A Date With Doomsday

Sadly, Doomsday - director Neil Marhsall's love letter to the post-apocalyptic actioners of the early '80s - has probably disappeared from all but a handful of US theaters at this point but I'd like to give it a belated mention as one of the more pleasant cinematic surprises of 2008 so far. I'll admit, when I noticed that the tagline for Doomsday was "Mankind has an expiration date", I had the kneejerk reaction of "yeah, and this movie has an expiration date, too - 1982!" Of course, Doomsday had already sold me a ticket based on the fact that my own expiration date happens to be 1982 as well but honestly, I had to wonder: was there enough people out there clamoring for a thickly laid homage to The Road Warrior, 2019, After the Fall of New York, 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape from New York to make this movie worthwhile? Well, after seeing Doomsday I was just glad that Marshall didn't let such stupid questions keep him from making his movie. Doomsday has taught me that when a studio is willing to spend their money for you to get your geek on, you just do it. So the movie flops - so what? What a dumb thing to care about, right?

While Doomsday 's trailers and teasers had me bracing for a real eyesore, production-wise, I felt the film looked much better on the big screen than I was expecting. Marshall didn't squander a dime of Doomsday's budget and as a result, the film looks more intentionally gritty than it does impoverished. I was also surprised at how intense the action was. There’s several scenes depicting the crazed denizens of a long abandoned, virus-striken region swarming over the small band of soldiers who have entered looking for a cure for the Reaper virus (what else would they call a virus in a movie like this?) that are genuinely gripping. And the action and the film’s settings are more varied than the ads would lead you to believe as well. It’s not all about car chases and urban squalor. There’s some great sequences later in the film that take place in and around a coverted castle that give the movie a visual breath of fresh air.

Doomsday’s lead, Rhona Mitra, is set up as the film’s Snake Plissken figure and while she does all right, she’s no Snake. In line with that, Doomsday’s main problem is that in every way it isn’t in the same league as the movies that it idolizes. There’s a climatic car chase that’s clearly indebted to the final chase in The Road Warrior but isn’t even close to matching George Miller’s still-jaw dropping sequence. And Marshall should’ve come up with a last shot as iconic as the end of Escape from New York with Snake walking away, destroying the tape that holds the world’s fate in the balance, as the distinctive beats of Carpenter’s synth score rise on the soundtrack. With Doomsday, after its final car chase (bonus points to Marshall for using the Frankie Goes To Hollywood hit "Two Tribes" here), the movie half-heartedly sputters through a couple of scenes and then the credits roll.

That’s not to say that Doomsday on the whole isn’t enormous fun. Sure, it may only be a pastiche of earlier - and for the most part better - films but it’s the only pastiche of this particular rank of films that’s out there right now and the only one likely to be made for some time. Even though an eternity of heavy rotation on cable likely awaits Doomsday, Marshall clearly made this for the fans so it's disappointing that more of them didn't come out to support it on the big screen.

I definitely liked Marshall's previous films - Dog Soldiers and The Descent - but this is the first one that's really made me excited about what he might do next. That’s not to say that this is his best film, but it’s the first one to make me think that if someone keeps giving this guy bigger sandboxes to play in, he’s going to really deliver and his films won’t look like processed Hollywood ’product’.

"For He's A Jolly Good Fellow"

Even as a young kid, when I watched the original Twilight Zone in syndication, I found myself especially drawn to a handful of memorable Rod Serling-penned TZ episodes that involved distressed and despondent middle-aged men. In episodes like "Walking Distance" and "A Stop At Willoughby", Serling presented protagonists who were at the end of their personal and professional ropes. The lead characters in these episodes were business men who had spent their adult lives fighting for space on the corporate ladder and had only a gnawing emptiness to show for it. For me, these shows were among the finest to go out under the TZ banner - bringing out the best in Serling. For whatever reason, the dilemma of these harried men who want to leave behind the grind of the present for a bucolic past was a topic that Serling really warmed up to.

Years later, during the first season of his swan song program Night Gallery (which ran on NBC from 1970 to 1973), Serling revisited the thematic ground of "Walking Distance" and "Willoughby" and outdid his previous work by penning the stand-out Gallery episode "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar". Without writing towards an ironic twist, Serling simply poured his guts into this dramatic script. While the protagonist here may be seeing people from his past, it's clear that these are the products of his melancholy mind, rather than actual ghosts or spirits. We know that the supernatural will not be intervening here.

