From Zombos Closet

Movies (Bad)

Red Riding Hood (2011)
Hoodwinks Audience

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red riding hood movie

Zombos Says: Fair

“I still want my money back,” insisted Zombos. He gets like that when we see a movie he doesn’t like.

“Fine, then,” I relented. Here’s your six dollars. But I’m not paying for the popcorn and Junior Mints. You ate most of those anyway.” Zombos folded the money and pocketed it, then rushed back to the concession stand. Probably to buy more Junior Mints. While I waited
for him, I thought through my impressions of Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood.

A child’s imagination of fairy tale prettiness infuses everything. Clothes, people, the surrounding medieval forest, it’s all colorful, cheerful, and naively pretty. Clothes are clean and neat, people are clean and neat, and the village is clean and neat. No Dark Ages grunge or
malaise to be found here. Cindy Evans’ television series costuming (the way rustic villagers in Stargate SG-1 episodes are dressed, for example), reinforces this lightness. And although snow is falling and winter is upon them, no one is bundled up against the chill. No frosty-breath comes from mouths and the ladies’ bosoms are bared for spring, especially Valerie’s (Amanda Seyfried). When Grandmother (Julie Christie) gives her the red-hooded cloak, it’s a fashion statement, not a garment to wear because it’s cold.

The Village of Daggerhorn has been beset by a killer wolf for many years, yet the village is happy, a thriving place with everyone well-adjusted, immaculately groomed, and nattily attired. The forest is happy with its bright fields of flowers, and the village idiot is happy, and
as pretty and well groomed as everyone else. He doesn’t act too idiotic, either, just enough to be adorably off.

Father Auguste (Lukas Haas) is the only one who is dour and shows concern. He has sent for the witch and werewolf hunter Father
Solomon (Gary Oldman playing Gary Oldman). Father Solomon’s prior experience with a werewolf left him traveling around in an armored carriage with heavily armed guards. Arriving in the village, one guard, sitting atop the carriage, keeps aim with his crossbow, sweeping it back and forth as if he expects trouble any second. It looks pretty silly. Solomon also travels with a large, hollow, bronze elephant, with a door in one side. He locks people he doesn’t like in it and lights a fire underneath to torture them.

This is as medieval as it gets.

Before Father Solomon arrives, Valerie’s sister is killed by the wolf, sending the men off to hunt it down. They find a gray wolf, kill it, bring its head back, and show it to Father Solomon, claiming he’s not needed. He disagrees and gives them the standard rundown on
werewolfism. They ignore him and hold a rave party instead (or what would be the equivalent of one, I’d guess, for medieval times). The computerized werewolf shows up, chews up the scenery and townsfolk, and speaks to Valerie before he leaves. She notices his big brown human eyes as he tells her to run away with him or else he’ll put the bite on the entire village.

Valerie now has a difficult decision to make. Run away with the darkly handsome, tousle haired, woodcutter Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), or stay and marry the handsome, tousle haired blacksmith Henry (Max Irons), or run away with a real stud, the tousle haired werewolf with big brown eyes. There is no tension or suspense produced by her difficult decision: Hardwicke’s tone is non-committal, David Johnson’s story is vapid, and Seyfried’s performance is overshadowed by her hooded cloak. I had a more rewarding time at the concession stand making up my mind between Junior Mints and Reese’s Pieces.

The romance turns into a whodunit as Valerie stares into people’s eyes, wondering who (maybe whom?) the werewolf is. When the revelation comes it’s like an ending from an Agatha Christie mystery.

Come to think of it, I want my money back, too.

Skyline (2010)
Not Much to See

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Zombos Says: Fair

Print001
Here it is in a film cannister: if you’ve seen the trailer for Skyline, you’ve seen the most exciting part of this slimy-aliens-from-space pulp drama of Borg-like ( part machine, part organic, all regenerating),  Matrixy-looking, multi-tentacled creatures vacuuming up humanity through a sparkly blue light as easily as dust mites are sucked up an Oreck.

In this war of the worlds special effects opus of us losing against them big time, the kicker here is they want our brains, which they use like Energiser batteries to power either themselves or their machinery, or maybe it’s both. I will, with difficulty, refrain from making any dead battery jokes just because they’re attacking Los Angeles, but feel free to infer whatever you like, or even change the locale to suit your preference.

It looks like Independence Day, but it doesn’t have that movie’s patriotic enthusiasm or energetic characters; it looks like War of the Worlds (old and new versions), but it doesn’t have either of those movies’ overwhelming sense of decimation, growing futility, or soul-numbing despair; it even looks like 1954’s Target Earth, whose hunting mechanoids scour the city’s streets for survivors in hiding. With Skyline  mashing dramatic ingredients from many science fiction movies, the Brothers Strause fail to add any of their own sugar and spice to the familiar effects to make this more satisfying than the Coke and Reese’s Pieces I had while watching it.

I will pin much of the blame on the dialog: it’s stultifying.  None of the pretty people trapped in Terry’s (Donald Faison) penthouse speak in their own words. They bicker, they yell, but in stock, one-line sentences. Pick any two people and switch the dialog around; there would be no difference. The ugly aliens have more personality and they don’t talk.

As Los Angeles is vacuumed clean of residents, Terry’s house guests hide from the invaders with the blinds drawn. His automatic window blinds reminded me of the house shields in Forbidden Planet. They weren’t very effective either. There’s Jarrod (Eric Balfour), his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson), Terry’s girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel), and Terry’s personal assistant (emphasis on personal) Denise (Crystal Reed).

They disagree on whether to stay or make a run for it. Eventually they reluctantly run, but a giant alien stomps on their escape. Oliver (David Zayas), the concierge, comes to their rescue. He and Jarrod disagree on whether to stay or make a run for it. Much of the movie seems to be spent on everyone disagreeing on what to do next. A possible tension-mounting relationship between Candice, Denise, and cheating Terry is quickly stomped on, too.

