There’s more to a zombie movie than brain-eating, dismemberment, and finding clever ways to dispose of the zombie threat.

Granted, there are a lot of people out there who want nothing more out of their zombie flicks.  No matter how idiotic the rest of the movie, if we get a good crowbar-through-the-forehead gag, they’re satisfied.  They’re also stupid, and probably enjoyed the Day of the Dead remake.

What made George Romero’s zombie films as successful as they were had a lot to do with a very important point that a lot of people tend to skim over: What happens when the zombies are off-screen.  Because if you can’t give a shit about the characters involved, what’s gonna make you care when they’re threatened by some flesh-eater?

That’s not to say that Dance of the Dead should be compared to a Romero zombie flick (nor should any other zombie movie; Romero’s are in a class of their own).  But the filmmakers (writer Joe Ballarini and director Gregg Bishop) make it a point to create likable characters who you’re going to enjoy following for 90 minutes.  The film takes place on prom night, so when the inevitable zombie invasion begins, the only people available to save the prom-goers from becoming zombie lunch (200 teenagers in a single room?  Zombie smorgasbord) are the ones that couldn’t get dates to the prom.  The losers, the weirdos, the geeks.

And maybe that’s what make you love ’em so much.  Because let’s face it: most zombie fans are, to some extent, geeks or outcasts of some kind.  I may not have been in the Science Fiction Club (gimme a little credit here) but I was, ya know, one of those weirdo art students.  It’s easy to relate to the heroes when you yourself may not have been the prom king/queen.*

The first 20 minutes are funny and entertaining enough that I’d have been happy spending the evening with the geek heroes even if the zombie attack had never happened.  But happen it does, and the filmmakers waste no time in changing the mood from funny to downright creepy.  From then on out, it’s pretty much your typical zombie plot — get to cover, board the windows, find weapons, etc. — until the outcasts decide to make a visit to the high school to rescue the rest of the student body, but the script manages to stay funny enough that you don’t mind the fact that, well, you’ve seen a lot of this before.

All of that stuff that I mentioned at the beginning of this review?  The stuff that you expect to see in every zombie movie?  Well, it’s all here too.  In loads.  And for a movie with a budget as low as this one, the effects (mostly practical, with the odd CGI effect thrown in here and there) look incredible.  And oh yes, lots of blood, guts and gore.

I’m not going to go out and say that Dance of the Dead is the greatest zombie movie you’ll ever see, and it’s light years away from achieving the greatness of the horror comedy of, say, Shaun of the Dead.  The movie’s got its issues.  After getting off to a strong start, the movie slows down a bit in the second act, as if the filmmakers decided that they needed to throw a few cliches in just so that the audience doesn’t feel disappointed.  The aforementioned boarding up of an old house, the weapons-building montage, the crazy gym teacher who turns out to be a militaristic nutjob (just the person to have with you during the Apocalypse) are all things that you’ve seen in countless other films.  But it’s got enough of its own flourishes — including zombies literally launching themselves from their graves and hitting the ground running! — to make the movie more worth your while.

While most of the horror hitting your local mulitplex is little more than marketing trash designed more to sell tickets than to actually, uh, entertain, it’s good to know that excellent, entertaining and fun horror flicks are still out there to be found.

*Note: While I did go to the prom — twice — I kind of hated it and think that a zombie invasion would’ve probably been a vast improvement over the night’s events.

I should have come home after work tonight and gone to sleep at a responsible time. But I just couldn’t wait.

I should wait until tomorrow night and just write a full review of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. But, by then, you will have probably already seen the movie yourself and drawn your own conclusions.

But I can’t sleep. Not without getting a few thoughts on this movie out in to the world. I can’t stop thinking about the movie. I want to live in Hellboy’s world. I want to shop in the troll market.

Hellboy 2 is an absolutely wonderful movie with more imagination than any other film you’ve seen this year. It’s breathtaking in its wonder and its magic. Guillermo del Toro is a genius with a mind that works unlike anyone else’s. And in Hellboy 2, his mind is splattered across the screen in a way that he hasn’t been able to accomplish before, for a variety of reasons.

