Movie Knights - KnightRiders!

This flick by director George Romero is a sometimes confusing and overlong exploration of how might the ideals of the chivalry of Camelot be realized in the modern world. And the conclusion is just as it was in the myths, Camelot is only available when the people look at the world as a place of nobility and honor. This film is idealistic and the characters are at once complex human beings and mythic archetypes as well. 

Imagine a Renaissance Fair group blended with a motorcycle gang which lives on the edge of modern American society by staging tournaments for the entertainment of the locals here and there across the country. The group is together because of the ideals of one man named Billy who is also considered the king of this particular roving "Camelot". He and his queen preside over the tournament and even take part at times as the knight fight for superiority within certain rules of engagement. Meanwhile various hangers-on sell faux merch to the crowds attracted by the spectacle. The troop is on the outer edge of sustainability as the money the need to continue is being stretched to the max. Efforts by various well-meaning folks in the group to expand the operation are seen by Billy as antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise. 

We have characters who fill the slots, a king and queen, a trusted medicine man named Merlin even and a black knight even. The chivalry which guides the contests is necessary to keep the knights from being injured even more severely than they sometimes are. There are rules to the games they play though those games are rough indeed. 

This movie is too long, a failing of Romero's movies in general. He seems to have scenes which are curious and interesting but not really essential. But that's a small flaw and overall this movie though slow in the beginning after a bravura opening, does pick up the tempo sufficiently for the pay off at the finale. I would not call the end of this movie a happy one, but then the source material and the inspiration did not turn out all that pleasant to begin with. Camelot is an aspiration and this story shows that more than any I've come across, the will to be a part of something greater and better is what is necessary for the better to even be at all. 

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Creepshows!

That I have never seen the movie Creepshow is amazing to me. Part of it might be that I'm not particularly a Stephen King fan, apart from his excellent Salem's Lot. But I am a fan of Berni Wrightson, so it's good that I have at long last added his adaptation of the yarns spun in the movie to the overflowing heap I dub a collection. (Even if Berni's work is hidden beneath a worthy Jack Kamen cover.) There are five stories in the movie and in the comic, each attempting to evoke the classic EC style of storytelling with equal parts grotesque cosmic justice and just plain grotesque.

To be frank really, the stories work better in comic book form than in film. George Romero is a celebrated name, but I find his movies sometimes remote and this one seems to be style over substance. (I might rate Martin as his creepiest movie.) The characterizations are very broad and in a movie come across as unreal, which undermines any tension. The one exception is "The Crate", a yarn starring some outstanding pros such as Hal Holbrook and Fritz Weaver and this story has with actual suspense, even if it does lack depth. (I wasn't looking for depth really.)  Both Creepshow the movie and the comic are worth the trouble to visit and glad I did after all these years.

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Don Of The Dead!

Zombies have become ubiquitous in modern culture, so commonplace that they are used for all manner of dramatic, comedic, and pedagogic purposes. The zombie is a blank through which all of mankind's weaknesses and even some strengths can be showcased. "Zombie Apocalypse" is a phrase known to most all people these days, a short hand metaphor for anything which threatens the security of modern daily life. But it all started somewhere and as far as I can figure we have George Romero and his mates from Pittsburgh to blame. Night of the Living Dead is a masterpiece of independent film making, perhaps "the" masterpiece. In that sometimes rugged black and white tale much is revealed and not all of it intentional, but no less valid. Turns out the story was a comment on our society's tendency to isolate the individual and focus on what makes us different than what makes us alike.

When next Romero took on the dead,  it was to poke fun at the consumer culture which has simultaneously buoyed and diminished our culture in the last many decades following the last great World War. The unyielding quest for things (of which I claim no immunity) has defined us in the time since I've been around. We are citizens of course, but first and foremost we are customers, catered to and coaxed constantly to buy what we don't need and eventually need what we shouldn't want' When war came knocking as the twin towers tumbled, we were told to go about our business, to keep the economy humming in the face of the assault. Romero's Dawn of the Dead tagged us long before Osama Bin Laden thought to throw our gross impulses into our faces.

