Zombos' Closet of Horror Blog

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) Once More Unto the Breach

Zombos' Devil Dice roll a 1-Poor, 2-Fair, 3-Good, 4-Very Good, 5-Excellent, 6-Classic, 7-Sublime

Zombos was waiting for me to answer him. He'd been away in Europe with the family for most of the summer --the peace and quiet with them gone were my vacation-- and now, with the spirit of Autumn winds soon to rise, he had returned with all his blustery piquance intact. Or maybe it was just too much starch in his collar. My fault.

"I still say it was okay," I reiterated and, ignoring him, continued to write my review. He returned to chewing on his candy corn Oreos and sipping his hot chocolate, making sure to be as noisy as possible just to irritate me.  I focused on my task nonetheless in spite of him.

Speaking of irritation, with five Resident Evil movies bolstering the franchise, I'm surprised each iteration boils down to this: run!, fire guns!, run!, drop-kick!, hustle!, fire bigger guns!, roll!, evade [insert your choice here:  zombies, bad guys, clones, mutants]!, dodge explosions!, run!, walk fast!, run!, say something obvious!, look concerned!, race around in a car!, keep running!, keep firing guns!, and leave off with a boffo ending that promises more than each entry has yet to deliver. Except for maybe next time, since Resident Evil: Retribution leaves off with a boffo ending that squeezes every ounce of CGI mutant mayhem and zombie armageddon into its dire landscape. 

When the ending came I looked at my watch. I couldn't believe the movie had ended. At just under an hour and a half, everything flies by with video game-like music and hustle and bustle, but without the involvement. There are endless fighting rituals with giant axe-wielding mutants, hungry zombies, and clones of people who were characters in the other movie entries. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wields big guns (no metaphor intended: she does wield BIG guns) as always, and she shoots them endlessly as always, and she acts perturbed as always, taking a licking but rebounding as she always does. 

And still I find myself coming back for more. Maybe it's my hope the next sequel will break the T-Virus mold and not be homogeneous like its predecessor.

Providing additional eye-candy is Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), who looks and dresses like she's ready to slay, but you will have to watch The Forbidden Kingdom to fully appreciate what she is capable of bringing since it's missing here.

Ada is working for Wesker (Shawn Roberts) as he channels a Max Headroom ambiance in his gloating, floating presence on large monitor screens. Formerly known as Wesker-the-Alice-Hating-Bad-Guy, he's now teaming up with her to save what's left of humanity. (Seeing what's left, I'm not sure why he's going to all the bother.)

Oh, but that's the next movie, sorry, I was getting ahead of myself.

This movie is all about freeing Alice from the nefarious Umbrella Corporation's underwater facility in the Arctic, where they test scenarios of their manufactured virus contagions spreading across populations. There's Tokyo, New York, Moscow, and even suburban-ville, spread out like a super-sized Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck.

Paul W. S. Anderson moves Alice across this changing, but recognizable, landscape as she tries to escape it to reach the surface, while a rescue team descends to help her. You know the drill: the rescue team ends up needing rescue by Alice as she takes charge. There's a toss-away submarine-breaking-the-ice-moment--which echoes Ice Station Zebra's climax--but it leads to a drawn out brawl between Alice and a super-charged Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) and Jill (Sienna Guillory). Spot animations highlight broken bones as blows hit home, visual information snippets like you would find in a computer game.  

The plot is clever, but everything else is typical Resident Evil movies' pacing and mayhem. I'm stymied how all this action, noise, and bloodshed doesn't generate the expected tension or intensity it should. There's a definite style to this franchise, but it doesn't hold dramatic weight. The de riguer zombies line up to be knocked down, mutants provide side-tracking annoyances, and the emotional moment when a young girl mistakes Alice for her mother (her mother was an Alice clone) are smoothed over to pave the way for more action which soon numbs our attention given to it. 

Anderson's gimmicky opening credit sequence showing the attack on the Arcadia freighter (where the previous movie left us) in slow motion reverse, then normal speed forward, is a good example of why this franchise is always fun to watch but is not yet memorable. Perhaps if he stops playing with the characters and the scenery, and starts playing the game in the next movie, it will be.

