Burly Movies: ZOMBIELAND

ZOMBIELAND is kind of false advertising. When I think of a zombie, I think of a slow, shambling Romero zombie. Of course the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD a few years ago moronically suggested zombies can run, jump, do all kinds of neat frenetic sh*t. Boring and stupid barely covers it. Anyway, even movies involving mindless flesh-craving maniacs, like the excellent 28 WEEKS LATER, who live only to spread their virus, has been classified as a "zombie flick."

Complaining gets us nowhere in the current culture. I won't call viral outbreak movies "zombie" movies, since a zombie is technically dead and "infected" people aren't dead. If someone was really clever, they'd make a movie about what happens when infected maniacs fight Romero zombies. That'd be kind of cool.

See, the running zombie will never frighten me. It's like making a movie about vampire teddy bears. It's ridiculous unless you're afraid of such things already. Since logically there should never be a running zombie, I guess I find them hard to take seriously.

Romero's zombies, of course, creep. They are easily escaped from by another who can run fast and far. Except there are a lot of Romero zombies, and they never stop creeping. Eventually they always catch up, because you have to rest, you have to sleep, you have to forage for food. And they'll creep up, and sooner or later they'll drag you down. Not only that, but one of them will probably be your dead old dad or your toddler. You'll know their name, which you get to scream while they feast on your intestines.

That's what scares the crimson butter out of me about Romero zombies. It's all contextual and social and, well, horrific.

Which brings us to ZOMBIELAND, which is a comedy. I didn't see this until recently despite being drawn to zombies of all types, Italian and Japanese and you name it. I fear the "zombie comedy" in the wake of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, which respected the sub-genre while still telling a smart, funny story. ZOMBIELAND doesn't fall into that category, since it isn't about zombies. It's about people infected by a virus, who develop into maniacal cannibals.

Which is keen. I can deal with cannibals, even cannibals who are called zombies even though a zombie can't be a "cannibal" any more than a shark can be a fisherman. They may both eat the same thing, but they aren't remotely the same species. Not when one of them are dead. Cannibalism is a conscious desire to eat human flesh. Zombies are driven by a mysterious primitive urge buried in their dim recesses.

The cannibals in ZOMBIELAND, like many in these "running zombie" times, lack "personality." With the creeping zombie you have a chance to identify the zombie by his clothing, his skin color, or the way he was killed. This is how you get "characters" like Clown Zombie and Butcher Zombie and whatever Social Caste Zombie you want to put forth. You can individualize the zombie within the mass of flesh-eaters, providing some kind of sad identification between the audience and that monster. The realization: the monster is us.

There's nothing like that in ZOMBIELAND, but you do get a comedy which plays off the new cultural recognition of the "zombie" tropes and pratfalls. You get a story that plays like a deft, self-conscious discussion about how great it would be if human beings turned into monsters. Because in that world, any man is king of his own fate. The choices are your own. There is an ideal of freedom in taking what you want, taking what you can carry, and taking what has always been denied you. That might be self-respect, or a new car, or a particularly hot girl who'd never have anything to do with you otherwise. But it would be good to be king, even in an imposed cannibal hell.

Burly Reading: TALES OF THE ZOMBIE

Transported from my previous blogsite, "Pulp Hero", from February 2009:

Introduced in a one-off story in 1953 by the esteemed Bill Everett (creator of Marvel Comics' headliner Namor the Sub-Mariner in the 1940s, and then co-creator of Marvel's headliner of today, Daredevil, bridging a gap for Everett that will reach into the far future,) Simon Garth was a coffee magnate in New Orleans already "soulless" in his dealings, brutal to his employees and dismissive of his daughter Donna who is all the family he has since his wife divorced him.



Garth takes out his failed marriage on subordinates, and smacks around a groundskeeper named Gyps at one point. Gyps is heavy into the voodoo however, and later kidnaps Garth to be sacrificed by a local Mambo priestess, Layla, who happens to be Garth's secretery at the coffee plant and is in love with him.



Freed by Layla, Garth almost escapes before being killed by Gyps. Gyps then forces Layla to reanimate Garth as a zombie, eventually to be under Gyps' personal enslavement. This is managed by the Amulet of Damballah around the Zombie's neck, which enables the holder of another Amulet to mentally control the dead man. As a Zombie, Garth cannot feel physical pain or sensation at all, and is unstoppable due to having "zombie strength" wherein neither pain nor fatigue are a factor, and any wounds he receives "heal" after a time. This is due to the curse of being a zombie, that he will never rot away. His soulless body is magically "protected" from the ravages of time and physical damage, except for the basic zombiefication of the tissues at hand. Garth also has no thought processes of his own. At least, that's the way it appears.



