Detention of the Dead - review

2012 (USA)

2013 High Fliers Films DVD R(2)

Contains mild spoilers.

"This is so the Breakfast Club", my wife commented, "They've even taken whole scenes and lines." Now, I've not watched The Breakfast Club as back when it was released I was ten or so, and more interested in running around skidding on my knees shouting pew pew than watching teen angst ridden romantic indulgence. Then the years since I've never really felt the need to catch up; probably because that young boy grew testicles. "You should watch it, for research," she commented at the shrug of my shoulders. "But I don't have to now" I replied "because you've told me this is The Breakfast Club and this one has zombies in it." She had no reply to this of course, smiled and nodded. So... my point is, this is The Breakfast Club with zombies, and it even says so on the cover, but you're going to have to take my wife's word for it, not mine.

It's detention time and six one dimensional high school types have collided to write 'I must not be so superficial' or whatnot a hundred times. Jacob Zachar is Eddie the bullied nerd, Jayson Blair is Brad, the good looking cool popular kid who torments him, Christa B. Allen is his gorgeous blonde cheerleading girlfriend Janet, Max Adler the token jock Jimmy and Alexa Nikolas, Willow, the angst misunderstood goth chick. Each is adorned in the appropriate costume, each is replete with lines and behaviour befitting their caricature and each actor is really way too old for the high school personality they're purporting to be. Oh, I should add, there's also Justin Chon as Ash, a token stoner and a bit of a throwaway character with throw away jokes. There's something about dumbed down high school comedies that almost demands single dimension tropes and it's hard to be too critical about it all if I'm honest. Detention of the Dead knows what it's trying to do and it's an authentic parody attempt that never tries too hard to be anything other than a pop corn indulgence with characters and acting appropriate and on message.

The characters are introduced and zombies appear. Detention of the Dead to its credit doesn't dally with their appearance and plays the new post-modern zombie card that of course the high school kids are fully vested with the modern zombie zeitgeist and instantly recognise them for what they are. They know not to get bit, they know to go for the head and brain, and they know that a good barricade, or closed door will hold them back (yes they're your quite crap corpse eaters that stop their immutable creep of death at the smallest obstacle - or the budget didn't include breaking and replacing doors.) What follows is a zombie survival story with angst ridden misogynists and the me-me generation trying desperately to come to terms with the fact the zombie apocalypse might actually be more important than their own depthless problems and confused romantic troubles. 

It's light, it's airy, full of all the bright clean colours of US high school life and it never takes itself seriously.  There's plenty of infantile and throwaway jokes and dialogue, with humour and playful a constant theme to the many extravagant and gratuitous scenes of gore and flesh ripping. There's a little bit of satire scattered here and there but the narrative never tries too hard to come across clever or insightful. Director / writer Alex Craig Mann has done a more than competent job imbuing the action with a teen audience look and feel and has picked a suitably light youthful soundtrack to accompany the gut munching and high school shenanigans that never allows the pace to lull.

The zombies are Romero slow lurchers that never-the-less lunge quite quickly at times for the bite. They're well made up, though with, in my opinion excessively forced and added guttural low demonic growls; they snarl, horde, pull out intestines and generally act with all the unpleasantness you'd expect. The action starts small and insular focusing tightly on the school then expands leaving the question whether the whole world is now in trouble hanging. The manner in which the many extras stagger out about is cohesive enough for what it is and I've no real complaints with our undead chums.

Detention of the Dead is what it is, a Saturday night spectacle suitable for partners and mates with pizza on the coffee table and beer in hand. It also made a nice change to watch something openly with my wife rather than skulking off shamefully to some exploitative thirty year old nonsense I'd probably not openly to admit to liking as much as I do. Yes it's superficial, deliberately derivative and ultimately quite forgettable but never-the-less it's fun, obvious and enjoyable for all the same reasons. I've no real complaints with comedy, horror parodies such as these; they're undeniably jumping on the zombie bandwagon, uncomplicated and not particularly ambitious, but that's ok and its far better to work within your limits than try too hard and too serious. Also competently made zombie reinterpretations of, let's say, more female oriented cult classics are always welcome and it's not the first; just look at Romero & Juliet aka Warm Bodies; which actually kind of worked and it makes me wonder what might be next, Fried Green Tomatoes? Pride and Prejudice? A recommended date-night film with first rate acting, that should also satiate that zombie itch, 6/10.

Steven@WTD.

Hell of the Living Dead (Zombie Creeping Flesh / Virus / Night of the Zombies) - review

1980 (Italy / Spain)

2002 Starz / Anchor Bay DVD R(1)

Contains mild spoilers.