They watch as the military shoots nukes at the motherships–over Los Angeles–but the blown apart ships regenerate.  A few soldiers are dropped by helicopter to fight the maruading aliens, but they lose. Jarrod takes Elaine up to the roof, hoping they can escape by helicopter. The aliens intervene and they are captured. We get to see inside the mothership, how nasty the aliens are, and the groan-inducing potential for a sequel. However, I’ll admit I do like the ending: it’s hokey but pure pulp science fiction in tone.

Skyline is a straight to DVD movie that somehow got a lot more money to add a lot more fiery special effects. Now that’s science fiction.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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Residentevil Zombos Says: Fair (but only because I like Milla Javovich)

Watching the lissom Alice (Milla Jovovich) adroitly manhandle automatic weapons only goes so far to entertain in this unending series of flying bullets, flying kickassery, and flailing plotlines, padded with relentless undead and increasingly inane T-Virus mutations. Paul W. S. Anderson’s unending slow-motion, freeze-frame interruptions to the CGI action are almost as annoying as the numb-thumping soundtrack that rocks on, oblivious to its purpose. Resident Evil: Afterlife is as glossy as a MySpace page and as dramatically rendered.

An NRA supporter’s dream–mine, too– of seeing an army of tightly-clad Alice clones rapid-firing their way through the evil minions of the Umbrella Corporation, and countless slobbering undead, lasts only as long as the CGI budget allows. After that it’s up to the original Alice to fly around in her two-seater plane looking for survivors.

An impossible crash landing on the roof of a maximum security prison introduces a few more characters for us to play with. Oh, sorry, this isn’t the interactive game, just the uninvolving movie: I keep forgetting. There is the sports star (Boris Kodjoe), the expendables for the monster attack scenes, the feisty and determined Claire (Ali Larter), the nasty producer who you know is going to screw everyone because he just wants to go home (Kim Coates), and the mysterious military guy they’ve locked up (Wentworth Miller).

With that amazing kind of luck that only happens in bad scripts and Resident Evil movies, an arsenal of heavy-duty firepower has been left behind by the army, but access to it is submerged under the water that’s now flooding the lower levels of the prison. I won’t spoil your fun–this movie does its best to do that already–but my favorite slacker hack of bad scripting, the air vent big enough to crawl or drive through, comes to the rescue as T-Virus nasties begin piling up.

The biggest nasty wears a sack over his head and wields a meat tenderizer and axe combo that is as big as that air vent I mentioned. No explanation is given–and I suppose none is really expected at this point–for this nine-foot mutant showing up at the prison gates. He winds up in the shower with Alice and Claire (but not like that). Anderson’s action-interruptus slow-motion kills the excitement anyway.

The Umbrella Corporation’s evil mastermind (Shawn Roberts)–he wears black and tauntingly slicks his hair back–shows up for the finale. He’s ingested some T-Virus himself and tries to put the bite on Alice. More action-interruptus ensues.

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the 3D. That’s because there is nothing to say about it. Its use in this movie is as pointless as everything else.

The Last Airbender (2010)
Gasping For Air

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the last airbender

Zombos Says: Fair (watch the animated series instead)

When everyone kept mispronouncing Aang’s name in The Last Airbender I realized M. Night Shyamalan was holding true to form, which means once again he exhibits his propensity toward ponderous, preachy, hubris-driven moviemaking. It’s the kind of moviemaking that comes from writing and directing inwardly for one’s self and not outwardly to others. George Lucas is the king of hubris-driven moviemaking (the best episode in the Star Wars series, The Empire Strikes Back, was not directed or scripted by him). I now crown Shyamalan the prince and heir apparent.

The Last Airbender (really Avatar: The Last Airbender, but possible confusion with James Cameron’s Avatar led to “Avatar” being dropped from the movie’s title) is based on an American anime series filled with engaging, colorful characters living in a mystical world divided into Four Nations according to the four elements of Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. These nations include the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Within each of them are gifted individuals who can manipulate the natural element of their nation using martial arts-like movements: they are called Airbenders, Earthbenders, Waterbenders, and Firebenders respectively.

Keeping a peaceful balance between each Nation is the Avatar, a person who’s been reincarnated many times and the only one who has the ability to bend all four elements with mind-blowing power when his (or her) Avatar Spirit state is awakened. When the Avatar goes missing, the Fire Nation conducts a military campaign to subjugate the Water and Earth Nations. Fearing the reincarnation of the Avatar within the Air Nation, Fire Lord Sozin has it destroyed and its people killed. The series ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon. Shyamalan begins with Book One: Water from Season One, when the Avatar, missing for 100 hundred years, returns to stop the Fire Nation and restore harmony to the world.

Young Aang (Noah Ringer) is the Avatar. Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern Water Tribe free him from a ball of ice, where he’s been trapped in suspended animation, protected by his Avatar Spirit state after getting caught in a tumultuous storm. Katara and Sokka, after a long-winded and unnecessary explanation of the spiritual nature of their world and the significance of the Avatar, accompany Aang on his quest to learn manipulation of Water, Earth, and Fire in preparation for fighting the Fire Nation. Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), ostracized and disfigured by his tyrannical father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis), for speaking out of turn, is obsessed with restoring his father’s approval by capturing the Avatar.

What makes the animated series endearing, charming, and just plain groovy fun to watch is the interplay between its characters, their humor mixed with serious situations, and the overriding spirituality—a mix of 1960s Psychedelic Movement, Eastern Religions, and New Age riffing—that imbues its story with
purpose and contextual sensibility. The combination of American cartoon and anime styles creates a unique visual playfulness and verve that is never overly
dark in tone or preposterous in its unfolding. None of these endearing qualities made it into this live-action movie, which is ponderous to tears and burdened with tedious voice-over explanations and lengthy exposition crumpling the sparkling creativity of the animated series.

Shyamalan’s casting choices do not fit their animated counterparts well at all. Acting ranges from wooden to pretentious: Katara is a smart, confident, go-getter in the anime; here she’s awkward, uncertain, and burdened with clumsy dialog; Sokka, lighthearted and Jim Carrey-styled improvisational in the anime is rendered here broodingly serious and a killjoy; Aang, the pivotal character who’s aangst over facing his Avatar responsibilities and his fear of causing harm through his unbridled anger when in the Avatar state providing room for emotional growth in the anime, tempered by his boyish spirit of adventure, can’t muster a strong presence here. Look at any still picture of Noah Ringer as Aang and you will see no chi energy emanating from his posturing. He has the Avatar tattoos and glider staff but that’s all. Appa is a big fuzzy plush toy of flying bison perfection (Aang rides him through the clouds), but we don’t see much interaction between Aang and his cherished Appa, although they are practically inseparable in the anime.

