Jumping (Under) the Shark - "Zombie" (1979)

"And we don't know just where our bones will rest/To dust I guess/ Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below" - '1979' Smashing Pumpkins

"The boat can leave now. Tell the crew." - Dr. Menard, 'Zombie'



1979. International Year of the Child. Patty Hearst leaves prison, the Shah flees Iran, and the USSR makes the fatal error of invading Afghanistan. Star Trek: the Motion Picture proves that bad fashion choices still exist in the future.

It's also the year that President Jimmy Carter gets attacked by a swamp rabbit.

“Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.

“The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.”

Yet another incident of his time in the Oval Office that poor Jimmy's public image never quite recovered from. Thankfully, in his time since then, he's gone on to do things that no one really has the stones to make fun of -- like build houses for the poor.

But one can only imagine what those Presidential guffawers might do if they were out in a boat, and were suddenly approached by some weird, atavistic freak of nature. Would they deal with it rationally and calmly, or freak the hell out, leap from the boat, and swim to shore? Blow its cotton tail off or their own brains out?

Similar questions are asked in horror movies. Jaded cinema-goers might scream "don't split the party!" and "aim for the head!" while watching hapless soon-to-be-victims of, say, a zombie attack. But we have to wonder how any of us would deal with such a thing in real life.



I thought about that while watching what is probably one of best of the bad zombie movies: Zombie, also known as Zombie 2. If you're wondering what happened to Zombie 1, you've already seen it. It was called Night of the Living Dead.

How can that be? Well, consider that NotLD was called Zombi over in Italy. The story goes that, thanks to a lack of intellectual property laws, director Lucio Fulci was able to imply, through the title Zombi 2, that this was a sequel to the massively-popular movie.

The huckerism didn't stop there, though. They even went so far in the American trailer as to insist that barf bags would be handed to the audience just in case! Oh that wacky fellow...

Lucio Fulci went on to make a lot of other notable bad films as well -- some of which I will doubtlessly get to -- before finally kicking off from diabetic complications in 1996. But let's wind the time capsule back to the post-NotLD era, when zombies had been turned from creepy walkers in voodoo areas to shambling, cannibalistic hordes in urban settings. Fulci took the step of removing the scientific and modern explanations for the horror and placing it back to its Caribbean roots.

Sort of a gorier version of I Walked with a Zombie - with tits, ass, and the inability to properly pronounce "Conquistadores."

The plot in a nutshell: an unmanned boat washes into New York harbor, only it's not uninhabited -- there's a zombie on board. Said zombie munches down on a harbor cop and gets shot into the drink. The daughter of the boat's owner and a rather daring reporter team up to find out what happened, which involves them going down to the islands, hooking up with a somewhat libertine couple on a boat, and going to the apparently uncharted island of "matoo" to find her dad.

Sounds creepy? Well, this is where shit gets dumb, but also awesome.

The dumb includes a semi-nude snorkeling girl who gets attacked by a shark, and then a zombie, and then watches while the zombie tries to kung fu fight the shark.



Yes. You saw that. There's no getting away from it now.

Then they have to land their conveniently damaged boat on an island where the dead are walking. Turns out a scientist is trying to help the people and find out why they're up and about, but can only watch people die and then shoot them in the brains before they rise. Also turns out he's got wife problems, so it's just as well she gets dealt with in standard horror movie style... only with one eyeful of a difference.

See, one thing about Fulci - this man has a problem with eyes. In every movie I've ever seen him do he's got to do something to mess up people's peepers. Bleeding out in City of the Living Dead, eaten by spiders in The Beyond. And so on.

Was he forced to wear coke-bottle glasses as a kid or something? I dunno. But the bit in Zombie when the scientist's long-suffering, near-hysterical wife gets her eyeball impaled on a large splinter of wood as a zombie's pulling her head through the door is one of those horror movie moments that either make you weep for humanity or cheer for the glory of pre-CGI special effects.



Or remark on the usual sexism of these movies. In both cases where a woman gets threatened by a zombie, it's after we see her nude: the swimmer girl snorkeling topless in an eyepatch of a bikini, the scientist's wife showering in a mirrored stall so we can see everything from all angles.

(Yeah yeah, bitch and moan, Mr. Feminist. If I'd seen it at 16 I'd have popped wood. That was doubtless the intent.)

Speaking of that wife, a trip across the island to pass along the message from her husband and check up on her turns into a trip into hell. Fleeing the awesome spectacle of wife buffet, a zombie hit and run leaves them with a broken car and a turned ankle, which leaves our heroes slogging across zombie country.