Familiar character actor William Windom (most recognized by genre fans for his role as Commodore Decker in the original Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine") plays Randy Lane, a 48 year-old salesman for a plastics company who is well aware that his best days are behind him. Lane is a widower and while his secretary (Diane Baker) is devoted to him, he's essentially alone. His assistant (Bert Convy) is gunning for Lane's position and Lane doesn't have either the energy or the means to deflect the kind of cutthroat maneuvering that's aimed at him. And even without someone looking to push him aside, Lane is so disenchanted with his job and his life that a seemingly irreversible spiral is in effect. But it's the news that the city is due to tear down a longtime local watering hole that has Lane desperately pining for all the dreams that never came to pass.

When Lane returned from his stint in the service as a paratrooper in WWII, a homecoming party was hosted at Tim Riley's bar with family and friends fondly serenading Lane with a rendition of "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow". Riley's bar was also where he took his wife on their first date. Even though the bar is closed, its physical presence is an enduring brick and motar connection Lane has to a once-promising past that gets further and further away with every year. And the news that this landmark is about to be leveled ("just an old eyesore that they're going to tear down pretty soon", as he informs his secretary) is devastating.

Serling's script is impassioned, poignant, and Windom makes Serling's every word count in a heartbreaking performance. Lane doesn't come across as a self-pitying loser, but rather as an innately decent man who knows that the life he wanted for himself is forever out of his reach. At one point, as he breaks down in an acquaintance's arms, he sobs: "I shouldn't be hustled to death in the daytime and then die of loneliness every night!". And these words don't sound theatrical or melodramatic, they sound true - a cry from the heart. Serling was a master at writing dialogue that was poetic but yet still sounded like it was meant to be spoken.

If this episode's conclusion happens to run towards the implausibly upbeat, I'm willing to let it go under the assumption that Serling simply didn't want to be responsible for the inevitable spike in the national suicide rate if he didn't some way to put a silver lining in this story.

"They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" aired in 1971. Four years after the show aired, Serling passed away due to complications from a coronary bypass operation in 1975 at the age of 50. His Emmy-nominated screenplay for this episode is poignant proof that of all the outre nightmares and anxieties given airtime on both Twilight Zone and Night Gallery during their memorable runs, the one thing that Serling himself found most frightening was the slow, steady passage of time. As Lane says with wistful regret, "Rest in peace, you age of innocence...we shall not look upon your like again."

This episode can currently be viewed online for free. Click this link to see "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" and other vintage Night Gallery episodes.

I've Got It All On Video

Video stores were the backbone of my adolescence during the ‘80s, allowing me to indulge my love of horror movies in ways that I never imagined. And watching these stores and the VHS format vanish from the face of the earth in the wake of DVDs and Netflix makes me feel like my past is in the process of being gobbled up by those hell-spawned Pac-Man things from Stephen King’s The Langoliers.

My stepdad didn’t buy us our first VCR until ’86 but for several years before that he’d rent a player for the house for two weeks during the Christmas holidays and to remember having just those two short weeks in an entire year (!) to see whatever videos I desperately wanted to see (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, Deep Red, Zombie) is mind-blowing to me now. Of course, once we finally had a VCR of our own I was in horror heaven.

Thanks to the home video boom, there were several mom and pop outfits near my parent’s house to choose from (none of which cared if under-aged kids rented R or unrated films) and I spent many months exhausting each store’s back catalog of horror titles – experiencing ‘80s favorites like Cannibal Holocaust, Make Them Die Slowly, Dr. Butcher M.D., The Evil Dead, Burial Ground, Gates of Hell, Razorback, From Beyond, Scarecrows, Xtro, and Alone in the Dark for the first time.

Years later, when I started working at a video store myself post-college (where else would someone with a liberal arts degree get a job?), I felt like I had lucked into the ideal occupation (what can I say – I have low aspirations!). I worked for a locally owned and operated video chain called The Movie Shops and even though the home video industry had already peaked by the mid-‘90s, the market was still strong enough that I didn’t see an end to my dream gig in sight.

But by the late ‘90s, I knew all too well by our sluggish sales that the rental industry was eroding. It was discouraging to see it happen but even if the small guys that I was aligned with went under, I didn’t think that video stores themselves were going to dry up and blow away. After all, people still would want to watch movies at home and to buy new release VHS tapes was cost prohibitive except in rare cases when a title would be priced to own on street date. Call me naïve but I thought VHS was sacrosanct.

At the time, though, besides my job at the video store I also worked at a local Media Play outlet and one day, a small section on the back wall of the video section was opened up for a new product called DVDs. When I first heard about the coming of DVDs, I scoffed – believing that they’d never push laserdiscs aside in the hearts of collectors (as Kevin Smith famously kickstarted his Clerks laserdisc audio commentary: “Fuck DVD!”) and that they wouldn’t encroach on VHS as the general public wouldn’t feel the need to upgrade their collections to a whole new format (as I reasoned – “who’s going to buy all their movies over again after spending so much time and money on VHS?”).