I've sat in front of the computer for ten minutes now trying to work out not only how to start the review, but actually how I actually feel about what I've just watched. I mean, I can't hide from the obvious; it's a woefully low budget 80s euro-trash zomploitation video nasty with b-movie acting, a poor English dub (there was no original soundtrack with subtitles option on my DVD), a meandering derivative story devoid of any real content or meaning, and an obsession with the ridiculous misuse of externally sourced stock footage. Yet, I somehow enjoyed my hour and forty minutes with Lia (Margit Evelyn Newton) quite the enthusiastic front line reporter and Lt. Mike London (José Gras) and his blue boiler-suit wearing commando goon squad.

There's a rather superfluous and unexplained back story about a global conspiracy to euthanize the third world and it all going wrong with some giant clouds of degenerative toxins leaking out into the atmosphere. There's also a radioactive zombie rat. All that's really important to know is Lt. London is in New Guinea with his crack force of three totally unconvincing exaggerated 80s bad boy throwbacks, he can't get hold of his superiors, his crew have stumbled into Lia, her camera man Vincent (Selan Karay) and decided to let them tag along, and the normally quiet jungle landscape is teeming with blue skinned undead flesh-eaters.

There's not much else to the story. The gang of six travel to the nearest village, Mia takes her top off to communicate with natives who she was alleged to have stayed with for a year, the village is overrun, then they travel to an abandoned plantation, it gets overrun, then they travel to Hope #1, a sprawling industrial complex and the source of the zombie death cloud, and it gets overrun. Each location starts with the same promise of respite, only for some shadowy figure sitting in a chair with their backs to them to reveal themselves as a macabre flesh eating zombie and the place to come under siege.

I've seen director Bruno Mattei described as a total hack unable to fashion anything original, but I've also seen him described as the man to turn to, to get the job done with as little fuss and money as possible, and both are undoubtedly true. Hell of the Living Dead is a veritable pastiche of everything Zombie Flesh Eaters and Romero. It's formulaic, it's derivative, scenes are stolen, music is literally stolen (Goblin's Dawn of the Dead soundtrack) but if the remit was for a by-the-numbers repeat of the two success stories above, to be filmed in four weeks with no money, credit however begrudgingly, has to be given. What story there is never really comes together and it does drag out, but it doesn't actually fall apart, the characters are cheesy and obnoxious, and played poorly, but at least they're all entertaining each in their own special way, and each action sequence is contrived and poorly choreographed but the way the so called professional soldiers throw themselves about is always amusing to watch. There's also the fact there's an abundant and near constant flow of gratuitous and shocking gore on offer, almost as if Mattei knew this alone would sell a few copies regardless of all films other short-falls.

The zombies are, funny enough, a Dawn of the Dead / Zombie Flesh Eaters fusion. They're blue, they shuffle and groan, they arrive on mass and they like eating people. I've that usual complaint, that for quite the desolate unpopulated area there's an awful lot of zombies and even with a Jeep and boat the gang can't find five minutes respite. Also the zombies do seem to know when to hold off that fatal bite, even with people literally in their grasp, yet on other occasions, for instance when the village is over-run, a native must merely flash a bit of ankle for the teeth to get sunk in. It's almost like the zombies knew when each main character was to be bit and all the action was contrived to ensure it happened as planned. Other than this, it's head shots, with the guys going through the early rigmarole of shooting the body repeatedly first before having the hallelujah head-shot moment, fire being the zombie-no-no and lots of staggering around slowly with arms outstretched. There's nothing new on show but at least Mattei has taken what works and not embellished it unnecessarily, other than allowing their innate cannibalism to get a fair bit more screen time than Romero would have.

I'm not going to pretend that this is a good film; it's one of those that somehow transcends all that it does wrong to become worth watching for the sheer exaggerated stupidity on display. Mia's tribal undress entwined with all the obvious third party tribal stock footage is worth watching if only for the audacity Mattei had in thinking he could get away with it. Wise cracking Zantoro (Franco Garofalo) is worth following if only to witness a truly great maniacal goofy performance, and there's a good game of guess the next jungle animal in stock footage forced in to allegedly make the film as long as Dawn of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead it isn't though; and for all I say go watch it, be prepared for a bit of a genre stinker that you must remember even Mattei was ashamed to have his name attached at launch (he went as Vincent Dawn). Still recommended for that 80s euro-trash no-story maggot-crusted, flesh-munching zombie itch, but don't say you've not been warned, 6/10.