And it just gets gorier and nastier from there, wherein we get to the aforementioned "awesome," as this movie gets a lot more entertaining as it progresses. The slow build up and infrequent shocks of the beginning -- and ludicrousness of the kung-fu fighting zombie vs the shark, amongst other stupid bullshit -- hit a massive payoff as our walking wounded characters have to play defense against a massive horde of undead bastards.

And the movie finds a way to bring the horror of the islands back to civilization at the end, too.

Badfilm? No, not really. If they'd kept the goofy throughout it could have been a contender. If they'd shucked the goofy and gone for slow building horror it could have been a horror masterpiece. As it is, it's eurotrash gore that has eventual rewards for the viewer, but not a lot to recommend this to the top of the "must see" pile. If you want some Fulci, I'd start with City of the Living Dead and work your way backwards from there.

My favorite part of the movie is the part of the climax when you realize just how badly screwed up the heroes survival strategy is. Remember the attack of the swamp rabbit? This is where you find yourself shouting all kinds of unhelpful advice at the screen, but hopefully with the awareness that, if you were beset by the living dead, you'd probably be lucky to do half as well as they were.

Confucius says: 'It's hard to outrun a zombie invasion when your pants are full of shit.'



Zombie is standard video store horror aisle fare, and is currently available for viewing on a certain website that encourages people to post videos.

Assignments:

1) What did you think of the movie?

2) How would you have fixed it so it was a more even scare without?

3) Zombie vs shark - keep or pitch?

SubmariNaZombies - "Shock Waves" (1977)

"Danger Stranger / Better Paint Your Face" - '1977' The Clash

"Still, stomping Nazi butt is always a worthwhile endeavor." - Delta Green

1977. Jimmy Carter is President. Star Wars whooshes into theaters. Elvis plays his last one-man show. And on a mysterious island, down south in snorkeling territory, the Nazi exploitation genre gets a macabre, undead twist.

Nazis make perfect bad guys, chiefly because you can do so many things with them and almost none of them lack a soupcon of truth. Torture? Check. Human experiments? Check. The occult? Check. Sexual depravity? Check.

And unlike other films, where having a certain demographic as bad guys opens you up to complaints from the easily offended and politically correct, no one but no one minds if the bad guys are Nazis. Except, of course, for Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, White Nationalists, Racist scum, and people who think the genre is getting tired. In other words, no one who matters.



So if you're a filmmaker stuck for a bad guy for a horror movie or political thriller, there's always the big box marked "N" to fall back on. From the looks of things, the 1970's had a lot of stuck scriptwriters.

It was the era of the so-called Nazi Exploitation film, in which the deviant goings-on in camps were made vivid for audiences. Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS being the primary instigator of popcorn-munching young men wanting to pop a boner over something more wholesome and patriotic than, say, Deep Throat. In fact, Ilsa was so popular that she cheated death and came back at least three times, each less wholesome and patriotic than the last. That's more than can be said for Pier Paolo Pasolini after Salo -- possibly the most notorious Nazi exploitation movie of all -- got his ass run over by his own car.

There were also less salacious exploitation films, like The Odessa File, The Boys from Brazil, or Marathon Man, in which the remnants of the 3rd Reich walked amongst us, like Frankenstein's monster in a monk's hooded robe. "Nazis still threaten our way of life! Righteous people take them down! Credits roll upward towards the heavens!"

("Please throw your popcorn boxes away while exiting the theater....")

Shock Waves, made in 1977, is not about sexual exploitation, nor is it about righteous people taking down the fearsome, goose-stepping menace. It is about zombies - specifically aquatic, ageless, reasoning, and sadistic Nazi zombies - and therefore has more in common with the horde of slasher films that had yet to descend with John Carpenter's iconic Halloween, a year later. It also owed its existence to such memorable trash as They Saved Hitler's Brain, in which mad scientists kept the Third Reich going well beyond its allotted shelf life.

The plot in a nutshell: here's some people who really should not be on a tour boat together, on a tour boat that really shouldn't be afloat. Here's a weird thing that both creates atmosphere and facilitates their getting hopelessly lost. Here's a shock in the middle of the night that fucks up their ride and forces them onto the island. Here's a great but dilapidated old hotel, and a mysterious old man who makes Ebeneezer Scrooge seem hospitable.

And here's the zombies, walking out of the surf, by onesies and then by the dozens...



You can guess the rest, and I wouldn't want to rob you of the experience of actually watching this film which, though it is bad, isn't actually all bad. It gets major points for starring the ever-excellent Peter Cushing as the mysterious old man of the island, who guards a terrible secret about as well as he hides his past political affiliations (which is to say, not very well at all). It also gets mad props for the effective use of the island's landscape to create foreboding and danger.