The showdown between the Fire Nation’s armada of ash-belching ships and the Northern Water Tribe is rendered incomprehensible for anyone who hasn’t seen the animated series, and near gibberish for those who have.

The movie is missing important bridging scenes for what eventually wound up onscreen and a key dynamic of Aang’s involvement, a more plausible reason for why he traveled to the Northern Water Tribe in the first place, is pushed to the side. Shyamalan’s insistence on drawn-out movements to bend anything
exaggerates those motions to absurdity, and his action-stopping slow-motion overuse during battle scenes undermines their intensity and suspense. When Aang finally enters his Avatar state to combat the armada, this live-action confrontation appears anti-climactic when compared to the similar animated
sequence, where his destructive power is rendered more awesomely than shown here. The movie’s texture is dark with bright colors muted. Even the flares of fire are dull and lifeless, and do not convey a sense of heat. Critics have noted the retro-fitted 3D version is even darker. I watched the 2D version and it is
pretty murky.

As a fan of the anime series I’m disappointed in this confused, overly complicated, and pedantic adaptation. As a movie critic I can say that for a movie version of the anime’s spiritual journey, one filled with wonder and energy, this first movie in a potential series does little to emotionally involve us and gives even less to wonder at.

Unless you’re wondering what I’m wondering—and it’s not to find a duck and a hose at a 7 Eleven—I’m wondering how a heavy-handed director, with a lately spotty track record, is given a movie that requires a touch as light as air.

That’s what I’m wondering.

Jonah Hex (2010)
The Spell is Broken

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Jonah Hex

Zombos Says: Fair (read the comic series instead)

I miss Doctor Miguelito Quixote Loveless (Michael Dunn), the diminutive villain with grand schemes on the 1960s television series The Wild Wild West. He was a villain to reckon with, one far above John Malkovich’s burlap sack portrayal of renegade madman Quentin Turnbull in Jonah Hex. Loveless devoted his creatively criminal and misguided scientific genius to endless schemes embellished with his weapons of mass destruction, gleefully challenging government agent James West to stop him each time they crossed paths.

Paths are crossed in Jonah Hex, but they don’t seem to head in any sensible direction. They meander around with the artlessness of that silly Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith, then saunter a well-trod vengeance trail much like The Outlaw Josey Whales, and finally stop plumb cold at the usual quest-between-mundane-here and mystical-there with less force than The Crow.

A weapon of mass destruction, created by Eli Whitney no less, figures prominently. They always do. Mysterious glowing balls of fire provide the triggering mechanism for larger balls of fiery, explosive material. Turnbull does a dry run of the weapon’s capabilities by blowing up a small town just after church services. He threatens to blow up the nation’s capital on the centennial celebration for July 4th. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) conscripts Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) into hunting down Turnbull and ending the madman’s grand scheme. The bad blood between Hex and Turnbull goes back aways: Turnbull killed Hex’s family in retribution for Hex causing the death of his son.

Something truly weird happens in this movie and I’m not referring to Megan Fox.

Yet.

A flashback done in comic book format explains, sort of, how the Indians helped Hex survive to become the I-talk-to-the-dead-bounty-hunter-badass wanted by the law. Watching the colorful but limited animation (it brought to mind those Marvel Super Heroes cartoons in the 1960s) I wondered Did they run out of budget? Was this movie originally planned as animation? Why suddenly eschew perfectly good live action for a graphic novel on screen? Why not pepper this lengthy backstory as flashbacks throughout this leisurely-paced movie to make it less onerous?

I thought about this until “I don’t play house” Lilah (Megan Fox) and Hex hook up for a bedtime social visit. Then I started thinking Why is she in this movie? Beauty to his ugliness? She doesn’t have much to do, or much to say, or much to act on. Brolin has even less to work with, but he does have a nifty ability to talk to the dead. He just grabs hold of a moldy corpse and it springs to life. But he needs to talk fast because the fresher the corpse, the faster it starts to immolate into ashes. Aside from Hex’s orneriness, this appears to be his best and only mystical ability.

Red-tinted fever-dream flashes of him fighting Turnbull around a coffin with a crow sitting on its lid are the only other mystical touches. They don’t make sense, but touches they remain. Eventually Hex talks to enough dead people to find Turnbull. Before he meets his nemesis, he stocks up on the usual badass tricky gunnage that can deliver high explosive impact and flailing bodies flying asunder with minimal effort. He gets it from this movie’s equivalent of James West’s gadget-buddy Artemus Gordon.

Hex and Turnbull and Lilah square-off on an ironclad ship in Independence Harbor as it speeds toward the capital with its deadly weapon preparing to fire. Union soldiers pull up alongside in their version of the ironclad Monitor and ask Turnbull to kindly surrender his weapon of mass destruction and stop being such a damn nuisance. While they wait for his reply, he locks and loads and blows them out of the water in a shower of little ironclad pieces. I was hoping for a better reenactment of the Battle of Hampdon Roads.

The one thing they got right in this movie is when Hex whistles for his horse to come to him.

At least his horse knows what to do..

Survival of the Dead (2010)
Romero Without Bite

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survival of the dead Zombos Says: Fair

Survival of the Dead is a silly zombie movie when it shouldn’t be and a terrible zombie movie when it should be terrifying. Revisiting threadbare plot themes, George Romero’s once fearsome and unstoppable horde have become as bothersome as pesky mosquitoes in need of swatting when they get too close, and his always quarrelsome living survivors, not surprisingly, are still quarreling.

