The Dead Don't Die (2019)

The Dead Don't Die (2019): Writer-director Jim Jarmusch's bleak, hilarious homage to the zombie movies of George Romero is an occasionally meta-fictional delight, though the wall-breaking is generally left up to Bill Murray and Adam Driver's small-town cops. Don't get too attached to any of the characters, and don't expect anything all that normal to transpire in the small Pennsylvania town of Centerville (the Pennsylvania setting is another nod to Romero's Dead movies). 

Driver, Murray, Tom Waits as a prophetic hermit, Chloe Sevigny as another cop, Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker, and what seems like a cast of thousands all gamely walk and occasionally stumble into the apocalyptic night. Perhaps a perfectly cathartic movie for these COVID-19 times. Highly recommended.

The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King

The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King: The Dark Half falls into the transition zone between drug and alcohol abuse and sobriety for Stephen King, whose loved ones staged an intervention some time during the novel's initial composition. And among other things, the novel features a novelist who has struggled with alcohol addiction. 

Protagonist Thad Beaumont also struggles with his best-selling pseudonym having been 'outed' -- or forced into an outing, really, in order to deprive the discoverer of a writer's 'dark half' of any financial windfall after that discoverer tried to blackmail Beaumont. King's own pen-name, Richard Bachman, died of "cancer of the pseudonym" in 1986 under less blackmaily circumstances.

Beaumont himself writes (or, writer's blocked, wrote) mainstream literary fiction, with his first novel almost winning a major prize. His 'own' novels have never sold that well. Writer's block caused him to start writing violent, hard-boiled crime fiction as 'George Stark.' 'Stark' nods to the prolific Donald Westlake's 'Richard Stark' pen-name, if you're interested. 

The protagonist of two of these best-selling novels, Alexis Machine, also nods to a character in a novel by crime writer Shane Stevens, as King notes in his afterword.

Man, that's a lot of nods! One last one would be that Beaumont's name seems to be a gesture towards the prolific fantasy and horror writer Charles Beaumont, with 'Beaumont' itself having been a career-long pen-name for Charles Nutt.

So Beaumont retires George Stark -- in a feature article in People magazine no less! Thad's wife feels relief at this. She never liked the way Thad acted when he was writing as Stark, almost as if he were another person.

Well, yes -- George Stark does indeed turn out to be a different person. Or a different something, anyway. And he's really pissed at having been 'retired.' And he looks and acts a lot like Alexis Machine, the violent and amoral criminal protagonist of two of the Stark novels.

The Dark Half entertainingly wrestles with a surprising number of meta-fictional issues amidst its mostly propulsive plot. King structures the novel in an interesting way. It's what I guess I'll call the 'Two Steps Forward, One Step Back' Structure. 

Stanley Kubrick famously used this structure in The Killing because that's the structure the novel that was the basis for The Killing used. The plot follows one character for awhile until some sort of crisis is reached. Then it jumps back in time to a different character and proceeds forward until the crisis has been reached and passed for another crisis. Then, rinse and repeat. The studio found this structure confusing and forced an infamous voice-over onto The Killing. Here, it mostly works.

Recurring King character Sheriff Alan Pangborn appears here because some of The Dark Half occurs in Pangborn's Castle Rock. Pangborn would soon be the protagonist of Needful Things (1991) and, in an alternate-universe version, a character played by Scott Glenn in the first season of Castle Rock. Here, he's introduced to the weirdness of Castle Rock for the first time (Pangborn hails from New Jersey) but certainly not the last.

In all, The Dark Half is enjoyable, occasionally piercing, and only sometimes a bit padded, especially with lengthy, narrative-halting  biographies of peripheral characters, a recurring problem in King. King would re-use some elements of The Dark Half decades later in The Outsider. 

Somewhat bizarrely, King also gives an academic friend of Beaumont's some traits previously given to a character in "The Crate" (adapted in Creepshow). I have no idea if this was intentional or if King forgot that he'd used elements such as a wife/significant other who annoyingly tells people "Just call me Billie!" 

