Short Film: Malice in Wonderland

Had Sigmund Freud been around in the late 1960s and been a sugar-cube-eating hippy filmmaker of animated films, he might have made shorts like this Malice in Wonderland, Vince Collins' animated masterpiece and fine example of drugged-out psychedelia sexualis. This tripped out, nightmarish version of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not a product of the 1960s, however, but is actually from 1982. It is just one of many short visual overdoses that the filmmaker has made since he began his career as an unknown animated filmmaker, a career – and oeuvre of work – that really deserves far more attention than it gets. Vince Collins is still alive and kicking today in San Francisco, and has an entertainingly caustic page on MySpace.

Fido (Canada, 2006)

(Trailer.) Andrew Currie reveals a fine directorial hand and vision in his first theatrical release, a Canadian-produced zombie comedy entitled Fido (2006). The film is but one of many that has appeared due to the recent resurged wave of popularity of gut-munching zombies that followed Danny Boyle’s non-zombie zombie film 28 Days Later (2002/trailer) and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (trailer), a popularity that quickly also carried over to the comic take on the topic, as is evidenced by the success of such fine films as Shawn of the Dead (2004/trailer) and Slither (2006/trailer). But while the two latter zombie comedies owe more to postmodernist b-movie sensibilities and a healthy respect to George Romero and David Cronenberg, Fido's sensibility is shaped by a weird amalgamation of Pleasantville (1998/trailer) and the innocence of such films as Lassie (1954) or even the first zombie comedy of them all (and eternal guilty pleasure), Zombies on Broadway (1945). Fido is very much the mutant offspring of Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68) and The Night of the Living Dead (1968/trailer), liberally influenced by Father Doesn’t Know Best (1954-60), a television show that surely must exist in some alternative universe somewhere.
Fido more-or-less takes up where Shawn of the Dead leaves off, with the domestication of zombies as menial servants, but moves everything back to the Technicolor ideal of Middle America 1950s when intact families lived in suburban house with white picket fences and men earned the money while the dissatisfied housewives did the housework – at least they did if their husbands were too stingy (or zombie-phobic) to acquire an in-house zombie from Zomcom, the firm that created the collar that subdues the zombie hunger for live flesh and now controls the distribution rights of the living dead. The Zombie Wars are long over, and across America people live happily in fenced-in enclaves of safety, forever alert for the moment that Granddaddy drops dead of a heart attack on the front lawn and little Dick and Jane have to shoot him through the head instead of running away with their dog Spot. (And to ensure that they can do just that, shooting is part of their schooling, where the song they sing during class has such memorable lines as: "In the brain and not the chest. Head shots are the very best.") Timmy Robinson (K'Sun Ray) is the school geek, the skinny boy prone to ask questions that cause uncomfortable silences, the outsider classmate that even the town's Scouts beat-up on. When Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny), the head of security at Zomcom, and his family move in across the street, Timmy's mom Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss) decides she no longer wants to be the only one on the block without a house zombie, so she orders Fido (Billy Connolly) – much to the displeasure of her husband Bill (Dylan Baker), who still hasn't gotten over having to kill his own dad when he went zombie and tried to eat his son. Since then, Bill has just never been able to get close to people, something under which both his wife and son suffer. Slowly but surely, the curious, gentle and friendly Fido begins to win over the hearts of both Timmy and Helen, for as dead as Fido is physically, he is still more alive than the living, breathing Bill. The big problem is that Fido's collar doesn’t always work right, and soon he makes the bitchy old lady next door dinner. But even though Timmy manages to bump off and bury his newly zombified neighbour, one mistake leads to another and Timmy and Helen lose the most-liked man of their house when Fido is recalled by Zomcom. Timmy undertakes to rescue Fido with the help of his neighbour Mr. Theopolis (Tim Blake Nelson), who is particularly understanding about how attached one can become to one's zombie. But Mr. Bottoms catches Timmy in the act and locks him outside the fence in the dead zone. Can anyone, alive (his Dad) or dead (Fido), save Timmy?
That the film is an oddity goes without saying, but it is also a damn lot of intelligent fun. Although not exactly kiddy viewing, it is hardly as bloody as Shawn of the Dead or Dead & Breakfast (2004/trailer) and can thus easily be enjoyed even by those not prone to horror films. Fido has a skewering and skewered but dead-on satiric eye that takes the piss out of a lot more than just zombies and/or traditional family values. Aided by excellent production values, fine (at times sublime) acting and well thought-out script, Fido is a smart comedy that even stupid people can enjoy.

