Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category

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Open Water

January 24, 2012

Susan and Daniel (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) are your typical work-obsessed couple drifting apart in the American suburbs. But, when left to fend for themselves in tropical, shark-infested waters, they cling to each other so desperately, it’s almost sad and touching. That is, until those fins break the surface again, triggering panic on the screen and setting our nerves on edge. “Open Water” is a textbook example for how to build and sustain tension, develop character and even sneak in wry social commentary over a tightly wound eighty minutes.

Gutsily made by husband-and-wife filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, “Open Water” disarms the viewer (à la “The Blair Witch Project”) with its no-frills, home-video ethos, but, make no mistake, this is shrewdly calculative filmmaking. The story is straightforward, opening in Susan and Daniel’s leafy, SUV-appointed home as the cell phone-toting couple pack up for an island vacation, wondering if they’ll still get email where they’re going. In a few deft strokes, the filmmakers establish their couple and whisk them off to their tropical getaway.

Kentis and Lau assuredly develop the couple’s close-knit but none-too-romantic routine, intimately conveyed by actors Ryan and Travis. To soothe away workaday stress, they embark on a deep-sea dive. From the movie’s premise, we know that this is an ill-fated outing, that the couple will be left behind by a bungling boat crew. But we watch anyway, uneasily but riveted, as the movie puts its pieces into place. Then, from their initial petulance at finding themselves abandoned, through their spasms of antagonism, their attempts to cope and overcome and, finally, their realization that all is futile against a menace largely unseen, “Open Water” becomes an expertly modulated horror movie.

Perhaps the greatest irony in “Open Water” is the claustrophobia of its setting. The sea that looks so limitless and wide-open eventually feels so confining, availing the characters with the barest hopes for survival, not least of which is that its predators simply stay away. The water’s lapping and splashing sickens us as much as it does Susan and Daniel, and the predators most definitely do not stay away. Kentis and Lau know that horror can never be fully realized till the lights are out, and they gain maximum fright wattage out of the all-enveloping darkness of night with only flashes of lightning to orient us. At this point, the filmmakers teasingly cross-cut to scenes of island revelry, but the festive music is muted, faraway, thereby punctuating the ever-growing distance between Susan and Daniel and the lives they’ve left behind. It is here that the absolute meaninglessness of the material world, one of comfortable jobs, SUVs and cell phones, is most keenly felt, pitted against the cunning and merciless forces of nature.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Chris Kentis
Cast: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein

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Cabin Fever

January 22, 2012

Peter Jackson has hailed “Cabin Fever” as “brilliant.” And those of us with an unquestioned love of gore will likely embrace Eli North’s movie with the same giddy enthusiasm. In essence, his movie isn’t a far cry from Jackson’s own “Dead Alive” (1992)—his whacked-out horror spoof about humans who become ravenous zombies after being bitten by a satanic monkey. A deliriously unhinged nuthouse of a movie, “Dead Alive” makes a terrific double bill with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead 2” (1987), with everybody’s cult hero, Bruce Campbell, trapped inside a cabin, gamely mowing down zombies of his own. North retains the cabin setting of Raimi’s movie but replaces Jackson’s monkey with a just-as-fearsome flesh-eating virus, unleashing it among a bunch of bungling teenagers trapped in the deep woods. In that sense, “Fever” also harkens back to “Friday the 13th” and the whole spate of “teensploitation” horror flicks that followed in the wake of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” on through the mid-80s to mid-90s heyday of Wes Craven, by way of the biological gross-out of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982).

“Cabin Fever” is a rollicking nostalgia ride through that hallowed tradition of gore flicks that holds our childhood memories in such thrall. North and co-writer Randy Pearlstein have the uncanny talent for weaving into their narrative every cliché, plot device and nuance from the horror cannon of the last 25-or-so years. As an homage, it’s energetically made, enjoyable while it lasts, but never breaking new ground or leaving behind much of an imprint.

