Every time October rolls around, no matter how dead this blog has been in the intervening months, it's hard to resist the seasonal call to do another round of Trick or Trailers! And as the first trailer for the new adaptation for Stephen King's Pet Sematary has made its debut today, I'm taking it as a sign to do some of my own resurrectin'! Yes, I know "sometimes dead is better" but screw it, I'm doing it anyhow!
So, how does Pet Sematary look in its 2019 incarnation?
I'm gonna say...fairly promising.
I expect the main thing that will get some horror fan's noses out of joint is the Wicker Man-style masks that the kids wear on their way to the Pet Sematary. Those masks might strike some as a needless bit of ornamentation and I get that but I'm gonna just choose to roll with 'em.
As for the rest, the cast looks good, and I'm glad that John Lithgow isn't trying to approximate the thick Maine accent that Fred Gwynne used in the original.
Speaking of the original, how about taking a look back on that trailer for comparison's sake:
Well, whaddya know - that's a pretty damn good trailer!
Just seeing that late '80s style font appear when "He's the King of Horror..." pops up is so nostalgic! So many horror trailers back then used that exact same font, to see it again instantly evokes memories of that era.
It definitely makes me want to revisit the movie, one that I've never been a fan of. As big a hit as that movie was, and as much as a lot of fans hold it up as a classic, it's always hit me as something of a dud.
The novel was such a rich, heartbreaking read and the movie was, to me, kind of schlocky. King himself wrote the screenplay but it felt to me like he dumbed down his own book to translate it to the screen.
He took something that was genuinely agonizing and turned it into a cheapie drive-in horror movie, with all the flavor (and dripping gore) of an EC Comic tale. Had the last shot of the movie had a Creepshow-style "Yeeearggh!" word balloon coming out of Louis Creed's mouth as the end credits rolled, it wouldn't have felt out of place.
I wonder if, in writing the screenplay, that King just didn't want to go to the same dark place that he must have written the novel from (after all, King has said how he was so disturbed by Pet Sematary's ghoulish subject matter that he didn't want to finish the book at all until his wife encouraged him to keep going with it). Or maybe he just regards movies and book has having very different sets of demands and different sets of expectations from audiences.
Whatever the case, the approach King and director Mary Lambert took worked just fine for most viewers as Pet Sematary was a big hit.
Just the same, I always yearned for someone to do a better version. Will the new version be more along the lines of what I was hoping for in '89? I don't know, maybe. We'll see. If nothing else, at least this version won't send audiences out of the theaters to a Ramones song.
Nothing against the Ramones, of course, but having them do a theme song for a horror flick really undercuts any sense of gravitas. I know that for some, the idea of a Pet Sematary remake feels a lot like treading on sacred ground but despite its classic status I think the original already did its fair share of desecrating a long time ago.
My previous Retro-Shock Theater post - for The City of the Dead - marked the final RST column that appeared on Shock Till You Drop. Going through my old files, however, I've come across a couple of RST columns that were completed but, for whatever reason, never ran.
This one, for Day of the Dead, would've coincided with the release of the teen zombie romantic comedy Warm Bodies (I bet you totally forgot that movie even existed - I know I did!) on February 1st, 2013 but I guess the clock ran out and I thought I'd be better off getting a My Bloody Valentine write-up ready to go instead. Seems plausible.
Anyhow, here's some Day of the Dead love for ya!
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Some hardcore horror fans might balk at the idea of a romantically inclined zombie as portrayed in Warm Bodies because zombies just aren’t meant to be cuddly, damn it! But while the undead character of “R” might be more photogenic and more palatable as a love interest than the average flesh eater, the idea of a “good” zombie was validated and approved by the godfather of the modern zombie movie himself, George A. Romero, in 1985’s Day of the Dead.
He might not have qualified as choice dating material but the lead zombie of Day of the Dead, dubbed “Bub” (Howard Sherman) by scientist/father figure Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), was certainly endearing and was instantly embraced by horror fans as the first "lovable" zombie.
Romero had already planted the seeds for Bub in Dawn of the Dead (1978) by showing a growing empathy for his shambling undead hordes. When Fran (Gaylen Ross) kindly frees a zombie nun whose habit is trapped in a door, there’s an acknowledgement of the creature's buried humanity. And at the climax of the film, one zombie is fascinated by a rifle and trades it for Peter’s rifle, showing a dim thought process existing beyond that primal appetite for flesh.
But even though Romero allowed his zombies to be more than just slow-moving targets to be picked off in Dawn, it was still a big creative leap from their depiction in that film to having Bub command so much audience sympathy in Day. The film itself is the most abrasive of Romero’s original Dead trilogy but the character of Bub himself is undeniably soulful. Tom Savini’s make-up for actor Howard Sherman ranks among his best work, looking appropriately grisly while allowing Sherman to express a full range of emotion.
Compare the make-up on Sherman to the look of “Big Daddy”, the lead zombie Eugene Clark played in Land of the Dead (2005). Big Daddy was a character clearly created in the mold of Bub but that never achieved the same emotional connection with audiences, and I think that was in large part to the stiff, heavy make-up burying the actor's face. He simply looked too monstrous, his expression frozen in a permanent snarl, while Sherman as Bub was able to convey gentleness in the best tradition of Frankenstein’s Monster.
Even though the zombies currently seen in TV's The Walking Dead and Warm Bodies might be made with more state-of-the-art technical prowess, they haven’t surpassed the work that Tom Savini and his crew did in Day. Less than ten years on from the simple blue faced zombies of Dawn, Savini was able to use the advances in prosthetic makeup that took place in the short interim between Dawn and Day to create the greatest array of zombies ever.