I may one day try to write that full review that I mentioned (if I can put my love for this movie into words other than saying “I want to make love to this movie”). But until then, know this: When you see this movie — and you should, you need to — you will fall in love with it. If you don’t, then you’ve forgotten what wonder is.

Now, I’m going to bed with visions of Tooth Fairies dancing in my head.

[via B-D]

For the unaware, The Editing Room is a website run by Rod Hilton (no relation to porn star Paris) where he writes abridged screenplays for the latest Hollywood atrocities and points out all of their flaws.  Don’t worry: He’s much funnier than I am.

So here I am to direct you to The Editing Room’s latest masterpiece, The Happening.  Hopefully you’ll shed some poundage in the process.

Here’s how things begin:

FADE IN:

EXT. NEW YORK CITY – PARK

People walk around in the PARK while two unimportant characters have INANE DIALOGUE.

BORING CHARACTER 1

That was weird. Suddenly all of the people in this park stopped dead in their tracks and started acting like brainless robots.

BORING CHARACTER 2

Large groups of people behaving as though they have no personality whatsoever? That can only mean …

BORING CHARACTER 1

Oh shit, we’re in an M. Night Shyamalan movie!

They both KILL THEMSELVES.

EVERYONE ELSE

An M. Night Shyamalan movie! Our careers will be ruined!

EVERYONE ELSE kills themselves as well.

INT. PHILADELPHIA – CLASSROOM

MARK WAHLBERG teaches SCIENCE to a classroom full of middle school students. It’s exactly as believable as it sounds.

You can read the rest of it at Cracked.com, where Rod filled in as a guest columist.

Jimbo is 13. All he can think about is one girl, Sarah Jane. And no matter what stands in his way – bullies, violence, chaos, zombies – nothing is going to stop him from finding a way into her world.

Although I think I like DJ’s take on it better:

Imagine Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” set inside the world of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” with a dash of your first schoolyard crush sprinkled on top. In a nutshell, that’s “I Love Sarah Jane”.

That’s called foreshadowing!

Quint.

Jaws is, without a doubt, my favorite movie.  Oddly, I can’t recall the first time that I watched Jaws.  It wasn’t in the theater (the movie came out… um… a long time before I was alive), so it must’ve been on VHS at some point.  But it’s one of those movies that to this day, I can still watch and still be drawn in as if I’m seeing it for the first time.  I know exactly what’s going to happen at every moment of the film (I’ve probably seen the movie more than a dozen times), but I still sit on the edge of my seat during the Orca’s final expedition to eliminate that damn shark.

And every time, I hope that Quint is going to make it. 

Quint breezes into the movie like a breath of stinky fish air.  We don’t know anything about this guy, who he is, where he came from.  He screeches onto the screen with the sound of fingernails on a blackboard (literally) and when we first see him we think “Hey, here’s someone who might actually be able to stop all this people munching that’s been going on!”  Only later do we find out what brought Quint to where he is now, leading to one of the greatest scenes in film history (and one of the chief reasons why Quint is probably my favorite character from any movie):

How could you not want that man to live to a ripe old age?  Unfortunately, Bruce the Shark had other plans for Quint.

But at least he went down like a man.  He went down fighting mano y mano with a big fuckin’ shark.  I mean, c’mon, hewas still fighting the shark, even as his legs were somewhere in the shark’s esophagus (do sharks have those?)!  And really, I don’t think he’d have had it any other way.  But man, do I wish he’d lasted just a little bit longer… 

At least his appearance could’ve made the sequels a little more watchable.

Barackula is a short political horror rock musical about young Barack Obama having to stave off a secret society of vampires at Harvard when he was inducted into presidency at the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Obama (Justin Sherman) finds that he must convince the vampire society that opposing political philosophies can coexist or else the society may transform Obama to the dark side. Reminiscent to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and a slight infusion of Jesus Christ Superstar, this short film offers two original musical numbers, “Running” and “This Is Our Time,” which, lyrically, are allegorical to Obama’s current campaign and speeches. The film solely depicts Obama’s strengths, merits and genuineness while being quietly respectful towards the other presidential candidates.