Five horny, party-hardy co-eds take off for a week of sex, squirrel hunting and campfire stories at a secluded cabin. When a local hobo crashes their party, raving and stumbling in the throes of what is clearly an evil virus, things heat up. One-by-one, they begin to fall ill, panic and paranoia set in, and, in their blundering efforts to seek help, they only turn the already-freakish locals against them. The pathology of this virus isn’t clear other than it turns you into a raving lunatic and your skin into hideous bacon strips. North, in that sense, has commandeered the makings of crackerjack medical horror, with its slow-burn dread, then grafted it onto far less interesting teen-scream material.

Scott Kevan’s cinematography and Nathan Barr’s score, with help from David Lynch veteran Angelo Badalamenti, are effectively eerie and evocative. On their lead, North builds a genuine sense of creepiness and foreboding. Certainly, “Fever” packs its share of jolts and none-too-shabby black humor, both worthy of a place alongside Romero. But after all the noise dies down and “Fever” cools, resolving itself as predicably as any “Elm Street” installment, what do we have? A remembrance of past frights, I guess, but as a horror yarn in its own right, it just bleeds into the background.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Eli Roth
Written by: Eli Roth, Randy Pearlstein
Cast: Rider Strong, Jordan Ladd, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent, Joey Kern

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Bubba Ho-Tep

January 22, 2012

Elvis lives and so, apparently, does JFK in writer-director Don Coscarelli’s pseudo-horror indie lark, “Bubba Ho-Tep.” Based on Joe R. Lansdale’s short story, “Bubba Ho-Tep” tries ineffectually to be both a lyrical character study and a darkly satirical horror flick. As the latter, the movie demonstrates all the zeal and invention of a tired carnival act, and, in trying to mine heartfelt pathos from its depiction of two lonely curmudgeon-icons, it digs up only platitudes and schmaltz.

Bruce Campbell, something of a cult item himself and delightfully campy performer, plays a crochety, limpdicked Elvis, facing the twilight of his years in an old-age home. As “Bubba” tells it, Elvis, tired of his fame, switched places with an impersonator decades back and took to a more anonymous life on the Elvis-impersonator circuit. An injury, though, has landed him in these drably lit, antiseptic surroundings, rhapsodizing about erections and other bygone triumphs, nursing regrets about a wife and daughter left far behind. Elvis finds a sympathizer in a fellow resident (Ossie Davis), a black man convinced he’s Jack Kennedy.

“Bubba” starts off tantalizingly enough with black-and-white newsreel footage reporting the discovery of a cursed Egyptian mummy. That opening holds such lip-smacking promise of thrills to come that it’s a real letdown as Coscarelli’s script devotes much of its subsequent energies to Elvis’ plodding backstory, and to the derivative characters and circumstances surrounding his life at the home. We get the saucy nurse, the flinty doctor, the buffoonish hearse drivers, medicinal penile gel and even ruminations of what kind of shit a mummy might produce. This is all meant to be outrageously funny, but it isn’t quite, because “Bubba” never achieves that unfettered, freefall zaniness that it desperately needs to thrive and distinguish itself. Indeed, its script is too square and well-mannered, choosing instead to sentimentalize its offbeat characters—a fatal mistake since he never develops them beyond the realm of well-trodden clichés. He wastes precious storytime on tiresome jibes about Elvis’ once all-conquering penis, his schmaltzy ponderings over his past, and Jack’s own paramoid musings about Castro.

Once the mummy—an ill-developed creature himself, given to foppish headwear—lets loose inside the old-age home, “Bubba” still doesn’t wake up. Apart from a pitched battle scene between Elvis and a monstrous, winged beetle, the action scenes are predictably staged, leading to an appropriately limp finale. The Campbell-Davis pairing is inpired, but Coscarelli’s plotting and characterizations are too unadventurous for their dynamic to amount to much. Similarly, he peppers his movie with flash cuts and other run-of-the-mill shock tactics to distract us from the flimsy, half-baked goings-on. Still, if seeing Campbell in a bouffant wig and sporting the King’s sneer and swagger does it for you, then “Bubba Ho-Tep’s” charms—such as they are—may not be all lost.