Bub is arguably the most sympathetic figure in Day of the Dead, his only true competition for that spot being John, the laid back helicopter pilot played with a thick Jamaican accent by Terry Alexander. Who else is there? You've got the deranged Logan, the strong-willed and strident – often to her detriment – Sarah (Lori Cardille), her emotionally fragile boyfriend Miguel (Anthony Dileo Jr), good hearted but perennially sauced Bill (Jarlath Conroy), and then the perpetually enraged Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) and his crew of murderous assholes – this is a seriously flawed group of individuals. Even the good guys in Day are not so easy to warm up to.
One of the biggest criticisms of Day upon its original release – and, really, to this day – is that the characters are just too unlikeable, that they’re all pitched at such a high level of antagonism that they’re not endearing in the way that Peter, Roger, Fran, and Steven were in Dawn of the Dead. Worse than that, there's the accusation is that many of them are simply not believable as people. Because, really, who acts like this? But I would say Day shows Romero working even more ahead of the social curve than usual. The bitter bickering that goes on in Day, ultimately escalating to the point of homicidal rage, may have seemed outrageous in 1985 but it seems very much in tune with our world today.
We now live in an age more bitterly divided than at any time most people can recall. We are more ideologically separated than ever and the tone of public discourse on pretty much everything seems to have deteriorated to the point of insanity.
When the father of a slain child in the Newtown shooting is angrily berated at in a public meeting by gun advocates, you have to wonder where basic civility and decency has gone. It’s like the entire country has become its own version of the underground caverns of Day of the Dead – we’re all trapped with each other and the animosity and hate is rising by the day.
Day might not have spoken to the mood of the ‘80s so much but it speaks to today’s world with an uncanny accuracy. Captain Rhodes might’ve once seemed shrill to the point of cartoonishness but his coarse, seething demeanor is right in line with that of many modern pundits.
And yet, there’s also the argument that Rhodes has his points. His rage is not completely unfounded. After all, his slain men have been fed to Bub - a despicable move on Logan's part. His psychopathic anger is, to some extent, justified. Why wouldn’t he want payback against anyone who'd show so little regard for the value of his men's lives that they'd callously use them as servings of zombie chow?
Rhodes may be unhinged but Logan is just as nuts in his own way and it’s the stubborn, intractable separation of camps and the unbending need for one tribe to win over the other that ultimately makes life together unlivable. As John says to a frustrated Sarah: “…That’s the trouble with the world…people got different ideas concerning what they want out of life.” Day of the Dead is almost thirty years old but it’s more a movie of the current day than anything in theaters now.
Up until 10 years ago it looked as though zombies were dead and buried. But in 2002, the first Resident Evil movie became a hit and spearheaded a new age of zombie cinema – bolstered by the release of 28 Days Later which followed months later in the UK and came to US theaters in 2003.
Now, with the fourth Resident Evil sequel arriving in theaters, the acclaimed TV series The Walking Dead beginning its third season, and zombies even appearing in kid’s films with the ghoulish stop motion pic ParaNorman, it’s hard to remember a time when zombies were out of fashion. At yet, prior to Resident Evil, zombies had been deep underground for more than a decade.
The film that seemed, from a commercial standpoint, to put a bullet in the head of the zombie genre was 1990’s Night of the Living Dead remake. After NOTLD ’90, there were still some classic entries in zombie cinema – like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte, Dellamore (1994), and Brian Yunza’s underrated Return of the Living Dead III (1993) – but they were all either limited release or direct-to-video, films that found an appreciative cult audience rather than mainstream popularity.
Ironically, the only zombie movie to get a wide release during the ‘90s was the 1993 Disney comedy My Boyfriend’s Back (produced by Sean Cunningham and written by Jason Goes to Hell co-writer Dean Lorey) about a teenager who comes back from the dead for a girl he had a crush on but that film (both in its poor quality and dismal box office performance) only confirmed that zombies were deader than they’d ever been.
It looked like modern zombie cinema had, perhaps fittingly, gone out the very way it came in – with Night of the Living Dead. It would’ve been impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice but George Romero’s script for the remake was still a squarely told tale. And having cut his directorial teeth on several episodes of Tales from the Darkside, Tom Savini was an ideal candidate to helm the remake as his first venture into feature filmmaking.
On the surface, all the elements were in place for a successful retelling of NOTLD but when the film was released in October of 1990, even with Halloween around the corner, audiences didn’t turn out for it.
As far as the general public goes, I think the feeling then was that zombies were little more than yesterday’s garbage. After all, by then the zombie genre had devolved into limp comedies, like 1988’s Joe Piscapo/Treat Williams buddy cop/zombie pairing Dead Heat. And in the eyes of older horror fans, the original Night of the Living Dead was sacred ground, a film not to be remade under any circumstances – not even with the original players involved (remember, too, that this was not far from the time of the much-reviled move to colorize classic black and white films – including Night of the Living Dead – so fans were extra sensitive to the idea of anyone tampering with NOTLD).
For a younger generation of horror fans (the first to grow up in the VHS era), weaned from an early age on a diet of splatter heavy zombie films – from Romero’s Night sequels Dawn and Day, to Fulci’s Zombie, to Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground – anything less than an unrated zombie pic just wouldn’t do.
At the time, an R-rated Night remake was too mousy for most fans to bother with – especially with Romero and Savini involved. After Dawn and Day had raised the bar for splatter, what hardcore fan wanted an R-rated zombie film from these guys? The remake seemed to be, and was largely received as, a pointless enterprise (even if it had the well-intended purpose of helping the original filmmakers strengthen their copyright claims to the original). But good filmmaking gets noticed eventually and over the years, NOTLD ’90 has slowly become appreciated in its own right.
