The Walking Dead

George Romero defined the zombie film. And in that he perhaps did his job too well.

Very few zombie movies, hell zombie works in any medium, have pushed past Romero’s films, either narratively, stylistically, or thematically. The greatest deviation from the text thus far being the staggering idea, “Well what if the zombies… were like… fast?”

Virtually all Zombie movies end at the same point, with the last vestiges of civilization crumbling and our remaining heroes (if any there be) running off into the wilderness. (Two major exceptions being Danny Boyle’s nominally happy ending to 28 Days Later. Which along with Shaun Of The Dead tell me that though Brits might be cynical about a lot things, their trust in their government's ability to handle an outbreak of zombies is absolute). And Romero’s own criminally underrated Land Of The Dead. Some would argue that Dawn Of the Dead qualifies, but the mall is so insular I don’t think it counts. Had the film followed the bikers, then sure.) Were they go from there and what happens next has not been a question filmmakers have been particularly interested in asking.

Even movies like 28 Weeks Later which pointedly take place in the aftermath of a zombie disaster seem more or less dedicated to taking things to square one.

In the word’s of Henry Jones Sr. “They leave just as they’re getting interesting.”

There is of course one major exception to this rule, which would be Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. The secret to Kirkman’s Zombie opus, now Frank Darabont’s as well, is that it’s not really about Zombies at all. Though it makes fantastic use of them they’re really just one hell of a macguffin. The book could be about anything that forces society to rebuild itself. One suspects that Kirkman could have written his book about the aftermath of a plague, or a war, or an alien invasion. It’s all about the interruption of societies continuity. And what happens afterwards.

Or as Kirkman himself so succinctly put it on the back of each Walking Dead trade.

“When is the last time any of us really worked to get something we wanted?

How Long as it been since any of us really Needed something that we wanted?

The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessisty has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. In a matter of months society has crumbled. No government. No grocery stores. No mail. No cable TV. In a rule ruled by the dead we are forced to finally start living.”

That last line may be a bit on the nose. But there is simply no escaping the fact that Kirkman’s underlying message is that mankind would be much better off with a 99% of it’s trivial bullshit mercilessly and completely swept away.

And he makes a compelling case, despite the parade of horrors he’s shown.

Romero, who always tied his ghouls into specific aspects of social satire (Racism, Consumerism, Militarism, Neo Cons, Social Media Solipsism, the er Irish?) never came as close to obliterating the system in it’s totality.

This is in all fairness at least partially due to the fact that Romero had to tell his story in two hour chunks, while Kirkman has the luxury of at this point literally thousands and thousands of pages.

I’m certainly, not meaning to dig at Romero, who I admire immensely as a filmmaker, and not just because of his zombie pictures. And I certainly don’t think that Kirkman ever would have made Dead without Romero. All I’m saying is, that Kirkman, unlike just about every other person who has tackled the zombie in the past forty years, took the baton that Romero was waving and actually ran forward with it.

And if you haven’t experienced it yet, either in it's original form, or the Show which premiered on TCM last night. then brother you’re cheating no one but yourself.

The show begins, with a scene not in the book. With Rick our hero, wandering through the ruins of modern society, into what was apparently an attempt to set up a camp similar to our heroes. It’s that second tier that really makes it haunting. First one thing fails, then the response to it does. Then after a brilliant tease Rick is forced to shoot a little girl in the face. It should become clear at this point that “Fucking around.” is not on Frank Darabont’s list of things to do.

And indeed in no aspect of the production does Darabont fuck around. Everything from the naturalistic dialogue, to the genuine epic sweep of the visuals.




To the gore (mostly practical thank God). Indeed the gore made even me raise my eyebrows. Quick anecdote; a few weeks ago I was hanging out with at a friend's and we happened to watch Friday The 13th Part 3 on AMC, but quickly changed the channel, when it became clear that AMC was cutting out all of the gore gags. After watching Grimes literally stumble on a woman whose midsection is nothing but some vaguely recognizable lungs and intenstines, I can’t imagine why. This stuff would give Tom Savini nightmares.