But affordability and convenience can’t be ignored and soon that little DVD rack on the Media Play back wall (I wish I could remember what titles were on it – but I think that Lost in Space and the John Travolta film Michael were two of them) started to evolve, causing the store’s fairly sizable laserdisc selection to steadily diminish. And once that process started, it wasn’t long before laserdiscs had been permanently kicked to the curb.

Maybe because I never owned a laserdisc player it didn’t hit me so hard to see the format phased out (although I always loved the hardcore love of movies that it represented). But somehow the overtaking of laser by DVD still didn’t foretell the death knell of VHS to me. I thought that three had been a crowd but now with laser gone, that DVD and VHS could peacefully co-exist. But that wasn’t meant to be (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m something of a slow-on-the-uptake, can’t-see-shit-in-front-of-my-face kind of guy). Now here we are less then ten years later and there’s a generation of kids about to enter their early teens for which movies have always been available – and preferable – on shiny silver discs.

But from day one, there was an appealing vibe of archeology attached to VHS that DVD has never shared. The horror sections of the stores I went to as a teenager always occupied cramped back corners and I vividly recall being crouched behind shelves, pouring over every lurid title (Spasms! Hospital Massacre! Incubus!). And perhaps because their shape evoked books, VHS carried a subliminal romantic quality for me as well (and many of the mom and pop establishments I used to go to had wooden shelving, lending an additional library-like feel to their stores).

Of course I expect I’ll be nostalgic for DVD one day too – once the day comes when no one buys physical copies of movies anymore, when people just download all their media. Some might say that next step is an improvement – taking the unnecessary clutter out of movie collecting. But why would anyone collect anything if they didn’t like a little bit of clutter in their lives?

Looking around the newly converted DVD-only rental selection of one of my local “video stores” several weeks ago and seeing the remnants of their once-proud VHS past stacked in discount sales bins, I couldn’t help but think of how excited I was twenty five years ago when my stepdad hooked up that first rented VCR to our 18 inch TV and introduced us to the magic of VHS (“Look, you can stop it anytime you want!”). As soon as I saw that first videotape cue up, I knew that my already movie-obsessed life had taken a profound turn.

And as I stood in this now disc-only store thinking about how it was possible that video could have vanished, I looked at the young employee behind the counter and it dawned on me that this kid hadn’t even been born when the store he was now working in was first opened. And then I realized with DVD-worthy clarity, “Oh, yeah – that’s how. I’m old.”

I used to think that being part of the last generation to remember a time before home video made me feel old. But now it’s not the fact that I remember a time before home video, it’s that I’m now part of a generation who can say they shopped (and worked) at video stores before they became extinct.

Cabin Fever

My first exposure to Sam Raimi's demonic debut The Evil Dead came through an article filed by Stephen King for Twilight Zone Magazine for its November 1982 issue. Having attended the Cannes Film Festival earlier that year on behalf of his collaboration with George Romero, Creepshow, King had seen The Evil Dead at a screening and wanted to share his discovery with stateside fans. King's TZ article was an excited love letter to what he would be widely quoted as calling "the most ferociously original horror movie of the year".

I encountered this issue of TZ at the local Stop & Shop supermarket where my mother did our weekly grocery shopping and when my mother came around to retrieve me from the magazine racks en route to the checkout, I begged her to purchase the issue. As TZ didn't have the same graphic pics that kept her from approving Fangoria, it was an easy sell. Once I got it home, I kept returning to that issue over the subsequent weeks and re-reading King's article, intently studying the grainy b&w pics that accompanied it (TZ ran few color photos and except for the middle pages, it was never printed on glossy paper). At the time, The Evil Dead hadn't been purchased for distribution in the U.S. and as King himself stated in his article: "Take a look at the accompanying stills, dear reader, because most of the large American film distribution nets have already passed on Raimi's independently financed film".

Eventually Fangoria kicked in its own Evil Dead coverage, finally providing glossy color stills revealing the truly putrescent sights of dissolving Deadites, and in time its U.S. distribution was secured (although my ability to see the unrated release as a thirteen-year-old horror fan was another matter) but for awhile my only connection to The Evil Dead was through King's three page article and the handful of stills that ran with it (including the famous publicity photo seen above of a blood-soaked Ash holding a chainsaw over his head as skeletal hands clutch towards him).