Grade: C

Written/Directed by: Don Coscarelli
Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Ella Joyce, Heidi Marnhout, Bob Ivy

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A Tale of Two Sisters

January 21, 2012

Dread may be our most primal response to the unexplainably grotesque. If you reflect on the high water marks of Hollywood’s post-60s horror canon, you may find that the best–among them “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” and the more recent “The Sixth Sense” and “The Others”–all masterfully elicit and sustain dread. David Lynch, not really a horror filmmaker, has traded in the elements of horror from the beginning: Consider that cavernous thrum and echo that reverberates through the sound design from “Eraserhead” to “Mulholland Drive” and which foreshadow the nightmares, murders and dangers that saturate his dread-filled cinema.

As “A Tale of Two Sisters” attests, Korean writer-director Ji-woon Kim has well absorbed the lessons of Kubrick and Lynch. This tantalizing blend of psychological horror and chamber drama is propped up on the question of what is imagined and what is real–similar to M. Night Shymalan’s design for “The Sixth Sense” or Alejandro Amenábar’s for “The Others.” Unlike those filmmakers, though, Kim doesn’t strive to create fully rounded, sympathetic characters. Instead, he goes for a macabre fairy tale dynamic within which his main characters–a pair of adolescent sisters traumatized after their mother’s death, a sinister stepmother, and a guilt-ridden father–function more as archetypes in the Roald Dahl mold.

Kim concocts a puzzle box of a story–turning the past and the present, dreams and memories into slowly cohering pieces–as Soo-mi (Su-jeong Lim), just released from a mental asylum, arrives with her sister, Soo-yeon (Geun-yeong Mun) to live at her father’s country house. Tensions begin brewing between the sisters and their stepmother (a terrifically chilling Jung-ah Yum) who may or may not be responsible for their mother’s gruesome demise. Soo-mi, who is deeply attached to her curiously quiet sister, seems troubled by her burgeoning womanhood (much is made of menstrual blood), terrorized by her stepmother and by nocturnal visions of her dead mother, all while her father hovers ineffectually in the background. “Two Sisters” teases us with bits of information, never providing quite enough to substantiate its weight of psychodrama and its final-act revelation feels tacked on just to tie up the frilly ends of its plotting.

Story weaknesses might easily undo your average Hollywood horror outing, but in “Two Sisters,” story is merely as a springboard for Kim’s bravura filmmaking. His movie is a delirious mélange of styles that absorbs us for two solid hours. Depicting the placid environs of his setting, Kim crafts a lovely, unhurried naturalism before he guides us through his forboding interiors wherein his movie becomes a kaleidoscope of color schemes and visual tones, from the retina-searing crimson of pubescence and death, the creams and blues of memory, to the bleaker hues of stepmotherly deception. Kim’s tour de force culminates with a Lynchian descent into madness, in which the sepiatoned past collides with its blood-spattered consequences in the present. “Two Sisters” poses gross questions of causality and character development, but when a filmmaker can wield his palete with such joyous and assured fury, who knows how to spook you with bursts of cinematic dread, you don’t ask questions. You just enjoy the ride.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Ji-woon Kim
Cast: Kap-su Kim, Jung-ah Yum, Su-jeong Lim, Geun-Young Moon

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Best Worst Movie

January 20, 2012

Michael Paul Stephenson’s enjoyable, sometimes fascinating, “Best Worst Movie” chronicles the making of the horror cheapie “Troll 2,” and how, in the twenty years since its critically panned release, this so-called “worst movie ever made” has spawned a significant worldwide cult. Stephenson can claim personal authority with his subject since, as an eight-year-old, he was himself part of “Troll 2’s” cast. By and large, though, he keeps his own opinions under wraps, and lets his documentary’s motley assortment of characters tell the story. Front and center among them is Dr. George Hardy, now a successful dentist in small-town Alabama, who played the lead in “Troll 2.”

“Best Worst Movie,” in a sense, is Hardy’s story as Stephenson’s cameras follow him through a fling with a kind of revisionist stardom thanks to “Troll 2’s” growing internet fan base. We watch as Hardy, a cheerful and unassuming gentleman, reacts with puzzlement then delight at the wild reception he receives nationwide while making appearances at “Troll 2” revival screenings. These opening sections of “Best Worst Movie” feel weakest because they lack tension between the subject and his environment — the stuff of great drama – as Hardy and his movie are met with unbridled adoration by one and all. But, then, gradually, a sense of reality creeps in, and heartbreak as it dawns on Hardy that, beyond a very narrow segment of film buffs, he and his movie are about as well regarded as last week’s leftover pizza. Those moments of realization ground Stephenson’s documentary with a humility and wisdom that give it a resonant, poignant quality, however bittersweet.