Savini’s direction compliments Romero’s lean script by not going for any unnecessary ornamentation. He doesn’t whip out a lot of stylistic tricks; he just puts the camera where it needs to be to get each scene across. It’s an old-fashioned film in that regard as by the late ‘80s/early ‘90s it was common to see directors becoming more indulgent with their visuals, trying to accomplish more impressive, innovative shots. Sometimes this would be to brilliant effect, as with Sam Raimi, but Savini practiced a more classical brand of storytelling.
More time and money on this production might’ve achieved a different result as Savini has said in interviews over the years that many of his storyboarded plans were scuttled due to limitations but such compromises arguably worked to the film’s favor. With Savini in the director’s seat, the film’s myriad FX duties were headed up by John Vulich and Everett Burrell of Optic Nerve FX and their crew did a bang-up job, delivering an array of memorable zombies with some of the gags – such as Johnny’s wince-inducing fatal face dive into a headstone – bearing Savini’s stage magic-based influence of accomplishing illusions in-camera with simple props and misdirection.
Savini also had an excellent group of actors to work with – with a cast including Tony Todd as Ben, Tom Towles as Cooper, William Butler as Tom, Bill Moseley as Johnny, and Patricia Tallman as Barbara. It’d be right to criticize the decision to turn Barbara into an action heroine – one of several creative choices that ensure this version doesn’t resonate as deeply as the original as it strives to be more rousing and crowd pleasing – except for the fact that Tallman does such a great job with the character.
She’s so good in the part that she makes it easy to overlook the fact that Barbara loses her glasses early on but yet still proves to be a dead shot with a rifle. Female heroines are commonplace these days but Tallman imbues her Barbara with a sense of resiliency and humanity that remains rare.
Tallman’s Barbara isn’t just about mowing down zombies. She makes smart decisions, argues her points with intelligence, and never seems cartoonishly superhuman as many action heroines (as well as their male counterparts) now do. In fact, the best moments of Tallman’s performance show her very human responses to what’s going on around her, as when she’s confronted with a female zombie clutching a child’s doll.
With Barbara in the forefront more than she was in the original, Romero’s script makes Ben slightly more childish in his squabbles with the petty, cowardly Cooper. In the original, Ben was more clearly depicted as the voice of reason (even if he wasn’t always necessarily right) but in the remake, Ben is still heroic and well-intentioned but his inability to temper his rage against Cooper is his undoing (he’s also shown to unfairly overreact to Cooper at times, as when he causes the TV Cooper is carrying to tumble down the cellar stairs) while Barbara is the one who’s more able to keep her cool.
Even Ben’s idea to board up the house turns out to have been a fatally flawed plan as Romero introduces the idea that all that hammering may have been responsible for attracting a larger group of zombies to the farmhouse as we see zombies aimlessly staggering in the field suddenly become aware of the noise and then turn and walk towards it.
Todd fills Duane Jones’ shoes admirably, though, and he gets a classic moment towards the end as he sits alone in the basement, sees the missing keys to the gas pump, and laughs madly to himself at this last bitter irony. NOTLD ’90 differs from the original most notably in its last act, as characters meet different fates than their original counterparts and we see more of what’s happening in the world outside the farmhouse on the morning after. The sympathy towards the undead that Romero developed in Dawn and Day is in evidence here and as we see the grisly circus of undead abuse unfolding through Barbara’s eyes (this is essentially the ground level view of what the Dawn of the Dead crew glimpsed as they flew in their stolen news helicopter over rednecks shooting zombies for sport), the closing moments of NOTLD ‘90 serve as an effective coda – not just for this retelling of Night, but for Romero’s zombie series as a whole.
Even though this is Savini’s film rather than Romero’s, Romero’s screenplay is enough to give it a credible place within the official Romero canon. If anything, this version of Night dovetails more neatly with Romero’s sequels than the original does.
I hasten to add that this doesn’t make it a better film than the original Night, only that it better reflects how Romero’s “rules” of zombie behavior had evolved over time.
Romero would later (thanks to the resurgence of zombie cinema) add to his undead legacy with Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and 2009’s Survival of the Dead (with more to come, probably) but whether you think those films are good or bad (and they have divided fans), they feel like they inhabit their own separate space.
NOTLD ’90 was the last of the Romero-verse zombie films to be made in Pittsburgh, rather than his current base in the Great White North, and it feels like a grave marker for that earlier homegrown era. Ignored or derided upon its original release, the reputation of Savini’s film has only grown over the years – proving that eventually every Night must have its day.
On paper, it looked like a dream project – horror masters Dario Argento and George Romero re-teaming for the first time since Argento served as producer on Romero’s seminal splatter masterpiece Dawn of the Dead (1978) but this time each gentleman would be directing one half of an Edgar Allan Poe anthology.
Originally, Argento had planned the film to involve two other directors as well (reportedly John Carpenter and Wes Craven), but scheduling conflicts and other concerns caused Argento to pare it down to the more manageable duo of just he and Romero. Even today, when expectations for their newer work has diminished some, I believe it’d still cause plenty of fan excitement for Argento and Romero to be collaborating on a project like this but back then, Two Evil Eyes held the promise of being a true event.
In addition, FX maestro Tom Savini was on board to supply his patented brand of grisly Grand Guignol so with that kind of killer talent and with such classic source material to work from, Two Evil Eyes looked like one of the most promising pictures of the increasingly horror-starved late ‘80s/early ‘90s. If anyone was going to show the world how it was done and put horror back on the map again, you couldn’t do much better than the combined forces of Romero, Argento, and Savini with the spirit of Poe guiding them.
As anticipated as Two Evil Eyes was, though, it ended up shuffling quietly onto home video with zero fanfare in the fall of 1991. At the time, the general verdict on Two Evil Eyes was that it came dangerously close to giving Poe a posthumous black eye but with the Poe-inspired The Raven currently hitting theaters, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit Argento and Romero’s tarnished team-up to see if it’s improved at all with age.