When I finally did see The Evil Dead on video at a much later date, I wasn't disappointed. Everything King said on behalf of the film was true as far as I was concerned - I was cowering in my seat during the entire running time. And several years later when I saw the first trailer for Evil Dead II in front of Witchboard, I was all in for another round of nerve-shredding terror. How far would Raimi take it this time, I wondered? But when I finally saw Raimi's sequel at a midnight showing on its opening weekend, I loved it but I was also taken aback - I had NO idea going in that this was going to be funny (yes, this was back in the pre-internet days when it was so much easier to be surprised by movies). I thought Raimi had made a great movie, but on the way out of the theater that night I had some explaining to do to the friend I went with who I had promised we'd be seeing a balls-to-the-wall horror film (things went much better for Alan and I when we saw Hellraiser together later that year).

Since then, and since most newer fans of the Evil Dead series have watched the series in backwards succession on video - discovering Army of Darkness first, then going back to II and then the original, the horrific impact of that first film has been lost to time. But the current comic book adaptation of the original, by writer Mark Verheiden and artist John Bolton (and published by Dynamite Entertainment) is a corrective swing of the pendulum back towards making The Evil Dead what King called "a black rainbow of horror".

Only two issues (out of four) have been released so far with Ash and Scotty currently in the midst of keeping their possessed girlfriends at bay but I can say that from page one, this has been an impressive adaptation. While Verheiden gives later-day fans some of the smart-Ash quips they've come to expect, it isn't a campy retelling and Bolton's vivid artwork (check above for the cover to issue 1) takes me back to looking with fascination at those stills in Twilight Zone Magazine so many years ago. It serves as a welcome reminder that all you really need to scare the shit out of an audience is to send some kids into the woods, put 'em in a cabin and let the demons loose.

Never Question Your Own Taste

Looking at the cover of the upcoming Fangoria, I realized what a constant source of stupid, childish, grin-inducing pleasure it's been for me over the last twenty-five years or so to discover how gross each new Fango cover will be. While Rue Morgue is a horror mag that your girlfriend or significant other can catch you reading and there won't be any outraged words or disgusted sighs on their part (or even a "what did you waste your money on now?"), Fango is another matter. If I happen to leave Rue Morgue lying out in plain sight, my wife won't blink an eye. Hell, I could bring it to the dinner table if I wanted. But if she spots a Fango with a cover like the one above, a "how can you read that shit?" comment is guaranteed. And when she asks, I think she honestly wants an answer that makes sense - after all, I am raising our child with her. But really, what kind of question is that? As soon as you start to question your own taste, you're ruined.

Coal Miner's Slaughter

Given the affection I still have towards the early '80s slasher films I grew up on, it's a little dispiriting to see favorites like Prom Night now being remade and aimed at a generation too young to have even seen Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the theaters but for me the upcoming My Bloody Valentine remake is the real heart-breaker.

I vividly recall the TV spots for My Bloody Valentine terrifying me back in the early months of 1981. I was a latchkey kid, alone in the house after school until my working parents came home around 6 o'clock each night. And in the weeks leading up to My Bloody Valentine's Febuary release, it never failed that at some point after it got dark but before anyone else was home, a commercial for My Bloody Valentine would come on with its shots of a pick-axe wielding killer stalking through tunnels in his miner gear. This was before the days of remote control (at least it was in our household) so to change the channel, I'd have to actually approach the TV, which I couldn't bring myself to do as long as the commercial was playing. My alternate solution to that was to simply scurry out of the room. These spots were likely only 30 seconds long but to this scared shitless kid they seemed to last a tortured eternity.

When I eventually saw MBV a few years later on HBO, I really dug it. Sure, it wasn't quite as nerve-frying as its commercials had me expecting but it was a solid effort, comparing well to the other modern horror movies I'd seen up to that point. And as I've revisited it over the years, I've found it to have a much healthier shelf life than almost all of its slasher contemporaries.

What I continue to enjoy about MBV is that director George Mihalka and his cast made a real effort to bring a sense of realism to their film's blue collar community. The mining town of Valentine Bluff ("the little town with the big heart") is a convincingly dead-end piece of Nowhere and even the most attractive cast members here don't look too Hollywood (which would be strange if they did, seeing as this was a Canadian production - but you get my meaning).

