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.

Evil Dead (2013)

Evil Dead (2013): based on the original film written by Sam Raimi, written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues; directed by Fede Alvarez; starring Jane Levy (Mia), Shiloh Fernandez (David), Lou Taylor Pucci (Eric), Jessica Lucas (Olivia) and Elizabeth Blackmore (Natalie): 

Made with the participation of original [The] Evil Dead (1981) writer/director Sam Raimi, this Evil Dead makes some smart changes to the low-budget 1980's horror film that launched the careers of Raimi, his brother Ted, and star Bruce Campbell.

The first is to come up with a weirdly plausible new reason for the inevitable trip to a cabin in the woods: four of the five characters are staging an Intervention/Drug DeTox for the fifth, Mia, who appears to have a heroin problem. 

The second is to alter the tone to one of more seriousness, or at least more angst, for the first two-thirds of the film. The Evil Dead is far less loopy than sequels Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, but next to this Evil Dead, it looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Are there problems? Of course. The addition of a dog to the cast of probably doomed characters goes nowhere, possibly because the filmmakers shied away from graphic violence involving a dog as either victim or perpetrator. The characters are a little shrill at points, though this may be intentional -- certainly, the issues of the various characters are intentional, as is at least one resolution to those issues. The angst tends to overwhelm any attempts at witty or blackly comic dialogue, though. Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer's Body) was brought on as a script doctor to add such wit, but it isn't all that apparent what her contributions are.

Gore and violence come in increasingly rapid, escalating waves as the film progresses. Nail guns (an homage to Raimi's Darkman?) and electric knives do some terrible stuff. Several characters take levels of physical punishment that would have made Bruce Campbell's Ash proud. If you're going to be a character in an Evil Dead movie, you've got to be able to take a beating and keep on punching back. The film bounces ideas from all three previous installments around, sometimes in newly effective ways, though I wish they'd worked the overwrought tape recording of the archaeologist into something other than the closing credits. I love that guy.

Through it all, the Book of the Dead remains indestructible and weirdly attractive to otherwise intelligent characters in search of bathroom reading. Even barbed-wire wrapping and annotated warnings from some previous reader of the tome can't stop the high-school teacher from reading an incantation out loud. Stupid teachers! 

The filmmakers finally jettison most of the serious dramatic tone for the final twenty minutes, cutting loose in a manner more consistent with the series as a whole. Frankly, it's a relief. And the identity of the survivor or survivors comes as something of a surprise. Recommended.

Disappearance at Devil's Rock (2016) by Paul Tremblay

Disappearance at Devil's Rock (2016) by Paul Tremblay: In his follow-up to A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay again walks a line between supernatural and natural horror with this story of a missing teen in small-town Massachusetts.

Troubled teen Tommy Sanderson -- introvert, zombie-obsessed -- disappears one night while out with his two best friends. He seems to have disappeared into the (real) Borderland State Park. The questions of 'why' and 'how' and 'where' will occupy the rest of the novel. 

His best friends Luis and Josh are clearly hiding something. His sister seems to know something. And his mother is also haunted by memories of his father, who deserted them and then disappeared himself, into death after a single-vehicle accident.

Soon, mysterious apparitions (if they are apparitions) and messages start to appear. The mother has a vision of a gruesomely disfigured Tommy. And they everything seems to focus on a Borderland landmark called Devil's Rock.

Except it isn't really called Devil's Rock -- that's the name Tommy and his friends gave to it, without any real provenance. A story about the Devil lurking in the park since time immemorial also seems to be dubious. But strange things keep happening. And getting Luis and Josh to tell the truth about that night seems to become more and more difficult as Tommy's disappearance stretches on.

Tremblay's novel ends up being as much about the sort of secrets that can devastate families, and the sorts of problems that can snowball into horror for teenagers. There's more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies in some of the revelations towards the end of the novel -- but touches of what may or may not be the supernatural throughout also suggest a certain inevitability to Tommy's narrative. 

The novel does a nice job of creating believable human evil, in teens or adults, without giving us anything along the lines of teen psychopaths and bad seeds. The entire enterprise tilts a bit more towards sorrow than horror, though there are several scenes of excruciating awfulness. 

Tremblay notes in his afterword that the title and some of the novel's concerns are a nod to Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its mystery surrounding the disappearance of a school teacher and several students in Australia. Tremblay's book is ultimately more concrete than that mysterious film, and somewhat more conventional. Recommended.

