RE-ANIMATOR is one of those good old ’80s college buddy movies, you know? You got the tall, blandly handsome star student Dan (Bruce Abbott), he’s fucking the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton), there’s an uptight professor, Dr. Hill (David Gale – the one from SAVAGE WEEKEND, who I still don’t think is the same one THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE is about), who disapproves of the relationship. Then a new student comes to Miskatonic U., the socially inept but brilliant Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who maybe got kicked out of his school in Switzerland, or maybe had to flee. A troublemaker! Double secret probation!
Dan seems like a jock, Herbert like a nerd. Dan is a normal person, Herbert a creepy weirdo. And they become roommates! It would be fun if it was about Dan trying to loosen him up, bringing him to parties and stuff, or to pledge at a fraternity, but maybe that’s in the sequels.
I don’t want to say I’m a zombie fan. I mean, George Romero’s first three LIVING DEAD movies are some of my all time favorite movies. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a classic. Fulci’s ZOMBI 2 is pretty good. I keep watching The Walking Dead. And there’ve been other ones I’ve enjoyed. But I mean, it goes without saying that this particular type of monster has gotten overexposed. I do not envy whichever poor bastard decides to do a book chronicling all the zombie movies, and has to watch every imagination-free piece of shit that’s come along in the last ten years or so. Don’t make any more zombie movies for a couple ten years, you guys. You wore ’em out. I’m sick of fuckin hearing about em.
But it’s true, I do like a good one, and I was open to Brad Pitt’s blockbuster-budgeted zombie epic because it’s an approach that hasn’t been tried before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder... who *are* the walking dead, anyway? Is it them? Are *they* the walking dead? Or could it be that in fact, the walking dead are-- Wait, is that Sophia over there?
I guess about 9 million people watched the second season finale of The Walking Dead, so I was thinking maybe one or two of you saw it. And then I saw some of you talking about the show in the comments, so that supports the theory.
For those of you who are watching and all caught up to the end of the second season I need to ask you guys about the last couple episodes, get a couple things off my chest. So this will involve the ol’ spoilers, including deaths of characters, if you care.
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It’s safe to say NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is one of the most famous movies ever, right? It’s been remade and badly remade in 3D and colorized and sequelized and homaged and recut and it’s in the public domain and pretty much everybody’s seen it and even if they haven’t they probly have some kind of familiarity with the guy saying “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” in the cemetery as a zombie stumbles toward them.
This weird 1973 creep-out is directed by Willard Huyck, co-written with Gloria Katz. If you don’t recognize those names, they were George Lucas’s (alright, calm down everybody) friends from USC who went on to write TEMPLE OF DOOM and write/direct HOWARD THE DUCK. But back in the early ’70s they helped him write a treatment for AMERICAN GRAFFITI, then turned down the job to write that script when they were given a week to come up with an idea for a horror movie and then write it. They went and made this and got done in time to go back and write AMERICAN GRAFFITI after all. (read the rest of this shit…)
DYLAN DOG: DEAD OF NIGHT is a semi-clever and watchable but also not all that great or original supernatural detective type deal. It’s like CONSTANTINE but not as well directed and with more jokes.
Brandon Routh plays the title character (well, the “Dylan Dog” part of the title; the “Dead of Night” part is played by various undead creatures). I’m not really clear if “Dog” is his last name or if it’s just a cool nick name. Nobody ever calls him “Dylan Doggy Dogg,” but it might be short for that. Anyway he’s a private eye who is in on the secret information that there are vampires, zombies and other monsters living among us. (read the rest of this shit…)
“Hey, I didn’t think SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD was all that terrible. Just not very good.” That’s what I told my buddies who had seen it before me. They were surprised and appalled.
The word was abysmal on George Romero’s latest, especially from the guy I saw DIARY OF THE DEAD with. He agreed with me that although that one was an embarrassing failure at least it had some good parts. He offered no such mercy for the new one. (read the rest of this shit…)
Man, I knew everybody loved NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, but the way people talked about it I always figured it was some nostalgic grew-up-in-the-80s thing like GOONIES or heavy metal. No, it turns out NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is truly fucking great! You guys should’ve been more clear!
