Fear The Walking Dead Season 2 - review

2016 (USA)

2016 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Blu-ray R(2/B)

With Season 2 and the group forced to flee a ruined Los Angeles up in flames, it's back to more familiar The Walking Dead ground. I say ground; as led now in part by Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), a single minded entrepreneur for want of a better word, the group are actually out seeking misadventure and intrigue on the high seas.

Setting the heroes on a boat and not on land was an inspired writing choice differentiating the series at the earliest opportunity from the mid-country claustrophobia of The Walking Dead. That being said the narrative is the same; with the companions dealing with increasingly maladjusted and dangerous situations, all the while picking up the skills they'll (some of them) no doubt need to survive into seasons 3 and 4. I say some; not everyone is made for the end of the world, but it's not as obvious as before, with all characters more closely vying for ineptitude and naivety.

The first eight episodes very much take over from the first series. Theirs is a discrete road (ok boat) journey of discovery; both literally to Mexico, and metaphorically, as they're actually forced to come to the conclusion that the shit-show is real, and there's not likely to be some magic paradise at the end of it. It's good post-apocalyptic drama, well presented and written, though now, out of the apocalypse into the post-apocalypse the characters aren't quite enough to keep things feeling as original or fresh. The journey being a tad too linear and the trials and douchebags on the way a tad too familiar. Then just as I was starting to worry, bang!

Whatever the reasons for what appears to be the huge injection of confidence and cash, the second half of Season 2 literally explodes in scope and ambition. Scattering the characters and their aspirations across a suddenly complete and city full of communities, power-play and danger, Fear The Walking Dead turns the dial up a notch and the results are stunning. The Mexican city of Rosarito and its surrounding area makes a great playground for the characters and also differentiates itself from The Walking Dead, with what appears to be lower population density; and hence fewer zombies, and an entirely different culture and landscape. The Americans too are the outsiders, itself creating a new dynamic in the story.

I've always been surprised how quickly and efficiently zombie survivors adjust to bashing in skulls and sticking sharp things into eyes and ears. One minute it's doing chores or revising for a mock history exam, and the next it's slicing and dicing like a seasoned killer; and to say the group's young'uns Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Christoper Manawa (Lorenzo James Henrie) and aforementioned Nick haven't adjusted to the bloodshed would be an understatement. Then again, stories are told by the victors; those that did survive for them to be told. Just mulling over my own existence and all the coincidences and wins that would have to have occurred to each and every ancestor, however big or seemingly insignificant, is it not plausible that the survivors of zombie dramas such as this, could be as capable, or fortuitous as they are? Take Nick; the guy who stuck poison in his veins in Season 1, and the guy who thought he could walk with the zombies. The odds of him not only surviving all the things thrown his way in both Seasons, let alone come out of it all with a girl on his arm, is astronomical and it could almost be too glaring; too incredible; yet Fear the Walking has the feel of a great epic and it doesn't seem too much at all.

Finishing Season 2, I feel here is a show that's finally found its confidence. With a more expansive playground and seemingly larger budget the already well developed characters have found their post-apocalyptic strength, and yet still haven't succumbed to the despair and resignation that seems to be main ongoing trait for Rick and his gang. Also, yes, other humans did once again rise to take centre stage, and that's a small pity in my mind, but it's still top tier zombie story telling with huge promise and mammoth potential - 8/10.

Steven@WTD.

Fear The Walking Dead Season 1 - review

2015 (USA)

2015 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Blu-ray R(Free)

Contains mild spoilers.

Say what you will, as to whether AMC and Robert Kirkman should have ever gone ahead with yet another unapologetic heavy post-apocalyptic zombie drama at a time the phenomenon was beginning to show signs of consumer fatigue. Then also perhaps overlook the rather trite moniker. The fact that we have got yet another big budget and meticulous zombie spectacular, no less, right back to the beginning, with all the confusion, discovery and false hope this brings, is a joy to behold. Where-as it's big brother is now nearly a constant slog of dark and bleak, but no less agreeable, with other humans the increasing major threat, it's refreshing to have the zombies once again front and centre. Also whereas Rick and the gang are now, with their years of weary survival drudgery, most definitely the definition of the walking dead, here it's still early days and, though yes it's not exactly all the fun of the fair, optimism is still tangible and ok, and the walking dead are still the ones with the gnashing chops and lumbering shuffle.

