"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?
1) Jim, I am a fan of this film. I think that it was a welcome addition to the zombie film genre. By ditching Romero's message-laden ouevre, for a more explicit, shocking variant.
ReplyDeleteFulci returns Zombi 2 to the genre's roots, by going to far off islands. The genre seems to have began as an exotic, heart of darkness variant of standard horror tropes.
3)Zombie vs. Shark, as ridiculous as it is, is one of the more talked about and effectively ridiculous sideshow ploys in horror genre history. In lieu of Sharktopus, this is one of the cooler, if goofy scenes to ever occur in a horror film.
3) you got that right. I think it ranks up there with the zombie lawnmower massacre from Dead/Alive :)
ReplyDelete1) I like the post-rising scenes, as they are very effective, and the gore is really darn good. But there's a lot of wasted time in this film. I think he could have cut a lot of exposition out and thrown in some more scares to make it a more even movie.