And we are never any uglier than the society seen in Day of the Dead. The world seems lost as the dead have overwhelmed society and people hide away and slowly go mad in their own ways, desperately cleaving to the identities they had before the world was whisked out from under them. Without orders soldiers lose their way, without a way to plan for the future even those who love do so in the minute and in the minute alone. We become prisoners behind cages built to contain others, our jailers are ourselves.

And finally when society does begin to reorganize the old hates and class divisions rear up to make again a mess of the world which was taken away. When even the dead begin to change and show some spark of empathy, mankind's inability to do so shows all to readily why we all of us might well live in a Land of the Dead already. Romero's use of the zombie apocalypse movie, a form he invented is all about showing the world not what could happen, but what has already happened. We don't await the zombie apocalypse, alas we are all of us too often part of it.

I know there are two more zombie movies from Romero, but I haven't seen them yet. Soon maybe.

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The Crazies!

The Crazies, a 1973 horror flick directed by Night of the Living Dead director George Romero has been on my wanna-see list for several years since I first learned about the movie's existence. Similar in tone and subject matter to the 1968 classic horror flick which made his reputation, this one falls short, but it's not for lack of effort. If anything, the movie works too hard.

The plot, simply put is that a U.S. Military plane crashes into the countryside of Pennsylvania releasing a deadly bio-weapon into the water system which infects the small town of Evans City. Almost at the beginning of the movie the United States Army bursts into the town and establishes martial law and begin to gather up the residents, most of whom are likely infected. The Army has responded quickly to the threat seemingly but have not brought enough men nor enough equipment to adequately do the job and so many of the town folk flee. We follow the exploits of a local fireman (also former Green Beret Vietnam vet) and his nurse wife and their friend who try to evade the authorities, often with lethal results. Meanwhile a scientist attempts to concoct a cure at the local high school chemistry lab, the same high school where the mad population is being herded. Things go wrong almost immediately. And over all hangs the threat of nuclear destruction if it gets out of hand.

It's a fantastic premise for a movie. The tempo of the plot is ideal, creating confusion and chaos almost from the beginning. That said, the movie making just ain't up to the demands of this provocative story. The budget for this movie was relatively small for the time, but still we get quite a bit of production value by the use of a real town. What really sets this one back is the rather indifferent acting. Many of the roles are handled by folks who just don't seem up to the task. And when clearly pros are on screen the lines the speak seem weirdly out of place. Everyone yells a lot so as to seemingly promote the notion that they are scared and tense, but after a very short while it becomes exceedingly annoying. There's really only ever one speed on this movie and that undermines most every attempt at suspense, of which there is almost none.

The movie tries to survive by offering up a series of disturbing scenes and vignettes which are often pretty crude. The dominant image is that of the military dressed in stark white hazmat suits. These images create a weirdly mundane and simultaneously bizarre feeling. Oddly the suits do make the actors underneath the masks nearly indecipherable but I'm not sure if that was a directorial decision or just more of the movie which lost out to the meager budget. They even have the makings of a nifty idea as clearly the notion of the filmmakers is to show the incompetence and callousness of the government in response to a threat to its own people. There is a truth to the situation which is shown, but that's sadly undermined by the indifferent editing and overlong scenes which seem to make little sense in the moment.


I wanted to really like this movie, parts of it I do admire, but overall it became a bit of a drag.

The movie was remade in 2010, and also called The Crazies this what I saw first and in fact this how I learned of the Romero original. This one clearly has more money and it uses its budget quite well. The story is pretty much the same but in this case the suspense is allowed to develop.