(Zombies apparently don't fear the FCC)

Right now one of the big discussions going on, is the fact that TV is doing movies job. Jim Emerson has been a big proponent of this, and like with most of what Emerson writes I disagree.

TV is a serialized medium, and Movie's are for the most part not.

A long running film series, like say just for a point of example, Sam Raimi's Spiderman, is lucky to last 3 movies. Break it down, that movie tells "a story" over about seven hours, and five years.

Compare that to the average Television show that last five years. That show if you break it down to forty minutes an episode, twenty two episodes a year is going to have seventy three hours to tell its story. 



Now that is both a blessing and a curse, as even the greatest TV show is going to have some weak points (Anyone remember the "Cast Of The Sopranos argues with Indians about Columbus Day" episode?)

The grey area, it seems to me, comes on DVD. To take The Sopranos as the example again, there is no way you can tell me that David Chase didn't look at the extended multi episode dream sequence that opened Season 6 and say "Eh, It'll work on DVD." 

That's where I first saw it, and I think it worked pretty damn well, but people to this day still bitch about it because they saw it over the course of three weeks rather then three hours. 

My point is, there may not be a huge amount of difference in how TV and Film is made. But there is a HUGE amount of difference in how they are processed.

That being said, if anyone is taking advantage of the new found porousness between the mediums it’s Frank Darabont. Able to transfer his Television crew from The Shield to shoot the down and dirty The Mist and able to effortlessly give The Walking Dead a sense of cinematic grandeur. Right down to the Drew Struzan poster.

(C'mon, that's fucking cool)

Darabont makes plenty of smart moves in the adaptation. He’s able to take concepts Kirkman didn’t think about until later (such as the consequences of Gun Fire) and introduces them as the rules of the world from Day 1. At first I have to admit I was a bit worried that the first arc of Walking Dead would be too slim to sustain a season of television. After all Kirkman tells the story in just one hundred and forty pages. But comic books are tricky, it’s not enough to tell a story in the thousands of pages a long running series can get, you have to be able to tell a story every twenty four pages as well. What Darabont does is expand the story without really adding any extraneous filler material. Where Kirkman had to be ruthlessly concise Darabont can stretch out a little. Taking scenes like Rick’s escape from the hospital, characters like the man who saves Rick, and relationships like Rick’s with Shane, all almost throwaways in the book, and expands and deepens them. It’s like being able to glance at what happens just before and after the various panels. The Walking Dead stands as an example of adaptation that is damn near perfect.

I may not agree that Television is supplanting movies. But I will gladly agree that The Walking Dead is scary, better made, and more human then any of the pathetic offering we horror fans got this October.

If the show remains this good, and its source material has laid down an excellent road map to it doing just that (provided that they keep the prison to just one season) I think we’re looking at a serious classic of the genre.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 19: Survival Of The Dead

Diary Of The Dead hurt me in a way that very few movies ever had. It broke my heart, by punching it through my testicles. Diary was a film that truly made me hate a George Romero film, which up until that point was something I was blissfully unaware I could do.

Based on the reviews I’d read, including those from critics who’d given Diary a pass, I figured Survival would be even worse. Reviews were ranging from deeply disappointing all the way to apoplectic.

Well, call it low expectations, call it lowered standards, I actually kind of enjoyed Survival Of The Dead. It’s not great, and it may be the first Romero Zombie movie to be “just” a zombie movie and it’s way smaller in ambition and scale then any of the preceding zombie movies.. But it manages not to be the affront to all that is good and holy that Diary was.

The horror of Survival is Nicotine, National Guard captain last scene marauding the documentary crew of the loathsome Diary. Hearing rumor of a safe haven of an island through the intertubes. Nicotine and his two dimensional crew make their way to a land where for reasons that perhaps should stay locked in the depths of Romero’s imagination, everyone is reenacting Darby O’ Gill And The Little People. Seriously, It feels at any given time these folks might burst out with a round of “My Dear And Darling One”.



Nicotine and his crew have been unwittingly dragged into an improtu revolution, stemming from a battle between two rival families. One who wants to keep the zombies “alive” until a cure can be found, and the other who wants to “execute every last one of the fuckers.” Among the movies good qualities is that it takes its dear sweet time in telling us which one is supposed to be the bastard.