Only this time he’s put them all on Plum Island and split the survivors into two feuding Irish homesteads headed by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) and Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Walsh). Seamus wants to keep the deadheads tethered or herded like cattle until a cure can be found. Patrick wants to shoot the rotters and be done with it. Almost everyone dresses, rides horses, and shoots guns like this is a Western; but it isn’t, although an Old West zombie story might have been more engaging. A zombie riding horseback is even lassoed by a cowboy. I halfheartedly wanted to see the cowpoke heat up a Melody Ranch branding iron and tag the zombie. It would not have made much sense but neither does much of this movie.

Eschewing the grittier and more grotesque Tom Savini-styled makeup effects that made zombies and their habits more revolting and terrifying back in the day (although this storyline does take place a few days after the plague starts), Romero instead enhances the de rigueur skull-splitting with assorted CGI-flavored dispatches including the cranium plop, the flare gun incendiary noggin’ (which reminded me of Jim Carrey’s Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooge), and the Looney Tune pop-eyed popper (I was disappointed no accompanying awhooozah! horn sounded when those pupils popped).

Romero’s zombies don’t look much the worse for being undead here. They continue to shuffle about everywhere, on land and in the water, but he directs Survival like he’s planing a piece of wood when he should be gouging deep splintery notches in it instead. Survival’s zombies lack bite: Romero prefers to make them loved ones gone bad instead of ravenous fiends looking to tear chunks of flesh from living bodies and play slinky with intestines. This may serve his story but turns his ubiquitous monsters, the same ones he fostered into popular culture, into slow moving hazards his characters avoid on the road to survival, but not too hurriedly. Survival’s deadheads would fit comfortably into the undead and not very scary crowd at the Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk.

Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) and his small band of soldiers turned mercenaries, last seen in Diary of the Dead, provide most of the action. One soldier on guard duty watches a late night show poking fun at zombies on his laptop. Another one, Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) masturbates to kill time. They come across a group of hunters who have put CGI zombie heads on spikes for fun. Irritated by that, Sarge kills all of them except for Boy (Kevin Bostick), who shows them a YouTube video with Patrick O’Flynn extolling the fresh air and safety of Plum Island. I wonder if he has a Facebook page? They decide to go there and travel to the docks in an armored truck. After finding a million dollars locked away in the truck, they agree it’s worthless given the current situation (the zombie plague, not the recession); but Boy still manages to keep the key.

It’s a lucky coincidence the banished Patrick and his small band of followers are at the docks when Sarge pulls up. Over bullets and zombies, and occasional flashes of Romero’s wit for dry humor–one man fishing keeps catching zombies, and a stick of lighted dynamite is fortuitously dropped into a zombie’s grasping fingers–Patrick and the soldiers make their way to a ferry and sweep it clean of infestation. They power up the engines and head to Plum Island.

The tension does not pick up with this shift in fire power. Romero doggedly undermines it with his feuding patriarchs squaring off on the dietary habits of the deadheads, another you-were-infected-weren’t-you? zombie in the making, an inconsequential twist, and a banal approach to showing it all. A few scenes of flesh and organ eating are for perfunctory consumption only. Zombies placed in the barn’s stalls like cattle provides a whimsical touch, but Romero’s unique ability to balance his story’s importance between living and undead falters here. In Survival of the Dead the living are caricatures of people and the deadheads are imitation zombies.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Not a Dreamy Remake

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Freddy KruegerZombos Says: Fair

Look, here’s the thing in a nutshell: if you’re going to do a remake, reimagining, reboot, or whatever you’d like to call it, you better come to the table ready to ante up big and play it for all it’s worth. Otherwise, why bother?

Freddy Krueger may be properly dressed in his signature striped sweater, brown Fedora, and nasty blade glove, but he has nowhere to go in this unimaginative reimagining of Wes Craven’s original nightmare. Under a deathmask’s worth of immobilizing rubber makeup (although I admit it appears more medically correct), Jackie Earle Haley’s perpetually pouting face made me pine for Robert Englund’s glistening bald pate, leering, spongy flesh-burned face, and his manic, gleefully malicious dream-devil-in-the-boiler-room enthusiasm.

The outrageous, lethally-twisted dream intrusions that are the hallmark of this franchise are put to bed in Samuel Bayer’s cardboard standee version of Freddy, where winking consciousness between Elm Street’s dreamland and wakefulness is less important than an almost back to back line-up of dead-teenager-walking kill-fests, escalating the body count while decreasing emotional involvement from us for those being stalked. This is a painting by numbers, pretty to look at (it’s well photographed by Jeff Cutter), but rote in its execution of mayhem: there is no sizzle when we should feel the burn as much as child-molester Fred Krueger did.

Ironically, the interpersonal perquisites of cell phone, too many close-ups of Google-like search engine queries, and a victim’s anguished YouTube-delivered solilocam cry for help, distance Freddy’s victims from each other—and from us—by substituting the more intimate sleep-over vigil shown in the original film, when Tina, Nancy, and Glen fret over their shared nightmares, with a modern digital one that trades the popcorn closeness for laptops and no-doze medications. While Freddy’s potential victims share a forgotten connection from having attended the same preschool, their relationships are made weaker because of this digitized distancing, rendering them less supportive of each other and easier prey for their tormentor. Which is good for Freddy because, being less creative in his attacks in this remake, he doesn’t do much beyond making sparks when he scrapes his blades against the pipes.

Again and again and again.

At least Nancy remains his favorite little girl. But this Nancy (Rooney Mara) is not 1984’s Nancy (played by the feisty Heather Langenkamp). Here she puts up a less-spirited fight against Freddy and spends more time searching the Internet for information and sketching her nightmares instead of trying to save her friends. Where Craven drove his story through the battle of wills between Nancy and Freddy, escalating the stakes through an ambitious series of special effects to add urgency and nightmarish uncertainty, writers Strick and Heisserer use the slow revelation of Freddy’s nastiness with children as their primary driver, eschewing the giddily insane, booby-trapped confrontation between Nancy and Freddy for repetitive, almost static, boiler room scenes of Freddy looking ominous and victims looking scared. Fans can debate the merits or demerits of this changed dynamic, but this remake’s less dreamland, more rational approach keeps the story as rigid as Haley’s burn makeup.