King does manage the feat of making the common sparrow into a magical figure of hope and dread. You wouldn't think sparrows could conjure up the Sublime, but The Dark Half somehow pulls that trick off. 

Recommended.

It Comes At Night (2017)

It Comes At Night (2017): written and directed by Trey Edward Shults; starring Joel Edgerton (Paul), Christopher Abbott (Will), Carmen Ejogo (Sarah), Riley Keough (Kim), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Travis), and Griffin Robert Faulkner (Andrew):

Tense, claustrophobic thriller is set during some sort of zombie-plague apocalypse but uses that apocalypse to explore the horrors of human beings under pressure. Father, mother, and teen-aged son hide in a house in the woods. A stranger arrives. Charity fights with fear.

Anyone expecting pitched battles with the walking dead will be disappointed in It Comes At Night. But if you're in the mood for a downbeat tale of character and failure, the movie is a solid effort. It's a use of the zombie to comment on human frailties that the Grandfather of Zombie Movies, George 'Night of the Living Dead' Romero, would have thoroughly enjoyed and endorsed. Recommended.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) by Max Brooks

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) by Max Brooks: Max Brooks is obsessed by zombies, especially those from the George Romero universe of zombies that first appeared in 1968's Night of the Living Dead: nearly mindless, man-eating, slow-moving hordes of the hungry dead. World War Z is a love letter to Night of the Living Dead, though Brooks' zombies have some attributes peculiar to his story.

The attribute specifically tailored to the tale of World War Z is that the virus that creates zombies (named 'Solanum') renders those zombies toxic to nearly every creature on Earth, from bacteria to vultures. Brooks thus avoids one of the problems with the idea of a zombie apocalypse: after about two weeks, the zombies should be defunct from wave after wave of attacks from every carrion eater on Earth from the microscopic level on up.

Other specific attributes include things that would later be familiar to watchers of The Walking Dead. The zombies don't swell their ranks with those buried dead who were not already infected with the zombie virus. Graveyards are relatively safe in Brooks' universe. His zombies don't digest their food. They're really, really dead. And they will eat any animal large enough for them to notice: they only PREFER humans.

Brooks has said that he got the idea for the format of World War Z from histories by Studs Terkel. Terkel's books told the stories of such events as World War Two (The Good War) by assembling first-hand accounts from people involved and then weaving them into topics arrayed within an overall arc. Brooks' frame narrator collects stories from survivors of the Great Zombie War, several years after the war is over. As World War Z seems to begin some time around 2010-2012, the frame narrative occurs somewhere around 2020.

Of course, the format of World War Z didn't originate with Terkel via Brooks. The documentary style has been with horror since its beginnings, whether in novels made up of letters and diary entries (Hello, Frankenstein!), novels that add newspaper articles to that mix (Dracula), stories that frame first-person narratives of the past within a present-day investigation ("The Colour Out Of Space"), movies that claim to be based on true events (The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre), or the now-ubiquitous variations on the found-footage movie made popular (though not originated) by the original Blair Witch Project. Brooks' addition to this long tradition is an admirable one, though, and generally pitch perfect.

Of course I have complaints. I still don't have the faintest idea of how a dead creature with no metabolism can walk around. I wouldn't quibble about this when the zombies are either supernatural in origin or at least not understood. Brooks' zombies, though, with their quasi-scientific backing, don't seem all that scientific when it comes to their locomotion. Or the fact that they don't all end up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or some other large hole given their tendency to flock together by the millions and tens of millions and walk mindlessly in straight lines. But that's another story. Don't bother with the movie. Highly recommended.

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks: This oddity predated Brooks' World War Z by a full three years. It's basically a set-up for that novel, a guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse written before the zombie apocalypse described in World War Z actually occurs by someone who seems to exist in the same universe as that of World War Z.