Trench 11 (2017)

Trench 11 (2017): written by Matt Booi and Leo Scherman; directed by Leo Scherman; starring Rossif Sutherland (Canadian Lieutenant Berton), Robert Stadlober (Reiner), Charlie Carrick (Doctor), Shaun Benson (German Kapitan Muller), Ted Atherton (British Major Jennings), and Luke Humphrey (U.S. Captain Cooper):

Enjoyable low-budget Canadian horror movie filmed in Manitoba and Ontario. Rossif Sutherland is an appealing Everyman as a Canadian 'tunneler' in WWI. He's supposed to be on leave as the war enters its last days. But British Military Intelligence needs him to help a small group investigate a mysterious underground German complex in the Ardennes.

Well, and we all know how respectful British intelligence officers are of human life, allied or otherwise. Because the Ardennes are under American control, the squad consists of four American infantry, two British officers, and our Canadian tunneler.

It's no surprise to discover that the Germans were developing a new weapon before something happened and they sealed the complex, badly. Once the squad enters the complex, things rapidly go sideways. 

Trench 11 becomes something of a surprise at this point, focusing on humanity's capacity for monstrosity rather than on some pitched battle against super-zombies. The film-makers do a nice job of conveying the claustrophobia and confusion going on far below the surface of the Earth. It's a terse and effective film. Recommended.

Cargo (2017)

Cargo (2017): written by Yolanda Ramke; directed by Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling; starring Martin Freeman (Andy), Anthony Hayes (Vic), and Simone Landers (Thoomi): One of those Netflix movies whose lack of a theatrical appearance baffles the viewer. It's a zombie-plague movie set in Australia with fine performances from Martin Freeman and Simone Landers. Landers is especially good as Thoomi, the 11-year-old aboriginal girl whom Freeman meets in the countryside at a dire moment. 

The plague has been around long enough that "countdown watches" are available to those recently bitten, giving a 48-hour count to the point at which a person will zombify. Freeman has been bitten as the movie begins. But in the depopulated countryside of Australia, he needs to find someone to take charge of his young daughter Rosie, the cutest 1-year-old girl ever to appear in a zombie movie.

Thoomi has her own trauma to deal with. The film-makers handle the growing friendship between the two delicately. It helps that Freeman's default acting mode is a sort of baffled, affable humanity. Thoomi is understandably cautious around him, but Rosie The World's Cutest Baby eventually wins her over.

There isn't a ton of violence in Cargo, though there is some zombie-fighting action (and human vs. human action, these catastrophic zombie events never bringing out the best in humanity). Cargo does hold out hope, though, in the manner of some of George Romero's genre-defining zombie classics. I shed a manly tear or two at the end. Recommended.

Hidden (2015)

Hidden (2015): written and directed by The Duffer Brothers; starring Alexander Skarsgard (Ray), Andrea Riseborough (Claire), and Emily Alyn Lind (Zoe): Parents Ray and Claire and tennish daughter Zoe hide in an old bomb shelter. They've been there for 300 days and counting. Creatures they've dubbed "Breathers" hunt for them on the surface. Underground, the food is running out.

It's a simple set-up for a fairly straightforward film. The performances by all three actors are solid and low-key, as is the direction. Flashbacks fill us in on what brought the family to the shelter. 

Running barely 80 minutes, Hidden is an adequate survival thriller which may or may not have a few twists along the way. Though the biggest enemies for much of the movie are a stubborn water pump and a rat that's gotten into the food supply. A talking doll carried around by Zoe plays the role of Chekov's Gun. Lightly recommended.

Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg

Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda) (2005/ English translation 2009) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, translated by Ebba Segerberg: 

Handling the Undead is John Ajvide Lindqvist's second novel after the great, and marvelously adapted for Swedish film, Let the Right One In (2004). The first time around, Lindqvist looked at vampires with a fresh perspective. This time around it's zombies to not quite the same level of excellence as Let the Right One In. There's no shame in failing to match the earlier novel -- Let the Right One In is a truly great horror novel.

Handling the Undead presents zombies in a new light. All the recently dead in a specific part of Stockholm at a specific time one day come back to life. This is not a zombie apocalypse. There are perhaps 1500 of them, and they don't try to eat the living. They just try to get home if they can. Those that are buried have a hard time of this until the authorities figure out the parameters of the Resurrection and dig up those graves that should have the living dead in them.

The novel does concern itself with Why and How this event has happened. But it's more focused on three families handling their undead. 