As a fan of horror movies, and yes, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, I can tell you this movie is a disappointment because it takes from the original storyline but doesn’t seem to understand it. Freddy is here, his victims are here, lots more technology use—and no weird-looking hairdos—are here, but the nightmarish invasion of one’s dreams is missing; the menace that sparked the first entry in this franchise is missing; 1984’s spirit behind the envelope-pushing special effects is missing.

This is one boring movie when it should have sizzled.

Now, if they had Johnny Depp play Freddy instead…?

The Grudge 2 (2006)

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Grudge 2

Zombos Says: Fair

The vengeful ghost in The Grudge 2 is a yūrei–definitely. Telltale signs are the long black hair that hangs disheveled, and the dangling; you know, the twisting, floating–sort of lopsided walk–most J-Horror apparitions do when staring you down, or just before they ring your neck into a pretzel. And those wide-eyed, gray-skinned ghosts definitely haunt a particular place. No, wait a minute. They do tend to leave the house a lot, even in The Grudge, and in this sequel they’ve hopped all the way over to Chicago. So they are now haunting two places at once. There’s nothing about yūrei haunting two places at once. Damn. And what’s with that little gray boy that meows like a cat, and the cat that doesn’t meow at all?

The Grudge 2 is a bit confusing at first. Director Takashi Shimizu weaves his continuing tale of blind rage and death between three plotlines: three school girls in Japan dumb enough to go into that house; Aubrey Davis (Amber Tamblyn) traveling to Japan to find out why her sister (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is accused of murder and arson; and a romantic relationship in Chicago that escalates into darkness, witnessed by a frightened young boy.

The opening breakfast scene jars you to attention, but before you can say “We should have gone to IHOP,” we cut to Japan and three school girls–one Japanese, two American, and all three heading for a major bad hair day. The tall, not-so-hip Allison tags along as they enter the haunted house where it all started. On a dare, she enters the closet. That infamous closet. Shimizu does a good job of building this claustrophobic scene to it’s expected climax with solid scares. Closets can be very scary, whether you are hiding in them or hoping nothing pops out of them. And the way you can never find things in closets–yes, they’re evil, pure and simple.

But this early scene is the only true scare in the entire film. While there are shock-cuts galore, Shimizu dotes on showing us the deadly duo again and again, as they appear under sheets, in windows, in hallways, on desk tops, and in sweatshirts (you will understand that when you see it). The tableaus are visually clever, but swing more toward the manga-style of visual cleverness making it all humorous; and lose their scariness and suspense by doing so. Instead of sustained tension from the unseen, Shimizu has created Hollywoodized slasher-yūrei monsters that rack up the body count in ever clever but not very scary ways. Instead of tight glimpses of that stark, wide-eyed pasty face of evil–covered by severe split ends of hair–we see lingering shots of it appearing out of photographs and mirrors.

This is not to say Shimizu has done a bad job: he’s just Americanized J-Horror to a stage where The Grudge has become a franchise. What was once iconic J-Horror imagery has now been replaced with your typical American horror movie modus operandi–and would you like fries with that?

A journalist researching the murders since the first occurrence joins Aubrey Davis in searching for answers to the mysterious deaths. Finding a journal written by an eight year old girl in the closet, he brings it to a friend who studies Japanese folklore. The journal explains some things, perhaps including why the original evil or rage came into existence, but before Davis and the journalist can head out to see the person who may be responsible for the evil, the yūrei pay a visit in a well-staged, but to be expected, scene involving photographs, photo developing trays, and really bad over-exposure on a negative.

As Aubrey pursues the answers to this mystery, our three daring school girls are not faring so well. The yūrei are working overtime to make sure no one who visits their humble abode goes without a thank you from hell. And Jake, the young frightened boy in Chicago, is also experiencing new tenant issues–only these tenants don’t walk up the stairs, and they make a hell of a lot of noise, too. The neighbors next door, the Flemings, also have a hooded guest who creeps him out. Strange noises and pounding from their apartment eventually force him to find out who the hooded person is, and why dad is going bonkers.

The score is actually quite good, creating more of an ominous mood than most of the movie. The weird gurgling, clicking sound made by the broken-neck yūrei apparition is also used very well here. It provides more chills than most of the closeups. The acting is topnotch, too. But the continual cutting back and forth between the separate plotlines is confusing, and has a dulling effect on what should be mounting tensions leading to a climax.

And what a disappointing climax. As one character notes, “there can be no end to what has started.” I would modify this to “there can be no end to a cash-cow franchise in Hollywood, so what you see is what you get until The Grudge 3. And don’t expect much there, either if we can strudel* the story along to The Grudge 4.”

*strudel: the fine Hollywood art of stretching a concept for all its worth, using as little ‘filling’ as possible to keep you coming back for more.

The Burrowers (2008)
Not Deep Enough

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The burrowers

Zombos Says: Fair

It came to this; a setting sun lingering at the warm edge of approaching 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 the monotonous drone of air conditioners humming through hot, molasses-sticky, nights where forgotten candy bars melted in jean pockets, mosquitoes danced to the crackling of ice cubes in sweaty glasses of
lemonade and iced tea and soda, and texting fingers Keystone Copped their slippery grasp on hot 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 the Indians—he doesn’t dig deep enough into his characters or embellish their actions to make this a 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 shot 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 through his shallow direction.

Clancy Brown’s tall and sure character, John Clay, is not given enough dialog or motivation to sink his spurs into. The brash relationship between the slow moving cavalry, wanting to treat every Indian as hostile and hang them high, the lovelorn Coffey (Karl Geary) wanting to move with more urgency to get his kidnapped fiancé back, and Clay’s impatience with the cavalry’s youthful commander never heats to branding iron hot in this story. And as soon as the riding gets rough, the Indian-hunting cavalry and the more determined group of rescuers, led by Clay, go their separate ways after a brief confrontation, splitting the tension, but not intensifying it. Also left behind is any hope of recalcitrance, growth in characters, or mighty clashes of egos to move this period piece beyond the more contemporary getting picked off, one by one, formula.

