brendan halpin

Land of the Dead— I had, for some reason, heard bad things about this and never saw it. I guess the conventional wisdom was something along the lines of “Romero shouldn’t make a big budget zombie movie.” Hard, hard disagree here.

This is really much more of an action movie with zombies than a horror movie, and while the gore gags are still good, that envelope has been pushed about as far as it can go with that, so when the (spoilers, I guess, but you’ve seen a zombie movie before, right?) zombies overrun the rich people’s enclave, it played like a tamer version of the zombies overrunning the mall and killing the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. (Goremeister Tom Savini, having been a biker in Dawn, gets to be a zombie here!)

But the satire is razor sharp in this one. The zombies getting smarter and starting to adapt means that they’re much more like people, which makes you consider the ethics of mowing them all down. When the protagonists go out on a supply run at the beginning of the movie, it’s hard not to read it as an allegory for colonialism. The zombies are there, minding their own business, trying and failing to make music in a bandstand, and these assholes with guns come roaring into town and steal everything worth stealing while killing tons of townspeople. (Who are technically dead already, but you get the gist.)

So Romero delivers the class satire with the whole gated community, getting a remarkably reserved performance out of Dennis Hopper in the process, but also just complicates everything morally with these smart zombies. Worth a watch!

The Taking of Deborah Logan— Regular readers (yes, I am being optimistic with the plural there) know I love me a found footage horror movie. This one involves some young people making a documentary about a woman with Alzheimer’s and her daughter/caregiver. Jill Larson as Deborah and Anne Ramsey as Sarah give absolutely fantastic performances that carry the whole movie. Because we believe this is a real mother and daughter going through the claustrophobic hell of a degenerative fatal illness, it makes it much more credible when the supernatural stuff starts. There was a delightful surprise about two-thirds of the way through the movie that further enhances the feeling that the events of the movie are happening to real people, and really my only quibble was the little stinger at the end that I saw coming a mile away even though it violated the rules of how things work that the movie had already established.

Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell— Regular readers also know I have a soft spot for extremely shitty low-budget horror movies, and this definitely fit the bill. There isn’t even the most cursory explanation for why the town is being menaced by a 30-foot rabbit. It just starts happening. There’s essentially no plot—just a bunch of kill scenes, often involving busty topless victims. Peter Sullivan is very entertaining as the hapless, egocentric, vain, and idiotic dog catcher who believes it is his duty to save the town, but the real star here is the rabbit. I think it was a marionette digitally inserted into the film. I was expecting a big CGI bunny, but this was so much shittier and more fun. Like, they literally can’t get the thing to even move with any kind of realism, so every time people are screaming at this special effect that probably would have been done better by a fifth grader, hilarity ensues. Is this worth seeking out? No. But I was entertained for an hour and a half. Well, most of an hour and a half. It starts to sag in the back half. But the boldness of the director’s vision in using this comically inept rabbit was strangely admirable.