Father David and son Magnus must deal with the return of the horribly disfigured Eva. She's David's wife and Magnus' mother, and she died in a car crash that occured almost simultaneously with the Resurrection. Of all the undead, Eva is the most intelligent and able to answer question, albeit vaguely.

Grandmother Elvy and granddaughter Flora have to deal with Elvy's undead husband who died a few days before the Resurrection after a decade of Alzheimer's. Oh, and Elvy and Flora are telepathic. And Elvy believes a mysterious spirit has told her that the Biblical Apocalypse is about to happen.

Reporter and grieving grandfather Mahler and his daughter Anna have to deal with the return of Anna's two-months-dead son Elias, who died soon after his sixth birthday from a fall from a window.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff happens in Sweden. Or at least Stockholm. The authorities round the dead up. Weird psychic phenomena start to happen. The undead that are extremely decayed cease to function. Is the Apocalypse at hand? And are these zombies ever going to eat someone?

Well, read it and see, I guess. Handling the Undead is a much shorter, less detailed, quieter novel than Let the Right One In. Too quiet, really, and the explanation for what has happened, when it comes, is just a little too goofy to be satisfying. 

As with the fantastic revelations at the end of Lindqvist's later Harbour, those in Handling the Undead don't so much satisfy as they undermine all the suspense and world-building that has come before. Despite all the uses of a very Stephen King-like "This isn't what was really there but only what the human mind can translate," the end sputters out in a most unsatisfying way. What has come before was pretty solid, but perhaps not enough to lift Handling the Undead above a Lightly Recommended.

Invisible Hindu Zombies of the Stratosphere

28 Weeks Later (2007): written by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Enrique Lopez Lavigne, and Jesus Olmo; directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; starring Robert Carlyle (Don), Rose Byrne (Scarlet), Jeremy Renner (Doyle), Imogen Poots (Tammy), and Mackintosh Muggleton (Andy): An astoundingly dumb sequel to an excellent original (28 Days Later). And even though the original film's director (Danny Boyle) and writer (Alex Garland) are credited as executive producers, the makers of this film don't seem to have ever seen 28 Days Later.

In 28 Days Later, the Rage Virus that turns people into murderous "fast zombies" fully dilates the pupils, causing these rage zombies to hide inside during daylight hours and hunt at night. Within five minutes of the start of 28 Weeks Later, Robert Carlyle is fleeing across the sunlit fields of England, pursued by hordes of rage zombies who should by all rights be inside taking a nap.

Along the way we're also told that the Rage Virus can't "jump species," which may surprise viewers who remember it doing just that -- from chimps to humans -- to start the apocalypse in 28 Days Later. OK. It's a scientist who makes this observation (Rose Byrne in a thankless role), so I assume she knows what a species is. Or not. The film-makers don't know how nerve gas works, how long it would take a car battery to die left unused in the open, or when you can push a car to start it, so I'll put the species mistake on them and not the character. 

These problems ultimately pale in comparison to the endless chain of idiocies, improbabilities, and impossibilities that crowd the screen from beginning to end. 28 Weeks Later could be used as a perfect example of Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot: nothing in this movie could happen if everyone wasn't an idiot. It's blazingly stupid and preciously self-important because, like, this is like Iraq, dude! The film-makers also must have really liked it when Roy Batty gouged out Tyrell's eyes in Blade Runner because we get not one but two eye-gouging scenes. Hoo ha! Not recommended.

The Other Side of the Door (2016): written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera; directed by Johannes Roberts; starring Sarah Wayne Callies (Maria), Jeremy Sisto (Michael), and Suchitra Pillai (Piki): A privileged white American couple get up to shenanigans in India. First their son dies. Then he comes back from the dead thanks to the mother's intentional misapplication of what seems to be intended to be some sort of Hindu ghost-raising ritual. Oh, white people. Is there anywhere and any way you can't cause trouble? 

Only one Indian actor has a role with more than a couple of lines of dialogue. Sarah Wayne Callies does that perpetually constipated look that seems to be her default facial expression. Jeremy Sisto has almost nothing to do. It's an even dumber version of Pet Sematary. The Guardian of the Underworld looks pretty cool, though, and technically she's the heroine of the movie. Just bad enough to be fun.

The Invisible Man (1933): adapted by R.C. Sherriff from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by James Whale; starring Claude Rains (Griffin), Gloria Stuart (Flora), and Henry Travers (Dr. Cranley): The voice of Claude Rains does terrific work as our titular mad, invisible scientist. It's a bit jarring to see Clarence the Guardian Angel (Henry Travers) as a scientist, though. Other than Travers, the supporting cast is surprisingly weak. 