As far as Romero’s contribution goes – an adaptation of “The Fact in the Case of M. Valdemar” (previously adapted as part of Roger Corman’s 1962 anthology Tales of Terror) – the answer, unhappily, is “no.”
This remains one of the flattest offerings in Romero’s filmography. To be fair to Romero, his work on Two Evil Eyes seemed hampered from the start. His original choice for adaptation was “The Masque of the Red Death,” which he envisioned as an AIDS parable taking place in a high rise tower in the future, but even though he had completed a screenplay and hoped to cast Donald Sutherland in the lead as Prospero, Argento felt that Romero’s take on “Masque” wasn’t in the spirit of what he wanted the film to be and adding to that dubiousness, the news that Roger Corman was mounting his own remake of Masque of the Red Death caused Argento to use his position as producer to force Romero to choose a different Poe tale as source material.
Romero eventually settled on “Valdemar” – less out of a passion for that slight tale than out of wanting to avoid any overlap with Argento’s segment, which utilized so many familiar Poe plot elements that “Valdemar” was simply the rare Poe story that didn’t share too much common ground. In contrast to the metaphorical richness and potential for social commentary found in “Masque,” however, “Valdemar” offered a somewhat hokey premise involving hypnotism that had to be fleshed out into an actual story.
The story that Romero hatched – involving Jessica, the scheming younger wife of the wealthy, elderly (and near death) Ernest Valdemar, and her ruthless lover Robert (who is also Valdemar’s physician) – was disappointingly routine, with its plotting lovers, reanimated corpse, and sense of ironic justice feeling more in line with EC Comics than with Poe. Because Robert happens to have Valdemar under deep hypnosis when the man passes away, Valdemar is suspended in a state between life and death. Until Valdemar’s business is settled, it can’t be known to anyone that he’s dead so in order to ensure that Jessica inherits her full due, Robert withholds the command for Valdemar to “wake up”.
The catch is that having Valdemar existing in that limbo between this world and the spirit world serves as a gateway for what Valdemar describes as “the others” (a concept that brings a hint of Lovecraft to the story) to come through. These macabre elements are given a lackluster treatment with most of the running time devoted to the mundane machinations of the two money-hungry lovers. As Romero himself noted at the time (in an interview in Fangoria #95), “it feels like I’m directing an episode of Columbo.”
While Romero corralled some of his best Creepshow veterans for Valdemar – E.G. Marshall as Valdemar’s lawyer, Adrienne Barbeau as Jessica Valdemar, Bingo O’Malley (who appeared in Jordy’s various visions in “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill”) as Valdemar, and Tom Atkins in a brief appearance as a police detective – sadly, none of the performances register as more than perfunctory.
Say what you will about Romero’s later-day output but at least films like Bruiser (2000) and Survival of the Dead (2009) bear Romero’s personal stamp whereas Valdemar seems like a work for hire assignment for which Romero had little feeling. On the flipside of that, Argento’s delirious, depraved The Black Cat is clearly one of his best works – so much so that his full-throttle passion for the material only makes Two Evil Eyes feel more like a lopsided film.
As Romero told Cinefantastique in CFQ’s December 1990 issue, “As I was writing Valdemar, I had a few pangs of ‘Gee, should I be more studious?’ And when I read Argento’s script – which is such a love poem to Poe with references to many of his stories – I thought he was doing a much purer thing. I felt a little like I had been lazy.” Whether Romero’s assessment of his efforts is too harsh or not, it’s undeniable that Argento as a Poe scholar and aficionado simply schools Romero – making one wish that Argento had either done the entire film on his own or that he had perhaps collaborated with someone closer to his own sensibilities, like Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church) – then a protégé of Argento. In fact, Soavi briefly did some second unit directing on The Black Cat, followed by Luigi Cozzi (Alien Contamination).
Harvey Keitel stars as Rod Usher, an intense photographer who specializes in grisly crime pics. He lives in an upscale row home in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend Annabel (Madeleine Potter), a professional violinist. Rod and Annabel’s relationship is a testy one, with his hostile demeanor in conflict with Annabel’s dreamy, sensitive personality. Events take a turn for the worse when Annabel adopts a stray black cat that Rod takes an instant disliking to – a feeling that is only acerbated by Annabel’s need to protect the animal. When Annabel is out one afternoon, Rod strangles the cat – photographing the deed as he does it – and disposes of the body.
Annabel suspects Rod of killing the cat but can’t prove it but when Rod later publishes a collection of his photos titled Metropolitan Horrors (briefly considered as a title for the film) with the cover photo being her cat being choked, she knows. A confrontation leads to Rod murdering Annabel and, in true Poe fashion, sealing the body behind a wall in his home – an apparently perfect crime.
Using Poe’s tale only as a loose framework, Argento and screenwriter Franco Ferrini (who previously collaborated with Argento on Phenomena and Opera) turn The Black Cat into a true Poe-pourri of references to Poe’s entire body of work with images, names, and lines of dialogue lifted from a wide range of Poe’s short stories and poems – including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.”
Argento is so thorough in paying tribute to all things Poe that a picture of the French poet Charles Baudelaire – whose translations of Poe’s work were instrumental in advancing the critical appreciation of Poe – can be spotted hanging on the wall along the staircase in Rod Usher’s home.
An effective portrait of a tormented psyche, The Black Cat is hampered slightly by an odd sense of naiveté in regards to the kind of public reaction that Metropolitan Horrors would generate. If such a book were published, even with assurances that no animal was harmed, Usher wouldn’t have time to worry about being tormented by a cat because he’d have to deal with his home being picketed by angry animal rights activists.