Attack the Block (2011) Bad Kids Do Good

ZC Rating 5 of 7: Excellent

"Oh, I can see its eyes."

"Not sure those things its eyes..."

Sometimes the simplest premise and the necessities of moderate budget constraints can lead to an understated sci-horror movie that shines with low-key wit, involves us with colorful characters by not forgetting their humanity, and dares to completely tell its story instead of neutering it in hopes of lucrative franchised bastardizations. Joe Cornish manages to accomplish all of this in Attack the Block, a zeitgeist experience, if ever there was one, of realness, fakery, nonplussed attitudes, a variety of cliches, and decade-spanning B-movie horror sensibilities. If that weren't enough, there's fur-ball monsters with large day-glo mouths and teeth to match, with wonderfully nondescript black bodies, yet ingenious in design because it's all about those teeth, and desperately keeping necks, arms, and legs away from them, that propels this sci-horror gem's action along. 

Thomas Townend exploits those wonderful teeth with his cameras in two key scenes: during the first appearance of a fur-ball alien the boys think is as easy a target as the hairless, light-skinned one they attacked and killed earlier, and when pot dealer Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) makes the mistake of not looking out the apartment window. It's amazing how much bang for the buck you can get from such a simple creature design when paired with those ominous, neon teeth.

The many meteors carrying these aliens crash into the neighborhood on Guy Fawkes Night, while fireworks are going off all around. The first crash comes after would-be youth gang's Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail), Biggz (Simon Howard), Jerome (Leeon Jones), and Dennis (Franz Drameh) hood up to mug Sam (Jodie Whittaker) in the street as she's heading home to the Block, the apartment building they all live in. The smashed up car the small meteor hit provides Moses an opportunity to rifle through it,  and the chance for Sam to get away. She does, and Moses avoids being nipped by an alien. He and the boys chase after it with youthful abandon, after first grabbing their assorted weapons including bats, a samurai sword, knife, and some firework rockets. Moses kills it and takes it to pot dealer Ron (Nick Frost), who then takes Moses and the creature to see Hi-Hatz, the bigger dope dealer, in his steel-door fortified, ultraviolet-lighted, pot-growing room. Moses is looking for a place to stash the creature safely, but he also wants to impress Hi-Hatz so he can accelerate his criminal career path.  

It's the deviation from this path that Moses must ultimately confront when he realizes the consequences of killing the first alien. The fur-balls are nastier, bigger, and unrelenting in their pursuit of him and his gang, but why they keep coming after him is a mystery eventually explained, while holed up in that fortified pot-growing room, by Brewis (Luke Treadaway), the pothead, nerdy, white kid caught up in the mayhem. (Sure, go ahead; imagine a hash pipe's worth of Cheech and Chong-styled humor undercut through all this, if you like.)

Between the gang's bikes and scooters transportation, the frantic chases, Sam and Moses reluctantly teaming up but growing to understand and like each other , Hi-Hatz having it in for Moses because Hi-Hatz refuses to understand or like anyone, the Block's cramped apartments and dreary hallways becoming a battleground, and those fur-balls climbing the building when they're not prowling its hallways--you may feel a subdued 1980s deja vu, but the sensation may also bring some 1950s kitsch and 1970s flow along with it, modulated by Steven Price's techno score.

Then Cornish rythms up with dialog that's one-liner bright and character revealing, pushing his story up two notches beyond the superficial people-fodder most often seen in horror and sci-horror. You may not like these kids at first, but after the movie, you'll wish you had them living in your Block when the alien invasion comes.

TrollHunter (2010) Troll-ble With Giants

ZC Rating: 4 of 7
(Very Good)

I had two questions in mind after watching Andre Ovredal’s TrollHunter: Why does Hans (Otto Jespersen) work alone, and why can’t American Horror movies take off-the-wall risks like this small budget Norwegian movie more often? 

Hans is the laconic troll hunter followed by three students from Volda College. They’re filming a documentary about bear poaching and he’s pointed out by the local hunters who suspect him because he’s a stranger. He tells them to go away, but they persist and follow him at night, deep into the woods. Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the leader of the trio, makes a joke about meeting inbred pig farmers (but this is not a French Horror movie, so he needn’t worry).