This again is not to argue that it's some watered down teen sideshow; a Return of the Living Dead Part II. It's just that this is still a world where it's ok to have inner moral conflict; where maybe people can be given the benefit of the doubt and perhaps strangers should be welcome with open arms rather than be suspected of owning an automated cannibal murder factory. Ok, for Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis) and his extended family, innocence won't last forever and by midpoint second season the same cynicism and, some might say, realistic sobriety has finally made its point and been taken on board. But I get ahead.

The Walking Dead didn't go right back to the beginning. It started with the apocalypse in full swing, and the dead out numbering the living a fuck-tonne to one. Fear doesn't just fill in the missing weeks, but goes one further, back to the minutes and hours most people thought things might still actually turn out ok (cue the laughter).

First time it was to see whether the cable audience would take to prime time zombie horror, and with its record cable audiences and Golden Globes, we know how they did. This time, I'd argue the six part teaser / trial was to see, first off, if people were ok with more of the same, and second if people would take to more disjointed and delicate, but more realistic and normative characters, and with a tighter, more insular family driven story.

Rick Grimes was, from the start, the gun toting, self-reliant larger than life comic book character and his companions and nemesis on the journey complemented the excessive story telling that became such a phenomenon. Without the comics central to the narrative, writers Kirkman and Dave Erickson present, with Fear, quite the different, more subtle, to start with anyway, world. If we're honest, from Rick to Shane to Daryl to Michonne or even The Governor, characters had identity tied to role and purpose. Yes there's character development, but true to its roots it's more caricatures with either something to offer or some deep flaw.

The Manawa / Clark family immediately offers something different. There's quirky dynamics, unspoken tension, complicated logistics and everything you'd expect in a modern mid-American family set-up. Ok, it helps to secure the characters before everything's extreme and everyone's under pressure, but even looking to The Walking Dead's flash backs, it's not hard to argue there's far more depth and ambiguity to the relationships even in these earliest moments. I don't think I was alone in taking some time to warm to them all; Travis was a bit stiff, Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) too sullen a matriarch and as for the rest I struggled to remember names or what they were really for; and it was precisely because they weren't as discretely defined.

It was Nick, (Frank Dillane), the brilliantly cast son of Madison who broke me though. The difficult junkie drop-out, and first to witness the return of living dead, is perhaps the gateway drug, easily type-cast, his demonstrable nuance as he deals what he's seen, and struggles with what he should do, amid his heroin come down craziness, and the way this permeates through the family brought everything together. I stopped seeing the characters as isolated identities but as social and broken beings and it all came to life.

Fear also packs the zombie punch, delivering all the highly polished horror goodness we'd expect from the now seasoned production team. The end of the world is brilliantly crafted and by the end of the series perhaps I grasped the Fear bit of the name I initially frowned upon. The undead are scary again, even on their own. They're not yet, anyway, just the obstacle, the problem to solve, but the unknown and incongruous other. They're also in this first series a temporary devastation; because of course things will get better and return to order. The world has yet to fully fall and the full consequences are yet to be grasped by minds that are clearly not ready to process such information. And it's engaging, surprising, both heart-warming and despairing, and utterly enjoyable as one would expect - 8/10.

Steven@WTD.

Nightmare City (City of the Walking Dead) - review

1980 (Italy / Mexico / Spain)

2008 Blue Underground DVD R(All)

Contains mild spoilers.

One thing Umberto Lenzi's silly little sordid orgy of gore is not, is dull. Now I've watched all manner of continental eighties zombie madness but nothing had quite prepared me the no nonsense, frenzy of violence that spilled so quickly out of the unannounced Hercules military aircraft, and marked the start of a good hour or so of audaciously unapologetic in your face bloody fun. Where was the good hour of faintly trite and badly acted build up? The slow belief / disbelief back and forth and small scale micro control of the situation so that it only effected a small band in an isolated setting?  They land a plane in broad daylight at the main airport, they spill out with camera's rolling and a full military presence and not a single fuck is given. It's as full on as it sounds, it's Nightmare City; and one has to applaud Lenzi for it.

