Bride of Re-Animator - review

1989 (USA)

2016 Arrow Video Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD Limited Edition R(Free)

Contains spoilers. 

I've no doubt that in Herbert West's (Jeffrey Combs) mind, he really isn't such a bad guy and all the slap-dash and irresponsible murder, carnage and surgical mischief is justifiable when the goal, to unearth the secrets to life and death, is so monumental. Watching the blood flow, the body parts mount up, and new increasingly nightmarish mutations come to life, one might not fully side with his calamitous unethical scientific methods or agree with his health and safety record, but one really can't help but love him for all the chaos he brings.

Brian Yuzna's Bride of Re-Animator; the sequel to the glorious dark, bloody and riotously inappropriate Re-Animator couldn't really fail. Ok, that's not strictly true but, as with Evil Dead and Bruce Campbell, just casting Coombs as the same irrepressible and eccentric West, and fashioning another slap-stick b-movie with cohesive yet equally eccentric side characters, vulgar and unnecessary bad taste skits and a hokey story to surround him, was sure to work. And despite some small missteps; mainly the result of what Yuzna tells of limited pre-production time, the film is undoubtedly another huge success and a worthy successor.

The film opens with an explosive flashback then flash forward to events eight months after the Miskatonic Hospital massacre that ended the last film in a highly memorable magical b-movie maelstrom of death and chaos. West and his companion cum enabler Dr. Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), the only survivors, are following up their unethical experiments, now in the safety of the Peruvian jungle with the front line of civil conflict as cover. There stay is short lived however, but long enough to set the scene and inform us that West has certainly not learnt from his mistakes. Then with another flash and a bang we're all back to Arkham and the place of their earlier misadventures, though by now the hope is that everyone has forgotten the carnage, and moved on...

West carries on his highly questionable experimentation with Dr. Cain fully on board with the promise he can somehow bring his late love Meg back. West's nemesis Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale who begged to be part of this sequel), now a severed head, is reanimated by a rather too curious pathologist (Mel Stewart as Dr. Graves), and begins his singular mission to seek revenge. The story ticks all the b-movie boxes; an increasing implausible and insane story, eccentric characters getting more stressed and desperate, and an abundance of excessive and unnecessary blood, guts and carnage, with Coombs, the meticulous conductor always the centre of the storm. And while one can understand, and almost forgive much of the collateral damage that results from West's fight with the established scientific world, forced as he is to work on the fringe where norms just can't apply, it's harder to argue the case for someone who just wants to tie an arm to a dog or a leg and bring it to life just to see what happens, whatever the consequence. It's these scenes that solidifies West as the larger than life personality and defines Re-Animator as an exceptionally good bad-movie rather than an average to rotten bad-one.

Yuzna isn't one to shy away from a bad taste idea, however disturbing, and in Bride of Re-Animator increasingly bizarre surgical experimentation is free to come to the screen however off the wall the idea. From twitching feet, to bat wings sown to a head, to a finger and eye-ball homage to every great disembodied hand since Thing, watching for each new increasingly unfettered experimental monstrosity is as much a part of the experience as the story. Also for the most part they're all perfectly realised, given the low budget, with enough sinew and blood to cover the cracks; and though not perfect; it's eighties, it's b-movie and cracks are all part of the charm.

I'd be hard pressed to describe West's creations as zombies in any traditional or even contemporary sense. If anything these Frankenstein's meat slabs intimate of life returned; of consciousness, id, ego and will all back alongside breath and a heart-beat. It's b-movie mumbo jumbo of course; of primordial ooze extracted from the amniotic sac of the cuzco iguana and stuff about consciousness not residing in the brain but any of the tissue but the short of it West has found a way of reanimating flesh; the rest doesn't have to make much sense. There is enough ambiguity, and some of West's lesser successes, and remnants from the first film, certainly appear zombie with decay, mindless behaviour with hints of hunger and violence, and towards the end of the film appearing to be controlled by the will of another, all in good old pre-Romero Caribbean style. I'd also be hard pressed to say any of West's returnees are exactly corpus-mentis.

