28 Years Later - The Bone Temple

Savile Row

28 Years Later - 
The Bone Temple
Directed by Nia DaCosta
UK/USA 2025
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: 28 Spoilers Later...

Okay, so 28 Years Later - The Bone Temple, is the fourth in what I shall call the ‘28 Units Of Man Made Measures Of Duration’ franchise and the second of the trilogy which is a sequel to the first two films. It’s also a very direct sequel to 28 Years Later (reviewed here) and, as much as I loved Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels (reviewed here), I’d have to say I really didn’t love this fourth film at all. This one has two story elements which, inevitably, meet up in the final act. 

So we have the somewhat overly long continuation of Spike (played by Alfie Williams), who finds himself reluctantly joining the team of satanists who base their look on Jimmy Saville, lead by Sir Jimmy Crystal (played by Jack O'Connell) and we have the other story element... Ralph Fiennes playing the doctor who befriended Spike in the first movie, this time actually having somewhat of an epiphany and actually coming up with a cure for the RAGE infested zombie-like creatures, in the shape of “I’ll be your Bub for this movie” Samson (played by Chi Lewis-Parry)... which is the only part of the story I was truly invested in, truth be told.

Basically, the whole movie plays out like some kind of home invasion movie, one of my least favourite genres of cinema, as the Jimmys do really nasty, brutal things to innocent folk... somewhat hammering home the obvious message that, while the RAGE zombies are a credible threat, they’re not really evil like that observed when humanity is given free reign. No surprise that the Jimmys are the villains of the movie. 

Um... yeah, I don’t have much good to say about this installment, to be honest... apart from Fiennes amazing performance of an

Iron Maiden number towards the end of the film (which is not a group I know but he put on a good show), it just didn’t hit right with me and felt somewhat out of place under the franchise umbrella, I thought, 

A criticism is that they never mention Jimmy Saville by name, invoking the name Jimmy Crystal instead for whatever reason but, it has to be said, with the look and the mannerisms... and constant cries of “Owzat!”... any audience member born in the UK of a certain age will have absolutely no doubt in their minds who this ‘cult of Jimmy’ is based on. There are also more Teletubby references, for those who dig such things. 

The end of the movie sets up the third (fifth) part by having the return of a character (and a taxi... and a nice signature nedle drop) from the very first movie, 28 Days Later, which will please fans of that movie and which promises some kind of connection to the films outside of the RAGE monsters themselves. 

But, yeah, somewhat of a shorter review than that of the last movie and I apologise but, I just didn’t find this one very interesting. Not completely dull but somehow less creative than the other films in the franchise, I thought. Although that epilogue and the final fate of the Jimmys as seen in this one does seem to set up the idea that... well... there must be other interesting things to say about the whole scenario after this one. 28 Years Later - The Bone Temple isn’t a complete dud but, yeah, it’s definitely the worst of the films so far and I’m fine to wait however many years it is until the next part of the franchise, for sure. 

The Plague Of The Zombies

When Push 
Comes To Shovel

The Plague Of The Zombies
UK 1966
Directed by John Gilling  
Hammer/Studio Canal 
Blu Ray Zone B

Well it’s been a while since I last watched this one and, yeah, it’s still a real cracker of a film, for sure.

I first saw The Plague Of The Zombies in my very early teens, projected at my school film club for all the kiddies to see (somehow, the janitor never got into any kind of trouble for showing 10 year olds films like Death Race 2000... a screening I sadly missed out on at the time). My earliest memories of this are that it was in black and white but, it’s obviously been shot in colour so my memories must have been more muddied than the print Studio Canal had to work with (to varying degrees of success... yeah, I’ll get into that in a minute).

The film, set in the 1860s, tells the story of distinguished medical professor Sir James Forbes, played with relish by the great André Morrell (who was, perhaps, my favourite of the TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass in the original, serialised version of Quatermass And The Pit, reviewed here) and his daughter Sylvia (played by Diane Clare). They are summoned from London to a small community in Cornwall to help out Forbes’ former medical student, Dr. Peter Thompson (played by Brook Williams), who has set up a practice there with his wife, a friend of Sylvia’s, named Alice (played by the great Jacqueline Pearce, who would of course grow up to be the scourge of the galaxy as Servalan in Blake’s 7). 

There is a curious disease, of sorts, sweeping the village and killing off people unexpectedly... but the audience has already been clued in that it’s good old proper Haitian voodoo zombies and, once you meet the local squire, Hamilton, played wonderfully by John Carson with his sideburns sharpened up into razor-like points, you know he is the one responsible for bringing this practice back to Cornwall, by the tell tale symbol on the ring on his finger. He lives in his old country home which also served as the grounds and headquarters for SPECTRE at the opening of the movie version of From Russia With Love (reviewed by me here). And if you were in any doubt as to his status as lead villain, he surrounds himself with some local thugs who assert their collective British villainy by going fox hunting and, at one point, trying to gang rape Sylvia. 

But Forbes is on the case and, once he knows that the squire has allowed no autopsies on the bodies of any of the strange victims, he finds that the bodies are no longer in their coffins and so he also enlists the aid of the local Police Sergeant Swift, played by Hammer favourite Michael Ripper (is it really a Hammer film if Michael Ripper isn’t in it?). After a few walking corpses have been sighted in the vicinity and Alice is killed (and flung at Sylvia by a cackling zombie), Forbes consults the local priest who seems to have a library full of books about witchcraft and voodoo (because, of course). His theories  are confirmed when Alice rises from her exhumed coffin and tries to kill him, prompting him to decapitate her with a shovel in one stroke (trimmed by the English censors at the time in, presumably, lost footage... when he originally took about four shovel strikes). It turns out, of course, that Squire Hamilton has been killing and reanimating people as zombies to use as cheap labour for his old, abandoned tin mines. Justice arrives in the form of Forbes and Thompson and we are left with a typical Hammer film ending from this period, no epilogue... just a sudden ending with the heroes glumly watching the tin mines burn and wallowing in their sudden, Pyrrhic victory. 