Since I’m a fan of rock operas, vampires, and Barack Obama, the very existence of this video is sort of a win-win… um, -win situation.

You can watch the film in its entirety in awesome hi-def at its official website or if you’re too lazy to click a link, you can watch the craptackula YouTube version after the jump (which still involves clicking a link, I guess).

Zombie’s been keeping very hush-hush on this one. Probably because he was very open about his involvement with Halloween and, well, everyone hated it. But maybe it’s just because nothing’s really happened with the movie yet. But that don’t stop us internet nerds from speculating!

From QuietEarth:

[I]t’s about a wrestler named Tyrannosaurus Rex who is on the run from a biker gang from hell. The idea for the film is loosely based on the comic book Zombie did with Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) entitled THE NAIL.” Here’s the synopsis for the comic Hunted in one of the most desolate regions of America, preyed upon by an evil that does not sleep, Rex Hauser is The Nail – and it’s time he took a stand. A semi-pro wrestler, Hauser has been touring the country performing at small-time arenas until the fateful night he and his family run afoul of a bloodthirsty gang of Satanic bikers stalking the North Dakota Badlands. Now he’s a lone man fighting for the survival of his loved ones in a no-holds-barred standoff against the forces of Hell itself! The Nail is a relentless, unflinching portrait of the heart of darkness, and what one man will sacrifice to hold it at bay.

That sounds pretty badass, so I hope it’s true. BUT IS IT?!

Here’s Steve Niles himself on the matter (via Bloody-Disgusting):

“I’ve been getting a lot of calls and mail about Rob Zombie’s new project, Tyrannosaurus Rex,” NIles writes on his blog. “People seem to be under the impression that Rob is doing The Nail and cutting me out. This is not true. Not only is T-Rex a different story, but also Rob is 100% owner of The Nail and is welcome to cherry pick anything he wants. It’s his concept. I was just along for the ride.”

So it’s not The Nail but it might be The Nail? I dunno. I’ll still do some movie nerd speulatin’ of my own and go ahead and cast those three peoples on the poster! Ready?!

I’m really just sort of pulling these out of left field, ya know?  Especially that chick on the right.

What the hell was that?

Okay, I’ve got to admit it. Before Lifeforce was chosen as the latest (and my first) entry in the Final Girl Film Club, I really didn’t know anything about it. I mean, yeah, I’d heard it mentioned in passing, but I pretty much thought that it was considered just another of Tobe Hooper’s failed directorial efforts (read: Everything that’s not Leatherface- or Spielberg-related). Oh, but it’s so much more! We’ve got boobies, space travel, giant bat creatures, boobies, zombies, Patrick Stewart, space vampires, and boobies! Really, what more could you ask for in a movie?

Oh. A coherent plot? Well, erm…

I’m not sure if I should blame the scattershot-ness of the plot on the screenwriters, Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby, or on the writer of the original novel (cleverly titled The Space Vampires), Colin Wilson. But since Dan O’Bannon is responsible for the existence of Alien AND Return of the Living Dead, and Colin Wilson is some guy I’ve never heard of, I’m going to go ahead and place the blame on Wilson. That’s how journalism works, folks!

The plot goes something like this: A crew of British and American astronauts* who are in space for…something… discover that there’s a 150-mile long alien spacecraft hanging out in the tail of Haley’s comet. Of course, they go to investigate and discover that the inhabitants of the spacecraft — giant bats, basically — are all dead. But the crew soon discovers three perfectly preserved humanoid bodies in crystal coffins, one of which looks like this** and naturally gets a lot more screen time than the other two.