Now comes the refreshingly audacious part: flashes of light and strange roars in the distance, followed by Hans running past them yelling “Troll!” I’m thinking this is going to be silly and it is, terrifyingly so. The troll crashes through the trees he nearly towers over and hunts them. All of the trolls in this movie are big or bigger, slow moving, and look like Jim Henson’s furry Muppets, but uglier and nastier than you’d find on Sesame Street. They are also quick to kill in this mockumentary, especially if they smell Christian blood. Hans isn't sure about a Muslim's blood when asked if the trolls hate it, too.

Hans uses UV light to turn the three-headed troll chasing them to stone. Later, the veterinarian he works with explains the biological factors behind that for us, but UV light either makes them explode if they’re young, or turns them into concrete if they’re old. Seriously. It’s this droll seriousness that keeps TrollHunter’s humor from trumping it’s chills, which come each time we meet different trolls,  each getting bigger as we do. Telling Thomas, Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) the cameraman, and Johanna (Johanna Morck)—who holds onto a boom microphone—that he "doesn’t get a night bonus," Hans finally agrees to let them follow him as he hunts trolls for the Troll Security Service. The TSS, using bear attacks as a cover, is not happy Hans let the secret out.

The funniest images happen when the veterinarian tells Hans she needs a blood sample. The needle he uses is a tad smaller than the one they used in the Amazing Colossal Man, but it’s still big enough to be a clown’s prop. Dressing in what looks like a suit of armor with a big red button on his chest, he carries a bucket filled with a “Christian man’s blood” to attract a troll living under a bridge. There’s a terminal amount of blood in that bucket so I wonder how he got it. After getting chomped on, slammed, and dunked by the annoyed troll, Hans warns Thomas not to touch the button as Thomas helps him up.

Given the this-is-film-footage-found-after-the-fact style of this movie, with the now standard night-vision scenery and budgeted special-effects viewing angles further obscured by shaky-cam, the story hangs onto its Blair Witch quality of suspenseful immediacy at the cost of details, especially when that footage ends abruptly.

Even so, the American remake is already around the corner. We're always good at taking safe risks after others take the more riskier ones.

Super 8 (2011): The Gang's All Here

ZC Rating 5 of 7: Excellent (but will seem very familiar)

The gang’s all here in J. J. Abrams’ Super 8. You’ll recognize them from The Goonies, The Monster Squad, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: there’s the fat kid waiting for his lean years; the geeky kid with needed gadgets (explosive ones this time); the love-struck kid dealing with loss; the cute, hip girl everyone likes more than she likes herself; and parents who stay in the background much of the time because this is not their story. What’s different is the monsterkid nostalgia you’ll experience if you’ve ever held an 8mm camera to film backyard horror movies, or dry-brushed Aurora model kits with Testors paints, or just wore dark paisley shirts with big collars, sported mutton chops, and listened to music cassette tapes while cruising.

Charles (Riley Griffiths) is the fat kid who’s directing a zombie movie everyone’s got a part in. He's secretly got a crush on the cute girl, Alice (Elle Fanning), so arranges for her to drive them to the train station late at night for a shoot. The Dick Smith's Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook geeky kid, Joe (Joel Courtney), unknowingly mucks it up by falling for Alice, but he does fantastic zombie make-up so Charles can't lose him. Watch the gang's finished 'movie' during the end credits and you'll see the same Dick Smithish zombie kid stumbling in different scenes, although he's killed each time. Getting to the end credits is a Spielbergian adventure seen through Abrams' eyes and the avocado greens and harvest golds of 1970s melange.

A mysterious late night train surprises the kids during taping, and when it's driven off the rails, it surprises us. An almost endless shooting gallery of heavy train cars, twisting metal, flaming explosions, and mad dashes through it all flying through the air, thunking down too close, becomes absurd, outrageous, and awesome. The incendiary-prone geeky kid (Ryan Lee) eats it all up with relish. What comes out of one of the train cars is a multi-legged nightmare for the small town and a Hardy Boys mystery for the kids to solve. The adults get in the way without realizing it, but youthful resourcefulness pays off when the military takes over the investigation of the train derailment, and the hunt for the missing living cargo. Of course there's the essential antagonistic-and-sadistic-career-military-guy-who's-sinister-agenda-only-makes-things-worse running the investigation (Noah Emmerich).