The odd use of English bumpkins as comedy relief in James Whale's Universal horror movies continues here, and is just as unfunny and distracting as its use in his Frankenstein movies. However, the invisible effects hold up, and Whale manages some moments of creepy terror and unease throughout the film. Though given the necessity of the Invisible Man being naked to be completely invisible, he really should consider trying to conquer a country with a more tropical climate. 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.

Skeletons by Al Sarrantonio (1992

Skeletons by Al Sarrantonio (1992): This wild, woolly, and marvelously imaginative novel takes the bare bones of the standard zombie epidemic narrative and makes them new. I've always viewed Al Sarrantonio as being a much more gifted writer of short stories than novels, but this dark fantasy novel is a real treat.

One day, all the dead on Earth rise from their graves. But they do so as skeletons held together by some inexplicable, translucent force field that resembles what they looked like (and what they were wearing!) when they died. Even if they died 3000 years ago. Even if they were dinosaurs.

And the skeletons possess their old personalities with one key difference: they're possessed of an almost-irresistable urge to kill the living. When the living die, their dead flesh vanishes and they, too, become Angry-Ass skeletons. It's the new circle of life! The skeletons can be killed, at which point they disintegrate into dust. But there are a lot of them. There are even insect skeletons. Ha ha whee!

With four first-person narratives telling the tale, Skeletons anticipates Max Brooks' multi-viewpoint World War Z in its structure to an extent, though certainly not in tone or content. We may start off with an apocalyptic war between the Living and the Dead, but the narrative soon starts building another narrative within that: a mythoreligious tale of a world periodically cleansed by a flood... of skeletons. It appears that God may have hit the reset button for humanity (not to mention most other species that aren't lucky enough to be plants). And not for the first time.

Sarrantonio's myth-building is faithful to the often unpleasant ramifications of myth and legend. There's a critique here of vengeful gods and chosen ones, of religious fanaticism and stories that reduce women to super-wombs. But that critique exists within a novel that scrupulously follows the ethos it creates to its logical end.

Though there's still room for a comical gorilla, a faithful wolf, and a drugged-out music promoter who somehow finds himself still human and stuck in the middle of things as the apocalypse heads to its end. Apocalypse, meaning 'the unveiling.' What's more unveiled than a person's naked skeleton?

And one first-person narrative consists of Skeleton Abraham Lincoln's story in the New World Order. Sarrantonio anticipates all those comic horror novels involving famous people, famous literary works, and newly added monsters. Though in this case, he's Abraham Lincoln, Human Hunter. It's a swell, bracingly comic novel. Highly 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.

Baptizing the Dead

The Ring 2: based on previous film and novel work by Koji Suzuki and Hiroshi Takahashi, written by Ehren Kruger; directed by Hideo Nakata; starring Naomi Watts (Rachel), David Dorfman (Aidan) and Simon Baker (Max Rourke) (2005): Here we go again. The homicidal ghost from The Ring continues to kill people in the year 2005 who are still using VCRs. Reporter Naomi Watts still has a lot of time to investigate the ghost's origins, not all of which were discovered in The Ring.

Hideo Nakata, director of the original Japanese Ringu, brings a certain amount of visual flair to certain scenes. Still, interminable exposition and a ghost with no real limits makes for dull viewing for long stretches. David Dorfman, reprising his role as Watts' vaguely psychic son, does a good job. Much of Simon Baker's role appears to have been left on the cutting-room floor. No wonder he headed to TV to become The Mentalist! Not recommended.

　

Warm Bodies: adapted and directed by Jonathan Levine from the novel by Isaac Marion; starring Nicholas Hoult (R), Teresa Palmer (Julie), Analeigh Tipton (Nora), Rob Corddry (M) and John Malcovich (Grigio) (2013): From the Forbidden Planet school of extremely loose Shakespearean film adaptations comes Warm Bodies, in which Romeo is a zombie whose sudden love for Julie/Juliet causes him to gradually turn back into a human again.

Droll bits early and late comes mostly from zombie R's narration. The middle gets swamped by Young Adult romance. Chaste Young Adult Romance. He's still a zombie, and only vampire movies explicitly sanction teen-aged necrophilia as an admirable lifestyle. Sort of enjoyable, though the CGI on the really-bad 'skeletal' zombies is completely awful and unconvincing. Lightly recommended.


