Synopsis: From January to December 2013, hundreds of movies opened on our screens. We saw everything from American Hustle to Zero Charisma, from the ridiculous — 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — to the sublime — 12 Years a Slave. The Reel Guys watched a lot of bad movies this year so you don’t have to and saw many great ones to recommend. But some of the good flicks slipped by without finding an audience. This week they revisit some movies you may have missed but should take a look at.
Richard: Mark, Pain and Gain seemed to me like it couldn’t lose. Starring Dwayne Johnson, who was recently named 2013’s biggest money-making star, Mark Wahlberg and directed by Michael “big bucks” Bay, it was the funny-but-true story about a trio of greedy dumb criminals who kidnap a rich guy. It plays like an episode of CSI: Miami performed by the Three Stooges and should have done boffo box office, but for some reason it didn’t. What did you like that slipped through the cracks?
Mark: I loved Pain and Gain, and if anyone told me one of the best movies of the year would be directed by schlockmeister Michael Bay, I would take it as a sign of the upcoming apocalypse. Another overlooked gem to me was Trance, Danny Boyle’s genre buster. Is it about an art heist? Mind control? Sexual obsession? Revenge? Best to ask James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson, both in fine form, and in the case of Dawson, I do mean — ahem — fine form.
RC: Also in fine form were the giant robots and sea monsters in Pacific Rim. I know they always say about Hollywood that “nobody knows anything,” that you never know what will be a hit, but I thought the combo of Guillermo Del Toro, colossal sea beasts with an appetite for destruction and humungous rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots was a winner. It’s a supersize geek freak out that transports you back in time to wherever you were when you were lucky enough to see your first Godzilla movie.
MB: Sorry, Richard, to me, actual rock-em, sock-em robots are more interesting, and are better actors. Another undiscovered gem for me was Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh’s Hitchcockian mindbender from early winter. Starting off as a condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry, it turns a lot of corners and becomes a thrilling cerebral murder mystery. And Jude Law, no longer acting with his looks, is magnificent.
RC: Warm Bodies was essentially one joke — the zombie as a metaphor for awkward teenage love — but it’s a pretty good one and well performed. Too bad more people didn’t see it. The movie doesn’t exactly make sense, particularly if you’re a zombie fan of either the Romero or Walking Dead schools, but no matter how fast and loose it plays with the established mythology of the undead it’s still a new twist on an old form.
MB: Warm Bodies reminded me of Ricky Gervais’ Ghost Town in mood and had the same limitations of premise. A foreign film I thought was brilliant was China’s A Touch Of Sin, which interwove four stories Pulp-Fiction style about the new economy in China and its victims, often ending in sad violent episodes. Brilliant Richard.
Here’s a shot from the Q&A Richard hosted with the “Knights” of the Living Dead (from left to right) Russ Streiner, George A. Romero, and John Russo after the October 19, 2013 performance of “Night of the Living Dead Live”! Thanks to John Migliore for the photo!
Here’s a shot from the Q&A Richard hosted with the “Knights” of the Living Dead Russ Streiner, George A. Romero, and John Russo after the Oct 19, 2013 performance of “Night of the Living Dead Live”! Thanks to John Migliore for the photo!
Celebrate the HALLOWEEN season in style with LEGENDS of HORROR! This Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19, come see George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead Live with special guest Q&A featuring the Godfather himself, GEORGE A. ROMERO, along with original Night of the Living Dead co-writer John Russo and the man who played the “Johnny”, Russ Streiner!! Q&A to follow the 7pm performance on October 18th and 19th. Hosted by Fangoria editor Chris Alexander (18th) and radio and television personality Richard Crouse.(19th)
“You may come and go, but you will not take people from the city. If I hear of it, a single time, I will destroy you without salvation.” — Tada Cuda (Lincoln Maazel)
Imagine George A. Romero going to a psychic early on in his career.
“There’s good news and bad news,” she might say, gazing into her crystal ball. “Which would you like first?”
“The good news,” the Dawn of the Dead director would reply.
“You will make many movies . . .”
“That’s great! What’s the bad news?”
“The only ones people will go see all have the words ‘of the Dead’ in the title.”
That didn’t happen of course, but the fact remains that zombie king Romero has had a rough time attracting audiences for his non-Living Dead efforts. Dig deep into the Romero bargain bin, though, and there are a number of films that deserve a second look. The Crazies is a spooky thriller about a manmade combat virus that causes death and permanent insanity in those infected while Knightriders is a wild romp that can best be described as The Legend of King Arthur meets Mad Max. Best of all is Martin, an arty 1977 movie about a young man who believes he is a vampire.