Also, the concluding moments of The Black Cat are awkwardly staged. I understand that Usher must perish in the manner that was prophesied by the markings in the cat’s fur but I doubt that even the most distraught mind would think that trying to exit from a second floor window while handcuffed to a dead man weighing in the ball park of 300 pounds is a winning idea.
I remember being confounded by these closing moments the last time I saw the film about twenty years ago and they make no more sense now. Argento and Ferrini should’ve sought a better way to end their tale but unfortunately it is what it is. Luckily, what it is is still mostly great. The Black Cat was Argento’s first film shot in America (he really revels in showcasing the city of Pittsburgh), it was his first film with big name actors, and the opportunity to pay homage to Poe (and perhaps a sense of unspoken professional competition with Romero) served to bring out the best in him.
When it comes to writing the book on Poe, cinematically speaking, that honor is likely to always remain with Roger Corman. But Argento’s contribution to Two Evil Eyes endures as a heartfelt toast from one dark dreamer to another.
There's a few answers to the above question but the only one that really matters is Night of the Living Dead. It's a movie that's been so influential and is so thoroughly familiar to horror fans that it's easy to take it for granted. But in rewatching it recently, I was struck by how well it still works. I mean, I didn't expect it to suddenly suck, of course, but I sure wouldn't have faulted it for not hitting me as hard as it once did.
But it did get to me. Besides being as scary as I'd remembered - it's a movie that's just relentless in piling on the horror - I was grateful to be reminded of how much real sadness the movie carries. It's not a traditional tearjerker, no, but the deaths in this movie aren't just there to be gawked at for the FX (like Capt. Rhodes' death in Day of the Dead) - they really pierce you.
When Judy (Judith Ridley) impulsively bolts out of the farmhouse to ride shotgun with Tom (Keith Wayne) on his run to the gas pumps, it seems like such a true gesture on her part. And when Cooper (Karl Hardman) slams the front door behind her, it already feels like the end has been written for her and Tom. After their mission to fuel up the truck has gone horribly wrong and Tom has bravely driven the flaming pick-up away from the gas pumps, when he turns back to help Judy free her caught jacket, it's still a jolt to see that truck explode. Romero doesn't milk the scene for any gratuitous suspense. We don't see a lot of fumbling with Judy's jacket - it's about being hit by that sudden, instantaneous loss of life.
That's the moment where Romero and co. really let the audience know they're playing for keeps. The early, unexpected loss of Johnny (Russell Streiner) was cause for concern but the abrupt loss of Judy and Tom in that one fiery moment moves the film to another level.
It's also interesting to watch NOTLD now and see how differently the zombies are depicted from how they went on to be portrayed in Romero's subsequent Dead films. Everyone who makes a zombie movie or writes a zombie book now always points to Romero's original Dead trilogy as the Bible in how to proceed (unless they're going off on their entirely own take) but it wasn't until Dawn of the Dead that Romero really started to refine the rules of what his zombies could and couldn't do. NOTLD is its own thing. You would never see a zombie stabbing someone with a garden trowel in a Romero, or a Romero-influenced, zombie movie today but yet it's such an iconic moment in the original when Karen (Kyra Schon) attacks her mother (I bet the main reason this scene was changed in the 1990 remake to Karen simply biting her mother - with the spurting blood splashing on a nearby trowel as a nod to the original - is because zombies weren't supposed to be capable of that kind of advanced action anymore).
There's also the crazed ferocity with which the Cemetery Zombie (Bill Hinzman) attacks Johnny and Barbra, to the point that he grabs a rock to smash the car window to get at Barbra. And look at Johnny's eyes when he returns as a zombie and sees Barbra:
The intensity that he looks at his sister with (can we call it recognition?) has subsequently became a violation of the rules (almost all zombies now have those murky cataract eyes that seem to see nothing). But it's such a chilling moment in NOTLD. The way that Johnny focuses his gaze on her, it's almost as if he's been trying to get to her ever since he came back. In NOTLD, zombies have the capacity to glare - a skill that's since been stolen from them. With Johnny's pale skin and glowering eyes, I also feel like there's a little hint of vampire lingering in this encounter - perhaps a faint spiritual residue from the acknowledged influence of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend.
While it's well-known that Romero imagined this film as the start of a larger story from the get-go, watching NOTLD I always get the impression that in the bigger world beyond the farmhouse things were generally well in hand. At one point, the field reporter asks the Sheriff if the problem is going to be wrapped up in the next 24 hours, or words to that effect, and the laconic Sheriff gives a pretty unconcerned response. From the perspective of law enforcement, this zombie plague seems more like a temporary inconvenience than an apocalypse. And that's something I always liked about NOTLD. Within that isolated, overwhelmed farmhouse, this is the end of the world but in reality it's a manageable crisis - nothing that a redneck posse can't successfully mop up once the sun is out. I feel like when that bonfire is lit at the end, normalcy - for what it's worth - has been restored.
Of course, I'm probably the only person who looks at NOTLD this way - because, you know, there's all those sequels that say otherwise - but I like the idea that all this really was just a wind passing through. It makes it seem a little sadder to me, and makes the character's losing struggles that much more bitter.
To think that these people might've survived their long night of horror only to become part of the thankless, never-ending fight against an army of the undead doesn't seem so poignant to me. But to look at Ben (Duane Jones) and Cooper's bodies next to each other on the pyre and think that they might've returned to their normal lives had they only found a way to protect each other and those around them for a few dark, desperate hours - well, that's something to mourn.
