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DVD Tuesday: They're Baaaaack! Diary of the Dead
DVD Tuesday: And the corpse came back, the very next day... George Romero's Diary of the Dead puts a nasty new spin on old living dead cliches.
Zombies have always given me nightmares, and Night of the Living Dead terrified me before I'd even seen it -- Roger Ebert's piece about seeing it at a kiddie matinee in a neighborhood theater gave my imagination plenty to work with.
I've seen a lot of zombie movies since then and I'm pretty inured to them, which is why I was pleasantly suprised by George Romero's new Diary of the Dead, if pleasantly is the word. I was afraid that the conceit -- essentially rebooting the Dead franchise by going back to the beginning and telling the story on digital video, as though it had been made by student filmmakers (a la Blair Witch Project) -- would seem hokey and tired, like the efforts of an aging filmmaker to appeal to the young folks.
TV Spot 2 - Where Will You Be?
But I was wrong: It actually get Romero back to the raw immediacy of Night of the Living Dead -- which was shot on the fly by a bunch of filmmakers with no feature experience -- and, better still, smoothed over Romero's tendency to overstate the metaphor. You know: The dead, they're the nightmare us, a permanent underclass literally rising up to bite the power.
When those ideas -- along with some newer ones about media-mediated experience in the internet age -- spill from the mouths of pretentious film students, they sound exactly right.
And I have to say, Diary's zombies are nasty. The special effects are far more elaborate than the ones in Night, but they lack the "check this out!" polish of most contemporary effects. It always pulls me out of the horror when I'm admiring the latex work.
I recommend checking it out. And if you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead -- or haven't seen it recently -- it's coming out next week in a 40th anniversary special edition. The film looks great -- in its grainy, B&W way, and the extras include an audio interview with Duane Jones, who played Ben, and new featurette featuring much of the original cast.
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Things to Consider:
Where do you stand on zombie movies -- do you find other monsters more interesting?
What do you think is behind the current spate of zombie books and movies, including the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later and Max Brooks' novel World War Z, which Eli Roth is adapting for the screen.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
2008:
Videodrome
The Kingdom
M
Touch of Evil
Bonnie and Clyde
Atonement
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
Rififi
Michael Clayton
Network
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Shoot 'Em Up
Freeway
A Mighty Wind
2007:
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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May 12, 2008 4:51 PM
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Ugh. I hated Diary. Thought it was the product of an old man making a movie for and about a generation he did not understand. Now [Rec], that's a first-person zombie movie to write about. Hopefully it will get a region 1 DVD release when the American remake comes out next October.
Also, Eli Roth behind World War Z? Noooooooo!!!
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May 12, 2008 9:15 PM
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My Dear FlickChick
I know you have a special place in your heart for the scary and gory but this makes four columns in a row that deal with that genre or related ones. How 'bout a little variety?
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May 13, 2008 2:35 AM
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Thanks for another great article extolling an unjustly overlooked film. I gotta say, each of Romero's zombie flicks really works in it's own way by creating its own world with its own rules and commenting in some way on the current social situation. And while the last one was a bit heavy-handed, I think this one found just the right tone.
I am all for more zombie flicks. I never have been able to get enough (of course, I grew up with a Saturday matinee on Pittsburgh TV called "Zombie Theater"). I'd like to see one a little closer to The Serpent and the Rainbow for a change of pace, however. Just to mix things up.
As for the comic book zombies, I'd like to see the return of the canonical Simon Garth!!
I have been wholly underwhelmed by the garish Marvel Zombies books. But The Walking Dead from Image Comics is definitely worth checking out!
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May 13, 2008 2:59 AM
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I am not ready to check out another zombie movie as I am still trying to recover from 28 Days Later!
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May 13, 2008 8:06 AM
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DaMess: Oh, come on, Videodrome and The Kingdom are awesome! Don't be a Negative Nelly!
Now, a filmbuff-confession: I'm seriously undereducated in zombie-faire. I've only seen a very few (28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, both of which I enjoyed immensely, and a few more) so I don't know really how intelligent my thoughts are going to be. However, I've never been afraid of looking like a fool, so here goes:
There's an obvious socio-political allegory behind the recent spate of zombie-movies: the nameless, soulless masses who only have a primal desire to consume, to kill, to destroy. You could sensibly make the argument that for the post-9/11 climate in America (and much of the rest of the western world), this image is one we instantly recognize. We're inundated with the image of the terrorist, a person with no morals and only a primal hate, who can inflict enormous pain very easily and it's virtually impossible to stop him. There's also the sense that this is somehow "infectious", that when suicide-bombers are hailed as martyrs, it breeds more faceless suicide-bombers.
This is a rather simplistic explanation, but there certainly have been movies that have played on this fear. 28 Weeks Later does it very well; I'm thinking for instance of the scene where the American snipers are standing on rooftops and below them people are fleeing. The soldiers desperatly try to pick apart who is infected and who is not, but they can't do it and they start killing all of them.
If that doesn't evoke the current situation in Iraq, with terrorists hiding amongst civilians, then I don't know what does.
(also, how about this: the last zombie trend was in the 70s, aka right smack in the middle of the Cold War. There certainly was a mass of cold, faceless people who wanted to destroy America then too)
Of course, this is probably not the only reason. Trends come and go naturally. Maybe this was just the zombie-trends time to re-emerge. These things just come and go.
I tend to think that the whole concept of a zombie is fairly modern. There are no ancient mythologies which feature these creatures, human beings that have been robbed of their soul. There's plenty of demons and tricksters and evil spirits and things, but I can't think of a single myth from ancient times about soul-less evil humans, and I know mythology pretty well. There are some "manufactured" humans, like the Golem or the two sex-less creatures of clay that saved Inanna from the underworld, but they were both creatures of good, and they were directly controlled by real, ensouled people (I realize I'm being a little obscure here, apologies). I mean, even Frankenstein's monster had a soul!
I think that's because until very recently, the idea of beings that were alive but soulless were so anathema to how we made sense of the world that a story about a human being without a soul simply wasn't believable. When somthing is moving, we say that it is "animate", a word which ultimately comes from the Latin "anima", meaning soul (that's where "animal" comes from too). Human beings, for most of our history, simply explained of things that moved by ímbuing it with a soul, nothing else made sense. Maybe the reason that we started telling stories about zombies is that in the last two hundred years, we've proven that assumption false. We have planty of things that move by its own, manufactured by us, that has no soul at all, something which goes against hundreds of thousands of years of human experience. On a concious level, we've dealt with this and realize that this is completely natural, but I think that it unnerves us on an instinctual, unconcious level. We've played God, and now the result wants to eat us!
Food for thought. I've been typing out of my ass for too long now, so I think I'll stop there before I start ranting about shamanism. Cheers!
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May 13, 2008 9:41 AM
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DaMess: Oh, come on, Videodrome and The Kingdom are awesome! Don't be a Negative Nelly!
Where in my post did I say they were not good movies Oskar? I made no comment whatsoever about the quality of the films - only the type.
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May 14, 2008 2:36 AM
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