Tag: horror movies

28 Days Later (2002)

28 days later poster

The zombies are fast.

It’s true that in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later the crazed, flesh-eating villains aren’t technically zombies. In fact, Boyle has gone to great lengths to qualify them as humans infected with a virus known as RAGE. Yet, to this reviewer at least, the differences seem moot. In traditional zombie pictures, and in this film the creatures are mindless, they carry a real zeal for human flesh, they have a predilection for turning everyone else into their like, and they are fairly easy to kill. Whether the creatures are the living dead so to speak, or infected by an incurable virus doesn’t make much of a difference. Though the zombies here, seem updated from their cinematic ancestors.

These zombies are fast.

Traditional zombies are a slow-moving lot. Having been rotting in their own graves for untold years, their reanimated flesh is a little atrophied, causing them to move at a slow, sluggish pace. This has always been a helpful plot point for the heroes in zombie films, for they are easy to run away from. In fact, zombies are generally able to kill their victims through sheer numbers. Individually they are easy to destroy, but as an oncoming onslaught, the sheer numbers win every time.  Boyle circumvented this convenience by allowing his monsters to run at normal human speeds. It is an excellent update to the genre, giving the ability for more scares.

Man, I dug the first half of this movie. Well, except for the very, very beginning. The opening scene gives us the origin of RAGE, with a bunch of Clockwork Orange-inspired monkeys. I’ve never really dug origin scenes in zombie flicks. I think it’s much scarier to just have the zombies running around eating brains, without any reason for their existence. Origins, generally, just seem dumb. And here, with the infected monkeys being freed by some Green Peace types doesn’t really inspire any other feelings. Though, I suspect it was another move to plant this film outside the zombie track.

But after the scene of the dumb origin, things get really good. We’ve got a naked guy named Jim (Cillian Murphy) hooked up to various tubes in a hospital bed. I always like it when there is a bit of male nudity in a flick since there is always so much of the female variety. Anyways, Jim gets out of bed and wanders the streets of London. There are plenty of shots of Jim (fully clothed now) walking by big famous London monuments without another soul around. It seems London has been vacated. It is creepy and effective.

In a bit, Jim clamors into a church figuring to find some sanctuary, or at least have a few questions answered. What he finds is a bunch of dead folks piled up. In a good holy crap moment, Jim says, “Hello” to find a couple of the dead guys not so dead and jumping up. From there until the second half of the film, it is a constant run from the zombies.

The zombies really work in this film. They are fast, furious, and vicious. Jim eventually teams up with some other survivors and they set about trying to figure out what to do. Boyle really does a great job of adding tension to the film and keeping the scares up.

Then the film changes.

The group is rescued by a gang of all-male military types, living in a compound. Turns out the military types are a bunch of psychos and the film turns from being a zombie flick into being a stranded-in-a-compound-with-a-bunch-of-psycho-military-types kind of film. To make sure we know this is no longer a zombie flick, a big group of zombies launches an attack on the compound only to be massacred with machine guns and land mines.

In this half of the film, I don’t dig nearly as much. Zombie flicks always have trouble filling out their whole hour-and-a-half time slot. Even with a good introduction of characters, and a slow build to zombie free-for-all, there is still plenty of filler time. Here, the filmmakers seem to have decided that they might as well dump the zombies and give us some other tension-filled concoction. But, there isn’t really enough time to develop the military end of the story and it feels wrong.

It’s too bad too because that first half was really promising.

Army of Darkness (1992)

army of darkness poster

Those of you looking closely at my list of DVDs will notice there are a couple of movies before Army of Darkness. But on a Sunday night, you watch what your wife wants to watch. Especially when it’s part of the Evil Dead series and not a silly romantic comedy.

Army of Darkness is the third (and so far final) movie in the Evil Dead Series. Before director Sam Raimi went legits with a series of critically acclaimed dramas and the Spiderman Trilogy, he was a low-budget horror genius. Army of Darkness begins right where Evil Dead II ended, with Bruce Campbell trapped in medieval times to battle the deadites once again.

The trilogy began with  Evil Dead as a pretty straight horror movie. A group of people discover a book of the dead and unleash gore-filled horror upon themselves in a remote cabin. Evil Dead II basically re-tells the same story with a different cast (except for the ever-present Bruce Campbell), a bigger budget, and plenty of slapstick. The second movie is by far my favorite in the series. It keeps the ghoulish gore while adding hilarious physical comedy and some classic one-liners. Army of Darkness furthers this tradition by adding even more slap-stick and one-liners while removing almost all of the gore.

What little plot there is goes something like this: Stranded in the middle ages Bruce Campbell is at first captured by a small army, is mistaken for a member of a rival army. Bruce quickly uses his “boomstick” to gain clout with his captors and is sent on a quest to recover the Necronomicon which will both send Bruce back to his own time and save the army from evil. Bruce being Bruce he gets the book and unleashes an army of the dead. There are two endings released for this movie. One happier ending was released in US theatres and another sequel set up unhappy ending seen in a theatrical cut in the UK and on many US DVD versions.

Raimi once again does a nice job creating a mix of horror movie homages (which range from Jason and the Argonauts to Gulliver’s Travels) with the slapstick of the Three Stooges. Unfortunately, the comic elements seem to take over this picture leaving the horror end of it as more of a backdrop. It feels more like a Zucker brother’s movie more than a horror film. Most of the evil dead are formed as skeletons that crumble when destroyed rather than burst into a mess of blood and guts as they did in the first two movies. This may seem to be an absurd complaint, but as a fan of gory movies, I felt disappointed with that choice.

The cinematography is actually quite well done throughout most of the picture. My DVD copy is quite beautiful in scenes. Especially the exterior shots around the windmill. The use of color and lighting is well above par for most horror films. The pre-CGI special effects affect the quality of the print in several areas, but they still hold up as goofy Raimi effects. I kept thinking the picture was too pretty for what was actually taking place on screen.

Bruce Campbell once again does a nice job of making Ash come to life. He delivers his lines with the comic timing of a comedian while still delivering enough pain to make his albeit over-the-top beatings believable. The rest of the cast is hardly memorable as characters or for their acting.

Army of Darkness still makes a nice end to the trilogy. In a way it makes a nice bookend to Evil Dead’s pure gore horror with the single middle book being a mix between bloody gore and slapstick comedy.