Rodrigo Blaas has worked as an animator for many years now on popular big-budgeted animated masterpieces such as Ice Age (2002), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), WALL•E (2008) and Up (2009); Alma is his first solo short film, and what a film it is. Well accompanied by a score by Nacho Mastretta, Blaas's award-winning short is without a doubt one of the most beautifully made computer animated short films around – and one of the most seriously disturbing. Opening with a fabulous long shot across the winter-time roofs of an unknown European city that travels slowly down to show Alma, a cute little girl, frolicking down a snow-covered street, the film quickly moves into the territory of Twilight Zone from Hell. The tale told is beautifully rendered and the narrative as tight as it is short — and, possibly, predictable — but the horror of the events leaves a terrible sense of despair and sorrow, even for those who do not have children. And while the film shows no blood and no violence, it could easily instigate nightmares for both small children and their parents. What did Alma do to deserve her fate? Nothing — she is a cute if mischievous child, but hardly horrid and in no way of deserving of that which befalls her. And possibly worst of all: she is actually still alive, capable of seeing and thinking — could there be a worse hell on earth than what she, now one of many, is cursed to live forever? Alma is a beautiful film, a terrible film — a film well worth watching. But be forewarned… The official Alma website is here.
Once upon a time, zombie movies are among the driest of horror movies. Even way back in the day of the non-flesh-eating zombie, say the time of White Zombie (1932 / trailer / full movie) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943 / trailer), humor was seldom to be found in a zombie flick — with the possible singular exception, of course, of the famed and entertaining guilty pleasure Zombies on Broadway (1945). And after film zombies started chomping innards for lunch in the late 60s, with the possible exceptions of Return of the Living Dead (1985 / trailer) and Dead Alive (1992 / trailer), up until Shawn of the Dead (2004 / trailer) there were few films that attempted (and less that succeeded) in mixing flesh-eating zombies with laughs throughout the entire flick.Since Shawn of the Dead, however, many a director has attempted to meld stomach laughs with gut munching; some — like virtually every subsequent film of the Living Dead franchise, the last and worst being Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005 / trailer) — less successfully; others, such as Zombieland(2009 / trailer) or Dead Snow (2009 / trailer), more successfully. But for all the social commentary that George Romero put in Night of the Living Dead (1968 / trailer / full movie), the classic (serious and straight) horror flick that gave birth to the contemporary genre of somnolently moving, flesh-eating undead, little of the comedy found in the funny undead films — with the possible exception of aspects of Fido(2006 / trailer) — could be described as socially or politically satirical.
“Mommy ate Daddy.”
But now, finally, a film has arrived that can fill that vacant slot on every zombie fan’s DVD shelf still awaiting an effective and bloody zombie movie that balances horror with its social satire: Zombies of Mass Destruction, the low budget debut film of director Kevin Hamedani. It might not be subtle, and it might take awhile before it gels, but Zombies of Mass Destruction offers a fine variety of laughs, gore pieces and occasional scares — with an added helping of well-drawn characters, excellent acting for a film of its budget, and fun plot development. The zombie action does take some time before it starts, but the slow build up only serves to give the various characters more personality and make them more than simple zombie-fodder. And, once the first face gets ripped off, Zombies of Mass Destruction does not skimp on the filicide, matricide, patricide, splashing blood, ripped and exploding body parts, and other such visceral and fun stuff. This is truly the stuff good films are made of! (OK, the film lacks T&A — despite the hot lead babe — but as a trade-off ZMD does offer a few scenes of a typically camp 50s AMGPhysique Pictorial filmic fun. [For the story behind that, you might want to watch Beefcake (1999 / trailer)].) Set in 2003 in the bucolic community of Port Gamble, Washington, the film opens with a blind guy that mistakes a zombie washed up on the beach as a dead whale — it is the last mistake he makes. From here ZMD goes into low speed cruise control to introduce various core characters: the Princeton dropout Frida Abbas (Janette Armand, a talented 10 on the babe scale who exudes likeability and can act), the American-born daughter of Ali Abbas (Ali Hamedani), a hard-working Iranian immigrant incapable of understanding his daughter’s lack of pride regarding her heritage; Mayor Burton (James Mesher), who’s running for re-election; the 700 Club hardliner Reverend Haggis (Bill Johns) and the various members of his limited congregation; the local “liberal” teacher Cheryl Banks (Cornelia Moore); the couple Tom Hunt (Doug Fahl) and Lance Murphy (Cooper Hopkins), who have come to Tom’s childhood home so that Tom can finally come out to his mom (Linda Jensen); and the Miller family, Frida’s typically neo-con middle class WASP neighbors. (In the fallout of 9/11, like so many "real Americans" they suddenly see their non-WASP neighbor with patronizingly different eyes.) Just when all the introductions are beginning to get excessive (despite the occasionally great underlying dry humor), Frida’s boyfriend Derek (Ryan Barret) gets his face ripped off by a zombie and suddenly the gut munchers come out in troves. Tom hardly has the chance to say "I suck cock" to his mom before she converts (she was bitten at the store that day) and Lance is forced to pin her to the wall with a poker. As Ali charges through the streets like a zombie-hunting Rambo in search of his daughter, Frida comes home to a locked house and is forced to take refuge with the Miller’s in their basement. Learning that the zombification of the townspeople is the result of an Islamic extremist terrorist attack, Daddy Joe (Russell Hodgkinson [seen somewhere in the background of Tim Burton’s exercise in whimsy, Big Fish (2003 / trailer) and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (2009 / trailer)]) is convinced Frida must be in on the act and ties her down to — shades of the American way at Guantanamo Bay — torture the "truth" out of her. Will she escape? What about Momma Judy (an attractive Victoria Drake), who’s been bitten, and their wimpy son Brian (Andrew Hyde), who has had an eternal crush on Frida since a young tyke? Across town, Tom and Lance cross paths with Cheryl and take refuge in the church, where Rev Lance is convinced Armageddon is finally at hand. As a last act of faith, he and his flock decide to convert Lance and Tom into heterosexuals... ZMD is a rarity: a zom com that doesn’t go just for sitcom laughs or pop culture giggles. A product of a US-born man with Iranian roots that experienced the illogical and misdirected fear resulting from the tragedy of 9/11 and the Bush Administration’s brain-nullifying use of color-code scares to push through their subsequent agenda, ZMD sets it sights on social, religious and political stupidities and rips into them much like the zombies rip into their meals. Sure the broadsides are aimed at “sterotypes”, but then, the US is a land of stereotypes (any and all presented are probably to be found within any 2-generations of collected family — I know I can find them in mine). Much of the social and political aspects attacked in the film are as much of everyday society now as they were in 2003, and by taking the piss out of them ZMD becomes much funnier, more relevant and more on target than the average sitcom or semi-humorous drama that gets rave reviews and popular acclaim for its safe laughs and campy high drama. As to be expected, ZMD keeps its focus mostly on the right — a side that has never much been able to laugh at itself — but it does take a quick and trenchant stab in its last scene to the liberal tendency of flipping easily into conservatism (ala Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Michael Medved, and David Zucker, for example). If you laugh at Friends reruns or Two and a Half Men, you probably won’t find Zombies of Mass Destruction funny — and neither will most stick-in-the-muds, libertarians and Baptists. But watch it with a group of fun-loving liberals and/or foreigners, and the laughter will be as contagious as a zombie’s bite. In short: Zombies of Mass Destruction is bloody fun time.