13 Eerie: written by Christian Piers Betley; directed by Lowell Dean; starring Katharine Isabelle (Megan), Michael Shanks (Tomkins) and Brendan Fehr (Daniel) (2013): They made this Canadian horror movie for $3 million. In Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan! The low budget and filming location are the most interesting things about this warmed-over bit of zombie nonsense.

Six forensics students, their professor, and an unfunny comic-relief Dogsbody head to a secluded island for their final field exam. They take an hour in a boat and some time in a converted school bus to get there, seems pretty odd later when they're all standing by a highway. Apparently, it's only an island on one side. Various zany experiments were conducted on convicts. Then the government left everything, including the undead convicts and the undead chemical barrels that made them undead, behind. And some other stuff. The zombies look like Peter Jackson orcs. Not recommended.

Up from the Past

Rec 3: Genesis: written by Luiso Berdejo, David Gallart and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Leticia Dolera (Clara) and Diego Martin (Koldo) (2012): Enjoyable fake-found-footage Spanish horror movies Rec and Rec2 become a less enjoyable horror movie combining found footage and traditional narrative elements.

There are nice gory and goopy bits scattered throughout, but an awful lot of this is just rote zombie action set at a wedding. The interesting religious reveal at the end of the first Rec has become here a shovel hitting us in the face over and over again. Lightly recommended for people who have seen the first two and will see the fourth (and ostensibly final) installment.

The Big Sleep: adapted by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman from the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler; directed by Howard Hawks; starring Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Louis Heydt (Joe Brody), and Charles Waldron (General Sternwood) (1946): Perhaps the most indispensable hard-boiled detective film of all time -- only Chinatown rivals it, though The Maltese Falcon too has its champions.

Screenwriters Leigh Brackett (who would thirty years later work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back) and Jules Furthman and Chandler's original novel supply most of the verbal fireworks, William Faulkner having wandered back to Oxford, Mississippi in the middle of screen-writing to drink, hang out with his wheelbarrow, and inspire Barton Fink. Virtually all the dialogue crackles with wit and substance; the plot is twisty but ultimately perfectly logical (though depending on which version you see, the mystery of the chaffeur's murder may or may not be fully explained).

The performances are stellar throughout, with lengthy reshoots a year after the original completion of filming to beef up the badinage between Bogart and Bacall. Hawks directs with his trademark rapid-fire dialogue, and the black-and-white cinematography is beautifully deployed by Syd Hickox. If for no other reason, one needs to see The Big Sleep to fully appreciate the Coen Brothers' gonzo homage/parody, The Big Lebowski, with its warped parallel characters and situations (and use of the word 'shamus'). Highest recommendation.

Poltergeist: written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Craig T. Nelson (Steve Freeling), JoBeth Williams (Diane Freeling), Beatrice Straight (Dr. Lesh), Dominque Dunne (Dana Freeling), Oliver Robins (Robbie Freeling), Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne Freeling) and Zelda Rubinstein (Tangina) (1982): Stephen Spielberg essentially co-directed Poltergeist and controlled its post-production, and it shows: this is very much a mirror image of E.T., released within a week of Poltergeist in 1982.

Much of the early material with the family soon to be beset by vengeful spirits works pretty well; we're in Spielberg suburbia, where the Dad is distant (figuratively here; literally in other Spielberg films) and the Mother is the spiritual head of the family. The supernatural starts with what seems to be a furniture-moving poltergeist ("Noisy ghost") but soon moves into high-tech pyrotechnics, rubbery models, stop-motion trees, and large accumulations of skeletons rocketing up from the muddy ground.

I can't say the Spielberg kitchen-sink approach works all that well in horror -- indeed, many of the later effects here would be spoofed to a certain extent by Evil Dead 2. There are brief moments of wonder, but the Spielbergian need to underline every effect and every emotional sequence with music, flashing lights, and endless close-ups of people looking awestruck quickly dissipates that wonder.

One of the elements of the main plot -- the disappearance of the little girl from her own house into an alternate dimension, with only her voice being able to be heard in our dimension -- is lifted pretty much wholesale from the Richard Matheson short story and, later, 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost." Besides being afraid of old Twilight Zone episodes, original story-writer Spielberg was also apparently scared of trees, his face melting, clowns, and really large faces. And getting trapped in a crowd of skeletons. It's amazing how many of the horror tropes here previously showed up in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lightly recommended.

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon (1980)

The Night Boat by Robert R. McCammon (1980): This enjoyable, overstuffed, pulpy as all get-out early novel from McCammon gives us a World War Two U-Boat filled with undead Nazis terrifying a Caribbean Island in the late 1970's after the explosion of an old depth charge releases the U-Boat from its burial beneath tons of sand on the ocean floor.