If I was to nit-pick, it could be argued the story is a little disjointed; more a mash-up of sub-narratives and ideas that happen to overlap rather than a grand singular story. It's also under critique rather light on substance with many of the more excessive and memorable scenes rather throwaway and unnecessary from a narrative point of view; included, the b-movie aficionado would argue for the shits and giggles, but for the cynic, perhaps to fill and because gore always sells. Still, they do fit with the insanity and as said they're really just as integral a part of the whole experience as the increasingly incredulous plot. Bride is another riotous Re-Animator chapter allowing both Coombs and the supporting ensemble to shine. With a lively, whimsical sound track and good pacing, it's perfect goofy, excessive and shocking b-movie entertainment, and this new Arrow Blu-ray release; packed with every extra you could hope for, does everything it can to bring it to life - 7/10.

Steven@WTD.

Day of the Dead 2: Contagium - review

2005 (USA)

2005 Arrow DVD R(2)

Contains spoilers.

I'll cut to the chase. Ana Clavell and James Dudelson's unofficial sequel to Romero's seminal Day of the Dead is a long winded, incoherent, uninspired and quite frankly shoddy piece of film making that should come with an apology. Make that two; one for actually thinking it was ok to release what can best be described as meandering, pointless and confused soap opera cross cum episode of the x-files in that state, and two, to Romero, for trying to take advantage of a fan favourite's namesake, instead tainting its legacy forever by association.

So what's wrong? Let's start with the zombies. You'd think at the least; given the blatant lack of effort, competence or savviness of all involved, that they'd be able to follow the Romero undead template, given, you know, the whole sequel what-not. But no. Never have I come across such a convoluted incoherent miss-mash of ideas; that maybe if part of a zany silly zombie spoof might have had some merit, but here, acting as the central narrative pillar in quite the serious zombie melodrama it's incredulous. First there's a soviet spy plane, a crazy Russian pilot with vials of a highly infectious recombinant virus of unknown origin, a memorial hospital, an outbreak, then a thirty year gap. Then there's a new age psychiatric doctor out with four patients enjoying the peace and tranquillity of a grass verge, the discovery of a lost and forgotten thermal flask and the lack of foresight to not open it. We've come to expect a certain level of contrivance and naivety in the precursor to a main story and recognise that it's all part of the great zombie hyperbole; so as daft and convoluted as all this is I'm kind of ok with it. It isn't really what I'm talking about.

It's the zombies themselves. Clavell and Dudelson's nonchalant attempt to explain the disparities, as a side effect of each hosts differing reactions to the DNA tampering virus ultimately fails and the multitude of undead we're left to make sense of is nothing but confusing and insulting. There's Isaac (Justin Ipock), Emma (Laurie Maria Baranyay), Doctor Heller (Andreas van Ray) and the gang who were first exposed and these guys are kind of cognisant mutating-larvae zombies with a kind of shared consciousness and meta-physiology. They're hungry gut-munchers and dead, but they're self-aware even able to demonstrate restraint. Then there's Marshall (Joe C. Marino) the warden who was bitten by Emma; he changes quickly into a b-movie monstrous mass of sinew and muscle hell bent on dishing out as much indiscriminate carnage and death as possible. Then there's everyone else and they're kind of just normal zombies albeit some shuffle, some run, some jump and some spasm about like defective crabs. It's all a perplexing mess and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, which is a major problem as the slow unveiling of all this is pretty much the entirety of the narrative.

That's not quite true. There's, a good old Italian 80's inspired army vs undead slaughter-fest to start things off and while it doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny it definitely possesses the so bad it's good vibe. Then there's the ending; an almost comical explosion of violence and carnage that swings between audacious farce and serious Romero-esque satire without any conformity, and again there are moments I found myself quite enjoying what I was seeing. What we're talking about, and the problem is all the stuff in-between; a vast vacuous meandering lazy meh. A drawn out hokey b-movie cum soap opera with a single-story thread, that as said above is bafflingly incoherent and just tedious.

By far and away not the worst film I've reviewed it's still quite the all-round disappointment with a bewildering narrative, perfunctory if we're being polite, effects and make-up, and a music score that does nothing but mock and deride the action I believe it was commissioned to flatter. What occasional good performances there are; and there are some, are lost behind the all too many that are not, and if we're honest were ultimately doomed with a script that does nothing but fill for well over an hour.  A lazy production you'd be doing everyone a favour with if you just pretended didn't exist - 2/10.

Steven@WTD.

Lifeforce - review

1985 (USA)

2013 Arrow Video Blu-ray R(B/2)

Contains spoilers.