Scripter John Beaird has been quoted as saying that MBV was striving to be the "Deer Hunter of horror films" in that, like Deer Hunter's steel worker protagonists, this was also about close-knit, working class characters. Most slasher films of the time featured protagonists on the cusp of promising futures - either high schoolers as in Halloween, Graduation Day, and Prom Night or college students as in House on Sorority Row, Hell Night, and The Dorm That Dripped Blood (even Terror Train centered around the final good times of a graduating college class) - but MBV was different. It was about kids (twentysomethings, actually - another break with the slasher norm) with no futures to look forward to. For these characters to live their adult lives in Valentine Bluff meant working in the local coal mine with no prospects of breaking the cycle of their parents (the one character who does try to get out - Paul Kelman's 'Jessie' - fails to make it on his own and has to return home shamefaced to work in the mines). And that focus on these working class heroes continues to mark MBV as being a different type of slasher movie.

I don't know what direction the remake's script will take but I'm anticipating that they'll entirely abaondon the original's mining town setting and if that's the case, then it isn't My Bloody Valentine in my eyes. It was unique at the time of the original's release to see a horror film take place in a community like this and it's even rarer now. In fact, it's become almost impossible to see blue collar characters in any form of entertainment any more. TV used to be filled with ordinary people who lived paycheck to paycheck but now for a character to be the center of a TV show means that they must be either a lawyer, a doctor, a cop, a CSI invesigator, or a TV writer. The days of people working as mechanics, bar tenders, taxi drivers or waitresses are extinct (with the notable exception of The Office, virtually the only time you see everyday people on TV now is when they're grasping for their fifteen minutes of fame on reality shows). And movies aren't any better in this regard. I mean, I know movies are all about escapism but in recent years, it seems like there's been a new-found aversion towards characters who live within modest means. Even middle class characters are being pushed aside - for example, it's just been reported that the family in the remake of Last House on the Left are now due to be vacationing at their lakeshore home!

Although current trends aren't in its favor, I hope that the new My Bloody Valentine won't abandon its blue collar roots in favor of flashier folk. If the only place I can see regular people is in a slasher movie, then so be it.

Rambo

In 1982's First Blood, during an exchange between Brian Dennehy's out-of-his-league small town sheriff Will Teasle - who is trying to flush rampaging Vietnam vet John Rambo out of the woods - and Richard Crenna's Col. Trautman, Teasle is incredulous at Rambo's ex-superior officer's claims as to Rambo's combat skills - "Are you telling me that 200 of our men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?"

To which Trautman replies that if Teasle plans to send that many men against Rambo, he should bring a good supply of body bags. That same advice applies to this latest installment of the Rambo saga, except that much of the carnage that Rambo leaves in his wake here calls for a mop more than it does for body bags as Rambo reduces most of his adversaries to wet red stains.

When Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem's red-band trailer was released last year, fans were amped at the promise of that trailer's violent highlights only to be disappointed to find that the trailer contained almost all of that film's gore shots. Well, Rambo's early trailer created the same fan excitement with some spectacularly brutal clips. But what's shocking about the film is that its trailer proves to be only the tip of the iceberg! They actually left at least a half hour of good shit for the movie itself! I only wish Joe Bob Briggs could step in to deliver the Drive-In Totals on this because they'd be some incredible numbers.

As a bloody last hurrah for the Rambo franchise, this is right up there with Stallone's well-recieved final bell for Rocky Balboa last year. Of course, Rambo isn't all about heart like Rocky is - Rambo's all about dealing out death. And writer/director Stallone gives his steadfast sociopath ample reason to maim and kill by putting him at odds with the military dirtbags of Burma.

In showing us the kind of atrocities taking place in this far-flung region (highlighted by a prolonged village raid that single-handedly earns this film its hard R rating), the first half of Stallone's Rambo will have many a genre fan flashing back to the Italian-made 'mondo' films popular in the early days of home video such as Shocking Asia and Mondo Cane that traded on exploitative, documentary-real imagery - films where you could practically wave the gathering flies off the death on the screen. Call this Mondo Rambo.

And when the reclusive Rambo ("Fuck the world" he declares at one point) decides to save a group of missionaries he had reluctantly agreed to transport into a volitile area only to be later informed that they'd been kidnapped by the Burmese Army, the violence that ensues could only have been topped if Stallone personally came into the theater to murder you.

Not only is this one of the most violent films ever to play in U.S. theaters but as a director, Stallone should be commeneded for making a contemporary action film where fast edits and shaky camerawork never take the place of coherence (I'm looking at you, Paul Greengrass!). During Rambo, even when the screen is filled with various warring factions engaged in mutiple battles, confusion never sets in.

I just hope that audiences turn out to support Rambo. Not that I'd want to see the series itself continue (why run the risk of spoiling a perfectly good finale?) but I would love to see Rambo's success spur current action films to follow its lead.

Oh, and if Stallone has any thoughts on what he'd do with a sequel to his underrated cop flick Nighthawks (1981), I think there's an eager audience waiting to see that movie. Bring back Billy Dee, man!