Petty makes the horror palpable through brief glimpses of the hungry quadrupeds skulking in the bushes, waiting for the cowpokes to fall asleep. The way in which the Burrowers paralyze their victims, bury them, still conscious, in shallow graves to ‘season the meat’—you will know what I mean when you watch the movie—and then chow down after a few days wait is gruesome. But he never moves beyond the lazy horror movie tempo of stalking and dying. If you have watched a few contemporary horror movies, you know how often it always seems to boil down to one frenetic encounter after another, leading to one victim after another being killed, with emphasis on how creatively or gorily that kill is done. For Clay and his search
party, you can break it all down to when an attack will take place—at night—and who will be next; place your bets on the annoying guy who can’t shoot straight. This approach fills the running time; suspense and chills don’t, even when the rescuers find their bullets aren’t effective in holding the Burrowers at bay.

In-between encounters, the cowboys learn a little more about the Burrowers, who mysteriously show up every twenty years, chow down hardy, and then
disappear until the next time. When Clay and his party hear that another tribe of Indians knows how to fight these mysterious Burrowers, they go looking for members of that tribe to help them. The method that tribe uses, however, is not quite what the rescuers had in mind, which leads to the only nail-biting showdown with the Burrowers. If only the rest of the movie could have shown more of this.

At one point I hoped the cavalry would show up with a Gatling gun; but maybe the budget squelched such ideas.

After the initial attack on the homestead in the opening minutes, the pace becomes leisurely with little verve to distinguish the proceedings from the usual horror movie situation. When a young survivor from another attack is dug up, she’s quickly packed up and sent away with Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), a young man whose mom sent him along with the search party hoping it would make a real man out of him. Not much happens between the paralyzed girl, who can only wiggle her toe against her boot, and Dobie after he is sent back with her, hoping to find a doctor who can help; except for an encounter with the Burrowers that ends on the expected down note.

Eventually you start to wonder how many people are buried in shallow graves lying a few feet away from the riders as they make their way along the trail. At one point, a horse’s hoof breaks through the ground—and something more—but Petty keeps his riders moving unawares. The beautiful views of the Plains take on an ominous tone after this, especially when you realize the Burrowers bury their living victims close to where the attack takes place.

The Burrowers fails to use, play with, or dance around the wealth of tropes, clichés, and thematic conventions most of us are familiar with after watching Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves, and many other Western shows and movies.

While not exactly a hanging offense, it would have given the story more true grit.

Prom Night (2008)

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Zombos Says: Fair

Prom Night‘s life-size theater-promotion cardboard standee of a door, strategically placed to pique interest for this teen thriller, is a good indication of how much effort went into this movie. When I opened the door it only produced a halfhearted, single scream. The teenagers walking by when I did this looked surprised and laughed. Even they were expecting something a bit more slasher-scream-full.

When I watched the movie, I found boredom made my mind wander a bit when Donna (Brittany Snow) and her boyfriend, Bobby (Scott Porter) exchange corsages as Donna’s aunt and uncle look on, beaming with happiness. I imagined a prom night filled with monster corsages devouring boyfriends, Carrie-like J-horror prom nights stalked by ghosts seeking vengeance, or maybe even tuxedoed zombies crashing the prom night party; anything else but this unnecessary reworking of Jamie Lee Curtis’ more violent and relevant 80s slasher. I didn’t attend my senior prom. Perhaps I have unresolved issues with that. Or perhaps this movie has unresolved issues with terror, tension, and thrills. I think that’s more likely.

Director Nelson McCormick has done a large amount of episodic television work so maybe that’s why his movie is paced around imaginary commercial breaks. Each time tension builds he moves away from the action to show people dancing or crowning the prom king and queen. Like an episode of CSI, nothing appears out of control or erupts into hysterical terror. He also seems to have a fetish for closets. I lost count how often someone opened, reached into, looked in, or hid in, a closet. Donna hides under a bed twice, but I didn’t find that as annoying. Not much tension builds from opening closets, I can tell you that. I’d sum up this movie this way: give sinister look, slash a victim, show dancing in slow motion, show someone opening a closet; give sinister look, slash a victim, show more dancing, show someone else opening a closet; slash a victim, stop the dancing long enough to show prom king and queen being crowned, show someone opening a damn closet again, slash another victim; and so on…

Donna is stalked by her college teacher (probably her chemistry teacher; they’re all nutzy from handling toxic substances). It’s not clear why he needs to kill people in order to get close to her, but this is a slasher movie so reasons are not always necessary, only lots of slashing. He’s so good at it he leaves a bloodless trail suitable for this PG-13’er. After her family is massacred, three years pass before Donna’s back to normal enough to attend her senior prom. Not surprisingly, her stalking teacher escapes in time to rent a tux and join the festivities.

The teacher (Johnathon Schaech) gives overly sinister looks and acts like a Charles Manson wannabe. He wears a black golf cap, tweedy sport coat, and needs a shave. He looks intensely at you when spoken to without saying a word. Only in movies do psychos dress and act this way. In real life, the only guys who dress and act this way are directors and bloggers of horror movies. I admit I did wear a black golf cap before seeing this movie. Now I realize it does make you look like an oddball if you’re not golfing, so that’s it for me. I’m happy to say I haven’t worn a tweedy sport coat in years. I do still need to shave.

When Donna realizes she’s being stalked again, the action is chopped, but not in that good, horror-chopped-up sort of way. We keep shifting, never staying long enough in one place to be scared or cause popcorn tipping seat-jump. The opening few minutes promise much but deliver little, and I won’t pin all the blame on the PG-13 rating requirements. All the action is homogenized around those imaginary commercial breaks, and starts and stops with little tension or visceral involvement. It’s all glossy, television-slick—not cable, mind you–with no blemishes to fret over.

The prom is held in a lavish hotel with beautiful young people who don’t worry about recessions or social inequities or our out of control national debt. The police are adequately inept to help increase the body count, but Detective Winn (Idris Elba) goes through the motions anyway, and Elba does a good job in spite of the character he’s written into. When Donna is left almost friendless, I imagined how different this might have been.