Commercially, Creepshow was something of a minor miscalculation back in 1982. Sure, upfront it looked like the safest bet that anyone had ever made. Bringing together George Romero and Stephen King at their respective peaks? With splatter superstar Tom Savini supplying the FX? How does that NOT add up to the biggest horror movie ever? It wasn't for nothing that Cinefantastique's Creepshow cover story (in their Sept-Oct '82 issue) posed these three titans of terror together and asked the rhetorical question: "Are These The Scariest Men in America?"
But while the $8 million dollar movie (Romero's biggest budget to date) went on to do respectable business (making close to $20 million in the US), it didn't go through the roof. You'd think that horror fans would've been stampeding theaters to support this collaboration but perhaps they did and that just wasn't enough. The wider audience was soft on Creepshow, for some reason. And I think it comes down to the fact that Creepshow was all about paying homage to something that was before the time of the young audience of the early '80s.
Anthologies have always been a tough sell to begin with but Creepshow was also out to celebrate a series of comic books from the 1950s that were unknown to most of the under-21 crowd. The grisly lore of E.C. Comics hadn't made its re-introduction to the popular culture yet (that would have to wait until the debut of the HBO Tales from the Crypt show in 1989) so in wearing its influences on its sleeve, Creepshow came across as a big "huh?" for a lot of people.
Romero was definitely onto something when he said in a Cinefantastique interview in the magazine's April '82 double issue, months before Creepshow's release, that "I don't have a lot of faith in audiences anymore. It seems that if something doesn't click into immediate recognition nobody wants to figure it out or understand it." That's a pretty dead-on description of the initial reception of Creepshow. Unfortunately, this was supposed to be the film that would give Romero and King the chance to prove their box office mettle and give them the clout to do a theatrical version of The Stand. That a Romero-directed Stand never came to be may not be entirely due to the box office performance of Creepshow but had Creepshow been a hit on the level of Dawn of the Dead, rather than quietly coming and going from theaters in the fall of '82, you never know what might've happened.
While Creepshow may have only turned a few heads in theaters, today it's regarded as one of the most well-loved horror films of the '80s. For myself, this was the first R-rated horror movie I was able to convince my mother to take me to so it'll always have a special place in my heart. I had never anticipated a horror film with so much excitement before and despite my mother's reluctance to have anything to do with Creepshow, I was determined not to miss it (this was before our household had either cable or a VCR so if I missed Creepshow in the theaters, I was screwed). About a month prior to seeing the movie, I asked my mother to buy me the Berni Wrightson-illustrated adaptation and I read that thing to death in the weeks before Creepshow came out.
Creepshow has a vibe to it that never fails to pull me in. The movie is so amiable and so imbued with a good time spirit that it overrides any serious critical thoughts. With its replication of a comic book's visuals, it's the most meticulously designed film of Romero's career and it's sadly the last time he was able to have that killer combo of money and artistic freedom. Everything since then for him has been a little compromised in one respect or the other so that makes Creepshow really something to appreciate. If you're a horror fan, you've got to know it like the back of your hand. It's practically a law.
You can't do E.C. right without a moldy corpse crawling out of its grave and "Father's Day" brought it right out of the gate. People always talk about the hallway murder in Exorcist III as being a classic jump scare and, yeah, it is but that rotting hand jutting up into the frame in "Father's Day" as Nathan Grantham bursts out of the ground really does it for me. "Father's Day" showed me that just because I had read the comic adaptation, I was still going to be startled plenty by this movie. Oh, and how can you not love the disco stylings of "Don't Let Go"?
Reading the Wrighton adaptation made it difficult for me to immediately appreciate this segment as the sometimes-goofy looking FX work (no fault on Savini's part - it was just a hard order to fill for 1982) couldn't compare with the nastiness of Wrightson's illustrations. The adaptation played more heavily like a tragedy but the laughs of "Jordy Verill" are essential to the Creepshow experience. Stephen King plays the part of Jordy Verill so broadly that it ought to be a liability but his performance works and when anyone ever busts out quotes from Creepshow, it's usually this segment that they quote from first ("Meteor Shit!").
Having a phobia about the ocean and drowning, the early part of "Something To Tide You Over" is always uncomfortable for me to watch as Ted Danson and Gaylen Ross meet their watery demises. But Leslie Nielsen makes a terrific villain, born to smugly gloat, and all these years later, it's a kick to check out his character's once high-tech, but now primitive, home video equipment. Some might say that two segments about people coming back from the dead is too much for one movie but Savini's work on the wrinkled, water-logged ghouls is so good, it'd be wrong to complain. "Something To Tide You Over" also boasts my favorite score of all five segments.
When I saw Creepshow in the theaters, "The Crate" is the segment that sent my mom and my step-sister hauling ass out to the lobby. When the crate monster made a meal of Mike the janitor, they were out of there. They crept back in eventually but seeing all that blood as Mike was sucked into the crate was just too much. This is arguably Creepshow's best segment, thanks to Adrienne Barbeau heroically tearing into the role of the despicable, shrewish Wilma ("Just call me Billy!"). Every hateful expression she makes is gold.
Creepshow's most famous segment. The tale of a virulent bigot and manic bug-o-phobe who gets his (and then some) during a city-wide blackout, "They're Creeping Up On You" remains a tight little masterpiece of creepy-crawly terror with E.G. Marshall topping Creepshow's preceding portrayals of evil shit-heads with his performance as the wealthy, reclusive Upston Pratt, a man who missed his true calling as a rightwing talk show host. The final scene, as we see where all those bugs have got to, ranks as one of the great gross-outs of all time.
I wouldn't say that Creepshow is my favorite horror movie but yet whenever I rewatch these "jolting tales of horror," it somehow feels like it should be. It's definitely my go-to horror movie for the Halloween season. John Harrison's magnificent, goosebump-inducing score alone makes it choice Halloween viewing ('82 was a damn good year for horror soundtracks, between this and Jerry Goldsmith's Poltergeist score). And hell, I just realized that I've been talking about Creepshow all this time and I haven't even gotten around to saying anything about Tom Atkins as Stan, the comic-hating, asshole dad.