Stephenson explores intriguing themes about the nature of bad cinema, about notions of cult celebrity, and why legions of enthusiasts rally around certain admittedly awful movies – of which “Troll 2” seems to be the reigning king. “Best Worst Movie” succeeds in much the same way as recent documentaries like “King of Kong” and “Anvil! The Story of Anvil”; they all reveal and humanize little seen communities in our shared culture, and offer deeply felt answers to pressing questions about fame, success, and finding purpose in life.

For Hardy, the journey to cult celebrity and back offers a hard-won realization that stardom, for all its tempting thrills, can be equally demoralizing. For others in “Troll 2’s” cast and crew, the cult status with which they’ve been conferred is met with various and surprising reactions, from actress Connie Young’s bemused embarrassment to Italian director Claudio Fragasso’s intensely conflicted feelings over being regarded as the maestro of bad cinema. But where Stephenson’s film really plumbs its darkest, richest depths is in the portraits of co-stars Robert Ormsby, Don Packard, and Margo Prey – all of whom seem to be living on the margins, whether retired, withdrawn or recovering from illness. The bare honesty of their personalities speaks both to their courage and to their willingness to share their most private insecurities and regrets.

“Troll 2” is a terrible movie, but it’s the best kind of terrible – unselfconscious and made with utter sincerity, as if the fate of humanity depended on it. Listening to the testimony of the movie’s true believers, from film critics to cult-movie fans, I began to wonder if, on the scale of good to bad – from, say, “Citizen Kane” on one end and “Troll 2” on the other – art from either extremes can and must be appreciated in their own, albeit polar opposite, ways. Whether a brightly radiant star or a powerful, all-consuming black hole, both elicit our awe and our admiration, do they not? Perhaps the anti-masterpiece deserves a place in our hearts as much as the masterpiece.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Michael Paul Stephenson
Written by: Michael Paul Stephenson
Cast: Michael Paul Stephenson, George Hardy, Darren Ewing, Jason Steadman, Jason Wright, Robert Ormsby, Don Packard, Margo Prey, Connie Young, Claudio Fragasso

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Black Death

March 9, 2011

The pall of fear and death hangs over thriller-maker Christopher Smith’s “Black Death.” It’s 1348, and we’re in England’s bleak, mist-encircled countryside. The Bubonic Plague stalks the population, killing off entire villages and infecting those who’ve evaded it with constant dread. The Church finds itself losing ground to the Plague as it fails to deliver its followers of their suffering.

For callow monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), the crisis of faith in God is less about the heartless decimation of innocent lives and more about his personal struggle to reconcile his pledge to God with his irresistible love for a woman, Averill (Kimberly Nixon). To keep Averill from the Plague’s clutches, Osmund sends her into the forest while he himself signs on with a band of mercenaries, led by the steely-eyed Ulric (Sean Bean) on a mission for the Church Bishop.

Osmund is tasked with leading Ulric and company to the other side of a mysterious marshland where, as rumor has it, a village untouched by the Plague exists, guarded over by a sorceress, capable of fending off disease and resurrecting the dead. For Ulric, an agent of the Church, the sorceress represents a threat to Christian order and must be eliminated. Hence, once the men arrive at the mystical village, Smith’s film shunts into psychodrama as Ulric and the heretic sorceress, Langvia (Carice Van Houten), circle one another with suspicion and grapple for the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Whether Langvia is truly a sorceress or a charlatan manipulating the gullible villagers with sleight-of-hand is a question weighing on the film’s closing act. It’s a question Osmund faces head-on as he contends with guilt and grief upon realizing that Avrill may have been killed in the forest and Langvia tempts him by offering to bring her back. This issue of what is real, what is illusion and of one’s faith in God amidst so much misery entwine compellingly throughout “Black Death,” and give Dario Poloni’s script its thematic heft.