The key thing in the volume is an explanation of the zombie virus (dubbed 'Solanum'). There have been zombie outbreaks throughout history, our nameless guide-writer tells us, all caused by that mysterious virus.

Brooks differentiates his zombies from most others with one of the effects of this virus: the living dead are rendered poisonous to virtually anything that might regard them as carrion, from almost all bacteria to bears. Zombies who truly are edible carrion would, as many zombie nitpickers have noted, be pretty much neutralized as a threat in a couple of weeks.

With Solanum comes a couple of other effects: zombies don't digest the people and animals they eat, and zombies can only be killed with a head-shot. The former has been implied from time to time in some zombie movies; the latter has been a staple of zombie movies since at least George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

I'd guess that this book would be pretty useful if one actually lived in Brooks' fictional universe. There's one glaring problem with Brooks' world both here and in World War Z: he drastically over-rates a silencer/suppressor's ability to muffle the noise of a handgun or rifle. 

This wouldn't be such a problem if the book didn't exhaustively detail all the 'noisy' things one shouldn't do (drive a car, yell, walk through tall grass) while nonetheless espousing the worth of silenced guns. Go look up silenced/suppressed decibel levels some time. They're definitely louder than walking through tall grass, cars (even cars without mufflers!) and pretty much everything else.

Brooks' unnamed writer also waxes eloquent about the efficacy of the Japanese samurai sword (or 'katana'). An entire Internet argument sprang up around this topic (and Michonne's use of the katana in The Walking Dead). The general consensus was that the katana is extremely difficult to wield and, wielded by a novice, has an alarming tendency to break. Oops.

There are long, tedious stretches throughout, the boredom and page-flipping arising from those sections which consist of check-lists for what one needs for certain zombie-apocalypse scenarios. Brooks really goes all-in on the idea that this guide is 'real.' And oh so boring in its details.

The most enjoyable parts consist of the entries on zombie attacks throughout history. Brooks apparently thought so too, as a subsequent book and graphic novel series described some of these millennia-spanning attacks in greater detail.  Brooks goes back to Ancient Egypt in terms of recorded encounters and even further back with cave paintings and other prehistoric artifacts suggesting that zombies have been around as long as Homo sapiens. The Zombie Survival Guide works best in concert with World War Z. Lightly recommended.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1968): written by John Russo and George Romero; directed by George Romero; starring Duane Jones (Ben), Judith O'Dea (Barbra), Karl Hardman (Harry Cooper), Marilyn Eastman (Helen Cooper), Keith Wayne (Tom), Judith Ridley (Judy), Kyra Schon (Karen Cooper), George Kosana (Sheriff): George Romero's witty, gritty, subversive zombie film pretty much kicked off the entire genre of the walking, eating dead. 

The restored print used by TCM is a revelation. Romero's low-budget film now looks and acts more like an art-house classic than a drive-in staple. It's amazing how good the movie is, and how eccentric -- an African-American hero, a protagonist (Barbra) who slips into near-catatonia 20 minutes into the movie and pretty much stays there to the end, and those rapidly evolving zombies who quickly learn how to use tools. 

Night of the Living Dead is better than every walking dead movie or TV show that followed with one exception -- Romero's own sequel, Dawn of the Dead. Brilliant film-making, and acting by amateurs and local actors that works beautifully, none more beautifully than Duane Jones as Ben. Highly recommended.

Invisible Invaders (1959)

Invisible Invaders (1959): written by Samuel Newman; directed by Edward L. Cahn; starring John Agar (Major Jay), Jean Byron (Phyllis Penner), Philip Tonge (Dr. Adam Penner), Robert Hutton (Dr. Lamont), and John Carradine (Dr. Noymann/ Voice of the Invaders): One of the places the titular aliens announce their nefarious plans for Earth is at an NHL game between the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Rangers. All right!

Invisible Invaders is noteworthy for being a pre-George "Night of the Living Dead" Romero example of zombies in formal-wear stalking the Earth and killing the living. Here, they're inhabited by invisible aliens who can also take over dead bodies. And they have a plan.