Zombie Lake / Le Lac des morts vivants (France, 1981)

Founded in 1937, by the 70s Eurociné was one of Europe's most active and exploitive trash film manufacturers. Still regurgitating an occasional film today, the company was most productive from the late-60s well into the 80s, when it spit out one low-budget Eurosleaze project after the other involving such honoured (?) names as Brigitte Lahaie, Lina Romay, Howard Vernon, Paul Naschy, Georges Montgomery, Christina Von Blanc, Jess Franco and Jean Rollen. The last two are the "creative team" behind this 1981 film, Le Lac des morts vivants, an infamous turkey better known by its international title Zombie Lake, although Jess Franco is reputed to have bailed from the project early on. He nonetheless is credited for the script, which is supposedly based on a story by Julián Esteban, who had written the demurely titled Franco film Sexo caníbal the year before.
Jumping on the bandwagon of the then-current popularity of gut-munching zombies instigated by the original Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the innumerable Italian rip-offs that soon followed, Zombie Lake cribs the basic concept of water-logged, homicidal zombie Nazis from the much better Shock Waves (1977) and moves the action from the Caribbean to the French countryside, where the legendary cuisine – and all those European nymphets that are so happy to get naked at the drop of a hat – simply makes the zombie Nazis much more hungry. (The following year Franco was to dry the gut-munching un-dead National Socialists out and move them into the desert for the equally notorious Oases of the Living Dead.)
In what looks to be the late-70s (going by the clothes, hairstyles, cars, interiors, signs, etc) but should be about 1957 (in accordance to the plot), a small town in France is suffering from a nearby cursed lake populated by zombie Nazis. It seems the lake is a once-sacred location that only allows eternal rest to the dead that are burned and enter the lake as ashes. At the end of WWII, however, local partisans ambush and kill a group of retreating Germans and throw their bodies into the lake whole. Thus, the Nazi dead can never rest and rise up occasionally in search of French food. Often they need not even leave the lake, for the superficially calm waters entice all young nubiles that pass-by to strip down to full-frontal shots and swim. (Thus giving the viewer some nice swimming bush shots when the green-faced Nazis start groping the girls from the bottom of the swimming pool where the “lake” scenes were obviously shot.) The blonde Nazi zombie eventually stumbles into the bedroom of 12-year-old Helena (played by Anouchka, the daughter of Eurociné's CEO Daniel Lesoeur) and they both figure out that they're related: He was bonking her collaborationist mother, who died when she was born. So when the other zombies try to make lunch out of her while the two are out for an afternoon stroll, he protects her, and as repayment little Helena collaborates with the villagers to destroy all zombies.
Zombie Lake is reputed to be a truly and incredulously incompetent piece of visual flotsam, and there is little more one can add to that, other than that to describe the film as such is actually a massive understatement. In comparison to Zombie Lake, every other bad film in the world surely must look like a piece of cinematic art. The script, which is not only padded excessively but is full of characters that disappear and events that lead nowhere, is an underdeveloped mess that makes more sense on paper than on the screen. Furthermore, the acting and direction and editing and make up are hilariously incompetent – in truth, there really isn't anything about the film that in any way gives an inkling of any professional experience or cinematic values.
True, the girls get naked a lot – basically, whenever they are about to die – but even this slight vicarious thrill is outweighed by the pain Zombie Lake inflicts upon one's retinal senses and intellect. (Were a copy of Playboy not both much more continuously enjoyable but intelligent as well?) Of course, the unbelievably extreme ineptitude of the project does also make Zombie Lake a relatively funny film, but one can only laugh so long at mental retardation before one starts doubting one's own self and sense. By the end of the film, one can't help but feel a sense of relief that it has finally ended.
Legend has it that Jean Rollin was brought in the last minute to make the film after Franco bailed, and that the master of French lesbian vampire cinema had but two weeks to cobble the film together. Were it not that Rollin actually has a small throwaway (and padding) part in the film as an investigating policeman from Paris, his involvement could be doubted, for little in Zombie Lake evidences Rollin's usual poetic touch – but then, perhaps he simply drank too much with the inebriated-looking townspeople that populate the film.