"Hello? I'm opening the door, if you want to stop what you're doing and put your clothes on!" Kelly
(Spoilers.) Another one of those films that is hard to either hate or to like because there are so many reasons to do both. After a slew of high-budget flops, Carpenter returned to his low-budget roots for this bodycount horror film that liberally steals aspects from films as diverse as Five Million Years to Earth (1968 / trailer) and Demons(1985 / trailer), not to mention countless other zombie and kill-by-number movies. (That Carpenter owes something to Five Million Years to Earth is underscored by the fact that he credits the movie's script to "Martin Quatermass," a direct reference to the main character of the Hammer film and the English television series it was based on.) Peppered with all sorts of quantum physics and religious mumbo-jumbo and featuring a flawed narrative from beginning to end (not to mention a group of unlikable non-characters with horrible 80s blow-dried haircuts), what works the best in this film is its low-budget atmosphere and the cheap tension that mounts as the next would-be victim approaches his or her unavoidable doom. Featuring what may be the longest opening credits sequence in the history of films, The Prince of Darkness also features one of the few times in which Carpenter's music actually helps build tension. True, it is basically the exact same dirge that he has used in every other horror or science fiction film that he has yet made and scored, but for some unexplainable reason it doesn't annoy as much as normal. In one way, The Prince of Darkness is almost the flipside of They Live! (1988 / trailer), Carpenter's project the next year, another film which also featured a large amount of homeless people. Unlike They Live!, however, in which the homeless are good people repressed as the result of an alien invasion, in The Prince of Darkness the homeless are presented as all being minions of evil. The film got a bit of publicity out of the fact that Alice Cooper is featured as one of the evil street schizos, but he never really does anything other than stare gap-mouthed at the church or impale one or two faceless victims. Whereas Five Million Years to Earth features an ancient spaceship that releases evil unto the world once discovered, The Prince of Darkness has an old canister of green ooze that slowly releases evil unto the world. In Demons and Demons II (1986 / trailer) there were infectious body fluids that changed the people into evil critters (an idea that became a staple to horror films as of The Night of the Living Dead [1968 / trailer] at the latest), in The Prince of Darkness there is either infectious, spurting ooze or projectile puking. The canister, from which the evil first oozes, hidden from the public in a church in downtown Los Angeles for thousands of years (!) by The Brotherhood of Sleep, a once super-powerful secret society within the church (so secret that it is even unknown to the Pope), is discovered by Father Loomis (Donald Pleasence) when the last of the Brotherhood dies. Loomis calls in quantum physics professor Edward Birack (Victor Wong of Big Trouble in Little China [1986 / trailer] and Tremors[1990/ trailer]) to study the thing, who in turn drags in some dozen students and other people for the weekend. Of course, in no short time the ooze decides to ooze out and one by one the bodycount grows as the various idiots wander around alone and get puked on. Kelly (Susan Blanchard) is the chosen one who gets to swallow the whole canister and thus become the blood and pustule encrusted entity needed to release the all-powerful evil one from his imprisonment. Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker of White Dog [1982 / trailer]) is the film's nominal hero, but he does relatively little other than make the viewer wish that he would die. Catherine (Lisa Blount of Blind Fury [1989/ trailer] and Dead & Buried [1981/ trailer]) is Brian's nominal love interest who ends up sacrificing herself so as to save the world. But wait! Was her sacrifice in vain? Another typically open ending is tagged on as a last scene so as to let the viewer decide for themselves... If your New Age mom is into quantum physics then The Prince of Darkness is the film for her, though it probably presents the subject in a light she never really thought about. Other people might like the tastelessness of watching infectious projectile puke flying into the open mouths of various would-be zombies of evil, or the sight of one particularly unimportant and instantly expendable character (Robert Grasmere as "I have two lines in the whole movie" Wyndham) get eaten by beetles. Once Kelly gets her stomach full of ooze, her gradual development into an unstoppable evil is rather scary (primarily because we are forced to watch it along with some character locked in the closet of the room), and how she keeps replacing her head every time Father Loomis chops it off with an ax is also fun to watch. Just try to ignore the thousands of candles lit by nobody, the people walking around alone and stupidly ignoring all the strange things going on, an ignored bruise that is too obviously not a simple bruise to ignore, a girl who stares at an obviously unnatural phenomena instead of running from it, some brainless concept about dreams being a message from the future and the various other flaws in the story. The Prince of Darkness is definitely no masterpiece, but for a low-budget film it delivers its cheap wares more than effectively. It'll scare the shit out of your kid brother, if he can make it through the quantum physics shit without getting bored. It's definitely better than the Italian version of the story that came out the next year, Michele Soavi's La Chiesa (aka The Church or Demons III [1989 / trailer]).