One of McCammon's strengths throughout his career has been the density of his inventiveness in his novels -- stuff just keeps on happening even when it doesn't necessarily build from anything or to anything. Here, that density gives us three Ahabs in search of their great black-hulled Nazi whale, one of them suddenly appearing with about 60 pages to go. It also gives us a former Nazi Ishmael who shows up and then has almost nothing to do. Was this novel edited down from a much longer manuscript? I wonder.

Anyway, an expariate American scuba diver with a tragic past which will, of course, become a vital part of the story's machinery is compelled to unearth the submarine that's lain on the sea floor since 1942. It's the same sub that shelled the small Caribbean island of Coquina during World War Two before being sent to its apparent death by several sub-chasers and a lot of depth charges. But rise it does, to the astonishment of all, whereupon it drifts into the harbour and gets stuck on a reef. So the good people of Coquina elect to tow it into an abandoned military dock despite the fact that the sub managed to kill one fisherman during its trek into the harbour.

And from within the decades-sealed submarine...is that the sound of someone pounding with a hammer? Well, let's open it up and find out!

Did I mention that Voodoo plays a role as well? Of course it does. And undead zombie Nazis with an unquenchable thirst for blood and the ability to use tools. They can smash you with a hammer or fix a submarine. These are not your garden-variety stupid zombies. They have an ethos, and it's called National Socialism!

All in all, The Night Boat is a wild romp that pays off on enough plot threads to be pretty thoroughly enjoyable. McCammon would write much better novels, but no more enjoyable ones on the basic level of pulp melodrama. Recommended.

My Long Zombie Nightmare

Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, edited by John Skipp (2010) containing the following stories:

* ? Lazarus (1906) by Leonid Andreyev,
* ". . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields"(1929) by William B. Seabrook,
* The Return of Timmy Baterman (1983) by Stephen King,
* ? The Emissary (1947) by Ray Bradbury,
? A Case of the Stubborns (1976) by Robert Bloch,
* ? It (1940) by Theodore Sturgeon,
* Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed (2007) by Steve Duffy,
Bitter Grounds (2003) by Neil Gaiman,
* ? Sea Oak (1998) by George Saunders,
* The Late Shift (1980) by Dennis Etchison,
A Zombie's Lament (2010) by S. G. Browne,
Best Served Cold (2010) by Justine Musk,
The Dead Gather on the Bridge to Seattle (2010) by Adam Golaski
The Quarantine Act (2010) by Mehitobel Wilson
The Good Parts (1989) by Les Daniels,
Bodies and Heads (1989) by Steve Rasnic Tem,
* On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989) by Joe R. Lansdale,
* Like Pavlov's Dogs (1989) by Steven R. Boyett,
* Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy (1989) by David J. Schow,
The Visitor (1998) by Jack Ketchum,
The Prince of Nox (1992) by Kathe Koja,
Call Me Doctor by Eric Shapiro,
* The Great Wall: A Story from the Zombie War (2007) by Max Brooks,
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite,
God Save the Queen (2006) by John Skipp and Marc Levinthal,
Eat Me (1989) by Robert R. McCammon,
We Will Rebuild (2010) by Cody Goodfellow,
Sparks Fly Upward (2005) by Lisa Morton,
Lemon Knives 'N' Cockroaches (2010) by Carlton Mellick III,
* Zaambi (2006) by Terry Morgan and Christopher Morgan,
The Zombies of Madison County (1997) by Douglas E. Winter,
Dead Like Me (2000) by Adam-Troy Castro.

Six months later and I'm finally finished this anthology. Now I know how the survivors of a zombie apocalypse feel. There are a number of good and/or historically relevant stories here. I starred them. There are a number of stories that I wouldn't classify as zonbie stories because while they feature dead people walking, I wouldn't classify 'dead people walking' as the sole determinant of zombieism. I question-marked those.

The rest run the gamut from perfectly OK to dreadful, but being a nice fellow, I didn't indicate which ones are which. I must say, I'm exhausted by boundary-pushing hyperviolence, especially when it's linked to sex. I just don't care and I'm not scared. There's a surprisingly low 'fun' level here. Zombies are serious business. So serious that I don't remember what half these stories were about. They've all vanished into the eternal slurry of the walking dead, of what the walking dead leave behind.