“Black Death,” rightly so, is not a pretty looking movie; Smith and cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid wash out primary colors, and give their film a coarse, grainy look, befitting the ugliness of their milieu and the brutality of the violence (and, be warned, there’s plenty of it). But “Black Death” is all jitters and quick cuts from the first shot; we hardly get a moment to absorb the mood of pervasive dread and paranoia without being distracted by the jerky, hand-held shooting and restless editing. Smith’s frenetic style is appropriate to the battle scene that takes place midway, but it’s everywhere, creating a sense of anxiety that doesn’t feel organic to the material.

Moreover, when Langvia enters the story, “Black Death” becomes enwrapped in its parlor game regarding her identity, complete with a secretive pagan ritual that feels recycled from every satanic-cult scene ever made, to maintain the sense of terror essential to it plot. The performances are generally sturdy, and while Redmayne’s Osmund is too slight a character to carry the film, Bean compensates with his intense presence. Ulric may be a secondary character here, but Bean owns this movie. His characters’ zealousness, personified by the actor’s grim visage and battle-ready comportment, as well as his commitment to his faith, tested in a painful-to-watch torture sequence, are the driving engines behind Smith’s otherwise sporadically effective film.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Dario Poloni
Cast: Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Carice Van Houten, Kimberly Nixon, David Warner, John Lynch, Andy Nyman, Johnny Harris, Tim McInnerny

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Zombieland

January 21, 2011

It’s a familiar horror-comedy premise: The Zombie Apocalypse. The world is in ruins and overrun with flesh-eating zombies. Among the few scattered human survivors is Columbus (as in Columbus, Ohio; the characters in the film are known for the destinations to which they’re headed), played by Jesse Eisenberg in his typical (and highly effective) dithering mode. He hitches a ride with the loose-cannon Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) along a highway littered with corpses and abandoned vehicles. Columbus and Tallahassee have a testy dynamic — the former being the tentative, always-anxious yin to the latter’s off-kilter, aggressive yang. Soon, the pair is joined by the scheming twosome, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). They form a dysfunctionally amusing clique, fending off hordes of zombies while tearing along in their truck towards a new destination, an amusement park in Los Angeles rumored to be zombie-free (No spoiler: It’s not).

The zombie-based action in Zombieland is old hat. We’ve seen it all before: Zombies attacking recklessly while our human heroes fend them off with shotguns and sharp objects. The comic violence is amusing up to a point after which it’s just a monotonous succession of beheadings and splatter effects; zombie violence is a dangerously one-trick pony and gives this sub-genre a been-there-seen-that vibe. But where Zombieland really shines is in its characters: Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, director Ruben Fleischer and the four-member cast create a group of truly endearing personalities who we enjoy following. Harrelson is in top nutcase mode, playing off perfectly against his exact opposite, embodied in Eisenberg. Stone, playing tough-chick Wichita, is charming, especially as a tentative romance develops between her character and Columbus. In fact, Zombieland’s best scene might be the one in which these two flirt tentatively and warm to each other. Breslin, meanwhile, as the no-nonsense Little Rock has a couple of sharply funny scenes with Eisenberg as well.

The central section of Zombieland, surprisingly, contains almost no action. It’s an extended interlude that takes place in, of all places, a mansion belonging to Bill Murray, who plays himself and brings to the film its goofiest, most hilarious moments. Dressed as a zombie to “blend in,” Murray has survived the apocalypse and, when he appears before our star-struck group, goes into a virtual stand-up routine, raising the nuttiness bar of Zombieland up one refreshing notch.

The action, especially its tiresome third act consisting of — you guessed it — more zombie mania, is about as dull and predictable as they come in this genre. It’s Zombieland’s delightfully offbeat characters that give the movie its staying power.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin

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Resident Evil: Afterlife

September 14, 2010

Producer-director-writer Paul W.S. Anderson’s unstoppable spinoffs of “Resident Alien,” the megahit humans vs. zombies video-game franchise, continues with “Resident Alien: Afterlife.” It offers the full grab bag of “Matrix”-y effects thrown at your eyeballs over and over again accompanied by a head-pounding fusion of hard rock and techno. In fact, during many scenes in “Afterlife,” I wasn’t sure whether to watch Milla Jovovich do leaps and somersaults in slo-mo while firing bullets and bathed in droplets of rain, or just get up and dance to the soundtrack.