Shutter (Thailand, 2004)

(Spoilers ahead. And since the original Thai version of the film is such a good movie, maybe you should just skip the review for now and watch the film first.)

Now that the Hollywood PG-13 version of Shutter (2008/trailer) has hit the screen to almost unanimous derision it is time to go back and take a look at the film it is based on, a truly scary and well-made Thai horror film from 2004 entitled – what else but? – Shutter. Dunno just how bad (or, perhaps, good) the US version is, as I have yet to see it, but I do know that the original Thai flick, once I got over the early hit-and-run scene that initially cost all my sympathy for the two main characters (but later proves key to understanding them and their fates), scared the heebeegeebees out of me more than once and, in the end, impressed me by both its effectiveness and unpredictability – not to mention that the film also has one of the most ironically horrifying final shots ever caught on film.
The young photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee) are on their way home from a wedding party when Jane, the driver, accidently runs over a woman who appears from nowhere. In shock, Tun convinces Jane to drive on, and they leave the lifeless body in the road. As the guilt slowly gnaws at Jane's conscience, a ghostly figure begins to appear in Tun's photographs, in their dreams and in their daily life. Returning to the scene of the accident, they find out that no dead body was reported or found. The occurrences get increasingly scary and physically real as they delve deeper, and soon Tun's four friends of the wedding are all dead by suicide – the last one taking his life right in front of Tun's eyes. Jane finds out that the ghost is that of a young woman named Natre (Achita Sikamana), an odd and lonely student that Tun was seeing while he was studying. Could there be something more behind Natre's haunting than simple unrequited love? And why did she drive his friends to suicide?
First time directors (and scriptwriters) Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom supposedly were inspired to their story after seeing some photographs of a 1973 riot in Bangkok during which 77 protestors were killed. In a variety of the photographs, unexplainable ghostly images were to be seen, a phenomenon commonly known as "spirit photography". In Shutter, the concept of “spirit photography” is taken a step further, and the ghostly images that initially appear in the photographs taken by the film’s protagonists quickly take a far more physical form, terrifying the young couple in the typically Asian form of a long-haired white ghost which, as expected, glides along upside down at one point and, less expectedly, in other scenes spits out blood and teeth over a textbook or slithers along the side window of a moving car. But whereas the ghosts found in Ringu (1998/trailer), Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) and untold other Asian films could actually whisk you dead away or physically harm you, the ghost of Shutter is far more of the spectral type: She is less a hands-on representation of horror that kills than a nightmarishly corporal form of karma. And, indeed, as the last shot of the film reveals: Living with guilt on your shoulders can be worse than death.
If there is a flaw in the original Shutter, it is one that is probably based more on cultural differences that a (PC) Westerner cannot understand than on narrative failure: Perhaps, in Thailand, it is indeed worse to be caught on film being raped than it is to be caught on film as being the rapist (as in inferred by the rapists' request to be photographed in the act). Shutter is an excellent horror film that is as equally scary as it is – in the end – saddening. Hollywood may have fucked up with the remake, but the original version pays out in spades.