This was another one that wasn't really on my radar. It was only seeing it chosen by Dominic Brunt (Director of Before Dawn) as one of the headlines for the 2014 Leeds Zombie Film Festival that put it on. Having now watched it I'm still a tad uncertain. Sure the final fifteen minutes, depicting a ravaged London overrun with snarling cannibalistic monsters is zombie all the way and the victims of the space vampires are for the most part unwitting slaves incapable of imposing their own will on their actions. But, it's energy vampires. Both Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), the only survivor of the ill-fated deep space explorer and Dr. Bukovsky (Michael Gothard) chief medical scientist of the European Space Agency and Thanatologist (the study of death) say so, and it is really all about three intelligent bat like creatures camouflaged as pretty wee things who are sat at the top of the food chain.

The first fifteen minutes or so are pure eighties space indulgence. The HMS Churchill out in the deep beyond on a mission to explore Halley's Comet discovers a hundred and fifty mile ancient space relic in its tip. Inside as well as the desiccated remnants of hundreds of human size space bats they find three perfectly preserved and perfectly naked humans caught in some kind of suspended animation and decide to bring them back on board.

The lead naked, and that's a word I'll be saying a lot, space person, is played by Mathilda May and as I'm watching the splendid new Arrow Blu-ray transfer of the original 116 minute cut, which is fifteen minutes longer than the theatrical cut the US audience had to watch there's an awful lot of it; not that I'm complaining. Brought back to Earth by the US Columbia which finds the HMS Churchill gutted and burnt out and the crew dead, it doesn't take long for those investigating the disaster to realise it might have something to do with honey lips and perhaps they're in a spot of trouble. Finally alone with a young doctor sparks fly, both metaphorically as lips meet lips, and literally  her first victim has his lifeforce zapped out of him before moving, naked, through the complex like an electric maelstrom escaping out into the wider world.

The young naked space girl with ulterior motives beguiling poor innocent men who just can't say no when presented with a willing bosom is a trope that's been done to death. It's a good, neigh, great excuse to show copious flesh with a semi-legitimate excuse, though in this case I'm not quite sure whether to applaud director Tobe Hooper or not, for the audaciously long time it takes for him to decide she should cover up. While Lifeforce doesn't go down the Species road making this trope the be all and end all of the film it does make up a large part of the story, and to be honest when if does decide to stray playing with alien possession it does unravel a little becoming unnecessarily convoluted and complicated, almost making one think it might have been better if they had.

There's a lot going on with the space vampires and while it's possibly all a bit over contrived it's fun, thought out and for the most part cohesive. They're energy vampires capable of draining the lifeforce from people. They can beguile people, making them fall so deeply in love, both spiritually and sexually, that they can't resist and they can also transfer their consciousness / soul / being into another person assuming motor control and suppressing the host's will. Also while they don't always drain all the lifeforce from a person when they do, leaving them a dehydrated lifeless husk, they do also leave a nasty surprise.

Two hours is the magic number in several ways. Firstly it's a two hour alarm call that springs the mini-vamps / zompires back to life, pulse racing with an insatiable hunger for some lifeforce of their own, else they'll explode. Secondly should they drain the next victim before they pop, they've only another two hours until they need to feed again. This idea of brainless primal hunger, the constant need to feed and the exponential spread of the disease is zombie all the way. These zompires, especially during the last fifteen or so minutes certainly look the part snarling goring their way through the streets of London and the effect as they leap on cars and chase the view remaining survivors also certainly looks zombie and they're a good enough fit in my mind. And let's not forget writer Dan O'Bannon's next film was The Return of the Living Dead, so this is a man well versed in the genre.

A solid script if a little convoluted and farcical, Lifeforce is a good film though not a great one and for such an over the top premise I felt it perhaps played it all a little safe. Peter Firth leads a strong cast who do well with what they've been given, and one can't help watch Patrick Stewart being wrestled to the floor and later orally explode with blood, without a wry smile. The pacing is good for a long film, and there's never a dull moment but it just as we too were coming near  the two hour mark and the finale, I felt it just hadn't elevated my heart rate to the to the same level as those on screen. A fun hokey sci-fi, tame-horror with a lot of nakedness that will leave a smile on your face, if nothing more, 6/10.

Steven@WTD.

Revolt of the Zombies - review

1936 (USA)

2008 Sunflower Pictures DVD R(2)

Contains spoilers.

