I'm not talking the whole wussy boy Bruno Mars "take a grenade for you" kind of things. Well, okay, yeah, kinda along those lines. Take as an example what I've been doing since my last post here: I've been watching a 10-movie set of zombie movies. Normally, I'm all "Cool! Zombies! Gore! Guts! More gore! Even more guts!!!" Not this time. I'm done with zombies for a while. You might say, I've done them to death. (Hey, until I put AdSense on here, the humor stays cheap, so shut your cake-hole!)
Yes, 10 zombie movies. At least that is how they advertised it. Technically correct, I suppose. They mention zombies in all the movies. Or they call them "the living dead" or (no copyright infringement meant) "the walking dead". Occasionally "them motherfuckers" and "dead sons of bitches". Let's not bandy semantics.
The offenders...perpetrators...suspects?...the people behind The Midnight Horror Collection-Zombies would be none other than Echo Bridge Entertainment. This company is nipping at the heels of Mill Creek Entertainment, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was some connection between the two that us mere mortals cannot readily see, but someone else can follow the money because I'm here for the movies. Movies, we got. 10 of them! For a mere 5 bucks! At fifty cents a movie, you can't possibly go wrong. Right? Please tell me I'm right. Can I get an "Amen, brother!"?
There is no right or wrong order in which to present these films. To be blunt, a few of them brought on so little mental activity as to escape getting labelled "good" or "bad". More often that not, they got "Why isn't this over yet?" hurled at them. So, here they are, in no real order.
1. I Am Omega: If you had conflicting images of I Am Legend and The Omega Man running through your head when you saw that title, then you played directly into the hands of the shit peddlers at The Asylum. These turd monkeys crank out sound-alike movies so they hit video the same time the big-name movies they are ripping off are hitting the theaters. Mark Dacascos plays a guy whose family was killed when a plague causes people to become zombie-ish killers. He survives much like Chuckles Heston in The Omega Man. It is boring. Straight up freaking boring. There's a couple of moments where you see that the film might, with massive rewrites, turn out so-so, but it shoots itself in the foot every chance it gets. Answer me this: Why can't we have characters who just freaking kill the hero instead of almost killing them, but leave them around to recover and save the day? Could have saved a good 15 minutes of a bad ending with one more well-placed bullet.
2. Teenage Zombies: I can sum this movie up in two words for those who recognize the name--Jerry Warren. Oh yeah. THAT Jerry Warren. The guy who churned out crap films like a coke-addled Hollywood insider wannabe drops names. Only slightly better than Ed Wood and wore fewer women's clothes. Wacky teens run afoul an international plot to turn Americans into mindless zombies. If only they could have seen 40 or so years into the future, they would have realized we would turn ourselves into mindless zombies. Cornball humor, tedious camera work, and the always convincing guy in a gorilla suit with a poor-fitting mask. True Americana for your eyes and brain.
3. Last Of The Living: This piece of...um, film making?...hails from New Zealand. How the hell they made a movie down there with out working sheep into it in a big way is beyond me (last count I had, the Kiwis are outnumbered by sheep by a LARGE margin). Three annoying slackers have managed to survive the zombie plague and still manage to be uninteresting douche bags who make references to having sex with the same zombies they spend time killing, but only the female ones...that don't look too rotted. They stumble upon a living woman who is trying to find a cure for the plague. Even for a comedy (of sorts), it's a freaking zombie movie. Do things ever go well in a zombie movie? There, saved you some time.
4. King Of The Zombies: If you can overlook the "shotgun blast to the face of an innocent baby" style racism, this short little programmer (named because short films of this nature were "programmed" before or between more important things in early television days) is rather entertaining, primarily due to Mantan Moreland. He carries the film with his rapid-fire one-liners throughout the whole film while he is routinely treated like something akin to the family pet. A greatly over-looked comedian due to being a black man during a time when whites dominated films. Plus, we get a storyline that barely avoided coming out and pointing the finger at dirty Nazis for stirring up the bulk of the trouble in the film. I think the filmmakers were pussy-footing around to get international distribution during the time Hitler was rising to power in Europe. Still, an interesting bit of fun for those who enjoy older "horror" films.