Thirty days pass, blah blah blah, the Britmerican crew is dead, but the bodies, miraculously, survive and are brought to earth where, the Space Lady decides to pull a fast one on us and not be dead. She promptly sucks the “life force” (a-ha!) out of a nearby guard, despite the fact that he was sporting some pretty state of the art protective gear:

You see, Space Lady and her space friends (who end up exploded so the filmmakers didn’t have to go all Austin Powers trying to think of ways to keep their junk out of the camera’s view) are Space Vampires. And they have to feed on the life force of other beings to stay alive. Every two hours. Which, I’m thinking, would get pretty damned tiresome. If they don’t feed? They explode into a poof of dust. Really, it would kind of suck to be a Space Vampire. (Get it? It would “suck.” Heh.)

Oh, but I didn’t mention the fact that the victims of the Space Vampires turn into zombies. ZOMBIES! If you think this stuff is convoluted, wait until you get to the part where the Space Lady can partially transfer part of her life force to other people, a bit like the killer did in Fallen. How this works is never really explained, but it does give us the excitement of seeing Captain Picard — under the possession of Space Lady — declare her love for Colonel Tom Carlson, the only astronaut to survive the original Haley’s Comet mission, and someone who seems to have a special connection to the Space Vampires…

…because he is a Space Vampire! At least, I think that’s what they were trying to get in the end, as some sort of big twist that had very little impact. So little impact, actually, that I’m not even going to bother apologizing for spoiling it for you.

If it sounds like I’m bashing Lifeforce, it’s because, well, I sort of am. It’s a ridiculous mess that feels like 5 movies mashed together into one incoherent piece of cinema. But you’ve gotta give the folks behind this credit for having the ambition to not only roll with a concept as silly as Space Vampires (who, it turns out, visited earth eons ago and that’s where the vampire legend originated! ::slaps forehead::), but to add zombies into the mix as well. By the third act of, our antagonist is literally running through hoards of zombies trying to get to a naked Space Lady and save the world from the soul-sucking alien vampires. If that sentence were any stupider, I think my head might explode.

But it’s a fun movie, and it’s worth a watch if only to enjoy its ridiculousness. I only wish that the movie had the kind of self-knowing humor that O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead would show later on. As it is, Lifeforce takes itself a little too seriously considering its premise. But all of its shortcomings are forgiven simply due to the fact that Space Lady is indeed naked for the entire movie. So if you, like me, are a fan of aliens, vampires, zombies, and boobies, then by all means, watch Lifeforce. There’s bound to be something in it to entertain you.

A Note About The Poster: I’m not sure what’s going on in the poster that I’ve got pictured at the top of this article but I think it’s pretty safe to say that whoever designed it never even saw the movie or really even knew what it was about. I think they heard two words — “space” and “boobies” — and their mind shut off, and this is all they could come up with.

*Do the British even HAVE a space program? Oh, wait, this is a movie about space vampires. Believability not a big drawing point.

**Yep, this is NSFW. I could’ve warned you ahead of time, but I figured if you’re at work, you should probably be doing something more productive than reading my blog anyway. You got what you deserved.

The movie is being screened at The Bloor tonight at 9:30. Unfortunately, The Bloor is in Canada. It’s times like this that I wish I was a Canuck. And also when I can’t go to the doctor to treat a massive head wound brought on by zombie attacks because I don’t have health insurance (Medicare, of course, doesn’t cover zombie attacks). Thanks, America!

Luckily, it’s going to be released on DVD next week.

Pakistan s first splatter flick in the tradition of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre delivers spine-tingling thrills when an attractive group of teens pile into a van that runs out of gas in the middle of a dark mysterious forest. Their ghoulish nightmare begins when rotting fresh-eating zombies and a decapitated head-toting screaming banshee-like hitchhiker begin to terrorize them at every turn. But when a mysterious figure dressed in a blood-drenched burqa appears sporting a medieval weapon dripping in gore even the teens prayers won t save them from a night of savage demented horror.

Good looking teens run out of gas in the middle of nowhere? I’d make a crack about how unoriginal that sounds, but the synopsis saved itself with “blood-drenched burqa.” I’m all in.