I quite enjoyed White Zombie; it's eerie atmosphere and competent story were highly evocative of an age now long forgotten and it will always get my sincere respect and admiration for the part it played in establishing the cinematic zombie. It wasn't without its faults however, though they were mostly born from being a low budget horror produced when film making was still in its childhood, and I did cut it much slack. Being second, Revolt of the Zombies, the unofficial sequel to White Zombie and produced and directed by the same Halperin Brothers (Victor and Edward) has a problem before we even start.

From the off I knew the sixty-five minutes were going to be a bit of an ordeal. The film is in the public domain now so I knew my print was likely to be a bit on the rough side and if I say I found myself scrambling for the remote to look for subtitles that weren't there, you'll get an idea just how bad it was. It turns out this was the least of its troubles though. Revolt of the Zombies takes all the faults of White Zombie; hammy acting, a bit of a convoluted plot line with too much emphasis on getting the girl, and one dimensional characterisation, and amplifies them, while all the time relinquishing everything it actually did well. The story in White Zombie may have been a bit involved, shall we say, but the puerile and cheesy mess which is Revolt of the Zombies makes it look positively intelligent by comparison. 

It's World War 1 and an expedition of Allied representatives are in Angkor Wat (Cambodia) where they believe they'll be able to find the secret to making zombies and destroy it as there's no room for black arts and the occult in the civilised mass slaughter of millions, that was the great war. One of the expedition experts, Armand Louque (Dean Jagger) falls in love with the daughter of one of the trips benefactors, Claire Duval (Dorothy Stone - not the other way round as the cover would have you believe) and she accepts his hand of marriage. Claire however really loves Clifford Grayson (Robert Noland) and at the first sign of requited affection she ditches Armand and offers her betrothal to the new man. Armand decides he's not happy about all this so he sets off to discover the secret by himself, amasses an army of zombies and enslaves the whole area and everyone he knows. That's pretty much your lot. It's convoluted, vacuous and a simpletons love triangle soap opera, with some zombies leveraged in.

A series of unfortunate deaths and accidents on site, that were really caused by the wily conniving Gen. Mazovia (Roy D'Arcy) forces the premature removal of the team from Angkor, but sensing himself close to discovering the secret, Armand returns. It's magic and ancient mysticism but it's not voodoo nor the Caribbean. The secret it turns out is, well, we don't really find out and it's all a bit confusing and messy, though it would appear a gong is involved in some way. A few chemicals, a bit of smoke and some wafting in the general direction of Armand's servant is a bit of mixed success, but in an eureka moments he works out it's Bela Lugosi's eyes directly taken from the 1932 film, that is needed to get the job done. It's never explained, doesn't make any sense, but when ever Armand wants to take control of another person, up come the eyes, bong goes the gong, and the camera returns to an all new automaton.

The will-less zombie slaves are still very much alive, though there's an early scene demonstrating the incredible destructive power a regiment of them could have as they seemingly stride into battle invulnerable to bullets, they can still talk, responding to instructions from their master and they ultimately can get 'better' once the master relinquishes his telepathic mind control. There's a lot going on, telepathy, the ability to take control of another remotely and alive but without will, but able to be shot (though this was just the one scene). None of it is particularly convincing, none of it is even remotely plausible and in many ways it all feels a bit shoe-horned in.

I've generally enjoyed my forays back to 30s and 40s, recognising the inherent limitations of film making of the time and immersing myself in its accents, language and ideologies, however repugnant by modern standards. Revolt of the Zombies faults however transcend time. Languid pacing, a blathering narrative, extremely poor set design and shot direction is just some of the criticisms I feel could be levelled at it, but more than this, the film is just tedious and obvious. The love story is shallow and uninteresting, the story far fetched and poorly conceived and the zombies a bit of a superfluous mixed bag of ideas. Not a good film, 30s or not and it just goes to show that zombie stinkers were established as part of the scene right back when it all started, 3/10.

Steven@WTD.

The Astro-Zombies - review

1968 (USA)

2000 Image Entertainment DVD R(1)

Contains spoilers.

Twenty minutes into The Astro-Zombies as I sat patiently watching Dr DeMarco (John Carradine) the films Dr Frankenstein painstakingly remove three screws from a small metal box, drop in a small bit of a circuit board then screw them up again, only for the action to then move ponderously to his deformed Igor, Franchot (William Bagdad) who was crouching waiting for a switch to be flipped so we could watch his large bucket of blood dribble full I realised that I really do hope your guys and gals appreciate what I'm putting myself through on your behalf. That scene alone took about five minutes though it felt much longer, and that's the rub with The Astro-Zombies; it's just so damn ponderous and laboured.