And those zombies. Fuck me, those zombies.

Admittedly, the first few times you see them, you'll probably be wondering why Front 242's roadies were around in the late 70's. (See Figure A) Indeed, I think the film tips its hand a little too early by having one of them be fully seen before we really know what we're up against (unless you looked at the movie poster, or the back of the dvd box).



But by the time the shoe's dropped, and the characters know what they're up against (courtesy of that old guy who can't keep secrets so well) the sheer, silent malice radiated by those things makes the groaning, shambling hordes of post-Night of the Living Dead films seem as menacing as Smurfs huffing glue. They can think. They can hunt. They take a great deal of satisfaction in playing with people before closing in for the kill.

And they do. Not. Make. A. Sound.

(until you take off their Front 242 goggles and they die for some dumb reason)

Recently, I attended an author panel discussion about the newfound popularity of zombies in horror fiction. The comment was made that zombie fiction is the same genre as disaster movies, only the zombies are the dangerous element: the flame in the Towering Inferno, the sea in the Poseidon Adventure, and so on.

In this case, the zombies are not an element, but an active character -- just one without any real lines. And the director plays them for all they are worth, especially when the characters start losing group cohesion and entropy takes its inevitable toll...

Badfilm? Not really. Not entirely a bad film, either, though it has some flaws. It has two opening framing devices and really only needs one. And there's the glaring question about why they didn't make for their own damn wrecked ship at some point.

I think the best part in the film, other than the scene where the zombies walk into the water in a line while staring at Peter Cushing's character -- silently sneering at his mangled German orders -- is the bit where the characters who've survived the initial onslaught are paddling through a claustrophobic waterway out to the ocean on an overloaded rowboat. We know, courtesy of framing device #2, that this is not going to work. But we can't not root for them as we cut to scenes of the zombies under the water, in the treeline, ahead of them...

We know they are doomed, but our hearts pound for them all the same.

Shock Waves has been a horror aisle staple in video stores since the early 80's, and is easily found and viewed on a certain video media website as of this writing.



Assignments:

1) Did you like the movie or not?

2) Which framing device do you think it doesn't need, if any, and why?

for extra credit, someone who has some leet videomaking skills should do a mashup of Front 242's Headhunter using key scenes (and maybe some quotes and sound effects) from the movie.

Plan 9 from Outer Statement of Intent

"And remember my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future..."

I fucking hate writing statements of intent. They sound so ooty-footy. "Hey, like, I'm gonna do this thing, and here's why. So, like, pay attention and stuff, cause it's important. Also, this is not a pipe."

So this is not a statement of intent. This just is

Badfilm is a term stolen from the Subgenii. It's either in the first book or the second that they go on about the glories of Badfilm. Badfilm is the state of being in which a movie is so horribly, terribly awful that it somehow becomes a work of art because it's just so horribly, terribly awful.

Kind of like a snake eating itself becomes an Ouroboros, even if it was just damn hungry and out of mice.

The chief rule of Badfilm is that you cannot set out to make Badfilm. You have to make a film and just have it be Badfilm. If you try and make a Badfilm it comes across as twee comedy or satire.

You want an example of prime, grade A Badfilm, we have to talk about Plan 9 from Outer Space. And there's a lot of be said about that film - so much so that Everyone's talked about it, by now. Who knew it would be so popular for being so bad?

The first time I saw Plan 9 from Outer Space I was drunk.

I was at a "friend's" house. I use the term loosely. These two friends were younger stoners I hung out with in high school because I thought they could get me women and beer. They let me hang out with them because I had a car.

In stonermath, "Nerd < vehicle to get cigarettes, beer, and girls."

I got beer, alright, but all the beer got me was drunk on a friday night with some people I either didn't know or wasn't really friends with. It was a "sleepover" so far as my mom knew. I lied about what was going on, just as I lied about going to work the next day.

Karma was a bitch that night. My attempt to be cool while drunk failed. My attempt to get smooth with the few unspoken for ladies there was equally unsuccessful.

Nerd Party tip 1: Never let a stoner girl pour beer on your head. It will not get you laid.

Friend A got drunk, put me in a headlock, then got even more drunk. The beer baptism may have occurred pre or post headlock. The next thing I know Friend A is passed out and lying in a pool of his own barf, and Friend B is freaking out because it's his mom's place.

I tried to help, perhaps to impress the girl who'd poured beer on my head. She'd struck me as alpha girl and I'm a sucker for women in charge. My attempts to help were rudely rebuffed. I stood around and felt stupid, drunk, and no longer horny.