What if Polly Pureheart Donna was a black-haired goth with punky attitude? Perky goth Donna flirts with her chem teacher (or maybe lit teacher is better: they like tweedy jackets, too), and going too far, regrets it. He goes nutz when she calls it off and can’t hold a test tube without breaking it just thinking of her. So now there’s her guilt and his feelings of rejection adding to the terror. Guilty terror with feelings of rejection is always great for building tension. To stay alive, she’s forced to make nice with the vixens from hell–the envied, fashion-conscious, hip girls at school who despise her Ubergoth ways. Her Doom Cookie boyfriend finds out all about the side fling and joins the chem teacher and both go after her and her newfound friends. Much collateral damage ensues, add lots of blood. The end is a multi-ambulance tear-jerker.

But, sadly, Donna is not goth, and her friends are the socially coolest in school. Everyone but the stalking psycho is dead set on having fun at the prom. Even the girly rivalry between Donna and Paris Hilton–sorry, my bad–between Donna and the spoiled rich girl who despises her is lukewarm and goes nowhere. Her boyfriend doesn’t even get the chance to protect or save her. What’s a boyfriend good for if he can’t at least do that? When the end comes, it’s exactly like the ending you’d see in a non-continued television episode just before the commercial break.

And roll credits.

Wait! There’s a glimmer of tension when her best friend Lisa (Dana Davis) realizes who the creepy guy in the black golf cap and tweedy jacket reminds her of, but no, that fizzles out without much frazzle. Instead there’s lots of predictable running away from potential help and through translucent plastic curtains hung in dark rooms as Lisa hides from the killer in a deserted part of the hotel under renovation. I was hoping she would stop and improvise a defense from the paint cans and tools lying on the workmen’s tables, but her character wasn’t written to be that clever.

At least she didn’t open another closet.

The Sick House (2008)

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Zombos Says: Fair

“I don’t have time for this,” said Anna (Gina Philips), the comely archeology student in The Sick House.

Zombos and I looked at each other. We agreed with her. Once again Paul Hollstenwall, the scion of inconsequential cinema, had underwhelmed us with another exercise in pointless moviemaking.

Anna has just discovered the four punk metal wannabes who are freaking out because one of them appears to have the plague. For shame: that will teach them not to go kicking about in stolen cars for joy rides and breaking into bio-hazard excavation sites previously used as plague hospitals. And shame on Anna, too. Here she is yelling at them for breaking and entering when she did it first, releasing a centuries old evil—and former member of that notorious 1665 London touring group known as the Black Priests—in the process.

The five of them, the usual mix of underachieving and overachieving victims you’ll find slamming into each other in slasher movies, are in for a rough night of it. So is everyone else watching this whoozy, blurry, head-spinning shock-cut apparition, and zoicks! musical extravaganza. Whatever originality and novelty to be found in the story is undercooked by director Curtis Radclyffe’s palsied camera and over-reliance on J-horror hackneyism.

“Why can he not keep the bloody camera still!” cried Zombos.

“He’s sustaining the tension by forcing your disorientation with his constantly moving frame,” explained Paul.

“Tension? My neck is tense from all the quick-cut splicing and visual chittering,” Zombos retorted. “And those flickering fluorescent light fixtures must go. Could they not afford better lighting? I cannot see what is going on.”

Plague doctors? London’s Black Death of 1665?

A capital idea for gut-wrenching suspense and terror is reduced to a half farthing’s worth of overdone digital and cutting room trickery, making sense
the first victim in this suspense-less nonsense. My mind drifted among the possibilities if less confusing herky-jerky motion and more stillness
were the norm, to let the actors convey the terror overwhelming them.

Gina Philips gives a fair performance, though she seems too calm, too emotionless at times when you’d expect some “oh, sh*t, it’s the plague, we’re so f**ked!” or “blimey, what the hell is that thing what wants to eat our souls and kill us!”

Instead, she’s so proper, so academic. At least the others provide some frenzied bickering and craziness, and run like the dickens through the halls of the orphanage away from the not so good reawakened evil doctor making his terminal rounds. Lots of aimless running is part and parcel to horror movies, but here it’s more aimless and unintentionally confusing.

“Help me out here,” pleaded Zombos. “Are you pondering what I am pondering?”

“Not if it involves cocoa butter and bananas,” I said.

Zombos and Paul stopped arguing and looked at me. I quickly pulled my thoughts back to landfall.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“What do you think? asked Zombos. “Paul thinks this bloody movie is a punky masterpiece of new horror style and I am too old to appreciate it. Talk some sense into him will you.”

I took a deep sip from my hot mocha latte, embellished with Chef Machiavelli’s secret mix of herbs and spices he calls the Bombay tincture. I looked at Zombos, then at Paul. They waited expectantly with folded arms. I took another long sip and pondered. Was it simply bad direction or bad directorial choices? Was the acting mediocre or just hacked to pieces by all the scene juggling? Was the story poorly written or intentionally ground into a confusing mash? The Bombay tincture fortified my thoughts enough to proceed.

“It’s obvious the choices made here point to commercially shaping the movie for a younger audience, especially with the odd addition of that acid-drenched-metal song screeching over the opening credits. Today’s kids’ snippet-drenched YouTube attention spans are primed for choppy narrative, so they probably wouldn’t notice the yawning chasms of missing structural coherence in the visual narrative of this movie.”

There. I said it.

Zombos and Paul continued to look at me. Each slowly unfolded his arms. They ignored what I said and started arguing again. Good. At least now they would leave me alone to enjoy my mocha latte in peace.

But what ails The Sick House?

Although it contains cliché after cliché repeated in numbing succession, the acting is strong, the historical context very intriguing, and the atmosphere almost menacing, in spite of the overused Saw–styled tinting in the saturated lighting.

Ludgate Orphanage, aside from its spookhouse-flickering fluorescents, is dark—often too dark to make out what is happening—and filled with brooding rooms and hallways. Then there’s the tall, unstoppable, plague doctor dressed in his bizarre clothing and bird-like mask, stalking around with a bevy of grotesque children, murdered by him back in the 1600s. There is also a kicker ending that twists the story back on itself; but it will leave you just as confused as before.

The archeological dig that Anna’s been working on in the basement of the orphanage leads to another chamber further down. Before she can dig deeper, the authorities find evidence of lingering plague. Being an A student, Anna ignores the grave danger to herself, and the public at large, and breaks into the condemned orphanage after hours, to continue her work.

