. Six days after the zombie infection begins, O'Flynn has taken to shooting all zombies in the head and Muldoon has taken to preserving them in the hopes of finding a cure. Outnumbered and banished from the island, O'Flynn advertises the island as a safe-haven via the internet. The ad catches the attention of a small group of soldiers, with whom O'Flynn returns to the island to destroy both zombies and Muldoons.

There are a lot of ideas going around in Survival. One gets the feeling that Romero brainstormed and threw everything that interested him, concerned him, had him thinking into the soup without much concern for how readily they can be resolved. To beat the metaphor, it's a delicious if decadent soup. The visual and dialogue ideas are fun. The thematic ideas are interesting if at times a little confused. Some are followed through; some aren't; and many conflict.

For one, there's the issue of sentimentality. All throughout Romero's Dead films, the question has been lurking: Could you kill your friends or family as zombies? Survival addresses the question more directly than Romero's previous pictures. The first scene of the film is of Sargeant Crocket (Alan van Sprang) trying to make a superior officer 'mercy kill' a zombified soldier. The officer's inability to do so sends him directly into the clutches of a zombie, while Crocket coolly dispatches all the zombies. Yet, a little later Crocket and his team encounter a group of men who have placed several living zombie heads on sticks. Not only is Crocket apalled at the cruel treatment of the zombies, but Romero makes all the zombie heads African-American and the perpetrators white rednecks. Although it's possible Romero only wanted to make these men sufficiently unsympathetic for us to not mind if Crocket kills them all, it also seems that Romero is stipulating a racist element to the mistreatment of the living dead. So sentimentality toward the living dead seems to be a bad thing, yet mistreating them is also depicted as morally depraved.

This confusion extends to the conflict between O'Flynn and Muldoon. The first we see of O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), he is demanding the zombified children of a Muldoon family be killed. When the mother refuses, she, a living woman, is killed by his men. O'Flynn thus appears highly misguided, if not an outright villain. But it's O'Flynn who represents anti-sentimentality. Muldoon, on the other hand, starts out very sentimental. He doesn't want a single zombie to be killed because they may just be curable. His position appears, initially, reasonable and noble, if somewhat too soft-hearted (the zombies are, after all, trying to eat everyone living). However, the more we get to know O'Flynn, the more likable he becomes. His strength, surety and wit make him an extremely sympathetic character, despite his heartless approach. Muldoon, on the other hand, comes across as inconsistant, aggressive, and frankly perverse. His home is filled with portraits of family members taken after death along with, most prominantly, a gun-toting self-portrait. He loves dead things just a little too much. Once the film is over, it's still not clear how Romero feels about sentimentality. He seems to admire the practicality in Muldoon's position, but not the sentimental motivation or the necrophiliac personality. Muldoon is willing to kill living outsiders, but not the dead; his perversion tends toward a necropolis. O'Flynn, however, seems a bit too cold, even eager, about killing the zombies. The point, again, is cooperation. Both Muldoon and O'Flynn take extreme positions. There's no reason why some zombies can't be killed and some kept in hopes of a cure. The inability of the two island patriarchs to compromise and work together is what brings ruin to the island.

Patriarchy is another part of the problem. It's the problem of generational conflicts Romero has been emphasizing since Jack's Wife (1972) and Martin (1977), if not Night of the Living Dead (1968). O'Flynn and Muldoon each occupy another age, another way of doing things, that involves tribalism and conflict. The younger characters, such as the soldiers and O'Flynn's daughter, albeit rather mercenary in character, are able to cooperate and reach agreements. Even Crocker, the team leader, functions more like the leader of a democracy than a chieftain. Zombies, Romero has explicitly stated, are a previous generation rising to destroy the current one. Survival as a whole depicts the disorders of older generations destroying the budding one. Muldoon's major perversion is his obsession with past generations. O'Flynn, at least, is a progressive, but still a tribal leader. He is viewed almost as Ulysses, the aged patriarch who returns home to take the throne and finds his once-beautiful land in a fallen state, an apocalyptic world in decay. The ulyssean solution to retake the throne and re-establish his patriarchal authority is, for Romero, no solution at all. The ability to get away from patriarchy and its tribalism, to cooperate, is the only salvation for the newer generations, and indeed for the few survivors of Survival.