But you know what? Zombies aren't a horror trope that can support all that much seriousness or social commentary. I think George Romero's Dawn of the Dead beautifully shows how much heavy lifting the zombie can do, and how much that heavy lifting must be leavened with humour and pathos. Not recommended except for the zombie obsessive.

Brain Candy: Not So Dandy

iZombie Volume 1: Dead to the World: written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Mike Allred (2009-2010; collected 2010): Breezy, fun DC Vertigo series about the adventures of Gwen Dylan, reluctant zombie, and her natural and supernatural friends.

Gwen looks relatively normal most of the time, but she needs to eat human brains once a month to avoid turning into a more standard shambling, drooling zombie. As she doesn't like the taste of brains, this is something of a drag. At least her job as a gravedigger gives her easy access to the gray matter she needs but doesn't crave.

And at least she has friends, most notably Ellie, a young woman/ghost who died some time in the early 1960's, and Scott, a were-terrier. Gwen gets stuck trying to figure out who killed the owner of the brains she eats near the beginning of this collection -- the memories of the deceased transfer to her, though understanding them can be something of a chore. And there will be other supernatural problems to face as well, including mummies and vampires and monster-hunters.

Roberson keeps things light without getting glib, and Allred's art is, as always, a clean-lined pleasure. It's funny that more straightforward, 'traditional' comic-book art continues to thrive in the Vertigo line while the 'mainstream' DC line gets ever murkier and ever more over-rendered and buried in a slop of full-process colour. So it goes. Recommended.

Best New Horror 2010

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 (2010), edited by Stephen Jones (2011), containing the following stories:

*What Will Come After by Scott Edelman
Substitutions by Michael Marshall Smith
A Revelation of Cormorants by Mark Valentine
*Out Back by Garry Kilworth
*Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History by Albert E. Cowdrey
Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls by Brian Hodge
*Fallen Boys by Mark Morris
The Lemon in the Pool by Simon Kurt Unsworth
The Pier by Thana Niveau
*Featherweight by Robert Shearman
Black Country by Joel Lane
*Lavender and Lychgates by Angela Slatter
*Christmas with the Dead by Joe R. Lansdale
*Losenef Express by Mark Samuels
Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside by Christopher Fowler
*We All Fall Down by Kirstyn McDermott
*Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge
*Telling by Steve Rasnic Tem
*As Red as Red by Caitlin R. Kiernan
*With the Angels by Ramsey Campbell
Autumn Chill by Richard L. Tierney
City of the Dog by John Langan
*When the Zombies Win by Karina Sumner-Smith

Series editor Stephen Jones gives us 23 stories this year, along with the lengthy annual 'Year in Horror' and encyclopedic 'Necrology' (the latter consisting of obituaries of writers, actors and others with some affiliation to horror, written by British horror expert Kim Newman).

I've starred the stories I think are really exceptional. The writing level is, as always for this series, high. Stories range from nouveau-Cthulhu by way of hardboiled Jim Thompson (Norman Partidge's "Lesser Demons") to the surreal ("Featherweight"), from zombies (three stories) through Lovecraftian ghouls ("City of the Dog") to unwanted, menacing fruits and vegetables ("The Lemon in the Pool"). Ramsey Campbell supplies a story about old family grievances and wounds that may or may not involve the supernatural. Caitlin Kiernan and Albert E. Cowdrey give us fine examples of closely observed historical horror -- or maybe historical-research horror would be a better moniker, as the protagonists dig deeply, too deeply, into the undead past.

Angela Slatter delivers a story that reminds me favourably of some of Tanith Lee's best work. Scott Edelman and Karina Sumner-Smith both deliver elegaic farewells to, well, zombies; Joe Lansdale gives us zombies and Christmas; Mark Samuels delivers a disturbing tale focused upon a character based on deceased horror writing and editing great Karl Edward Wagner. All in all, another good year. Highly recommended.

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell

Waking Nightmares by Ramsey Campbell (1991) containing "The Guide" (1989) "Next Time You'll Know Me" (1988) "Second Sight" (1987) "The Trick" (1980) "In the Trees" (1986) "Another World" (1987) "Playing the Game" (1988) "Bedtime Story" (1986) "Watch the Birdie" (1984) "Old Clothes" (1985) "Beyond Words" (1986) "Jack in the Box" (1983) "Eye of Childhood" (1982) "The Other Side" (1986) "Where the Heart Is" (1987) "Being an Angel" (1989) "It Helps If You Sing" (1989) "The Old School" (1989) and "Meeting the Author" (1989): This mid-career collection from Campbell contains a lot of dandy stories published over the space of ten years and written over the space of about 20.