The eponymous creature of the night, Martin Matthias (played by Dawn of the Dead casting director John Amplas), is a shy suburban teenager with a blood lust, but none of the usual trappings of the Nosferatu. Instead of fangs he uses razorblades and needles to do the dirty work and he isn’t averse to garlic, sunlight or crucifixes. Despite no actual proof of his undead status, he is steadfast in his conviction.
Surprisingly he’s not alone in his belief. Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), an elderly old-world cousin believes that vampirism is a family “shame” and makes it his calling to save Martin’s soul by trying to arrange an exorcism with the local priest. He also takes the boy in and gives him a job at his neighborhood grocery store, but Martin can only control his cravings for so long.
Martin actually has more in common with Taxi Driver than it does with Dracula. Romero’s films have always brimmed with social commentary, but his 70s work is especially ripe with societal resonance. In Martin he filters the post-Vietnam ills of drug addiction and urban decay through the lens of a vampire film, focusing on the reasons why Martin behaves the way he does and not the behavior itself. Compared to other horror films this one barely qualifies as a shocker. There are just three violent scenes and while they are bloody, the gore is used more as a measure of Martin’s ineptness — his sloppy killing skills — than to scare.
Often labeled as horror, it’s more accurate to call Martin a psychological drama as Romero spends the entire film flirting with the question of whether Martin is really a vampire, or just a drug addict with a vivid imagination. Eerie black and white flashbacks portray him as an undead creature, but the reality is a much different story. With these black and white sequences Romero muddies the water, never settling on a definitive answer, preferring to let the viewers decide for themselves whether there are supernatural forces at work, or if this is all the product of a diseased mind.
In Romero’s world the notion that Martin might not be a vampire is scarier than if he was a certified bloodsucker. Romero uses the troubled mid-’70s and its products — drug-addicted youths, decaying cities and stultifying suburban life — as a catalyst for the kind of fantasy world Martin creates just to cope with his life. This reality, Romero seems to imply, is far more terrifying than a fanged man in a cape could ever be.
“I didn’t try to come down on one side or the other,” Romero said. “I like the lady or the tiger kind of thing. I tried to keep it ambiguous, but in my mind, he was a disturbed kid.”
Martin is dense with the kind of social subtext that Romero favors in his films. His zombie movies have been thinly veiled comments on consumerism and the media, and Martin is no less layered. On the surface it seems to be a simple story, but dig a little deeper past the garish lighting and Romero reveals a mixed bag of metaphors regarding drug addiction, mental illness and the evil that humans do to one another. It’s purposefully ambiguous. The director is asking the viewer to look inside themselves to decide what answer to Martin’s status they are comfortable with. Is he a vampire or disturbed young man? Drug addicted or mentally ill? The answer you come up with — what you chose to believe — Romero implies, says as much about you are as it does about Martin.
You might imagine that horror maestro George A. Romero’s favorite film is The Exorcist. Or maybe Cannibal Holocaust. Or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s easy to picture the twisted mind behind Night of the Living Dead curled up in his Toronto home with the Saw marathon unspooling on his blood splattered DVD player. Easy to imagine, but far from the reality. Most nights you’ll find him rewatching a classic. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove. Nary a decapitated head or disembowelment in the bunch! He also loves The Quiet Man, High Noon and King Solomon’s Mines but his all time favorite is an obscure 1951 Michael Powell film called The Tales of Hoffman.
“It’s the movie that made me want to make movies,” he says.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.
“He did it on a low budget. You could see the techniques he was using; he was reversing action, doing overprints, double exposures and it seemed accessible. I think at that age if I had seen Jurassic Park I would have said ‘Forget about it, I don’t know how to do this dinosaur thing’ but I could see how Powell made the film and it was accessible to me. It made me think that maybe someday I could do something like this.”
All these years later Hoffman and other films of that vintage still move him—“I’m a sucker for the old movies I loved as a kid,” he says. “I put them on and I get a tear in my eye when the overture starts.”—but don’t think he’s getting soft. The man known to fans as the “Grandfather of the Zombie” has a new gut wrenching (literally) movie called Survival of the Dead in theatres this weekend.
Like his previous movies it works on a couple of levels. “Goremets” will appreciate his signature style with the blood and guts but wipe away some of the red stuff and the social commentary of his work becomes clear. “I bring the zombies out of the closet when I have something I want to talk about,” he says.