Steven@WTD.

(Zombie Virus on) Mulberry Street - review

2006 (USA)

2009 G2 Pictures DVD R(2)

Contains mild spoilers.

One of the things I most enjoy with this blog is discovering genuinely good films I'd never have come across normally. As I've stated in the past. I've always been a big zombie and horror film fan and I'd watched most the popular films I've reviewed so far before at one time or another, but any film off the beaten track was generally missed through ignorance. What I haven't enjoyed since starting this blog is the marketing deception that takes place to make films seem more than they are. It seems that promoting the idea that the film involves zombies by say, including the word zombie in the title, or throwing a quote with the word zombie or even a picture of an apocalyptic horde of zombies across the cover results in better sales. Now I'm not saying the modern interpretation of the term and idea of zombie that has been broadened to include anything that exhibits frenzied blood thirsty unruly behaviour or a pathological herd mentality is wrong per se, but call me old fashioned, surely to actually qualify as a zombie requires a bit of the old dying and coming back stuff.

So here we have Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street and a cover with said scene of snarling apocalyptic zombie horde. The giveaway clue  if I'd had known, would have been that in the US this was marketed as just Mulberry Street; note the lack of Zombie. Now, we do have a contagious virus that turns people into ravenous crazy monsters with a taste for human flesh, they do seem to have single one track-minds driven by primal instincts and desires and they do seem to be able to take quite some damage, but dying first doesn't seem to be a prerequisite. There is one small caveat however; an early victim of the virus appears at the start of the crisis to be dead who later returns to dispatch one of the early victims, the janitor of the apartment block. This isn't repeated and she may have just been taking a nap but I'm pretty convinced she was supposed to be dead so I'll, and this is with quite some reticence I'll admit, tentatively allow this to be called a zombie film.

Ok, so all that out the way, what about the film? Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street tells the tale of a dangerous contagious rat virus spreads first to the residents in and around a small apartment block on Mulberry Street, Manhattan and also isolated cases in the underground we hear about on the news, then later across the whole of the city. Spread at first through rat bites, the infection turns victims into frenzied mutant rat-people with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Early symptoms are hairy ears, lethargy and hallucinations with the final stage leads to becoming full blown mutant hybrid rat-human monstrosities with a hunger for cheese; ok I made the cheese bit up.

Mickle does a good job of contrasting the lives of the small group of six in the apartment block with the backdrop of a city slowly falling apart. You get the tight localised picture from main protagonist Clutch (Nick Damici), a retired boxer, his neighbours Kay (Bo Corre) who lives with her teenage son and Coco (Ron Brice) interacting amongst an interesting and varied assortment of characters, and the wider picture from following Clutch's daughter Casey (Kim Blair) journey across New York on foot back home after being released from a military hospital for returning Middle East veterans.

Directed by Jim Mickle builds a tight highly stylish apocalyptic scenario with confident characters and well paced suspenseful action scenes. Given the quite frankly absurd even for the genre premise, it does a good job telling a fluent sincere story never resorting to over the top gore or effects, or parody, as many b-movies do, and because of this it never loses its identity. Many apocalyptic films start from the point of no return or just after, and it was refreshing to watch an attempt to tell the story of normal everyday people and society going through the confusion and carnage of the world falling apart. My only concern would be once going through the efforts to get to the tipping point, with mutants and death on every corner and in every house, Mickle didn't quite know where to take it and the film loses its way a little and turns into a bit of a traditional survival story of a small group holding out against the world.

The frenzied rat mutants are stylish and brutal and the makeup and effect team have done a great job of creating authentic albeit preposterous monsters and whether alone or in groups they never feel amateurish or actually that over the top. Mickle has a real flare for using music and highly stylised cinematography to enhance the atmosphere and isn't afraid to mix and match shaky in-the scene-action camera work with steady artful and even slow-mo shots and in these respects it reminded me very much of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. Given the limited budget and resources Mickle has done a remarkable job.

A dark brooding story with a slow character driven build up Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street has a lot going for it. If you'd have told me going we weren't going to be concerning ourselves with zombies but with rat mutants I'd have expected a hammy b-movie full of over the top gore and would probably have given this a miss and perhaps this is why they distanced themselves from the premise. What we have though is not hammy or amateurish but a high stylish apocalyptic horror story with a healthy mix of tight close claustrophobic tension and a grander apocalyptic-scale vision of the city going to hell. Tense, stylish and scary despite its ludicrousness, I really enjoyed it, 7/10.

Steven@WTD.