Don't get me wrong. It's still a low budget bastard horror of the eighties with a mixed bag of acting, effects and dialogue. For every brilliantly staged and shot axe to the head or naked boob sliced off (yes really) there's all manner of quite frankly half hearted amateur knife attacks or neck sucks. Also for every semi-coherent, semi-well-delivered reaction to the unfolding carnage there's an excruciating over worked line about radiation and hyper tissue regeneration.

Television news anchor Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) just happens to be at the airport when it all kicks off. He's there to meet a professor who can shed light on a recent nuclear accident (hence the radiation) and when the airport alarms go off he can't help but stick his reporter's nose. There really isn't much more to the narrative. He has a wife Dr. Anna Miller (Laura Trotter) who works at the hospital that soon joins in the tsunami of destruction, and there's a military presence which whilst keen to contain the situation are just as interested in avoiding a more national panic, and that's it. The narrative, such as it is, is the vehicle to allow the irradiated sick and depraved zombie like blood suckers to reek havoc on all and sundry, and for Lenzi to fashion a competent video nasty for a market that couldn't get enough.

I should mention the faint esoteric pseudo implied clairvoyance ramblings from Sheila Holmes (Maria Rosaria Omaggio), the wife of one of the Majors, and the equally daft and confusing existential ending but I didn't take any of this too seriously and suggest it was added more as an after thought than as a central idea. Dellamorte Dellamore or The Beyond this is not.

It's also worth mentioning despite all the unsavoury blood shed and dark themes it never really comes across a horror film but more of a disaster one, and the zombies reflect this. Their first appearance is sudden and all consuming. They stream from the plane like deranged mad-men throat slitting, stabbing, shrugging off shots to the body and clearing the soldiers and airport staff like a tidal wave of death. What's also clear is we're not in Romero's world. There's no slow gait, no shuffling and groaning and no 'walking dead' approach. They're fast, they're seemingly intelligent, if now entirely lacking a moral or sympathetic compass and they also appear to react to physical pain. It was during this initial attack, watching one of the attackers pull away from biting his victim only to wipe the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand I realised all was not straight forward.

Fortunately for us, all is actually revealed during a scene of such unashamed, unnecessary and over complicated explanation to become laughably brilliant. High levels of radiation have caused hyper-tissue regeneration to render the victim's indestructible and "abnormal strengthening of the cells vital qualities has increased their direct genetic capacity" granting increased physical capabilities, with a caveat that this is all at the expense of the efficiency of their red blood. It's a load of old tosh but it's good earnest tosh. Basically, they're alive, indestructible apart from the old noggin, they're strong, fast, they retain the memories to shoot guns, cut phone lines and they're singularly driven to replace the red blood cells they're rapidly losing. Lenzi himself didn't necessarily see them as traditional zombies, but with the loss of conscious will, the lack of 'self awareness' and they're unquenchable hunger they're zombie and a dangerous one to boot in my book. Add their faster turn of pace, their influence on the genre shouldn't be dismissed either, and it's hard not to see their impact in zombie's that came much later, with Boyles' infected top of the list.

In your face carnage and bloodshed from the get go, unwavering pace, gratuitous gore and unnecessary nudity; it has everything one would want or expect from an eighties video nasty. Lenzi's zombie opus is unapologetically rough and obnoxious but it's a delight to get swept away in. Big scale with limited resources undoubtedly brings with it problems, but if one is able to ignore all the background faux pas, the occasional excruciating exposition (the anti-nuclear monologue near the end is especially bad) and wooden acting there's a corking good b-movie here to whoop along to. A surprising gem, 7/10.

Steven@WTD.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2 / Zombie) - review

1979 (Italy/Mexico)

2012 Arrow Films Blu-ray R(B/2)

Contains mild spoilers.

I know, I know, this has been long overdue. To have a zombie blog and not have a review of the one of the zombie founding cult classics is a crime, but I'm happy to say I'm ready to put this right. It also makes it a Fulci review double bill having just finished The House by the Cemetery and with it the Gates of Hell trilogy which he went on to because of the success of this. They're not for everyone but over the three films I came to understand and respect his particular style of fanciful esoteric story telling and his use of shocking avant-garde gore and effects and expected Zombie Flesh Eaters, with its cult acclaim to be more of the same, but better.

