The Dead One.

Also known as “El Muerto: The Aztec Zombie”, with a plot that sounds an awful lot like that of “The Crow”, Fez from “That 70s Show” plays a dude resurrected by an Aztec God.  The film was written and directed by a guy who also wrote and directed a movie called “Keepin’ It Real” with the tagline “This rapper’s got her moving to a different beat”.  So he’s potentially a jack of all trades, but also potentially a master of none.  It’s based on a comic book too, so promises to have a real comic booky kind of a feel.  Anyways, let’s let the jury decide.

[...]

[Flashback of Fez as a kid, and some crazy old witch doctor places a bizarre curse on him and cuts his hand.]

Lovelock: That’s why I never follow creepy old Mexicans into a desert canyon.

Starkwell: Have you really ever been presented with such an opportunity?

[Young Fez has a crazy vision with spirit animals and insane clouds and rain and the sun and WOAH…]

Lovelock: Wait… I spoke too soon.  Seeing that, now, I’d TOTALLY follow a crazy old Mexican into the desert.

[...]

Then we are back to present day and Fez is in love with the Preacher’s niece or something.  He apparently BLACKS OUT every year on the day of the dead, and THIS year, he woke up with a weird tattoo, went out that night, had visions while driving and drove his car into a tree.  DEAD.  Or… is he?

[...]

[Fez is suddenly laid out on an Altar and being torn apart by a pretty sweet looking Aztec Skeletor.  His LOVE for the woman brings him back to life. His eyes are all black.]

Lovelock: I’d rather stay back with Skeletor and find out what his deal is.

[Wait!  He’s actually been dead a whole year.  He woke up on the FOLLOWING year’s day of the dead.]

Starkwell: So, in “The Crow”, he comes back because he’s got unfinished business.  Unless he’s coming back to screw the Preacher’s Niece, umm… why is he back?

Lovelock: THE CUUUUuuuuuuRRRrrrrSE…

Starkwell: And that means… ?

Lovelock: It means they don’t need a real reason.

[...]

After going to see his friend and acting all weird he blacks out and wakes up in the cemetery.  Oddly enough, his buddy doesn’t seem all that shocked to see his DEAD friend.  He’s kind of just all “what you doing here?”

[...]

[Fez steals some shit from an old lady’s store and then beats up on two dudes that tried to go get the stuff back once he realizes he feels no pain.]

Starkwell: So… basically he’s a criminal and an asshole?

Lovelock: Give him a chance… he’s only just now discovering his powers.

[He touches a guy’s chest and changes the guy’s mind.  Then he touches a guy’s chest and brings him back to life.]

Lovelock: Part “The Crow”, part Jedi, part Jesus… ?

Starkwell: All pointless.  So far.

[I think Starkwell’s getting impatient.]

[...]

The story continues to unfold and it becomes clear that Aztec Skeletor is using Fez to do evil stuff there on Earth.  Fez is kind of half possessed, and half his old weeny self.  Skeletor takes over his brain when he goes to visit the Preacher though, and the Preacher dies, because Fez rips his heart out.

[...]

[Fez shoots himself with the Sheriff’s gun, accomplishes nothing.  Sheriff dies of a heart attack.  Fez revives him.]

Starkwell: He is just a terrible person.  What is the point of all of this?

Lovelock: The Aztec Skeletor is thinking pretty small if he’s going to all this trouble to just kill one Preacher.

Starkwell: How so?

Lovelock: Well, have him fucking DO SOMETHING.  Fez is just walking around confused and freaking people out.

Starkwell: And the Preacher?

Lovelock: Right, but that’s ONE body. One body?  Come on Aztec Skeletor, you can do better than that.  This ain’t exactly Hell on Earth.

Starkwell: True.  Also the make-up job is pretty weak for an Aztec Skeletor.

[...]

Lovelock: Is it just me or did they suddenly drop the whole dilated pupils black eyes thing?

Starkwell: Who knows.

[...]

I think some creepy blind wheel chair woman just got possessed as well, but I haven’t got a clue.  The body count is now up to two, as another Priest is now dead.

[...]

[Apparently Aztec Skeletor needs the blood of the Preacher’s Niece.  Possessed old wheel chair lady wakes up and stabs Fez.]

Starkwell: There it is.  The point of all of this, coming in just over an hour into the hour and a half film.

Lovelock:  I’m pretty sure that’s a dude playing the old lady.

Starkwell: She is quite homely, and tall.

Lovelock: Her huge Adam’s apple is the clincher.

[So, possessed old lady is Aztec Skeletor?  Why did they need Fez in the first place?]

[...]