It’s a movie with a really unique feel. The only thing it reminds me of is RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, but for nerds instead of punks. It has a similar tone of funny-but-serious, similar stylishly cartoonish effects and puppet zombies (see thumbnail), similar confident visual style and storytelling. It lets the horror unfold a piece at a time (aliens, ax-murdering escaped mental patient in the 1950s, cryogenics, zombies, space slugs) and it just seems to know what it’s doing so I never questioned that it would all come together and make sense. And it did. It’s just great writing and directing – Fred Dekker, I forgive you for ROBOCOP III. (read the rest of this shit…)
Man, ZOMBIELAND was just begging for me to hate it. You know how picky I am about the balance between horror and comedy. And who the fuck makes a zombie comedy now? It feels exactly like that moment when somebody’s dad makes a reference to their favorite band from three grades ago, like he’s just catching on but he thinks he’s on the cutting edge. I was already sick of people talking about zombie movies back when SHAUN OF THE DEAD came out, and to be frankly honest even that one I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
I would’ve been even more skeptical if I had read up on it before seeing it, because I would’ve known it was written originally as a TV show by reality show producers trying to cash in on the “fast zombie” love during that couple weeks after the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake came out. It’s two writers and one of them says he’d only seen a couple zombie movies before (didn’t specify which ones), the other one had only seen SHAUN OF THE DEAD. And the director isn’t big on them either and had only done commercials before. (read the rest of this shit…)
I saw George Romero’s new movie DIARY OF THE DEAD. It’s basically “NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets BLAIR WITCH PROJECT” or “CLOVERFIELD with zombies” or “CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST – cannibal + zombies but not ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST.” It’s not a sequel to the living dead movies but kind of a do-over with the zombie plague beginning in the present day and depicted in documentary form. Some film students are working on a crappy mummy movie (come on George, this is 2008, only Rob Cohen makes mummy movies) when they start hearing news about the dead coming back to life, and their director is compelled to keep filming. We’re told at the beginning of the movie that his footage was edited by another character along with clips they downloaded from youtube, some news and security cam footage. Also she admits that she added music. And, I’m afraid, she narrates it.
I feel bad saying this but since nobody is reading this and it’s only a diary I will come out and say it: this movie isn’t very good. I enjoyed watching it and will list many of the good things about it right here on these pages, in the interest of balance. And in case Harry reads this because he got real mad at Quint for not liking it and I pretty much agree with everything in Quint’s review. But in my deepest, most personal secret opinion this is a failed experiment for old George. (read the rest of this shit…)
Man, I try to be a nice guy. I try to be an optimist. I was ready to burn the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake at the stake, but then I saw it and it wasn’t too bad. It’s a hollow action movie version of the original, but it’s a fun one, and it’s pretty well executed. I’m not too much of a hardliner to admit that.