What is the plan? Kill everyone on Earth.

Thankfully, the always intrepid John Agar as an Army Major teams up with three intrepid scientists to come up with a weapon to use against the aliens. They work fast. That's good because apparently the Moon was once like Earth until the aliens beat the Hell out of it thousands of years ago.

The acting is earnest but inept. The visual effects are pretty much all either laughable (why do the aliens drag their feet when they're invisible, leaving a very clear trail?) or stock footage of things crashing, blowing up, or burning down. I'm pretty sure the only clear shot of a UFO flying has been lifted from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Oh, well. Invisible Invaders also has a whole lotta narration, I'm assuming to bolster its attempts to look like a documentary. Strange, bad, enjoyable stuff. Recommended.

Creepshow (1982)

Creepshow (1982): written by Stephen King; directed by George Romero; starring Hal Holbrook (Henry), Adrienne Barbeau (Wilma), Fritz Weaver (Dexter), Leslie Nielsen (Vickers), E.G. Marshall (Upson Pratt), Viveca Lindfors (Bedelia), Ed Harris (Hank), Ted Danson (Wentworth), Stephen King (Jordy Verrill), and Joe Hill King (Billy): 

Is it an anthology movie when all the segments are written by the same person or a collection movie? 

Oh, well. 

This homage to the horror comics of the 1950's, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, is a mixed enough bag that it almost feels like an anthology movie from several different writers.

Creepshow is enjoyable. And it was adapted by King and Bernie 'Swamp Thing' Wrightson as an even more enjoyable comic book, complete with a cover by EC great Jack Kamen, who also provides some of the comic-book panels seen in this film. But Creepshow almost succeeds in spite of itself: King and Romero's take on those horror comics, and specifically the great EC Comics of the early 1950's, is too campy and arch by about 50%.

The decision to play up the comic-book aspects of the production with odd frames and effects and shots doesn't help things either. As in Ang Lee's Hulk, the extremely comic-booky  visuals just look sorta stupid. And in the context of the illustration style of EC Comics, which tended to stick to a very strict grid pattern for the comic book panels, many of the visual choices made by Romero make no historic sense except in relation to the Batman TV series of the 1960's.

The final mistake is literally two-fold. Romero casts Stephen King as the lead actor in one segment and his son Joe Hill King as a child in the framing story. They're both terrible actors. Romero compensates for this terribleness in King's segment by making it the most archly comedic sequence in the movie and having King yuck it up like a Little Theatre actor who got all coked up for opening night. The result is cringe-worthy and funny for all the wrong reasons -- it's like amateur hour at the Grand Guignol. Or the adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space" from an alternate reality in which the adaptation appeared on Hee Haw Country Playhouse.

Other segments with actual professional actors in them fare better. "The Crate," the longest segment, is adapted by King from a short story of his that has never been collected in one of his collections (yes, there are stories by Stephen King that even Stephen King doesn't like). Nonetheless, it's an excellent piece of comic horror that's at its best when it's not being comic at all: only the decision to make Adrienne Barbeau's character, an annoying faculty wife, into a shrill, clueless Harpy almost undoes the rest of the segment. 

But Hal Holbrook and Fritz Weaver, old pros both, make one believe in the rest of the narrative. Tom Savini's monster design for this segment is pretty solid, though not as alien as the creature described in the story, and a little more alien might have been nice. Of course, he's limited by the visual effects technology of 1982 and the film's budget: the thing in the story couldn't have been a guy in a suit.

Really, the non-King-Family cast is terrific. Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson shine in a tale of adultery and revenge from beyond the grave. And E.G. Marshall does nasty, blackly comic work as a squirmy, technocratic businessman (dig that early 1980's computer technology!)  besieged by an endless army of cockroaches in his Kubrickian white-walled apartment. A young Ed Harris is almost unrecognizable in the weak first segment, which offers as its main charm a really beautifully imagined walking corpse. Kudos again to Savini and his creature team. 