5. Night Of The Living Dead: Wouldn't be a complete set without some incarnation of the granddaddy of zombie movies. Since it didn't cost them a dime to add this, they tossed it in. Always a good film to watch, but if you try to look at it from the perspective of the time in which it came out, you start to understand the intensity and unrelenting horror this film brings to the party. Slow to start, but once it gets rolling, it never stops, never backs down and stays firmly within its own logic set. Most modern films cannot make those claims. Sure, the gore level is less than you see on most episodes of Full House, but you can't deny the constantly shrinking options the characters face as the night wears on and the zombie hordes grow. Required viewing for zombie fans, if you didn't already know that.
6. Awaken The Dead: This film is a rather unfortunate misfire. The lead male actor is pretty good, but has crap to work with. The female lead could be good with a much better director and more experience. There is a supporting character that you grow to like even though his part is a bit cliche. The story ultimately is not bad but it drags and drags. The whole thing, shot on video from the looks of it, is grainy and dark and monochrome in color. Not sure if they were shooting for a "mood". It would have been more tolerable in a crisper image, if nothing else. Like I said, not utterly horrible, but it commits the sin of being painfully dull.
7. White Zombie: Old-school horror with Bela Lugosi and stilted acting styles, impressionistic minimalistic sets and wise use of lighting and camera angles to evoke emotion. While the story is a bit thin and convoluted, the flair with which this very quiet film was shot makes it a gem compared to the newer films in this set. The story uses the more realistic style of "zombie" as in Haitian-chemically-induced people who have their thought centers wiped out so that they become mindless slaves. Sure, Lugosi fiddles around with wax figures combined with the target's personal item, but that is showmanship, as well as attempting to appease the Hayes Code with witchcraft naughtiness in the place of real-life medical possibilities. A rich plantation owner wants a beautiful young woman who is to marry another man. That's the basic story, but this fun movie is all about how the story is told, not the depth of the story itself. Sit back, relax and let all the camera work, lighting and stylized sets cast their spells on you.
9. Grave Mistake: The biggest near-miss in the whole set. Tongue fully in cheek every step of the way, but the overly broad acting (and just plain bad acting) and tired story elements constantly drag the film down. The upsides of the film would be that it moves fairly fast, keeps the action going by bouncing around to different characters without being confusing, and, amazingly, funnier than I think they were shooting for. I mean, it IS a comedy, but the funniest bits are the little things most people don't tend to look at, like great facial expressions during certain events or the occasional pitch-perfect tone and timing of some events. The movie starts with an asshole who has just buried his wife and adds the additional insult of dumping toxic waste on her grave. We all know that means zombies are a-comin' soon. Take note of the SCA-type characters tossed into the mix. There's a great movie idea waiting to happen there. (For those of you who don't know, SCA stands for Society for Creative Anachronism, an organization that attempts to recreate ancient battle styles such as sword and shield fighting while in full armor as an extreme contact sport. Not to be confused with those weird Ren-Fest types or LARPers.)
10. Hide And Creep: I will admit that this film is my personal favorite of the modern films in this set. Much like Plan 9 From Outer Space, aliens kick start a zombie invasion. But does this film ever take the concept and twist it in every direction with knowing nods to all the major zombie films out there while heaping great slapstick humor into the mix! I actually watched this thing twice because I had so much fun with it. Oh, don't think you're gonna see something high-class. This movie had a budget smaller than my apartment, but they knew how to wring every bit of good out of every single penny. The acting and the writing stand out, and they make this one giggle-laced treat of a film. I consider the five bucks spent on this set to be worth it for this movie alone.
Seriously though, I'm full up on zombie flicks after pushing myself through the lesser efforts in this set. If only I could find a dirt cheap set of 80s cheesy slasher flicks to wash away the bad aftertaste this set left in my mouth...and brain. Brains! BRRRAAAIIIINNNSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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