His classic Night of the Living Dead touches on Cold War politics and domestic racism, while others in the Living Dead series shine a light on consumerism, the conflict between science and the military and class conflict. The new one, the sixth in the series, is a lesson in the futility of war. Inserting these ideas into the films is very important to Romero whether audiences get it or not. He says he knows most people are “there either to just take the ride or watch the gore, chuckle at the gore, and don’t care about the other stuff,” but his work has had a profound effect on a couple of generations of filmmakers.
Quentin Tarantino, who says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A f**king genius,” cites the director’s fierce independent style as an influence and Romero’s blend of speculative fiction and social comment is particularly apparent in the work of Guillermo del Toro.
When I mention this to Romero he says, “Guillermo is my man! He runs a close second to Michael Powell in my mind.”
Without Night of the Living Dead movies like 28 Days Later, Shawn of the Dead or even Zombie Strippers wouldn’t exist. In 1968 the story of story of people trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse trying to survive an attack by reanimated ghouls dragged a bloody new horror genre into the marketplace. For better (see Re-Animator) and for worse (see Zombie Nightmare) the movie Rex Reed called “a classic” has spawned four decades of brain eating and head explosions, but according to the film’s co-author John Russo the origin of the idea was anything but sinister.
“Sometime in the winter of 1966 George Romero and I were having lunch with Richard Ricci,” says Russo, then a co-partner with Romero and Russell Streiner (who has the film’s most famous line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) in The Latent Image, a commercial television production house. “George and I were complaining about the fickleness of our commercial clients who, when they had not too much money to spend, would come to us for a good, creative job on their spots and sales films, and would promise to come back to us next time, when they would have more money to spend. But when they got more money they’d run away to the supposed glitz and glamour of New York or Hollywood. Richard said, ‘So why don’t you do something about it?’ I thought about it and said, ‘We oughtta be able to make something better than the crap we see on Chiller Theater.’
“George right away got excited, slammed the table with his big hand, sending bottles and glasses flying, and yelled, ‘We’re gonna make a movie!’”
The two batted around several ideas. One, titled Monster Flick, was a horror comedy about teenage aliens, while another focused on flesh eating aliens. “But we quickly discovered that we could not afford all the necessary special effects,” he says, so the writing continued.
“We’d go to work late at night in separate offices, at separate typewriters,” says Russo. “I said right away that our story should start in a cemetery because folks found cemeteries spooky. I was working on a script that started in a cemetery and involved aliens coming to earth in search of human flesh. But George took a break at Christmas time and came back with half of a story that started in a cemetery, and was in essence what became the first half of Night of the Living Dead. There were all the proper twists and turns and a lot of excitement, but George never said who the attackers were or why they were attacking.
“I said, ‘I like this, George, but who are these attackers? You never say.’ And he said he didn’t know. So I said, ‘It seems to me they could be dead people. But why are they attacking? What are they after?’ Again, he said he didn’t know. So I said, ‘Why don’t we use my flesheating idea?’ And he agreed.
“So that’s how the modern flesheating zombies were born!”
The film, titled Night of the Flesheaters, was shot on a shoe string budget—Bosco Chocolate Syrup and pig’s intestines subbed for real blood and guts—in rural Pennsylvania between June and December 1967. Once finished, Russo and Romero had a hard time selling the movie because of its unflinching violence and gory special effects. The pair stuck to their guns, however, denying distributor after distributor who demanded cuts or a happy ending. Finally they found a company who would show the film uncensored but there was still a problem.
“There was already a movie called Flesheaters, and their attorney threatened us, so we had to come up with a different title,” says Russo. “George Romero decided on Night of Anubis, after the Egyptian god of the dead. This was a weak title, and when Continental Pictures got ready to distribute we changed it to Night of the Living Dead.”
The movie premiered on October 1, 1968 earning a rave from Roger Ebert and that other mark of success for a horror film, condemnation from fundamentalist Christian groups.
These days it doesn’t take a lot of braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains to see the legacy of Night of the Living Dead. The ghoulish story is considered a classic, has spawned comedies like the box office hit Zombieland and serious television shows like The Walking Dead and was even selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”
“We were absolutely dedicated toward making a movie that was true to its premise and the motivations of its characters, from start to finish,” says Russo, adding, “[the movie] struck a primal chord in everybody, perhaps because of the atavistic memory of our species as easy prey for wild beasts, which we were for most of human history. We all carry the deep-seated fear of being devoured.”
You might imagine that horror maestro George A. Romero’s favorite film is The Exorcist. Or maybe Cannibal Holocaust. Or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s easy to picture the twisted mind behind Night of the Living Dead curled up in his Toronto home with the Saw marathon unspooling on his blood splattered DVD player. Easy to imagine, but far from the reality. Most nights you’ll find him rewatching a classic. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove. Nary a decapitated head or disembowelment in the bunch! He also loves The Quiet Man, High Noon and King Solomon’s Mines but his all time favorite is an obscure 1951 Michael Powell film called The Tales of Hoffman.