Instead of the military showing up in the first few minutes, instead we follow the local sheriff as he contends with seemingly mad and murderous townfolk. The mystery of what is happening is allowed to build before the army shows up and the story takes an even darker turn. The nature of the threat is more subtle with a reason given as to why not everyone will be affected to the same degree. Being a modern movie with a larger budget the action sequences are perhaps less credible but are no less exciting than those in the original as a handful of survivors attempt to escape the cordons enforced by the authorities.  Better acting makes caring for the survivors more attainable.


I enjoy both movies in certain ways but I will confess the original is less impressive in the final analysis than I expected. The ham-fisted acting just gets in the way too often to maintain the momentum the story requires.

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Night Of The Living Martians!

I picked up The War of the Worlds, Plus  Blood, Guts and  Zombies on a lark when I found it discounted for almost no money at some store I forget now. It seemed a harmless prank of a comic and maybe I'd give it a chance some time. That time has come.

The story mirrors the original novel, in fact is identical to it through large sections. Eventually after the Martians land radiation from their bullet-like capsule triggers a change in people which results in their rising from the dead, even when they've been roasted by the infamous heat ray.

That a zombie plague is unleashed by radiation from space is reminiscent of the off hand explanation which is proffered in the George Romero classic Night of the Living Dead. There the suspected culprit was an irradiated satellite, but that is not conclusive in any way. Here the trigger is clearly the coming of the Martians, though the zombies are not agents of the invaders.

So this story is unlike Ed Wood's notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space (originally titled Grave Robbers from Outer Space) in which outer space aliens reanimated the dead as part of a larger world-conquering scheme. The evident fact that the plan is ridiculous and doom to utter failure aside, the three animated corpses do constitute at least a meager threat, at least to humans too stupid to get out of their way.

In this novel the zombies seem to rise in the shadow of the invasion and create a separate but still dangerous threat to the humans who are besieged seemingly on all sides. The story sadly though is all too familiar and anyone having read the original will quickly notice that the zombies are mostly a sideshow who pop up now and again to menace people, but don't really offer a formidable threat on their own. They seem to get forgotten for long sections of the story.

Sadly this book is a missed opportunity with little imagination displayed aside from the original conceit of adding zombies to the invasion story. I expected more variety and more twists, but quickly became bored with the proceedings. There are a couple of supposed shocks, but they are too few and much too far between to keep it zesty.

It's an oddball book which I cannot really recommend. It's just rather dull.

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No Room At The End!

Having freshly feasted on the classic Night of the Living Dead , I had a hankering to re-sample Dawn of the Dead, the belated sequel to the classic horror flick. Dawn of the Dead from 1978 has a somewhat bigger budget than its predecessor and is in glorious and "gorious" color. One of the things which has long put me off about zombie movies is the gore; I'm not dismayed or shocked by it, but I find it mildly disgusting and often so gratuitous as to undermine the terror of a scene.  The gore in this movie hits about the right note, over-the-top and in certain moments overdone, but by and large reasonably appropriate to the tone and themes of the movie.

For the few who might not know, this is the one which begins about the same time as Night of the Living Dead, but in the larger city of Philadelphia in which we see the steady decline of organized society by first watching a TV station fall apart, then witnessing the police become overrun by the zombie threat, a threat they clearly have no firm understanding of at all. A quartet of survivors helicopter out and find a mall (a relatively new concept in the late 70's) and discover refuge there. They work mightily and not without consequence to make the mall something of a "home" but soon are discovered by all-too-human raiders who spoil it all.

The movie is famously a commentary on consumerism and the soulless nature of modern American society,  in which the acquisition of things drives most of us even it seems after death itself. Romero has created a dark dark satire which makes Dawn of the Dead a better and more interesting movie than much of the dull zombie drivel which has bombarded the market in more recent years.

While I think the movie is overlong, it nonetheless presents us with an often hapless group of protagonists who are all to much like what many of us might be confronted with a nightmare of proportion. There is a shred of hope in this often unrelenting film, but it's a slim hope at best.

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The Zombie Apocalypse Starts Here!