After some more inner struggling (and some serious YAWNING from Starkwell an Lovelock) Fez regains power over his own brain and eventually stabs the old man / old lady / Aztec Skeletor.  They leave it open at the end, as if there would be more of these.  This was an ‘origins’ sort of story for the hero he would then go on to be.  I guess FILM-WISE, that never happened.  Thankfully.  Not a terrible movie.  But it’s a pretty damn boring one, with some sizably confusing holes in the plot.

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand.

Also known as "The Exorcism of Hugh", "Neither the Sea Nor the Sand" has a nice DVD release from 'Redemption'.  This time around we seem to have been spared the random naked lesbian vampire sequence that usually starts up with one of that company's DVD releases.  Instead, we get the menu and music accompanying it that would not sound out of place on an early episode of "Sesame Street" in one of those sequences where we learn about bottle factories or something.  This further confuses Lovelock and Starkwell as to what the film will be about.  I'm also concerned about the nearly two hour running time.

[...]

Starkwell: What's this movie supposed to be about?

Lovelock: I know two things it isn't about.

Starkwell: Please don't.

Lovelock: Neither the sea nor the sand.

Starkwell: You're an idiot.

[Movie opens up with a girl on the beach.]

Lovelock: Wait a minute… sea and sand?  Talk about false advertising.  This should have been called "Lots of Sea and Sand, totally right off the bat".

[...]

So there's this girl, and she seems to be out gallivanting with a lighthouse keeper.  She's got a husband back home though.  I don't get it.  She's SUPPOSED to be heading back home, but decides to stay behind, I assume to bang the lighthouse keeper, a dude named Hugh.

[...]

[Hugh's older brother raised him.  They live together in the house.]

Starkwell: So the older brother cooks for them, starts them a fire, cleans up, and she bangs HUGH?

Lovelock: Well did you hear how grumpy the older brother was?  No thank you!

[Then there's a big sex montage, full of skin, orgasm faces and nipple nuzzling.]

Lovelock: You're a married woman!

[In the morning, the older brother was all "SHE BETTER BE GONE WHEN I GET BACK."]

Starkwell: Awesome.

Lovelock: Is there gonna be a point to this, because we've just been watching a love affair for over half an hour?  No drama, no nothing.  Just two people being in love for half an hour?  Bullshit.

[Goofy music plays while they show a montage of the two being in love and escaping to Scotland!  Riding bikes!  Rolling around in a field! Crashing in the waves!  Doing sex!]

Lovelock: What the fuck position is that?

Starkwell: She seems to have enjoyed it.

Lovelock: Ugh. BORING.

[After the sex scene there was another goofy montage.  But this one ended with Hugh randomly dropping dead while running on the beach.]

Lovelock: That's why I'll never go to Scotland.

Starkwell: Yeah, that's why.

Lovelock: It seems to rain a lot.  And what's with all the sea and sand?

Starkwell: Well, at least the honeymoon is over.

[...]

In the middle of the night, Anna goes wandering and stumbles upon undead (?) Hugh.  He's up and walking around.  She doesn't look shocked or even all that weirded out.  In the morning they leave, to return to Jersey, without seeing the doctor (who pronounced him dead) and it is VERY clear that something is up with Dead Hugh.  He isn't talking, he's just following Anna around and staring at her.  Anna, on the other hand, still looks the same ol' bitch.

[...]

[Anna is trying to teach Hugh how to speak.]

Starkwell: Um… ?  What?

Lovelock: How is it she knows what to do with a dead guy?

[Dead Hugh telepathically (?) tells Anna that he loves her…]

Lovelock: Did she hear that or just us?

Starkwell:  Why isn't she more shocked by the fact that he is dead.

[The older brother comes home, and tries to explain to Anna that Hugh is a walking corpse, possessed, and doesn't feel anything.]

Starkwell: And now he isn't surprised either?

Lovelock: I'd like to think that if I came across a walking dead person that I'd be calm like that, and be able to be all "let's go to a priest to EX-OR-CISE him.  EX-OR-CISE."

Starkwell: I think you'd scream like a little girl.

Lovelock: What?

Starkwell: Or giggle.

Lovelock: Better.

[...]

So then Hugh runs his brother's van off the road sending him to his death, and a chime plays, and it looks as though Anna knows about it already.  It's bizarre and unclear whether or not Anna is controlling him.  What is clear is that Anna is fucking nuts and kind of an asshole.  Then they do telepathic sex, I think.

[...]

[After celebrating the brother's death over breakfast, Hugh telepathically asks Anna to kiss him and then attempts to literally suck the life out of her.]

Lovelock: And that's why you never kiss a dead man.

Starkwell: Well, that could be one reason.

Lovelock: I hope he smashes her head in with a rock next.

[...]

Hugh comes after Anna, he's all decomposing and she slashes his face up with a candlestick.  He leaves and starts walking SLOWLY towards the lighthouse.  She follows him, also very slowly.  After carefully showing her one or two mile journey / slow walk to the lighthouse, Anna and Hugh walk hand in hand into the rising tide and drown themselves.  Yeah, and then the credits roll.