Overall, Creepshow is worth watching, or watching again. Other than the unfortunately arch comic-book visualizations, Romero's direction is effective throughout. "The Crate" creates real tension, while E.G. Marshall's segment offers a number of clever ways to send a cockroach skittering across the screen. The frame story is negligible, and the tone would better have been modulated towards the dramatic end of things. Even the Stephen King segment generates a certain amount of poignance by its end, though I'm not sure if one feels sorry for King's rural bumpkin or for King himself being exposed so thoroughly as a dreadful, dreadful actor and then being seemingly exhorted to overplay that terribleness. In all, recommended.

Strange Bedfellows

Quick Change: adapted by Howard Franklin from the novel by Jay Cronley; directed by Bill Murray and Howard Franklin; starring Bill Murray (Grimm), Geena Davis (Phyllis), Randy Quaid (Loomis), and Jason Robards (Rotzinger) (1990): This is almost a 'lost' Bill Murray movie, one that didn't do well at the summer box office back in 1990. I think it may be too low key to have ever been a huge success, but it also got lost in a flood of blockbusters that year. As is, it's the only movie which Murray also produced and (co-)directed, and it's really good.

Quick Change follows a bank heist masterminded by Murray's character. That part goes smoothly. However, getting out of New York turns out to be the real problem. Terrific supporting work from Geena Davis, Randy Quaid, Tony Shaloub, and Jason Robards makes a zippy script flow smoothly even if the plan does not. Murray's character, while sarcastic as always, nonetheless also resonates with what appear to be warmer human feelings. It's a fine, neglected performance from Murray in a fine, neglected film. Recommended.


And Then There Were None: adapted by Dudley Nichols from the play Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie; directed by Rene Clair; starring Barry Fitzgerald (Quincannon), Walter Huston (Armstrong), June Duprez (Vera Claythorne) and Louis Hayward (Philip Lombard) (1945):  Adapted from Agatha Christie's play, itself an adaptation of her own novel which at one point had a truly regrettable title in Great Britain (look it up). Fun though somewhat stagy and a bit overlong, the movie adapts a book that really works as the foundational work for an astonishing number of horror movies and thrillers in which a rising body count lifts all tides. Walter Huston and Barry Fitzgerald pretty much act everyone other than Judith Anderson right off the screen. Recommended.

The Grudge: adapted by Stephen Susco from the screenplay by Takashi Shimizu for Ju-On; directed by Takashi Shimizu; starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (Karen), Jason Behr (Doug), William Mapother (Matthew), Bill Pullman (Peter), Grace Zabriskie (Emma), Clea DuVall (Jennifer), Ted Raimi (Alex), and Ryo Ishibashi (Nakagawa) (2004): The sprung rhythms of this horror movie, adapted from a Japanese horror movie directed by the same director, sometimes yield good scares. By the end, though, the ridiculous omnipotence of the ghosts makes the movie an exercise in the cliched nihilism of most American horror movies.

No one even tries to find a religious or spiritual solution to the ghost problem, though there is a scene early in the film which suggests either an abandoned plot thread or a red herring. The logic of the ghosts in the movie would seem to suggest that everyone on the planet should have been murdered by spirits long ago. They can do anything and go anywhere. And what is up with the hair? Lightly recommended because it's really short.


Night of the Living Dead: written by George Romero and John Russo; directed by Tom Savini; starring Tony Todd (Ben) and Patricia Tallman (Barbara) (1990): 1990 remake of George Romero's genre-defining zombie masterpiece of 1968. Romero supplies a new script, while make-up wizard Tom Savini directs for the first time. The whole experience loses something in colour, but the thing does build to a satisfying climax.