Charles, taking a page from the Roger Corman school of filming, unperturbed, takes advantage of the army's investigation and train derailment by including them in his taping. His investigator (Gabriel Basso) conducts an investigation while the military conducts theirs in the backgrounds of his scenes. 

The often hopped-up, long-haired, electronics store shlub Charles gives his 8mm film to have developed provides necessary ground transportation in exchange for a date with Charles' hot sister as the hunt picks up speed for the monster, the really pissed-off something kidnapping townspeople, wrecking property, and driving all the dogs away. It's unhappy and angry from being locked up for years. Coincidentally, Joe is unhappy and angry because his mom was killed at the steel mill and his dad ignores him. And Joe's dad is unhappy and angry at Alice's dad, who was supposed to be working that shift where she died instead. And Alice is unhappy and angry with her dad because he can't get over his guilt, either, or the loss of her mom. Her dad's a long haired shlub, too, but he has his moments of redemption. And redemption comes for everyone when it's needed the most.

Super 8 isn't a coming of age movie. It's not really meant to be a nostalgic mind trip, either, though some of us will be reminded of nostalgic things and yearn for them again. It's even not a Spielberg adventure, but the camera movements and your emotions will remind you of what those adventures were like, except Super 8's more up to date in its nostalgic hipness.

It knows what we miss and gives it back for a little while. 

Poltergeist On Elm Street Insidious (2010)

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

Combining Poltergeist's spectre of evil intent poised at the threshold, and Nightmare On Elm Street's gloved spiritus emeritus, Insidious provides scares aplenty, making it a perfect first date movie. 

The evil intent comes from unwholesome spirits trapped in the Further, a place that's dark, endless, and appears to be one train stop from Hell. The paranormal investigator who explains the Further takes too much time to do it, and gives us more mumbo jumbo about it, and astral projection, than we really need to know; but getting to this point and moving on from it are what make this popcorn movie from director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell so much fun.

The Lambert family moves into their new home, a dark old house that has a darker, creepier attic. Soon, voices coming from the baby's monitor, dark shapes moving between rooms, neatly shelved books found scattered on the floor, and banging on the front door in the dead of night make mom Renai (Rose Byrne) fearful the house is haunted. When her son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) cannot wake up, and the loud noises and disturbances escalate, she insists they move.  Her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) reluctantly agrees.

Their new, new home is brighter and cheerier until those disturbances start up again. Muting colors increases the dread. When the Lamberts are in the older, darker house, it's still a tad brighter before Dalton falls into his coma-like sleep, then the color fades away. Color returns in their second home until the haunting continues, then it fades. Josh is losing his color, too. He avoids going home, saying he needs to stay late at work, leaving Renai terrorise en solo. Her mother-in-law Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) believes her: Lorraine has seen and spoken to the evil shadow with the red face hovering near Dalton's bed.  She knows what it wants. She explains why Josh has been avoiding the situation and why there are no photographs of him as a child.

Elise (Lyn Shaye), a psychic investigator and family friend,  is called in. Elise's two nerdy, geek-squad-style investigators pull out the ghost-hunting gadgetry and start searching for evidence, each trying to top the other with his technical savior faire. When one pulls out a flashlight after the lights go out, the other pulls out a bigger flashlight. Elise sees the red-faced thing hovering around the boy and realizes Dalton, like his father, has out of body experiences--astral projection--and has traveled too far into The Further: a place where spirits and demons dwell. He's stuck in The Further while they try to take over his body and use it as a bridge to reenter the living world.

It's hard to tell when Wan is being cheeky or serious, especially when Elise dons a goofy gas mask contraption to enter a trance, but the chills keep coming. I counted four jump scares I jumped at, then stopped counting but didn't stop jumping. Insidious plays like a William Castle spookfest. One of the pararnormal investigators even has his own makeshift version of Illusion-O to find spirits by looking through different colored filters.

If you insist on eating popcorn while watching this movie make sure it's not buttered; the people sitting around you will appreciate that. It also helps not to have buttered fingers when you need to reassure your date everything is okay. She (or he) will need lots of reassurance.