So if they already remade that and did okay I wasn’t gonna be too up in arms about a DAY OF THE DEAD remake. And I was rooting for Steve Miner too. He’s the director and I’ve seen people talk shit about him here, but I have a soft spot for him. He directed my two favorite FRIDAY THE 13THs (parts 2 and 3) which are fun and have a good energy to them. And he still had some of that spark when he did HALLOWEEN H20: H20 STANDS FOR HALLOWEEN TWENTY YEARS LATER. Nobody seems to like that movie, and to be honest the Michael Meyers mask looks terrible, but I think it’s a pretty good movie. The ROCKY BALBOA of the HALLOWEEN series. And it has that great chase at the end, you gotta at least enjoy that. Ignore that bullshit in the next one about how Michael Meyers switched clothes with a paramedic. That’s for conspiracy theorists. Anyway because of those three movies I figured if they had to do a fast running DAY OF THE DEAD then maybe Steve Miner wasn’t a bad choice to do it. (read the rest of this shit…)
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* * * *
Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
Adam C aka TaumpyTearrs on M3gan 2.0: “I enjoyed the first M3GAN, and was bummed about the general negative reaction to this one. Vern, your review has…” Jul 2, 20:59
Inspector Hammer Boudreaux on M3gan 2.0: “That’s obviously going to be Chucky, right?” Jul 2, 19:16
Danger Mouse on M3gan 2.0: “Absolutely loved the movie. Definitely feel if it had been released in January like the first movie, it might’ve done…” Jul 2, 17:45
Franchise Fred on M3gan 2.0: “I agree with Sternshein it’s too long. By the third or fourth act it became a little exhausting but I…” Jul 2, 15:18
Miguel Hombre on War of the Worlds (20th anniversary revisit): “BRAIN FART ALERT – really messed up the Matt Zoller Seitz section, like him, I agree that War of the…” Jul 2, 15:07
Inspector Hammer Boudreaux on M3gan 2.0: “Hey I don’t care about profits on the level of artistic enjoyment, and I would never see something that looked…” Jul 2, 14:59
Miguel Hombre on War of the Worlds (20th anniversary revisit): “One little detail from the screenplay that I loved was that Ray is exactly the kind of small scale fuck-up…” Jul 2, 14:58
VERN on M3gan 2.0: “The THE THING poster was funny because I complain about that sort of thing in Stranger Things – it’s just…” Jul 2, 14:29
RE-ANIMATOR is one of those good old ’80s college buddy movies, you know? You got the tall, blandly handsome star student Dan (Bruce Abbott), he’s fucking the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton), there’s an uptight professor, Dr. Hill (David Gale – the one from SAVAGE WEEKEND, who I still don’t think is the same one THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE is about), who disapproves of the relationship. Then a new student comes to Miskatonic U., the socially inept but brilliant Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who maybe got kicked out of his school in Switzerland, or maybe had to flee. A troublemaker! Double secret probation!
I don’t want to say I’m a zombie fan. I mean, George Romero’s first three LIVING DEAD movies are some of my all time favorite movies. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a classic. Fulci’s ZOMBI 2 is pretty good. I keep watching The Walking Dead. And there’ve been other ones I’ve enjoyed. But I mean, it goes without saying that this particular type of monster has gotten overexposed. I do not envy whichever poor bastard decides to do a book chronicling all the zombie movies, and has to watch every imagination-free piece of shit that’s come along in the last ten years or so. Don’t make any more zombie movies for a couple ten years, you guys. You wore ’em out. I’m sick of fuckin hearing about em.
This weird 1973 creep-out is directed by Willard Huyck, co-written with Gloria Katz. If you don’t recognize those names, they were George Lucas’s (alright, calm down everybody) friends from USC who went on to write TEMPLE OF DOOM and write/direct HOWARD THE DUCK. But back in the early ’70s they helped him write a treatment for AMERICAN GRAFFITI, then turned down the job to write that script when they were given a week to come up with an idea for a horror movie and then write it. They went and made this and got done in time to go back and write AMERICAN GRAFFITI after all.
DYLAN DOG: DEAD OF NIGHT is a semi-clever and watchable but also not all that great or original supernatural detective type deal. It’s like CONSTANTINE but not as well directed and with more jokes.
“Hey, I didn’t think SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD was all that terrible. Just not very good.” That’s what I told my buddies who had seen it before me. They were surprised and appalled.
Man, I knew everybody loved NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, but the way people talked about it I always figured it was some nostalgic grew-up-in-the-80s thing like GOONIES or heavy metal. No, it turns out NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is truly fucking great! You guys should’ve been more clear!
Man, ZOMBIELAND was just begging for me to hate it. You know how picky I am about the balance between horror and comedy. And who the fuck makes a zombie comedy now? It feels exactly like that moment when somebody’s dad makes a reference to their favorite band from three grades ago, like he’s just catching on but he thinks he’s on the cutting edge. I was already sick of people talking about zombie movies back when SHAUN OF THE DEAD came out, and to be frankly honest even that one I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
Dear diary,
Vern here…