That's how great Creepshow is - you can talk about it forever and almost forget to mention that Tom Atkins is in it. Most movies, that would have to be the first thing you mention, just to keep people from walking away. But that's Creepshow for you.
With its oppressive atmosphere and often abrasive characters, Day of the Dead is a hard movie to love - as opposed to the rollicking Dawn of the Dead (1978) or the classic chills of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Day is, by design, a harsh, difficult to approach movie.
In the summer of '85, it sure didn't have what fans were looking for in the final chapter in the Dead trilogy. For myself, walking out of a screening of it that summer, I must've looked more than a little dazed. Day was one gnarly zombie flick. Savini's FX had never been better or ghastlier. To me, it's the pinnacle of splatter in the '80s. Add to that the volatile atmosphere and murderous tensions within the film's underground caverns and you've got a pretty grim picture.
Looking at it today, it's still grim - time hasn't softened the movie at all - but in an odd way it seems more and more like comfort food to me. The old-school ingenuity of Savini's effects, the scenery-chewing performances of Joe Pilato (Captain Rhodes) and Richard Liberty (Dr. Logan), the endearing Howard Sherman as Bub, Terry Alexander's wonderfully cheesy Jamaican accent, and John Harrison's synthesizer score - all of it instantly takes me back to that summer of '85.
To read my full Summer Shocks review of Day of the Dead, click here.
The trailer for George Romero's latest - and still-untitled - zombie opus is up now and judging from this brief look emphasizing its western-style action, this looks like a lot of fun. Of course, as many an internet talkbacker will point out, it also looks extremely cheap. What's funny to me about this perception isn't that it's wrong - because, honestly, it's obviously a pretty impoverished production - but that it's low budget is considered a negative for so many fans.
While I wish that studios would write people like Romero a blank check for any project they wanted to take on, I find it interesting that genre fans today are so adverse to 'B' movies. I first noticed this attitude when John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars came out in 2001. As soon as the first trailer appeared, the complaints flooded the internet that it looked like some "B" movie. That reaction was an eye-opener for me - I realized that there's a generation (or two) of fans who have been raised to believe that sci-fi, horror, and fantasy are the province of big budget entertainment. This is the T2 generation, the Jurassic Park generation, the Matrix generation. They believe that their monster movies, their zombie films, their space epics should be state-of-the-art productions. If these movies look cheap, if they're not up to par with current technology, then they're not real movies.
I don't believe that every young fan feels this way, but I do believe it's an attitude that exists with the under-25 set in a way it doesn't with Gen-X fans. My generation was the last to be introduced to genre films as B-movies first and then see the big studios gradually make that kind of material their own (well before I saw Star Wars and Superman on the big screen, I saw the likes of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, The People That Time Forgot, and Empire of the Ants and well into the '80s, it was still common to see B-movies on the big screen along with A-titles).
It used to be a letdown when a big studio would try their hand at horror because more often than not, it would be a bland effort like Ghost Story or The Awakening. Low budget films, on the other hand, had personality. It didn't matter about how slick the film was or what the effects looked like. If a film looked cheap, well, that was usually a good thing. Night of the Living Dead looked cheap - that was how the best horror films ought to look.
But these days, unless they're made with hand-held shaky-cam, modern genre films can't get away with a rudimentary look. They have to be Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead. It used to be the exception - usually an unwelcome exception at that - when a horror film looked too consciously art-directed. Films like Tony Scott's The Hunger, Michael Mann's The Keep, Paul Schrader's Cat People and even Kubrick's The Shining were accused of spending too much time on their stylized looks at the expense of producing any scares. They kept horror at arm's length in a way that low budget films didn't (Ridley Scott's Alien was the rare film to be able to have it both ways - be gorgeous to look at but still be terrifying). But now those films are more in line with the direction that horror films have taken.
Maybe it was just inevitable as technology advanced and audiences became more sophisticated. It also might have something to do with the cost of entertainment. Paying $5 a carload to see a dawn till dawn triple feature at the drive-in is a lot different than paying $10-$12 dollars for a single ticket to see a single movie. Expectations change - people want more bang for their buck. And when they pour hundreds of dollars or more into the latest home entertainment systems, they don't want to be paying that kind of money to watch movies that don't take full advantage of the latest technology. Even if a movie is bad, at least it should look and sound spectacular.
So where does that leave a movie like Romero's latest? This chintzy looking zombie movie? In a better world, it'd be greeted without scorn but in 2009, it can't help but look like an also-ran (I have to wonder if Romero deliberately went with a western angle for this film just to acknowledge how out of step and out of fashion his approach has become). Unfairly or not, a movie from one of the legends of the genre is not even competition for whatever latest teen-oritentated remakes will be screening at multi-plexes this year. To make it as a horror movie today, you have to bring your A-game.
Once George Romero's watershed Night of the Living Dead (1968) became the defining moment of late '60s horror, the new cool in ghouls for the next two decades was zombies. All through the '70s and '80s, the undead marched en masse across the screen, sent from all corners of the world with one purpose in mind - to feed on the flesh of the living.
And it was all thanks to that grainy black and white classic from Pittsburgh that galvanized audiences with an almost newsreel-like verite. But after over twenty thriving years of copycats and rip-offs - many of them cult classics in their own right (everything from Let Sleeping Corpses Lie to Night of the Comet) - it was the commercial failure of 1990's Romero-written and produced, Tom Savini-directed Night remake that hastened the end of Zombie Cinema as fans knew it. Save for the limited release of Michele Soavi's Dellamorte, Dellamore (1995), after NOTLD '90 the undead were M.I.A. in theaters for the rest of the century. Not until 2002's Resident Evil would zombies come back into popular fashion. But while NOTLD '90 was found wanting by audiences at the time, I have to say that I unabashedly love this movie and revisit it often. When fans talk about the upper class of remakes, I believe that NOTLD '90 should have a place in that company.