I don't know when I first saw Night of the Living Dead, but most likely it was way back in the early 80's in the comfort of my home when I found a copy of the movie on VHS for tiny bucks. Since because of infamous snafus the movie has long been in public domain it's been nigh ubiquitous in the VHS and later DVD markets. Rare indeed is the horror collection large or small that doesn't include this 1968 classic. That sadly means the producers have made relatively little money from their masterpiece, but I'm confident that the widespread distribution of the movie has added to its reputation.

Most of the time when I've seen it, it's been a muddy print. But a few years I ago I picked up a cleaned-up DVD version, hoped to be by Romero and his colleagues a definitive version of the movie. It's certainly crisp and that adds greatly to the enjoyment of the movie. What the original Night of the Living Dead has going for it that none of its successors or clones has is true horror and relatively little gore. Much more is suggested than seen and that's always the more successful route for true terror.
 

What prompted my most recent viewing of the movie is finding a book by Joe Kane titled appropriately Night of the Living Dead which details the background, production, and influence of the movie over the course of the last fifty plus years. The book is fascinating in that it tells you enough without overwhelming you with endless detail. It also follows the careers of the people behind the original movie and how they have tried in the intervening decades to deal with the fame, the disappointment, and how they have from time to time tried to reap some financial reward from the reputation of the classic horror flick. The book also deals with the other zombie movies, the ones which preceded Night of the Living Dead and those which have come after -- that includes direct sequels, homages, and downright copies. The author does a great job, aided by many sidebar interviews and commentaries to put the whole zombie movie canon into some context.

The tale of the making of Night of the Living Dead is reasonably well known by most folks I'd suspect. Given that's it's small-budget and independent status set it apart from most other classic horror flicks of its kind, it has a distinctive quality. A group of friends decided it would be fun to make a horror movie and using their experience as commercial makers worked for the better part of a year filming and editing a movie which has made a lasting and ongoing impact on narrative storytelling and on the broader culture as a whole.

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Martin!

This is a vampire tale with a distinct difference.

I've heard about this movie off and on over the years. Like most folks I'm a fan of Night of the Living Dead and so the name George Romero carries some weight with me, especially when it comes to the horror genre. Like the more famous zombie movie, this story about a boy vampire was shot on a shoestring budget and yet makes the most of its tiny dollars.

Simply, the story concerns a boy named Martin who has been told his whole life he's a "Nosferatu", a vampire. He says he's 84 years old, though he looks to be in his late teens, and many members of his family seem to agree with him about his nature. As we learn from his uncle, who has taken him in, the family produces someone like Martin every once in a while and they live forever, so three are till around including Martin.


There's no direct evidence that Martin is a vampire, save for what he and some of his relatives believe. He does kill people and he does drink blood, but he doesn't have fangs, and he doesn't dread the sunlight, and he cannot transform into a bat or wolf. Garlic and crosses seem not to affect him at all. So as far as "magic" is concerned, Martin rejects all of the claptrap and though he's convinced he's a vampire he seems to think it's merely his nature.

The movie is held together by the lead actor, a young man named John Amplas, who gives a mesmerizing portrayal of the weird boy. We get the sense from what he says, that he kills people to drink blood when he feels the "shakes" to do so, and he is successful because he uses drugs to put his prey to sleep and he covers up the deaths, making them to appear to be suicides. He watches people closely and chooses his victims in such a way as it will hide his activity. It all comes across as oddly plausible.


The basic nature of the movie making by Romero and his crew really gives this movie a texture that adds to the reality. Martin's mental state is sometimes represented by black and white sequences which imitate vintage vampire movies with gothic settings and angry villages with torches and whatnot. This is countered by the austere real color world in which Martin actually lives. The setting is a stark mill town in Pennsylvania that is in hard times and the decaying buildings and grim streets add to tone of the movie.

There's some pretty good acting in this, and sadly some pretty bad acting as well, so it's not all even. But overall, the movie does get hold of you and the ending is a shocker for sure, and as you reflect on the development of the story oddly inevitable.

Good stuff.

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