One interesting feature of Survival is the dialogue. Or rather the whole approach to the narrative, in which the dialogue falls, that could best be characterized as 'coolness.' That's polite for 'cliche.' Ready-to-hand coolness is usually cliche, because coolness is created on screen before it is instantiated in life (2); it involves a considerable degree of contrivance. The dialogue and mannerisms in Survival seem so calculated for coolness, particularly amongst O'Flynn and the soldiers, that it reaches a new level--that other area of linguistic contrivance--poetry. Perhaps my favourite exchange occurs when we see a hauntingly beautiful zombie (Kathleen Munroe) ride by on a horse, the Boy (Devon Bostick) exclaims, "She's beautiful!", Crocket responds, "She's dead," and O'Flynn concludes, "She's my daughter." Elegant tricolons don't occur so readily in real life, but it sure makes a beautiful rhetorical stroke on the aural canvas. Similarly, the first we see of the character Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) is mid-masturbation in public. However liberated and coarse she's supposed to be, no woman is going to do that. It's utterly contrived, but in the overall tone and cool vibe of the film it's another stroke of poetry. Such contrivances can be annoying, as it is evidently manipulative; but at this extremity and with this mastery, it's pure poetry. The highly cinematic dialogue and mannerisms of these characters is something to be savoured.

Perhaps it's due to this cool and cinematic approach that Survival has another peculiar feature: Whatever is out of frame in Survival is usually invisible to anyone in-frame. However sharp Crocket's senses, he is totally unaware of a zombie right beside him until O'Flynn kills it. This move happens again and again. Anything could be occuring right out of frame and we don't know until a character reacts or it is brought into frame somehow. Survival is as far from the stark realism of Night of the Living Dead as the Dead series has gotten. Romero has dashed headlong into a brazen popular expressionism. It will work for some viewers and it won't work for others; for this viewer, it proved a very charming development.

Survival also boasts some of the finest performances Romero's ever gotten in one of the Dead films. While Romero has gotten good performances in non-zombie films like Martin (John Amplas) and The Dark Half (Timothy Hutton), his Dead films tend to have weak performances, with Day of the Dead containing the worst. Kenneth Welsh gives an excellent and energizing performance as the impish tough-guy O'Flynn. Welsh's quick way with words, charm, sly looks, and deceptively hobbled walk communicate a good deal about the character. The other truly outstanding performance comes from Athena Karkanis. While the other actors in the film tend to embody their characters a little too hammily, everything Karkanis says and does seems utterly natural, despite its poetic contrivance. She moves through the picture like a sexy, female David Hemmings.

So that's Survival of the Dead, a hodgepodge of Romero's late-in-life experiments with ideas and styles both old and new. For any who think Romero has long been over the hill, perhaps the final image and words of the film will draw a cynical nod. For myself, it drew an appreciative smile: Romero's creativity is alive and well, and Survival of the Dead may just be the most lyrical zombie film ever made.
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(1) - I argued in my out-of-date essay, "What's So Great About George Romero?", that the essence of Romero's films is in the arguments amongst the characters. At the time the essay was written, I hadn't seen all of Romero's films. There is much wrong with the essay, but the claim that conflict is essential to Romero's oeuvre remains, I think, a valid one.

(2) - "The Film, the World, and the Fantasy"

Zombies: The Beginning (2007) - 2/4

The final film of the great trashmaster, Bruno Mattei, Zombies: The Beginning is a fitting finale to a truly odd cinematic career. If there's anything that characterizes Mattei's approach, it's that anything goes. He comes up with an idea and in it goes. We sometimes say of people that there's no filter between their brain and their mouths; with Mattei, there's no filter between his brain and his script. Never once have I ever had the feeling that Mattei censored himself or even considered, "This idea might be too weird." So was his approach with this shot-on-video Philippine zombie epic that harvests ideas from every corner of Mattei's brain. That's not to say Zombies: The Beginning is a perfect movie or even a good movie. It's riddled with flaws and I'll talk about those too, but first the plot.

Zombies begins with the discovery of a woman on a raft by a rescue team. After recovering, she explains to the biotech company for which she works that her ship encountered an island where the dead are reanimated and everyone else was killed. They don't believe her and she becomes a Buddhist nun. Half a year passes and she's still having nightmares of her experience. The opportunity to be free of these nightmares presents itself in the form of Paul Barker, a bigshot scientist for her former company that wants to take her back to the island for research along with a military team. Off they all go to the island where they find themselves in a zombie trap with days to go until help arrives.

I'll start with the faults. There are some boring stretches, for one. These are dialogue-laden stretches and the actors are mostly dreadful, the dubbing worse than dreadful. Hey, this is a Mattei film! The lead actress (Yvette Yzon) isn't bad at all, but her dubbing does her a disservice. She has to carry a lengthy, indignant speech before the board of directors early on, then she has to debate Barker at the convent, then we see the military team prepping and bantering. These military guys, incidentally, have the worst dubbing of all; one of them has a voice best described as what Homestar Runner would sound like if he were a morbidly obese castrato. Even the rescue mission is played out at length with focus on verisimilitude, when it really adds nothing. I guess you could call it filler until we get to the island. It's a drag, but it's worth slogging through. Yzon is a beautiful lady (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2068456/) and you get to look at her the whole time, so it's not so bad.