Hot for Garth's daughter, but knowing she'd never give him the time of day, Gyps sends the Zombie to attack Donna, which Garth refuses to do. The cloud of mindlessness dissipates, and Garth returns to Gyps and slays him.

After this, the Amulet of Damballah worn by Gyps ends up in the possession of Donna Garth, as she senses a connection through it to her father. Donna influences the Zombie to follow her, without her knowledge, all the way to Port-au-Prince in Haiti where she is seeking information about her father's disappearance (not realizing he is dead, natch.) The Zombie instinctually finds one of his oldest friends in life, Anton Cartier, who vows to help Garth return to human life. It's here that Garth exhibits enough intellect to actually communicate with Cartier, convincing Cartier the soulless Zombie is not so soulless after all.

This leads to a series of adventures for the Zombie, who encounters mad scientists and giant spiders and rampaging voodoo priestesses. At some point, Donna Garth loses the Amulet of Damballah, which is found by a ruined, bitter homeless man named Philip Bliss.



Bliss inadvertantly called the Zombie back to New Orleans, and once discovering his control over the dead man, uses him to savagely attack the "lawyers" responsible for destroying his life, leading to a mass slaughter in a Bayou courthouse.

Subsequently, agents of a strange wealthy man named "Mr. Six" find Bliss and steal the Amulet, which leads the Zombie to his new master, a cultist named Papa Shorty. Bliss and a couple of friends attempt to save the Zombie from his fate, and in the resulting carnage, Garth is freed from Papa Shorty's sway and gets revenge for Bliss' ultimate sacrifice.

Soonafter, Garth ends up back with Layla, who had tragically initiated his zombiefication to begin with. Determined to help Garth find final peace, she takes him to Papa Doc Kabel, her voodoo grandfather. Along the way, Layla and Garth are continuously stymied, as the Amulet of Damballah is found by other bystanders, luring the Zombie away to eventually do their bidding (and usually resulting in their violent deaths by Garth's hands.)

In a real twist, Garth is responsible (under the control of an evil man) of mortally wounding Layla. Papa Doc uses Layla's fading life force to grant Garth twenty-four hour reprieve from his zombie curse. Again himself, Simon Garth wraps up his affairs as quickly as he can, gaining whatever vengeance he needs to (on Mr. Six, specifically) and redemption via his ex-wife and daughter, insuring financial security by selling his business out from under his corrupt underlings. After that, Garth becomes the Zombie once more, and his story ends in an odd, "real-world" way. Editors at Marvel claim the art of Pablo Marcos for what turned out to be the last issue of TALES OF THE ZOMBIE was lost in the mail, somewhere in Haiti. One imagines today a gris-gris seller's family home still containing a penciled Marcos Zombie story among the practitioner's aging files and books.



The bulk of Simon Garth's extraordinary "life" is chronicled by Steve Gerber, one of Marvel's better writers of the 1970s (MAN-THING, THE DEFENDERS) and the kind of writer who could pull off stories about a zombie.

Using the formula from MAN-THING, about a mindless shambling monster who cannot communicate or show emotion except by his actions, Gerber does the same thing with Simon Garth. Primarily, Garth is a judgement of sorts called down to bring home the point of the stories. The characters drive the story elements while the Zombie acts out his mission, and eventually collides with the holder(s) of the Amulet of Damballah. Most of Garth's clashes are driven by forces outside of himself, but the final penance comes from Fate, as always Garth brings about the definitive end to evil people seeking to manipulate him. They never last long, that's for sure.

For the final two entries of the Zombie's story, fellow Hall of Famer Tony Isabella scripted. All in all, the nine black and white mags containing Simon Garth's trials are consistently well-written, and because of the magazine's more "adult" orientation, Gerber and Isabella could touch on violence and moral degradation and horror much more explicitly. Of course tame by today's standards, the violence in the stories still holds up today.



The real star of the show is Pablo Marcos, one of a horde of Fillipino artists working for the major comics companies in the 1970s. Presumably from a shack in a tree in some jungle environment with only a small rattling fan to cleave the oppressive heat, Marcos' art on this title is nothing short of brilliant.

Luckily for me, and for all of us, this stuff has found its way to modern readers via the ESSENTIALS format. Because it was meant to be in black and white, the reproduction is solid, and Marcos' gorgeous art leaps off the page so you can almost smell the rot of Haiti, the sexuality of the priestesses, the desperation and the blood leaking onto the hungry earth.

Also, it cannot be ignored the impact of the covers of these magazines, by no less than fantasy/sword and sex painter Boris Vellajo for the first five, and the brilliant Earl Norem for the last five. The covers are frame-worthy before you even get into the Marco's swoon-inducing work inside, and the Steve Gerber story insanity to follow (though certainly not as insane as some of Gerber's work, for sure.)