While she’s digging around in the basement, the four miscreant fun-loving  hoody-punksters crash their stolen auto near the orphanage. Finding the door open—thanks to Anna—they hustle inside to avoid the English Bobbies and all those nasty lectures on grand theft auto and public menace behaviors they’ve obviously heard before.

It all goes down at midnight.

Time becomes frozen for everyone in the building as the plague doctor (John Lebar), brought back from the netherworld by Anna’s academic zeal, makes his killer appearance. There seems to be satanic purpose to his malevolence, but in J-horror fashion, the story doesn’t give you much to go on and the director is so hellbent on gimmicking the action it becomes impossible to follow at times, actually, most of the time, to the point of annoyance.

One clue: it all revolves around a baby to be born, but that is all you get.

Although there is not much gore, you do have people yelling at each other a lot and frantically running to or away from danger, people becoming possessed and frantically chasing other people, and people slippin’ ‘n slidin’ in something white, gelatinous, and filled with pukey-looking nastiness.

Leading up to an illogical but plot-convenient bathing scene—this is the creepy, insane killer infested orphanage remember—in thousands of blood sucking leeches (used to treat the plague back then: go figure).

The ending neatly leads into a sequelization antic for another set of plague doctor’s rounds ad nauseam in a round of franchise sequels, but I don’t think this doctor got to make another house call on DVD yet.

Maybe Paul is right. Maybe Zombos and I are too old to appreciate the style of The Sick House. Or maybe a script doctor and a steadier hand at the camera would have made this a more memorable, even classic, frightfest instead of another victims-offed in factory assembled horror movie storyline,
with added visual confusion to make it appear youthfully fresh.

Flight of the Living Dead:
Outbreak on a Plane (2007)

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Zombos Says: Fair

Marauding voracious zombies, no first class, no in-flight movies, and no salted nuts. And it gets worse! New Line Home Entertainment lands Flight of the Living Dead:Outbreak On A Plane straight to DVD, so fasten your seat belts because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

At a time when airlines have routinely kept passengers stranded in conga lines and airport terminals, creatively screwing-up the air travel experiences for so many travelers in so many nefarious ways, can flesh-eating zombies really be more frightening than having to get through a security checkpoint without completely disrobing, or finding your seat’s overhead luggage bin not already stuffed with A30, C13, and D2’s carry-ons? The writers, director Scott Thomas, Sidney Iwanter, and Mark Onspaugh, attempt the daunting task of answering that question, but don’t have the budget or the scripting verve to make it a resounding yes.

What they do have is a good cast which includes Erick Avari and Kevin J. O’connor from 1999’s The Mummy, and a clever sense
for using the 747 Jumbo Jet’s confining spaces as zombies overrun the cargo hold, the aisles, rip through the floor, and barge their way into the toilet. But the promise of a cheeky, retro-fitted storyline, and characters straight from the Airport disaster movies is not realized, although the opening credit sequence, with its bitchin’ song and animation, teases us with that expectation.

Yes, there’s a nun—sans guitar this time, thank God—a cop handcuffed to his wise-cracking, suave criminal charge, three perky
stewardesses, an aging pilot on his last flight, and fast moving bio-zombies. What’s not here is the needed scale to make the aisles of the 747 a harrowing battleground, or the depth of characterization and turmoil to put you on the edge of your seat, dreading every minute the plane is in the air. It’s a good popcorn and soda movie, but you will find the popcorn doesn’t stick in your throat and the soda doesn’t fizz into your nose like it does when watching more gripping horror fare. Missing, too, is the realism and normal discomfort of being on a plane: passengers on this flight easily stand in and walk the aisles during turbulent weather, and there’s no intrusive background jet engine noise; and for a 747, not many passengers booked this trip, although we keep getting new zombies from somewhere.

The strongest missing element is a more dynamic and iconic personality to rally the passengers against the voracious, economy class undead. While the properly cliché characters are adequate, not much is written into them. The famous golf pro, who carries and continuously polishes his beloved club, manages to knock a few growling heads off, here and there, but, like the martial artist in Snakes
on a Plane, his potential is never realized. The quiet nun, ignoring everything around her, unfairly meets her grisly end without redemption, just when she decides to get involved. The cop and the sky marshal whip out their guns, but don’t rally or rescue anyone in the process. Instead, it’s a free-for-all as passengers run and zombies chase in a paint-by-numbers flow of lively action.

Automatic weapons and incendiary devices provide wacky fun. The outbreak begins when an infected wife of one of the renegade
scientists on-board reanimates, much to the chagrin of the hazmat-suited guard nervously holding a semi-automatic weapon in the cargo hold. He opens fire, spraying bullets into the communications box and everything else but the agitated woman. She chomps down and the zombie romp begins.

With so many bullets flying around, it’s hilarious the cabin isn’t compromised. One errant bullet does manage to rip through the plane’s interior and into the side of a flight attendant in a deft scene of mayhem. An improvised munition to blow up the zombies in the cargo
hold doesn’t put a dent in the plane, either, but this intentionally ludicrous scene is done well.

At least I hope it was intentional.

Cut-aways to increasingly worried military and government officials on the ground give the backstory, but tend to slow the action happening on the plane, clipping the tension instead of increasing it. Exterior shots of the CGI plane in flight are also glaringly budget and should have been used more sparingly. Then there are the air ducts. I’m not familiar  with the 747’s air circulation system, but whenever I see air ducts big enough to elbow your way through them, the words “convenient plot device” spring to mind. The disbelieving sky marshal is quickly made a believer when he suddenly encounters one energetic zombie in one.

While the dialog is not crisp or witty, it does have its moments, and the fighter jet, scrambled to bring down the plane, complicates things for the few remaining passengers not gnawing on each other. Only one fighter jet is dispatched, though, so I suppose the Pentagon isn’t too worried about the infected plane landing (or crashing) in a populated area.

The best way to watch Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, is with a bunch of fellow horrorheads, lots of popcorn and White Castle hamburgers, Cane Cola with lime, and Oreo cookies.

Toss in Snakes on a Plane, and Spookies, and you’ve got a night of it.