I love a good-bad zombie film, and must even get some kind of masochistic pleasure from bad-bad ones as for all its problems, and there's a hell of a lot, Ted V. Mikels 60s exploitative space, pseudo scientific mumbo-jumbo spy thriller isn't actually all bad, though not for the reasons you'd think. It's not the wooden acting, the appalling masks and prosthetics, or the implausibly incoherent narrative or kitchen sink approach to content that pulls it down. Ironically it's the fact there's too much trying to present the ludicrously ridiculous as plausible and coherent, too much sincere explanation and a good thirty minutes of fluff that could easily have been cut or heavily edited out.

The story is pure b-movie super-cheese. The CIA, lead by Holman (Wendell Corey) are investigating a series of grizzly mutations suspecting it might have something to do with the missing Dr DeMarco who before he was dismissed from 'the space agency' had been working on an idea to put reanimated memory-and-will-sapped cadavers in space with solar powered hearts, disease free blood and thought wave transmission circuitry so that they could be operated from earth telepathically by highly skilled operators. Yeah. It's a bold idea and if I was the CIA I'd probably be keeping an eye out on him too.

They're not the only ones after him though. Not content for the film to be CIA vs the mad scientist and his zombies, Mikels deemed it necessary to add a third party to spice it all up and turn it into a bit of cold war spy thriller. The KGB have decided they want in on zombie space men so they've sent a crack team (I say crack team, I mean thug and camp sadist) lead by femme fatale Satana (Tura Satana) to acquire the research first by any means possible.

What we end up with a confusing tale, not helped with overly complicating editing. The CIA stumble about, the KGB stumble about, the rogue astro-zombie, or quasi-man, as they put it, stumbles about; there's a bit of espionage, a lot of 60s drinking and misogyny, a few shootings, lots of fringe-science / star trek-esque science-fiction that's over explained and even a few minutes of totally unnecessary topless go-go dancing from a painted girl to a Haitian Latin bongo beat. It's pure b-movie z-grade nonsense with hammy dialogue, poor effects and bad direction, but it did on occasion tickle my fancy so to speak. If we're honest we expected all this though; it is 1968 and the bizarre obviously fake prosthetic skulls, break away shots to blood spattered walls or silhouette whenever there's an amateur zombie fumble all attest the fact it's a shoe-string amateur production, obviously well intentioned but entirely lacking the ability to pull it altogether intelligently or cohesively.

The zombies are actually quite interesting all things considered. They're fresh cadavers, they've somehow and let's not get into it, had their emotions and memories removed to turn them into, as DeMarco puts it, pure calculating machines then they're given artificial hearts, organ transplants, a thought wave FM radio mind controller and then brought back to life. In many respects they're the perfect meeting point for the old Haitian voodoo zombies and the dead Romero-esque modern killers. They're automatons and slaves but they retain a murdering instinct and can go out of control. The rogue quasi-man is actually a rogue; he's bad, he's (with sinister music) dun dun dun, a criminal, and that's actually why he's gone off on his murderous rampage. You see, he may have been asset stripped of all that made him who he was but here central morality is all nature (not nurture). If you're a bad egg, you're a bad egg and you probably shouldn't be reborn with insatiable brutality, super strength and the ability to shake off being shot. Physically they entirely human in movement and even keep on their funeral suit; all that's different is the ridiculous head gear and all the cyborg circuitry.

The Astro-Zombie really is a clumsy cheap b-movie rehash of the Frankenstein story albeit spun as a poor early star trek episode allowed to be a bit gory and a bit less plausible. You've got to understand what you're getting yourself into with a movie like this though; it's right up there with Plan 9 and some of the worst movies ever made, with preposterous scripts and baffling audacity and ambition, especially given the lack of money and talent. The thing is, knowing all this, and going in expecting to be it all one can actually have a good time, and the absurdity becomes compelling. The Astro-Zombies is what is; the pinnacle of bad b-movie sci-fi horror film making with no redeeming quality other than having no redeeming quality. Great cheesy rubbish, 3/10.

The picture quality for such a b-movie was for the most part pretty good though there was the occasional scene or set of scenes with a lot of noise or sudden reduction in resolution. Sound was good if soft but I had no real problems with the disc. Some extras would have been nice though.

Steven@WTD.