 

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) Pavlovian Horror Redux

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good (but stretches camera POV thin)

Watching Paranormal Activity 2 I felt like one of Ivan Pavlov's dogs, but instead of salivating at the sound of a bell, I would watch the screen more intently each time a low rumbling noise alerted me to the onset of a supernatural event. I can't readily recall any other horror movie franchise that purposefully conditions you to wait for something to happen by making you watch near endless home video recordings of the same scenes, again and again, in anticipation of something happening. Either this is an ingenious use of minimalist cinema verite and camera POV, or we're being suckered big time. Maybe it's a little of both.

A prequel and sequel rolled into one, the reason for the haunting is also hinted at, removing the unsettling feeling of this-could-happen-to-anyone you get in Paranormal Activity, but leaving room for another franchise entrant. Since the explanation involves family members back in the 1920s, you'd have to show it through box camera and scrapbook photographs, and hand-cranked newsreel footage instead of modern handycams and convenient home security cameras, like the ones watching Hunter's bedroom, the swimming pool vacuum cleaner, the living room, and the front door during the night. Their use is a creative and necessary extension to the first movie's handycam-only point of view, but this camera POV storytelling is wearing its compensating techniques thin through overuse, to a point of creating a self-conscious persistance that erodes believability. How many people, young or old, have a handycam glued to their hand to record everything, including lengthy poolside chit-chat and room-roaming discussions?

Recordings from the security cameras are shown again and again, each night, until the family takes notice (and us) of the escalating activity around Hunter, the German Shepard, and Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden), Katie's sister. Katie was haunted and possessed by the demon in the first movie. The events in this one take place two months before that happens and explain why.

I suppose demons have all eternity to mess with mortals, so that's why not much happens for a while:  the pool's vacuum cleaner strangely winds up outside the pool each morning; the German Shepard barks and growl's at empty air; Hunter keeps staring at empty air; kitchen pots rattle and drop off their hooks with a bang in the dead of night; the family's nanny, Martine (Vivis Cortez), keeps cleansing the house of evil spirits. Like Maleva, the old gypsy woman in The Wolf Man, Martine knows something bad is happening. They didn't listen to Maleva until it was too late, either.

After her continual religious-based cleaning smokes up the house and irks Dan Rey (Brian Boland), he sends her away. The haunting begins in earnest after she leaves, and Dan's daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim) turns to Google to find out what's going on. In the older horror movies characters turned to moldy books, dusty parchments, curled scrolls, and bloody scrawls, and spent much of their time seeking them out (except for bloody scrawls of course: you just stumble across those); now every teen in a horror movie goes to the Internet to learn everything about the supernatural and demonic: same motif, different notes.

And yet it still works its magic. I jumped at the kitchen jump-shock, and waited uneasily for those payout moments that built from little innocuous events to the terminal ferocity in the basement.

In a horror movie, the basement is always the place you don't want to be.

Splice (2009) Missing Some Genes

"Scientists push boundaries. At least important ones do." (Elsa)

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good (but should have been better)

The Frankenstein brothers had it easier back in the day: just rob a few graves, swap a brain or two, dodge the villagers, and they were good to go. For Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody), two scientists splicing genetic material for the pharmaceutical company funding them it's harder: they need to quickly come up with a profitable benefit from their work for the company's board of directors while avoiding using human DNA in the process to help. There's all that messy ethical, moral, legal, and congressional-folk just itching to light those political-torches falderol if they give into temptation and cut that corner by doing so. But temptation is the bread and butter of horror, of course, and giving in to it is where Splice begins.

The movie cuts some corners also. It's not quite a horror movie, though we do have a metamorphic monster; it's not quite a character study, though there are glimpses into Elsa's troubled family life; and it's not quite a panoply for all those ethical, philosophical, and legal issues waiting to pounce when manipulations, creations, and terminations of human substance are involved; though fragments of this triplet codon are to be found here. This leaves Splice's horror and dramatic genes only partially joined, spread apart by inadequate dialog (thankfully devoid of too much scientific jargon) and a story that neither emphasizes its philosophical dilemmas or craftily avoids them, nor terrorizes us with their details.