So it's fuck-all in the AM, the party is over. Friend A is asleep somewhere. Friend B is downstairs with girlfriend. Just me and a buzz that's slowly turning into a hangover. Me and a cruddy comfy chair and no blanket and no babe and my first experience with that weird, grey headache that manifests itself between my eyeballs, nose, and throat.

Nerd Party tip 2: drink a lot of water after you stop drinking alcohol. Really.

There's a television. I turn it on.

Black and white film. Crappy ominous music. Zombies. Bad acting.

"Flying saucers over Hollywood."

I'm hung over. Headachy and feeling like shit. Realizing that the actions of my past few months have gotten me nothing but humiliated and feeling guilty. It's not worth crying over but it is a pisser.

Nerd Party tip 3: Aspirin is your new friend.

Movie's over. I stay up, unable to sleep. Come 5:30 I call into McDonalds to say I was sick and couldn't come in. I can't remember that manager's name I do remember him being upset.

Headachy and guilty, I watch as friend A stumbles awake and isn't aware of what he tried to do to my neck last night. Fuck him. Friend B gets up and cleans his carpet. We laugh a little. I don't remember driving people home but I know it happened. I do remember wandering about that day like a ghost, on a day as grey and overcast as my brain felt, until such time as I could go home in uniform and pretend to have worked.

"Flying saucers over Dublin, Ohio."

Thought it all out, me. If you don't look parents in the eye but don't look too far away when you lie to them, they never know unless your voice changes its modulation from fear or guilt.

The trick is to lie to yourself, first.

Friends A and B floated around my orbit for some time thereafter, but never as close. Friend B's girlfriend knew no one who would fuck me. Friend A stole my copy of Appetite for Destruction. Next and last time I saw both of them was when I came across a scene of carnage at the gas station I'd ride to for a daily 2-liter of coke classic. Skidmarks and a smashed car. Inside was friend A with gashed forehead, lying on a stretcher, and friend B watching over him as they prepared to get him out.

Appetite for Destruction? See previous comments about lady Karma and her turnabout policy. I said nothing to them, nor they to me.

"Flying saucers over my suburban sprawl of a teenage life."

The next time Plan 9 from Outer Space came into my life was years later, at college. Junior year, and I'm still a nerd -- but a nerd with a posse. Friendly Anti-Censorship Taskforce for Students, boyyyyy. Respect the FACTS or we'll fuck your shit up in our next newsletter.

A highly ebullient friend who'd joined the group helped me celebrate my birthday at his room. We had beer, birthday cake courtesy of my dad (by way of OU's cafeteria service), and a movie I HAD to watch.

Plan 9 from Outer Space.

This time drunk, but happy drunk, the movie opened itself up to me in all its goofy, earnest, and terribly bad glory. We laughed at the bad lines. Rewound key bad scenes. Chuckled at the goofy effects. Watched the ending of whatever Chow Yun Fat movie has everyone dead or blind at the end.

Next year my friend was gone - vanished into the ether of school transfers for whatever reason. I wonder what happened to him -- hopefully something good in return for putting the love of badfilm into me.

I become a junkie for terrible movies -- watching them not just for Tits, Ass, and Decapitations, but for the sheer joy of watching some really funny stuff. There was a lonely and lumpen poetry to these works, with chance snippets of wisdom and wonder. That and some shit that had to be seen to be believed.

"Flying saucers over the neighborhood video store."

Skip ahead years later. I'm back at OU, and the nerd has two posses: FACTS and Campus Crusade for Cthulhu. We open the doors to the game room so the rest of the wargamers can hear us yell "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" when the real horrorshow of the week comes shambling towards the investigators.

On a good week I scare the players. Respect, boyyyyyyyy.

Once I have a place of my own I start having something I've always wanted: bad movie night for CCC, so these glorious things can be shared. Repo Man. Glenn or Glenda. Deadalive. Split Second. Meet the Feebles. Zardoz.

And Plan 9 from Outer Space, now something of a constant companion.

Did my wife and I play that at the bad movie night that was secretly our engagement party? Or was it Glen or Glenda? I'm no longer sure, years later, but I do know that I have come through hell of my own making and out the other end, borne on the flaming ship of Ed Wood's magnum opus. No longer a nerd, now a proud geek.

Flying saucers over my life.

So these are my words, come to tell you of bad movies I've seen and enjoyed. No weighty discussion. No symbolic shibboleths or literary leg-lifting. Just me and a blog and some really crappy films.

Enjoy if you will.