[...]

Lovelock: HOLY FUCK, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!

BURT MALONE LETTERS: World War Z.

Burt Malone just sent me this lengthy email after seeing this weekend’s blockbuster zombie film, “World War Z”, and I figured it was a nice opportunity to give Lovelock and Starkwell some time off to recover.

[...]

If you’ve read the book you know that Max Brooks is all about the slowburn of the Romero-style shuffling zombie.  Within the first five minutes of the movie, it’s pretty clear that they threw that out the window along with Max Brooks’ blessing and probably a shitload of initial drafts of the script.

The only two things that this seems to have in common with the book are the title and the fact that it takes place in the ‘world’.  These zombies are not only NOT slow at all, but in fact they are MEGA EXTREME TO THE MAX.  Also, there is no war.  Now, given the recent popularity of a television show based on a comic book based on the Romero model of the zombie (slow, shuffling, menacing, flesh-eating, blargh), perhaps Brad and the 'Plan B' people figured they needed to take it in a different direction.  In an age when the Romero zombie movie has been done time and time again, as a comedy, drama, horror etc… perhaps Brad and the 'Plan B' people figured they needed to take it in a different direction.

Hmmm.

Guess what?  I can respect that.  I can respect originality.  But when you change something that is overtly stated by the source material’s author as WHAT A ZOMBIE IS, it’s insanely disrespectful, to both the author and to fans of the book.  So maybe you should consider changing the title, or something.  Fast moving, non-flesh-eating, collective consciousness (?) zombies that sound like velociraptors, react to sound like the T-Rex in "Jurassic Park" and have disease-detecting eyes ARE NOT WHAT MAX BROOKS FUCKING HAD IN MIND.  The zombies bite, but don't eat people?  Huh?

When Peter Jackson made “Lord the Rings” into a movie, he didn’t decide “hey, why don’t we give the hobbits shiny wings and flying abilities and make Gandalf a cyborg”.  You know why he didn’t decide that?  Because he is not a piece of shit, that’s why.  

“Maybe the dwarves should be way tall and the elves can shoot fireballs from their assholes.”

Moving on.

If you’ve read this book, you know that there’s no way to make it into a movie anyways.  I mean, how do you turn a large chunk of kind of unrelated documented events into a chronological film with characters?  You can’t, and you shouldn’t even try.  The actual “World War Z” as it exists in the book would be a war that would take hours and hours of screen time to develop.  It would have to be a mini-series or a TV show.  And in an era where, again, there is already a popular TV show essentially showing EXACTLY that, what would be the point in making another one?

Well, Brad Pitt would be in it, so I suppose people would still watch it.

So how do you take an outbreak and ‘war’ that would take dozens of hours to show properly, and somehow squeeze it into two hours?

FAST FORWARD EVERYTHING.  And I mean everything.  The world dies OVERNIGHT.

The zombies move in fast forward, and to be honest, so does the story.  The central character is not Brad Pitt, his family, or even the zombies themselves.  The central character is INVESTIGATION.  Because they just don’t have time to really give a shit about anything else, like details, developing characters, talking about the zombies or the virus AT ALL... all that stuff.

To be honest, the lack of character development doesn't stop me from liking Brad Pitt's character (as well as some of the side peoples), which is actually frustrating, because it just keeps reminding me how much better it could have been had the writers not been so lazy (or if they had at least read the book).  Considering the book is ENTIRELY made up of people telling horror stories of the great zombie war, you’d think that this film might at least try to have at least one scene wherein someone talks about how they lost their family or whatever (there is one scene where a guy mentions he lost his wife and kids, but it's not exactly a detailed story, more like "I lost my wife and kid").  But then I realize why that couldn’t happen in this movie.  With these ‘human tidal wave’ zombies, you can’t really witness anything and get away to tell stories about it.

If you see them, then you’re probably already dead.

So how did that guy manage to see his wife and kid die and get away?  And how did that Thomas kid get out of the apartment with a gun (spoiler alert (?) ) and manage to get up the stairs and save the day?

What the fuck.

There’s a montage shown in the last five minutes that speaks of (and kind of shows) epic ‘humans versus zombies’ battles, that at least SOMEWHAT resembles some of what is documented in the book.  So… the events in this movie take place before anything documented in the book?  Well, now I’m just more confused.  And in the end, we still have no answers.  We don’t even know whether or not humanity is going to make it. That would be fine ordinarily in a zombie film, except that, in the book (that this is supposedly based on), WE DID MAKE IT.  The whole book is after the zombie war ended.

FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Now.  Having said all of that.  I still enjoyed the shit out of this movie.