Nicotine is, well how should I put this... Not the most fascinating protagonist Romero has ever had. He's not bad. And Romero and the actor kind of do what they can with him, but the movie loses focus.

Along with the ambiguity, there are a few good beats, some striking imagry and tense scenes. Including a surprisingly expensive looking showdown on a dock, that has to be one of the best set pieces that Romero has ever filmed (“The road is mined!”)

And though less personal, Survival still includes plenty of Romero touches, including a sequence where Nicotine and his crew come across a posse of rednecks who torture zombies in a manner that Romero has wanted to try since his original draft of Day Of The Dead.

Aside from the incredibly incongruous Irish men inhabiting the island, one must also deal with the CGI gore and community theater level acting.

But the real problem is that while Night, Dawn, Day, Land, and yes even Diary, felt like big slabs of societal deconstruction that Romero simply had to make, Survival just feels like a cool idea he wanted to try out. And the lack of intensity shows. The other Dead films are novels burning with things to prove, this is a novella done for the hell of it.

It’s the textbook example of a B- film. It does just enough, and nothing more

THE RETURN OF 31 DAYS OF HORROR: #21 Land Of The Dead

Land Of The Dead gets a lot of hate. I remember reading about it when it was still called Dead Reckoning over on the early days of AICN. Even then there was this additude of “This’ll never happen but here’s the script for it anyway.” Then 9/11 came along and any lingering hope seemed to die. Then came Zack Synder’s, it’s taken me along time to come to terms with it, Dawn Of The Dead, and the project got momentum again and suddenly “Holy Shit Romero’s making another Zombie movie.” Curdled into “Bet It’s going to suck.”

Now look I’m not going to say Romero’s a saint. Diary Of The Dead broke my heart, by punching it through my testicles, a painful mortifying experience I never wish to experience again. I’m just saying I feel like a lot of people came to this movie with a chip on their shoulder. The movie’s not perfect, but I would honestly rank it above the underrated but still none too enjoyable Day Of The Dead. Now that the hypes died down, and Romero has done us the courtesy of showing us what a terrible Romero zombie movie actually looks like, we can all calm down a little and watch Land Of The Dead for what it is, a flawed, but cool, and undenialably Romero.

The thing that has always made Romero great as a filmmaker is his refusal to stop at point A. It’s not enough to come up with a clever idea you have to do something with it. So a story of a bunch of people trapped in a mall, becomes a devastating social satire, the story of some daredevil motorcycle guys becomes an unlikely dissection of the viability of artistic purity in a compromised age and the story of the last city on earth has some real teeth to it.

Land Of The Dead, follows a group of mercenaries who work out of Fiddler’s Green, a totalitarian city run by Dennis Hopper. On a routine raid of a nearby town they manage to piss off Big Daddy, a zombie who has apparently decided he’s had just about enough of this bullshit and follows them home. His bid to live in good part of town rejected, John Leguizomo stages an impromptu revolution, threatening to blow up the city with a pretty fucking cool zombie mobile.

All through Land Of The Dead are things I’ve never seen before in a Zombie movie. The eerily beautiful opening of the Zombie’s in their natural habitat as strange and beautiful as anything I’ve seen in a horror movie. When Fiddler’s Green commando’s swarm in with their sky flowersand start massacring it’s genuinely horrific, the canny reverse shot of the zombie massacres we all know and love. The moment where Big Daddy performs his first “mercy killing” and decides to follow the convoy is genuinely electric. It’s a great game changing moment.

The problem with Land Of The Dead is that after this opening scene, we get this weird down shift into what plays like a post 1990 John Carpenter flick, involving Dennis Hopper (in an admirably bug nuts performance), John Leguizomo, and The Mentalist over Dennis Hopper’s giant zombie killing mobile. The problem with this less then enthralling plot is it’s taking place infront of Fiddler’s Green which is so well realized that a more interesting film is taking place in the background of literally every frame of the movie.