This review is for Zombie Flesh Eaters, another sumptuous Blu-Ray remaster by Arrow Films with frame by frame touch ups, a second disc brimming with extras and its UK release name. In the US it was called Zombie but in Italy it's where the naming gets interesting. It's original working title was Gli Ultimi Zombi (The Last Zombie) but this was changed after the huge critical and commercial impact of Romero's Dawn of the Dead which was re-scored, re-edited and released there as Zombi. An obvious cash in, Zombi 2 has no real connection to its namesake predecessor though an attempt to create some direct connection was added after the film was first cut by adding the now iconic opening and closing scenes in New York.

Zombie Flesh Eaters was originally thought of as an action adventure and in many ways this is what it is. Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow) is questioned by the police after an officer is killed on her fathers boat which was found drifting in New York harbour. With tale of shambling rotting murderers, reporter Peter West (Ian McCulloch) stumbles into Anne, they discover the boat last sailed from the Island of Matool in the Caribbean and they decide to team up on an adventure to discover the truth.

After a flight, a bit of sailing on Bryan Curt's schooner (Al Cliver aka Pier Luigi Conti), a bit of naked scuba diving from his companion Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay) and one of most ambitious and downright crazy brilliant zombie scenes of all time with a zombie and shark going at it, the gang arrive to find the island cursed and the dead risen and hungry.

It really is return to the pre-Romero zombie with a story full of magic and voodoo. On the island they find Richard Johnson who plays the physician Dr. David Menard fighting a losing battle trying to make sense of what is happening. The doctors makeshift hospital is a truly horrific place full of islanders at various stages of zombiefication and despite Menard ruling out virus or bacteria there are definite signs of infection before death and reanimation. A single bite definitely hastens the process but there is also the Romero zombie ambiguity that implies reanimation of the dead is just as likely to occur regardless. Also, while the recently deceased do share much in common with Romero's creation; a slow shambling gait, a subtle blue tinge and a primal drive to sink their teeth into the living, Fulci is far more at ease when it comes to upping the ante. Gone is the always relatively fresh look with Fulci quite prepared imagine just how wretched  a cadaver would be if it had been left to decompose in the heat for quite some time before rising up. They are really some of the most gruesome deformed well made up monstrosities I've yet seen; full of foreboding, totally devoid of humanity and perfectly realised. Where-as there's a tendency to play with the ideas of a cure or redemption in many atheist, american zombie films, and indeed Romero plays with such ideas in his later films, here Fulci's mythology is full of southern Europe Catholicism and belief. Without the union of body and soul the reanimated are unholy, human-less, demonic and utterly unredeemable.

This eye for the disgusting and nasty is also brought to film with all the gruesome and excessively gratuitous gore scenes we've come to expect. One of the founding reasons there was a UK video nasty banned film list the film is full to the brim with over the top and highly scripted deaths and mutilations. On the surface it could all seem quite unnecessary but to get Fulci is to understand that to shock and disturb is a deliberate ploy and in keeping with the traditions of French surrealist Antonin Artaud whom Fulci deeply admired.

As said it's very much the action adventure horror story and not the horror mystery thriller that we had with the Gates of Hell trilogy. It's quite the contrast in narrative style; gone is the very European existential and surrealist tone, the esoteric dreamlike ambiguity or Je ne sais quoi. Zombie Flesh Eaters plays out in quite the linear Western fashion. Dialogue is dry and obvious, there's no real mystery and the story quite predictable and in many ways it feels like a backward step; like a return to an older adventure style of movie making without all the subtle nuance I'd come to expect and admire.  After my first viewing I was left a little deflated by the linearity of it all, remarking how I preferred the bigger thinking and vision of say, The Beyond and it was only after watching it again, a day later I actually came to appreciate it for the tight action adventure it was; full of vision and all Fulci's subtlety and daft-brilliance, it's just you have to look a little harder for it.

I did like Zombie Flesh Eaters, but I can fully understand that it's a bit of an acquired taste. The pace is quite slow, the dialogue a bit trite and the acting on the whole wooden but it still has a charm and panache that make it a delight to watch. Also there could be quite a strong argument the film is quite exploitative of women with the female cast only in it to scream or take their clothes off but they do it all rather well, ahem. Zombie Flesh Eaters is possibly carried by a few truly iconic scenes but as an influence on what zombie culture was to become its place is priceless. A mesmerising piece of zombie cinema no doubt, but those who wax lyrical may be slightly more nostalgia fuelled than they'd care to admit, 8/10.

WTD.