This is a must-read for anyone and everyone who loves good horror stories told through a tragic Pulp Monster like the Zombie. Everything you'd ever want or need is right here in this volume. Truly a masterpiece of the 1970s and one of the reasons the decade's better moments are exquisite counterbalances to its, and subsequent unfortunate decades', excesses.

Find the Zombie, before he finds you.

The Horror, the Horror...Halloween Countdown 2009

So, despite all the terrible reviews (I feel like) I read, I pulled DIARY OF THE DEAD, the fifth "official" George Romero zombie flick, released perhaps a couple years ago. I'd had some trepidation about it, considering LAND OF THE DEAD (the fourth) was more than serviceable but showing some "strain" in Romero's attempt to navigate a "studio" zombie movie.


With DIARY OF THE DEAD, Romero is working more "independently" once more. The red flags for this movie, however, begin with Romero returning to the initial moments of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD territory, refitting his zombie mythos into our current society, with its hubris, its slavering consumerism, its shallowness.


Man, I wanted to like DIARY, and it's still better than most zombie ilk made in the wake of DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1979 (not the admittedly fun but excreable remake...which takes a premise and dumbs it down significantly--another strike for Romero in that he "embraced" the remake, which is like me "embracing" a Tarzan movie starring Zach Braff)...which is to say, DIARY OF THE DEAD is a monumentally pretentious movie that hamstrings Romero in a way I've never seen before.


I've loved most everything Romero has done (still haven't seen all of KNIGHTRIDERS), and I think he was and is still as good as ever. His movie BRUISER was a fantastic "idea" movie, probably the best of modern Romero. LAND OF THE DEAD suffered from a desire for Romero to create sympathy for the Walking Dead, accomplished in a method that fit Romero's more proletariat style...Romero may layered his stories with social commentary, but subtle he ain't. "Thinking" zombies was almost as bad as "running" zombies, but you couldn't argue Romero didn't know how to shoot the sh*t out of a good zombie slaughter scene, whether the eaters are eating or getting blown away.



DIARY OF THE DEAD strains credulity, sure, but worse it just heaps on the heavy-handedness with its characters. The idea is that a group of Pitt college kids are shooting a class-project horror movie and stumble into Romero's "new" Zombie Apocalypse. One kid, name of Creed, decides to document the events on camera, downloaded to his laptop and edited, for posterity and presumably to become "famous." This isn't a short-coming of the movie at all. I liked the set-up actually...the characters are really hard to stomach. Everyone is incredulous that Mr. Creed is filming death, moray decay and cannibalistic murder, but nobody tries to stop him. Romero never touches on the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, all these youthful bright lights want to be stars. Even if it's the movie about the end of the world.


Instead most of the flick is concerned with a bunch of pompous posturing by various characters, which does fit in with the modern mindset of "starring" in each and every one's own movie. The problem is that the Creed kid just simply has no strength, moral or otherwise, while the "center" of the movie is his girlfriend, a "college student" if she didn't look thirty years old. Her strength comes from constantly brow-beating her poor boyfriend for his sketchy ethics in the crisis, and as understandable as it is...well, the kid never has a good argument for his actions. Frankly his relationship with this girl doesn't seem remotely real...without any basis for emotion, we can't have the tense attraction as between Ben and Barbara in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, or the strained need of Stephen and Francine in DAWN OF THE DEAD, or the playful pull between John and Sarah in DAY OF THE DEAD. In the fourth film LAND, the failing of DIARY's central relationship is also clear, a kind of muted charm without heat. The problem with LAND and DIARY lies wholly within their inability to make us care about the characters. This wasn't the case at all in the first three movies, but Romero's natural subtlety hinders inherent suspense.



Anyway, there's little in DIARY that is purely Romero, which is no good, and yet I can't dismiss it. I can say that Romero's reliance on CGI splatter is really grating. He might as well put the film reels of all his great movies in the bathtub and piss all over them. CGI in a Romero zombie movie is akin to watching classic 1970s porn in which all the full-bodied bush has been removed for the sensibilities of a shaved-beaver modern mentality. If you get my meaning. The whole point of 1970s porn would be the hairy genitals, hairy chests, and hairy upper lips topped off with white-man afros. Without those details, you don't have 1970s porn. And without squibs and Tom Savini make-up effects, you haven't a Romero zombie movie. It stands as a testement to the fact that every movie ever made is an accomplishment of many, not just one talent.


I can't recomment DIARY OF THE DEAD to anybody but the completist. Yet I can't say it's worthless, because there's never been a worthless Romero movie ever made. So there's that.




By the way, the top image is one of Travis Pitts' fantastic "Zombie America" 1950s retro posters. Go here http://www.imagekind.com/MemberProfile.aspx?MID=c3993939-15b1-45c0-bf80-904fb28bf10e for more such and others of brilliant magnitude.