The cast is one of the Romero’s least, when even Asia Argento isn’t flying a freak flag you know you’re in trouble. The casting seems mostly based on looks, so you can distinguish the hyper stylized one dimensional mercenaries from each other.

Things pick up again at the end when Romero remembers, “Oh yeah this is a zombie movie.” The siege is one his best, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch those last unfortunate souls who have been able to use status to shield themselves from the horror, finally succumb to the world around them.

Because for all the brain munching that goes on it’s those doomed figures in Fiddler’s Green who fill me with real horror. Waiting for the end of the world with their thumb up their ass. Doing their best to ignore the horror at their doorstep, unaware that they’re just biding time.

The RETURN OF 31 DAYS OF HORROR: #9 Creepshow

Well from Trick R’ Treat to the last decent anthology movie ever made. Creepshow is old school horror fun. While Trick R’ Treat was a decidedly modern take on the anthology horror film, and it’s antecedent the horror comic, only two of the sories where done in the classic “moral that ends up biting you in the ass” style. Creepshow is a hundred percent real thing.

Directed by the great George Romero, and written the great Stephen King,
(it also regrettably STARS King but we’ll get to that later). Creepshow tells five stories and one brief wraparound (which puts a SECOND great horror writer in the cast the brilliant Joe Hill. If you like horror and haven’t read Heart Shaped Box, 20th Century Ghosts, and Locke And Key your life is incomplete.)

The first and arguably the best part of Creepshow follows a very fucked up family’s annual Father’s Day reunion this time with an unexpected guest. It’s one of King’s patented upper class twit of the year competition where a bunch of boorish moneyed assholes get their just deserts. It’s got a great cast, including a rare appearance of Ed Harris with hair. Though there are some campy parts, such as Ed Harris’s super awesome disco dancing. He also possesses the worlds calmest, slowest reaction to having a giant tombstone pushed on him, waiting patiently at the bottom of an open grave for what seems like five minutes. But the great gore effects and dark sense of humor make it a classic.

The next is the controversial (loathed) The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrel. Which stars King as a Hillbilly who is turned into a giant living plant by a Meteor. It sounds silly, well because it is silly, but I still kind of like it. King’s acting is to put it kindly amateurish. To put it less kindly he seems to believe he’s starring the most gruesome Heehaw episode ever made. Scenes like the one where Verrell imagines selling the Meteor to the “Department of Meteors” at the local college is basically honky face. But the fact is for anyone whose read some of the horror comics that Creepshow is so fetishisticly paying tribute to, you know that this tone is actually pretty damn accurate. It’s awkward as hell, but it’s shockingly bleak ending turns the whole joke rancid. In it’s own way Verrell is kind of a extraordinary.

The third segment follows Ted Danson and Leslie Nielson in a fight to the death, it’s got some fun moments but has always been kind of the most vanilla episode to me. But then again it does feature Ted Danson and Leslie Nielson fighting to the death, so there is some intrinsic entertainment value there.

Things ramp up again with the next installment which stars The great (notice how often I’ve used that phrase in this review, there’s a reason) Adrienne Barbeau as the worst person in the entire world and Hal Holbrook as her henpecked husband. Things brighten up when Holbrook’s friend finds a monster in the college basement.

Things end on a surreal note with the story of a Howard Hughes’ type whose “germ proof” penthouse is infested with roaches, who are for some reason sick of this guy being a prick to everyone. Though this one is something of a fan favorite, I always found it a bit of a let down after the great preceding segement. A bizarre cameo from Billy Dee Williams livens things up a bit. But spending twenty minutes in an assholes’ apartment doesn’t really any more entertaining then spending twenty minutes in an actual assholes apartment. Even if he does get eaten by roaches at the end.

Creepshow’s a great showcase for Romero’s talents. Playing with the biggest cast and budget he ever had (until Land Of The Dead) he is clearly having a ball. A lot of this movie’s ahead of its time, for all the praise Ang Lee got for editing The Hulk like a comic book Romero beat him to it by twenty years and did a better job of it to boot.

While it modern horror fans might initially be turned off by Creepshow’s campy style, if they give It a chance this movie will grow on them. Delightfully retro, but bracing original, Creepshow is still a guaranteed good time.