Unsurprisingly, “Afterlife” is being released in both 2D and 3D versions; I saw the 3D, which adds nothing qualitatively to the experience. While if offers some genuinely clever touches initially, “Afterlife” loses steam once Anderson becomes less interested in the story at hand and more on wrapping it up, making sure to set up another sequel.

In terms of visual design, the movie’s opening set inside the expansively futuristic headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation (the company that perpetrated the zombie virus) impresses most. Here, Alice (Milla Jovovich), a human with all the emotional register of a mannequin, confronts the company’s CEO, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) – he’s the one sporting the shades and the bad Brit accent – in a no-holds-barred battle that begins indoors and ends in a plane crash from which Alice escapes. Thereafter, the bulk of “Afterlife” follows Alice and cohort Claire’s (Ali Larter) attempts to lead a group of survivors, holed up in a high-rise L.A. prison, to a tanker ship believed to be a safe haven from zombies, just offshore. The sections inside the prison work best as the survivors – ranging from the rangy, Will Smith-esque ex-basketball player Luther West (Boris Kodjoe) to the reptilian movie producer, Bennett (Kim Coates). Anderson, thankfully, slows the story enough to take advantage of his premise’s horror-movie and survivalist drama tropes as issues of betrayal, trust and camaraderie boil to the surface, and suspicions arise that the zombies may be tunneling their way in.

Once the zombies overrun the prison, “Afterlife” switches to action-movie gear from which it never returns, culminating in a finale that’s a pale rehash of the opening. The occasional flashes of imagination aside, “Afterlife” epitomizes what movies written largely by software and marketing committees look like. Diehard fans of the franchise and genre enthusiasts may flock to it, but on its own merits, the movie offers little. To say it’s nothing more than a crass merchandising gimmick would be to acknowledge Hollywood’s openly cynical attitude to story telling and the film business in general. And what’s the point of that?

Grade: C-

Directed by: Paul W. S. Anderson
Written by: Paul W. S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe, Wentworth Miller, Sienna Guillory, Kacey Barnfield, Norman Yeung, Fulvio Cecere

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28 Days Later…

September 7, 2010

Full of post-apocalyptic hysteria and high jinks, 28 Days Later… cries out for a tie-in video game or comic book. Jim (Murphy) wakes up from a coma in his hospital room to discover that everyone is dead, that the city is deserted. Soon after, he learns everyone’s been killed by a mass plague (caused by a virus called “Rage”) that turns its victims into homicidal maniacs. The plague’s few survivors are left to defend themselves against roving and rapacious gangs of Rage zombies. Jim teams up with a tough-as-nails broad and a little girl (whose father succumbed to the disease) and, together, they fight off evil, mindless Rage hordes as well as a small platoon of horny soldiers eager to re-populate the world. Boyle mixes elements of Mad Max and Night of the Living Dead and comes up with a wild cocktail of campy, gory fun. Just don’t scrutinize the plot too seriously; that can kill the buzz.

Grade: B

Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Alex Garland
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Noah Huntley, Brendan Gleeson

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Shaun of the Dead

September 3, 2010

A piss-poor attempt to spoof what is already a spoof: the zombie flick. So, even conceptually, this is difficult, if not an ill-advised, idea to pull off. The first half-hour is full of goofy moments whose humor, tonally, doffs its cap to Romero as well as to Peter Jackson (Dead Alive) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead). In its peripheral sense of paranoia, it’s set up to resemble Danny Boyle’s infinitely better 28 Days Later….

Unfortunately, the movie settles into a lazy rhythm of recycled antics, and I found myself just marking the minutes as Shaun (Pegg) and his ragtag group of blandly interesting/funny friends hole up in a pub as zombies mob the streets. One labored moment after another follows as Shaun reconciles with his stepfather and with his girlfriend (even as one of her roommates confesses to always having being in love with her). These shenanigans are simply not that humorous nor entertaining, because they’ve been done with so much more energy and insanity in the past (even Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead from 1985 is loonier and scarier). Pedestrian direction and script sap what anarchic fun this movie could’ve been, a more apt title for which might have been Yawn of the Dead.

Grade: C-

Directed by: Edgar Wright
Written by: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Cast: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Nicola Cunningham

Posted in All Reviews Archive, Comedy, Horror | 1 Comment »

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