Stuntwoman Patricia Tallman makes for a good heroine, much less passive than the original Barbara, while Tony Todd is sharp and sympathetic as her brother-in-arms (though not the actual brother who says that famous line I'm not going to repeat). The social satire is much more pointed this time around, and much more in the vein of Romero's Dawn of the Dead. His zombies may be dangerous, but they're also sources of sorrow and pity in a way few other film-makers have even even tried to capture. And unlike so many younger American horror film directors, Romero isn't afraid to mix a bit of hope in with the despair and the disgust. Recommended.

Black Mirror

Oculus: written by Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard, and Jeff Seidman; directed by Mike Flanagan; starring Karen Gillan (Kaylie Russell), Brenton Thwaites (Tim Russell), Katee Sackhoff (Marie Russell) and Rory Cochrane (Alan Russell) (2014): Competent horror thriller that uses some fairly effective narrative tricks rather than 'found-footage' for its scares. It's not easy to make a seemingly haunted mirror into a worthy antagonist, but Oculus manages this feat.

The leads are all solid, the reality-bending games are sometimes startling, and the stupid decisions made by Karen Gillan's character are totally explicable within the cinematic universe. She has motivation for how she does what she does, and all motivation in the film is suspect: the mirror manipulates people subtly as well as through illusions. If only someone had brought a fire extinguisher. Recommended.


Land of the Dead: written and directed by George Romero; starring Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy) (2005): George Romero's fourth Dead movie gave him a mostly name cast and a decent budget; Romero's own quirky muse caused him to use these things on what wasn't a horror movie at all, or at least not the horror movie the studio thought it would be getting.

Instead, Land of the Dead is part-satire, part-social commentary. The zombies aren't really the villains any more: indeed, they don't seem to have any interest in hunting humans until the humans piss them off. And piss them off, they do. I don't know that the movie benefitted from having known actors in some of the roles, though I am sure that this was necessary to secure funding. Dennis Hopper just seems miscast as a scheming businessman, but Leguizamo, Baker, and Asia Argento are all fine. But the real hero is the massive zombie (former) gas-station owner dubbed Big Daddy. He's the Robinson Crusoe of zombies. Recommended.

Pale Horrors

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie; written by Michael McDowell and George A. Romero, partially based on stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King; directed by John Harrison; starring Deborah Harry (Betty), Christian Slater (Andy), David Johansen (Halston), William Hickey (Drogan), James Remar (Preston), Rae Dawn Chong (Carola), Robert Sedgwick (Lee), Steve Buscemi (Bellingham), Julianne Moore (Susan), and Robert Klein (Wyatt) (1990): The 1983 Stephen King/George Romero movie Creepshow, an anthology of five horror shorts, was once supposed to become a TV series. That fell through, and the Romero-produced Tales from the Darkside series of the 1980's ultimately resulted. A second, lesser Creepshow movie came out in 1987. And then came this film, which horror effects guru Tom Savini called "the real Creepshow 3." Got all that?

Here we get three shorts and a frame story starring Deborah Harry as a suburban housewife with a shocking secret. She's actually a retired pop star! Well, no. Then we get three shorts: "Lot 249", loosely adapted from an Arthur Conan Doyle short story; "The Cat from Hell", based on a Stephen King story; and "Lover's Vow", an original penned by horror novelist Michael McDowell.

The last one is the best, with the first two (and the frame tale) partially submerged by too much campiness and jokeiness. As with Creepshow and Creepshow 2, most of the makers seem to have confused the jokeiness and punniness of the frame narration of the1950's EC horror comics from which these movies draw their inspiration with the content of the actual stories, stories which were generally played straight up and gruesome. It's the frame that's supposed to be jokey, not the tale itself. Thus horror gets repeatedly undercut by that deadly, deadly jolite. Oh, well.

The cast, especially of "Lot 249", is very good -- Julianne Moore and Steve Buscemi would soon be on their way to better things. "Lover's Vow" highlights the fact that Rae Dawn Chong and Jaye Davidson (of The Crying Game) bear a fairly startling resemblance depending on the camera angle. Short, vaguely enjoyable, and occasionally interesting. Lightly recommended.