But... any merit that there is herein, and anyone else out there that enjoyed it, isn’t going to be able to save it from the barrage of pissed off fans of the book that will tear this thing a new asshole for being NOTHING like the source material.  Or critics expecting character development or emotion.  Or people wanting to see Romero zombies.  Really, that’s a shame, because there are some good ideas sprinkled around in here.  Like I said, lots of potential, which only makes watching it even more frustrating.

It's like taking all of the ingredients needed to make a delicious cake, but then instead making an omelette and not telling anyone where you hid the fucking cocoa powder.

"Didn't you follow the recipe?", asked Malone.  "Recipe?", replied the cooks.

It just needed to develop its characters more, develop some of its ideas a little more, and, obviously, NOT be called “World War Z”.  Because, guess what?  This isn’t “World War Z”.  It’s just a pretty good popcorn movie, which is still way more than I can say about a lot of modern day blockbusters.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, “Man of Steel”.

That's it.  I ate too much popcorn and need to go have a good sit.

[...]

Burt ain’t exactly a Zack Snyder fan, although he did mention to me that even his 're-imagination' of Romero’s "Dawn" was nothing even close to the TOTAL obliteration of the source material that “World War Z” was.  And the Oscar for "least like the book" goes to...

Autumn.

I haven’t really heard much about “Autumn”.  I think it’s a Canadian film based on a novel by David Moody.  I know it’s about a virus that wipes out the most of the population, who then eventually RISE!!!  The movie starts immediately showing a montage of people coughing up blood and dying, and some people surviving the apparent FLASH plague.

[...]

[We are introduced to some survivors.  People somehow immune to this.]

Lovelock: They seem to be taking this rather well.  I would have probably pooped and peed my pants while vomiting at the same time.  And screaming.  And crying.

Starkwell: I don’t think that would look very good on film.

[...]

What is it with these low-budget movies using bad songs for the soundtrack and basically having whole sequences that look like bad and boring music videos?  Not my question, it was Starkwell’s… I just paraphrased since his version contained many curse words.

[...]

Starkwell: The two British actors make the Canadian actors seem even worse at acting than they actually are.

Lovelock: True… but I don’t think that they needed any help.

[...]

Considering that the film’s runtime clocks in at a little less than two hours, both Lovelock and Starkwell are concerned, given the snail’s pace that we are currently oozing at.

[...]

Lovelock: He’s going outside for a smoke?  Oh those polite Canadians…

[...]

Starkwell: How come all of the planes didn’t come crashing down when the virus exploded?  And if the people in said planes didn’t get hit by it, why haven’t the planes landed and the airports been flooded with people looking for answers?

Lovelock: Enough of your ‘what if this really happened’ stuff.  Focus on the movie.

[...]

[The bodies get up and start walking around.]

Lovelock: That’s what I’m talking about!

Starkwell: You were just talking about corpses getting up?

Lovelock: Well… no… but… FUCK YOU.  You know what I mean.

Starkwell: Alright, settle down, I’m excited too.

[...]

Lovelock: Why would the guy dressed as a clown stay dressed as a clown?

[...]

Holy shit this film moves slowly.  Both Lovelock and Starkwell can appreciate a deliberate pace, but this is making Jean Rollin films seem fast moving.  Starkwell still thinks that everyone is way too calm and that they seem to be figuring out what is going on way too easily.  It’s like the walking dead don’t even shock them.

[...]

[Guy shoots gun at a zombie, zombie ATTACKS HIM!]

Lovelock: Well, it’s a start.

Starkwell: Aren’t you the one who always says ‘it doesn’t matter how we get there as long as we get there’?

Lovelock: Yeah, but it shouldn’t have to take this long.

[...]

[Guy watches zombies eat a dog, the movie then freezeframes on him holding binoculars.]

Starkwell: The movie isn’t long enough already? They have to pause on certain shots now?

[...]

Somewhere around the hour and fifteen minute mark, the movie really starts picking up some steam.  Lovelock and Starkwell were quiet, and extremely focused on the screen.

[...]

[Carl finds a wandering Homeless Man.]

Lovelock: David Carradine?

Starkwell: Well that’s weird.

Lovelock: Is that a “Trailer Park Boys” poster?  Awesome.

[Carradine brings Carl to see his mother.]

Lovelock: If they were going to have a guy whose mom is still alive, it might have made sense not to cast a seventy-five year old as Philip.

Starkwell: This whole scene is a perfect example of something that could have been completely cut from the movie.

[...]

[Carl gets eaten.]

Lovelock: Well, it took an hour and forty-five minutes, but we just had our first zombie attack.

[Movie ends mid-sentence.]

Starkwell: For a film that took THAT long to get going, it sure as hell ended abruptly.

[...]

A better budget, better acting, better directing, and better pacing and editing could have taken this movie to ‘Almost Zombie Hall’ status.  But then again, if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.