“It’s the movie that made me want to make movies,” he says.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.
“He did it on a low budget. You could see the techniques he was using; he was reversing action, doing overprints, double exposures and it seemed accessible. I think at that age if I had seen Jurassic Park I would have said ‘Forget about it, I don’t know how to do this dinosaur thing’ but I could see how Powell made the film and it was accessible to me. It made me think that maybe someday I could do something like this.”
All these years later Hoffman and other films of that vintage still move him—“I’m a sucker for the old movies I loved as a kid,” he says. “I put them on and I get a tear in my eye when the overture starts.”—but don’t think he’s getting soft. The man known to fans as the “Grandfather of the Zombie” has a new gut wrenching (literally) movie called Survival of the Dead in theatres this weekend.
Like his previous movies it works on a couple of levels. “Goremets” will appreciate his signature style with the blood and guts but wipe away some of the red stuff and the social commentary of his work becomes clear. “I bring the zombies out of the closet when I have something I want to talk about,” he says.
His classic Night of the Living Dead touches on Cold War politics and domestic racism, while others in the Living Dead series shine a light on consumerism, the conflict between science and the military and class conflict. The new one, the sixth in the series, is a lesson in the futility of war. Inserting these ideas into the films is very important to Romero whether audiences get it or not. He says he knows most people are “there either to just take the ride or watch the gore, chuckle at the gore, and don’t care about the other stuff,” but his work has had a profound effect on a couple of generations of filmmakers.
Quentin Tarantino, who says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A f**king genius,” cites the director’s fierce independent style as an influence and Romero’s blend of speculative fiction and social comment is particularly apparent in the work of Guillermo del Toro.
When I mention this to Romero he says, “Guillermo is my man! He runs a close second to Michael Powell in my mind.”
SYNOPSIS: As The Walking Dead shambles toward its season finale in December the Reel Guys suggest some infectious zombie movies to keep you entertained until the show lumbers back to air next year.
Richard: Mark, several episodes from this season’s Walking Dead were among the best television of the year. It owes a HUGE debt to George A. Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead, but I still watch even though it gives me weird dreams every Sunday night. To calm my jangled nerves I’ve been checking out zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Cemetery Man. Everyone knows Shaun, but Cemetery’s weird story is worth a look. It’s gory good fun. Are you a zombie fan?
Mark: Depends on the zombie, Richard. I didn’t get a chance to catch up with the Walking Dead series because I was too busy watching the brainwashed terrorist zombies in Homeland. A different kind of zombie, to be sure, but zombies all the same. I think the faster the zombies move, the more I like the movie. Those slow-walking, arms outstretched flesh eaters aren’t that different than most of the clubbers I see at closing time on Saturday nights. I’ve never seen Cemetery Man, but it looks interesting; thanks for the tip.
RC: The whole slow moving zombies vs. fast moving zombies debate is an argument for the ages. I guess I’m a traditionalist. I like the Romero zombie, the bumbling undead who mindlessly and relentlessly keep hunting for braaains. Dawn of the Dead, I Walked with a Zombie and Lucio Fulci’s Zombi are masterpieces of the slow shuffle. You might like the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Man those zombies can run!
MB: I did like that one, along with Zombieland, Dead Snow (Nazi zombies, what’s not to like?), and the zombie comedy (zomcom?) Fido starring Billy Connelly as a kindly zombie. But the big question in all the zombie films is: How do you get away from a zombie? Well, it seems that the meat that tastes closest to human flesh is…pig! So I say, when confronted when a pack of zombies…let loose the porkers!
RC: Good advice. I’d add another zombie apocalypse tip I picked up from the movie Zombieland. You at your most vulnerable while sitting on the toilet, so hold it as long as you can. Also, having a machine gun where your leg used to be, à la Rose McGowan in Planet Terror, can be very useful.
MB: I’m old school, Richard. I prefer having both legs to utilize the strategy of actually running away. And remember, when being chased by a zombie, you don’t have to be the fastest runner- just faster than the guy behind you.
Synopsis: From January to December 2013, hundreds of movies opened on our screens. We saw everything from American Hustle to Zero Charisma, from the ridiculous — 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — to the sublime — 12 Years a Slave. The Reel Guys watched a lot of bad movies this year so you don’t have to and saw many great ones to recommend. But some of the good flicks slipped by without finding an audience. This week they revisit some movies you may have missed but should take a look at.