　

It opens with one of the odder 'inspired by a true story' horror stories I've ever read, "The Guide", which takes the fact that British ghost-story writer M.R. James also wrote a guidebook to the Lancashire area of England and uses that starting point in one of Campbell's most Jamesian, antiquarian horror stories. It closes with a tale of a disturbing children's book writer, a disturbed child, and a story in which the presence of the supernatural remains ambiguous throughout, "Meeting the Author."

　

In between are some fairly horrifying meditations on childhood horrors ("The Trick", "Eye of Childhood", "Bedtime Story", "The Old School"), zombies ("It Helps If You Sing"), religious nutjobs ("Another World"), writers with major problems ("Beyond Words", "Next Time You'll Know Me"), supernaturally altered landscapes (the increasingly malign nature trails of "In the Woods"), guardian angels ("Being an Angel"), and what appear to be a possessed raincoat ("Old Clothes"), a sinister-yet-familar board game ("Playing the Game"), and a malign pub washroom ("Watch the Birdie").

　

Throughout, Campbell's eye for telling detail and sympathetic characterization shines. The endings of many of the stories may be ruthless, but the impact of many of them relies on Campbell's ability to elicit sympathy for a character within the confines of a few thousand words. Highly recommended.

Airplane 3: The Bloodening

Quarantine 2: Terminal, written and directed by John Pogue, based on Quarantine, written by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, which was based on REC, written by Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo and Paco Plaza; starring Mercedes Masohn (Jenny), Josh Cooke (Henry), and Mattie Liptak (George) (2011): Straight-to-DVD sequel to solid scarer Quarantine, which was itself a remake of the excellent Spanish horror movie REC.

This sequel abandons the first-person, found-footage approach of both Quarantine and the Spanish original for a more conventional narrative approach, one that's familiar whether you've seen it in Alien (1979) or Stagecoach (1939): a group of disparate strangers are trapped together in an enclosed space by menacing forces, in this case fellow travellers infected by the genetically engineered super-rabies of the first film.

The super-rabies spreads fast and makes its victims tremendously anti-social, much like texting. Who will survive and what will be left of them? The answer shades way more to the high-body-count Alien end of the dynamic than the Stagecoach end, where almost everyone survives. Like Alien, this one also involves a cat as one of the threatened.

A mid-sized passenger jet flight out of L.A. has unwanted passengers of both the rat and human variety. Hilarity ensues, as the super-rabies of the first movie makes its appearance while the plane is in the air, ultimately forcing an emergency landing in Kansas City. There, the plane is...quarantined!!! At a terminal!!!

Hence the title!!!

Much monstrous mayhem ensues. This isn't a great movie, but it delivers some scares and shocks and a couple of clever action-horror setpieces. The monsters are of the fast-zombie variety seen in the first, better Quarantine, though they're a lot easier to kill this time around. That's unfortunate, as the Pythonesque Black Knight quality of the original monsters was one of the more effective and horrific things in that film. Oh, well. Not great, but certainly an adequate time-waster, and superior to a lot of higher-budget horror movies of the last ten years. Lightly recommended.

BritZom

Shaun of the Dead, written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg (Shaun), Nick Frost (Ed), Kate Ashfield (Liz), Lucy Davis (Dianne), Dylan Moran (David) and Nicola Cunningham (Mary) (2004): Pegg, Frost and Wright made the jump from the loveable BBC series Spaced to the big screen here with this part-satire, part-straight take on zombies and the film geeks who love them. It's become a cult classic, and deservedly so -- it's sharp and funny.

Shaun is a retail drone (the movie overtly and repeatedly hammers us with the idea that modern jobs, and modern life in general, have made zombies of us all) saddled with a hilariously lumpen best friend, Ed, who messes up the apartment they share and steadfastly refuses to get a job. Shaun's having girlfriend troubles, partially because of Ed and partially because the only thing Shaun wants to do after work is have a few pints at the Winchester Pub.

Zombies really shake things up, and soon Shaun is the only remotely competent person in his group of survivors (which includes his girlfriend Liz's roommate and her boyfriend, Shaun's mother, and Shaun's stepdad). Who will survive and what will be left of them?

As with the later Pegg/Frost/Wright movie Hot Fuzz, comedy gives way to (relatively) straightforward action over the last 20 minutes of the movie. One's reaction to this will depend a lot on how many zombie movies you've seen and how funny you think the blood-and-gore stuff is. All in all, a dandy movie. Highly recommended.