Wicked Rock and Roll Trick or Treat (1986)

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

 

Metalheads, demonic forces, wicked rock and roll, an intimidated outcast teen, and the 1980s seem to go together in horror movies like Honey Nut Cheerios and fat-rich milk. I do not know if Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price) liked Cheerios, but he does like heavy metal rocker Sammi Curr (Tony Fields). Idolizes him in fact. Sammi does things Eddie dreams of doing if he had the chance. When Sammi goes and dies in a hotel fire, Eddie, disheartened, heads off to school to face his typical day of being emotionally bullied by the in-crowd; the pretty faces, lithe bodies, why-do-you-listen-to-that-crap-why-can't-you-be-like-one-of-us crowd. His day is made worse when jock Tim (Doug Savant) precipitates Eddie's sudden appearance--without his very important shower towel--in the girl's gym class. Luckily for Eddie this is the pre-YouTube, Facebook age, so it was just a Polaroid of his butt making the hallway rounds later. Sammi, before he became famous, was bullied and intimidated for being different, too. He even graduated from the school Eddie goes to. Both have a lot in common, but it is Sammi's death that brings them face to face. But at a price of course; this is a horror movie after all.

Eddie's deejay buddy Nuke (Gene Simmons) perks up his down day with the master recording of Sammi's last, unreleased, album. Nuke already has it on tape and is going to play it at midnight. Later, when Eddie falls asleep listening to it, he dreams about Sammi's death. He wakes up to the record repeating some odd words and, on a hunch, tries the old trick of playing the record backwards (now it is an old trick; back then it was fairly new). Eddie realizes Sammi is speaking to him; really, not philosophically. There is no psychological subtlety here, no maybe it is just Eddie going off the deep end. Trick or Treat keeps its black sabbath evil straight as any self-respecting 1980's heavy-metalized horror movie should.

Sammi is anxious to get even for all the bullying he had to deal with in school. Eddie wants revenge for all his mistreatment. It is a match made in Hell and both hook up for some payback; only Sammi plays a lot rougher than Eddie and for cemetery-keeps. When Eddie balks after almost killing Tim in shop class, Sammi pays him a fire and brimstone visit, powered by the amperage in Eddie's stereo. Ozzy Osbourne puts in a brief appearance as televangelist Reverend Aaron Gilstrom, a crusader against the bad influences of heavy metal music. Brief because, as he appears on Eddie's television set during Sammi's sudden visit from the grave, Sammi reaches into the screen and pulls him out by his holy roller neck in a 1980's special effects kind of way. Not only does Sammi look heavy metal rock and roller musician bad, he is bad.

Eddie realizes he may have misjudged his idol a bit, and with the Halloween school dance about to start, needs to act fast to stop Sammi from exacting his revenge. Powering the dead rocker is his music played from a cassette tape (how many of you remember cassette tapes?). A seductive scene in Tim's car involving his girlfriend and Sammi's hot music allows for 1980's puppet-demon special effects and melted ears. Eddie deals with the evil cassette, but Nuke has his reel to reel tape set to go at midnight, and Sammi has set up a mystical force field around the machine at the radio station. Bummer. As I recall, there were times I wanted to do to my tapes what Eddie does to Sammi's cassette (and do not get me started on those evil 8 Track cartridges).

Eddie gives the task of destroying the cassette to his only friend, Roger (Glen Morgan). Sammi pays Roger a visit and, well, you know where this one is going. The cassette winds up at the school dance, allowing Sammi to appear for a song accompanied by lethal pyrotechnics. Eddie's sort-of girlfriend, Leslie (Lisa Orgolini), helps him fight Sammi. Both split up; Leslie tries to destroy the reel to reel tape player before midnight and Eddie goes for a hectic drive with Sammi.

Although the scariest things in Trick or Treat are the 80s hairdos and being reminded of those nasty cassette tapes, Sammi is a cool rock and roll villain, the story is low-key horror fun, and the music is heavy-metally sharp. Eddie's character is one many of us can relate to, and his idolization of Sammi mimics our own glorification of our rock and roll gods. And playing records backwards is really cool to do, especially on Halloween.