Save the Green Planet! — or, in Korean, Jigureul jikyeora! — is a Korean genre-bender from 2003 that was originally met with both good critiques and a number of awards (in Rotterdam, Moscow, Buenos Aires and Brussels, among other places). When the debut film of director Joon-Hwan Jang finally got an English-language release, however, it pretty much nose-dived straight into obscurity. In Europe, it went straight to DVD and has done little other than gather dust on shelves since then. A fate not at all surprising, for Save the Green Planet! is one of those rare films that defies all expectations by simply flying in the face of all of expectations. Is it a comedy? Science fiction? A horror flick? A thriller or detective movie? Some sort of social critique? It is, in the end, an original, off the wall, painful and continually surprising mix of all those genres; and as such, it is truly a movie with cojones as big as basketballs — and what it has, it knows how to use. The plot is as convoluted as it is simple, and for the sake of keeping the film’s many twists and turns and oddball and terrifying developments a surprise for the viewer, not too much of it should be revealed. In short, Lee Byeong-gu, a man whose life has been shaped by tragedy, is convinced that aliens are not only coming to destroy earth — the titular green planet to be saved — but that Kang Man-shik, the head and founder of an unscrupulous chemical corporation, is an alien spy. With the assistance of his dim and chubby circus-performer girlfriend Su-ni (Jeong-min Hwang of Black House [2007 / trailer] in a role modeled lightly after that of Gelsomina in La strada [1954 / trailer]), Lee Byeong-gu kidnaps Kang Man-shik and locks Kang up in the basement of his mountain retreat in an attempt to learn all about Kang’s "royal genetic DNA code" before the next full moon, the date of the invasion. As he and Kang play a game of physical and psychological torture, disgraced Inspector Choo (Jae-yong Lee) and the young policeman Kim (Ju-hyeon Lee) slowly hone in on the mountain hideaway... Sound simple? It is — and isn’t. The bare-bone description reveals the basic strand of the plot, but fails to do justice to the unexpected layers and crazed intricacies added to the gossamer thread. Indeed, Save the Green Planet! is one of those films that continually reveals new but relevant asides during every repeat viewing, even as it at the same time manages to reveal enough in one viewing to reach its macabre and inane but perhaps indivertibly logical ending. For a first-time director, Joon-Hwan Jang has a fine eye not only for setting up and filming scenes, but his control of his actors is top notch. Ha-kyun Shin (as Lee Byeong-gu, the possibly not-nutty nutcase) and Yun-shik Baek (as Kang Man-shik, the kidnapped businessman) excel in their roles, both doing an incredible balancing act with their characters, thus causing the viewer's sympathies to move back and forth between the two characters at any given time as the given man oscillates from being a psycho to tragic loser or from being an asshole businessman to man desperate to survive. Not that the opening kidnapping scene of Save the Green Planet! indicates that either of the two actors would do much with their parts, or that the direction would be any good, for it is perhaps the worst scene in the movie, indicating a possible eventual descent into third-rate burlesque comedy so common of so much Asian cinema (see the Japanese film Hiruko the Goblin [1991 / trailer] or the Chinese film A Terra-Cotta Warrior [1990 / trailer] for two films that are literally ruined by their Three-Stooges-like "humor"). Luckily, as much as the film retains an odd and wry humor even in its many blackest moments — and the film does indeed have a lot of truly black moments — Save the Green Planet! quickly leaves burlesque far behind in favor of a humor far less easy to describe.... Those who like their films pasteurized are probably going to find Save the Green Planet! as annoying as those who like their genre films straight up with no rocks, olives, cherries or twists. This flick is a cocktail, a cocktail with a mixture that tastes different with every sip and ends with an odd love-it or hate-it aftertaste — although it may take days before you decide which way you yourself go. But no matter whether you end up loving it or hating it, you’ll have to admit Save the Green Planet! is truly something original and different — and that alone makes it a rarity worth watching.