While the digital shooting is quite good, Mattei makes the mistake almost all shot-on-digital zombie movies make: slow-motion. Why must they all do this? Close-ups of zombies eating, often in slow motion. Make-up effects are more effective when glimpsed quickly. In fact, several things are shot in slow motion when they needn't be.

Another fault is one that at times is also one of the good points, and that's the use of cliches. The military guys are the same military guys that you've seen in every low-budget action sci-fi/horror of the '80s, except, if possible, even more cardboard and disposable. So you can kind of predict the scientists and the military won't get along, in good Day of the Dead fashion. It's kind of annoying. These guys aren't even as interesting as the morons in Rats: Night of Terror, because at least those guys were weirdos from underground. On the other hand, it can be amusing to see what films he's 'referencing'. The girl saved from the raft is Aliens, her returning to the island to overcome her nightmares is Mountain of the Cannibal God, the military and scientist mix is Day of the Dead, etc.. And I daresay Mattei's been watching horror hentai movies and playing Playstation games, because this movie's got some fricken weird ideas!

Or maybe I do Mattei a discredit. Maybe he really did just come up with this disturbing stuff himself. But disturbing is the word. Once they get to the island, we see Mattei really kick into action. The cinematography is serviceable, but it's the lighting that's excellent. It's always dark and raining on the island, but the way it's lit makes it look like a video game. You'd almost think you were watching a cut scene from some military strategy game. The video game comparison doesn't stop there. Once inside the research compound on the island, we're in Resident Evil territory. Humans have been used for horrendous research, there are fetuses everywhere, zombie women in cages, zombie women pregnant with monster fetuses, a zombie with some strange gadget on his head. And it gets even more incredible, but I dare not spoil the ending. It's really so bonkers, so outrageous, I was in awe. Mattei actually disturbed me. It even outdoes the end of Rats: Night of Terror.

And he frightened me too. The jump scares and suspense moments are quite often very effective. Not so much for the soldiers: I knew they're zombie-fodder from the get go. But the biologist/nun is our worthy protagonist and I sympathized with her. I cared about her fate. It helps, too, that Mattei designed some really interesting creatures and put the effort into good make-up effects.

I don't want to spoil anything further, as much as I would like to say more. I would rather let you discover. There are things in this movie that are just over-the-top weird and brilliant: midget zombies, mutants, apes. Things anyone but Mattei would have said, "Well I'd better have a reason for this." It's great trash and a fitting farewell. Bruno outdid himself.

Zombie Lake (1981)

Cinematic stylist Jean Rollin brings us a picture in which a town must face not just their own, but all of Europe's terrible past as a menagerie of zombies arise from the local lake intent on consuming the countless naked women in the village.

The lake itself is the inviting and yet terrible subconscious of man. Therein are hidden the dark secrets and terrors of our existence, the horrible truths long-suppressed. The town's mayor explains this lake was once used in black masses to dispose of sacrificed children. The townsfolk, during the German occupation, disposed of murdered Nazi soldiers in that very lake. Now the soldiers are rising and killing, the vessels of vengeance and intergenerational guilt; the repressed truths having soured into the death drive, 'Thanatos.'

Meanwhile, Eros, the life-instinct, is represented by the hordes of beautiful, naked women, whose lithe, nubile bodies, smooth and tight, perfect for bearing the seed of man, become the food of zombies. In a startling but ecstatically true moment, Eros is victorious, for the love of one of the zombies for the French girl he fathered before he was murdered may just hold the key to their destruction.

Anyway, so this is a bad movie, but it's also a really weird movie. There's a lengthy flashback segment in the middle of the film that tells, without dialogue, the love story of a German soldier for a French woman and the tragedy that befell them. This leads to an image that must be unique to this film: a little girl walking hand-in-hand with a Nazi zombie down an old cobblestone road in a French village.

There are lots of naked girls. They're quite sexy and all skinny-dipping mad. But Rollin, dirty old man he is, shoots them skinny-dipping from underwater, giving us awkward shots of their furry vaginas as their legs flail about. As Seinfeld puts it, "There's good naked; and there's bad naked." This is somewhere in between. It's not really sexy at all and kind of stupid-looking, but they're still cute girls. It gets even stupider-looking when the zombies start grabbing.

Ultimately, all I can say is that I found myself quite bored watching the film, despite some of the interesting things to be found within. For this kind of a movie, it's way too ponderous. The best part is actually the silent love story in the center.