Aliens, Apartheid, Aggression District 9 (2009)

ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

The striking thing about District 9, the expanded version of Neill Blonkamp’s short science fiction movie Alive in Joburg, is how it reworks familiar plot elements from movies like Alien Nation, The Fly, and The Matrix, cements them together with tableaux of apartheid and Nazi-like genetic experimentation, and still gleefully gets away with blowing lots of things up with a popcorn movie zeal.

Important to both the incidental social commentary and the loud action is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who makes us first dislike him for what he blindly stands for, then like him for what he learns to stand for. All of this does not make District 9 a great film, just a very good one; lying somewhere between Armond White's energetically overreaching discontent with its "sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema" substance, and Roger Ebert's ultimate disappointment that it "remains space opera and avoids the higher realms of science-fiction."

It is to District 9's credit that it dares to place more emphasis on its pop cinema approach, and less on those higher realms, to deliver pulp science fiction that, blow for blow, gets its deeper message across without preachiness or prompting moral revelation above the basic template of blood splatter, bullets, and bombs. Social commentary has all been done effectively and artistically before, frankly, to the point where it no longer really matters it be spelled out for us yet again in a movie that flows much better without it. Sometimes a movie should be just that, a movie; and not held to a higher accountability.

The Burrowers (2008) Not Deep Enough

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

It came to this: a setting sun lingering at the warm edge of night, watched from three rocking chairs indecisively teetering back and forth on their compass tips, saddled by three bored and restless riders of the stiff slatted pines.

In between a dot and a dash rode Zombos, Lawn Gisland, and me, to nowhere in particular as we traded silences and hiccups on the terrace. The footfalls of summer could be heard bounding up the steps, bringing with them the sizzle of barbecues, giggly splashes from pools, and monotonous drone of air conditioners humming through hot, molasses-sticky, nights where forgotten candy bars melt in jean pockets, mosquitoes dance to the crackling of ice cubes in sweaty glasses of lemonade and iced tea and soda, and texting fingers Keystone Copp their slippery grasp on warm cell phones.

"I am not looking forward to estivating by the seashore or anywhere near a barbecue," said Zombos, absently swirling the iced tea around in his glass.

"Mind chewing on that a bit more for me?" asked Lawn Gisland, lazily swatting a fly off the pitiado floral rose on his right boot. He yawned larger than a barn door opens and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Former movie cowboy and now traveling circus rodeo star, he was never one for estivating in all his long ranging years.

"Pass the summer," explained Zombos. "Estivate means to pass the summer."

We stared off into the waters of Long Island Sound as it grew dark. Zimba brought us another round of iced tea. Lawn took the half-lemon, cut just for him, and squeezed it between his massive fingers. We often joked that if he wanted so much lemon in his iced tea he should be drinking lemonade.

"Oh, I almost forgot, this came today," said Zimba. She held up The Burrowers DVD.

I jumped up faster than Zombos. "Last one in is a really bad egg!" I said, snatching the DVD.

Zombos and Lawn quickly followed me as we hurried to watch this Western horror tale.

 

Lurking monsters spoil the tranquil Western Plains in J.T. Petty's The Burrowers; an almost refreshing mix of creature-feature, saddle-sores, and the American Old West. I say almost because, while Petty mines the bitter social climate between Indian and settler after the Trail of Tears and the demise of the bison--a once plentiful food source for both Indians and, more importantly, those monsters--he does not dig deep enough into his characters nor embellish their actions to make this the definitive terror on the range Wild West story.

Homesteaders are massacred during the night. A search party is quickly formed to go after the Indians who everyone assumes butchered the men and kidnapped the womenfolk. While you may be tempted to draw comparisons to John Ford's The Searchers, that would be a bad trail to follow. Ford composed an emotionally-charged journey that eventually forces one man to confront his prejudicial demons, and filmed it against sumptuous vistas of sky and land where the deer and the antelope play. While Petty uses his budget-lens quite well to show the desolation across vast distances and makes his assembled posse just as calloused, with similar prejudices, its riders and their intentions pale in comparison. No one worth a tinker's damn stands out from the tumbling tumbleweed to take the bull by the horns or, in this case, the ugly as a mud fence Burrowers by their withers in his video game deep direction.