By 1990, genre fans had been inundated with a previous decade's worth of remakes that brought new levels of big budget spectacle to former B-movies such as The Thing, The Fly, The Blob, and Invaders from Mars but unlike those more lavish productions, one of this film's charms is that there's very little - outside of a few of the more convincingly grisly make-up effects - that couldn't have been done just as well in 1968 had the original been just slightly more flush with cash. Although the FX (courtesy of Optic Nerve Productions) are often very cool and startling (in fact, I much prefer the zombie designs here to KNB's work in Land of the Dead), this is the rare instance of a B-movie being remade as another B-movie.
But B-movie or no, one key improvement of the remake over the original is in its caliber of actors. No disrespect to Duane Jones and the rest of the original's ensemble of Pittsburgh locals but Savini assembled a choice cast for this film and much of what's memorable about NOTLD '90 is its performances. In particualr, leads Patricia Tallman and Tony Todd (as Barbara and Ben) are especially good, bringing real conviction to their roles. Ben's anguish ("Goddamn all of you!") and Barbara's growing resilience are both well-played and both actors have their share of indelible moments. Barbara's brief but poignant encounter with a zombie clutching a doll is one of the highlights of any of the Dead films and I love Todd's burst of mad laughter in the basement towards the end as he finally realizes how close to escape they all were earlier. It's a moment one can imagine as the irony-laced final panel of an E.C. Comics tale, complete with "Ha Ha Ha!" scrawled across the page in block letters.
Savini doesn't catch lightning in a bottle the way that Romero did but he turns in solid work (with some rumored uncredited assistance by Romero) and Romero himself clearly put as much thought into his script as he would've to any of his own Dead sequels. Whereas the original gained much of its energy through the palatable sense that it was written quickly, without being finessed, the remake is interesting in that we can see Romero having a chance to tell his story again from a more reflective place in his life and career. His script for the remake comes from the hand of a more seasoned writer and in turn is much less of a blunt instrument than the original was.
For example, it's a small detail but I like how Romero lays in the subtle suggestion that it's the sound of Ben and co. hammering boards to secure the house that draws many of the zombies towards the farmhouse in the first place. After all, this place is in the middle of nowhere - why would a horde of zombies come to it in such numbers? Had the survivors simply laid low, many of the zombies who come to attack them might have shuffled past the house with no thought to approach it, leaving an easily manageable number of zombies to contend with. But in doing what they feel is right, by taking 'heroic' measures, they only draw death closer to them. It's that kind of wry touch that Romero pulls off so well.
Early on in 1978's Dawn of the Dead, the film's fleeing protagonists fly their helicopter over an open field full of good ol' boys who we see treating the undead plague as an excuse to get drunk, party, and shoot zombies for sport. While this moment is played for derisive laughs in Dawn (with the country song 'Cause I'm A Man emphasizing Romero's send-up of redneck values), in NOTLD '90's effective coda, Romero and Savini now let us observe these same events through Barbara's eyes as tragedy ("We're them and they're us.").
With its slicker production values, NOTLD '90 lacked the immediacy of the Vietnam-era original but while this may not have been a movie of its time, I believe that time has been on its side. Of course, even close to twenty years later some fans continue to resent the idea of a Night of the Living Dead remake as a matter of principle. But for me, when comparing the two Nights, I can't always see things in black and white.
Something happened today that really gave this horror fan pause, something that stopped me, um, dead in my tracks. Apparently George Romero's latest chapter in his Dead saga (or his reboot to a new series or whatever), Diary of the Dead was released to DVD this week. As I strolled through the aisles of my local Circuit City, there it was in the horror section somewhere between Dementia 13 and Dreamcatcher. But what surprised me to see it was the fact that I was surprised to see it. This is a new Romero movie after all - a new Romero zombie movie at that - and yet its arrival came as news to me.
Oh sure, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that it was due on DVD soon. I've half-glimpsed the online ads for it that've appeared lately. But I never bothered to make a mental note of what date it was hitting stores. And that in itself is strange. A lot of movies fall through the cracks for me these days but I never thought I'd have such an indifferent reaction to a new Romero film. Not only was I surprised to see Diary of the Dead out in stores, but after seeing it was available I didn't even make a move to buy it.
Not just that, I didn't even make the minimal gesture of physically picking up a copy to look at the back sleeve to see the synopsis or special features! Seeing that this was out should've at least prompted a pick-it-up, walk-around-the-store-with-it, then maybe - grudgingly - put it back moment (with the intention to pick up a rental copy on the way home!). But yet I walked by Diary of the Dead like it was a box set of the Prom Night series.
Each Romero release used to be an event - as a kid I made it a mission to see films like Creepshow and Day of the Dead in theaters even though at the time I wasn't of age to see either. And even though the films he's made since haven't been his most exceptional work, I still looked forward to them - even Bruiser was a movie I rushed to watch on video. And as recently as Land of the Dead, I was hotly anticipating his latest film.
But Diary of the Dead is going to go unwatched by me and yet I couldn't even tell you why I can't bring myself to see it. The scathing reviews might have something to do with it but I wouldn't let that stop me from watching something I already had an interest in. Maybe it's just that I can't take any more zombies from the man. For me, as a fan, Land of the Dead closed that book to my satisfaction. Whatever the case, whatever is keeping me away from Diary of the Dead, all I know is that walking past Romero's latest without even a backwards glance made me sad.