And it’s a great movie. The zombies themselves predate the modern zombies kickstarted by George A Romero two years later in Night Of The Living Dead and are almost a cross breed of the brainwashed victims of Haitian zombies in earlier films and the ones to come... being that these specimens, with their white contact lenses and greyed skin, do bear more than a passing resemblance to some of those in Romero’s later ground breaking movie. And, of course, it also destroys the notion that Romero invented the kind of zombie that would tear itself from the under the soil and up into the open. For my money, the first movie to actually do that may have been one of the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels (I forget which one) but, in a strangely placed dream sequence, we see the pasty faced, dark rimmed with blank eyes undead rising out from the earth in the local graveyard... so, yeah, I suspect Romero might well have seen and been influenced by this movie in particular. 

Perhaps my one slight criticism of the film is that it seems like it’s been trimmed a little, possibly at the script stage, in that Morrell’s character seems to be jumping to just the right deductions before he has the necessary knowledge to make a judgement call. I suspect a few minor scenes of expository dialogue, such as more knowledge about the circumstances in which his daughter cut her hand (thus allowing the squire to make off with some of her blood to use on a voodoo doll), would have helped curtail those kinds of leaps. But it doesn’t really spoil my appreciation of the movie, which is that it’s pretty well made and a darn good yarn at that. 

What did spoil my appreciation of it a little, is the restoration on this relatively recent Studio Canal Blu Ray, which seems to be more than a trifle enthusiastic in its treatment of the many ‘day for night’ scenes, which appear to be presented way too bright than they ever have before... but I won’t get in to that argument here because, I believe there have been a fair few feuds about this and a few of their other releases in regards to this aspect online before... I just wish that someone like the Indicator label (aka Powerhouse Films) had been allowed to do a proper restoration instead. I’ve come to think of Studio Canal more and more like they’re the bad guys in recent years, blocking UK releases of some nice restorations and then leaving certain films either unreleased or in less prestigious versions over here in the UK. Which is a sad state of affairs for lovers of film but, there you have it. 

All in all, though, if you’ve never seen The Plague Of The Zombies before and you are a lover of Hammer horror, this is definitely one of their better movies and it certainly won’t be the last time I revisit this one. Much to be recommended here.

The ReZort

Hi-Di-Die

The ReZort
Directed by Steve Barker
UK/Spain/Belgium 2015
88 Films

Warning: A spoiler towards the end of this one.

The ReZort is yet another film I picked up on DVD for free at FrightFest a number of years ago but, it’s also one of the better of the freebies I’ve received from them. Like the majority of films made around a zombie outbreak, this one seems pretty low budget (unless you’re getting into something like World War Z) but, it’s quite a solid one and has a great premise.

This one opens up with some ‘found footage’ of a TV crew which is incorporated into a news bulletin and, for a while I thought this would be the format overall... but it’s just for this prologue to the story, to explain the world of the movie. Which is this... there was a big zombie outbreak, a la George Romero, and everyone on Earth was at war with the undead. The humans won and are slowly recovering their mental health and social interactions post ‘holocaust’ but, out of that, when a business woman discovered an island full of zombies, she turned it into a holiday resort. Basically a kind of Westworld but where people pay exorbitant fees to have a holiday blowing away the undead in a completely safe environment. There’s also a charity which has tents full of refugees in the same neighbourhood. However, the news team rushes to get a closer look at the Island because something has gone wrong and the ‘Brimstone Protocol’ has been triggered, which means the resort wil be obliterated by bombs to stop any zombie infection escaping within the next twelve hours. What went wrong?

Then, after the title card, we go into normal 3rd person viewpoint camerawork, with graceful, smooth movements in contrast to the cold opening. We cut to 10 days earlier and meet one of the main leads, the apocalypse haunted Melanie (played by Jessica De Gouw) and her boyfriend Lewis (played by Martin McCann). Melanie is haunted by whatever experiences she had in the pandemic and so she buys tickets for her and her ex-military boyfriend to get a cathartic release shooting zombies on the island. Then we get a beautiful shot of the company’s speedboat from above, cutting through the ocean and dropping off Melanie, Lewis and assorted other guests at the island. Including a shady character called Sadie (played by Elen Rhys) and a natural leader (and excellent shot) called Archer (played by Dougray Scott).

The guests party and then are taken out for their first kills, one group of many doing exactly the same thing on the island, where zombies are chained to moving targets in a walkthrough compound, for example, or shot at in great numbers from a safe distance (and, of course, if you don’t hit them in the head, they’re completely reuseable over and over as targets). However, the night before they go out for their first time, Sadie, who turns out to be an ‘undead rights activist’ sneaks in behind the scenes, hacks the security and swipes some files with all the statistics of the island, not realising that she has been set up and she is also downloading a nasty virus in the process. A virus which, inevitably, takes hold when everyone is out on their hunting parties. Very quickly, all the zombies get loose, eat most of management and go on the rampage. The aforementioned Brimstone Protocol is unleashed and the dwindling survivors have to try and make their way to safety before the island is bombed.

That’s the basic set up and the rest of the film follows Melanie, Lewis, Sadie, Archer and a few others as the usual stress dynamics play out while they are all trying to help each other get off the island. But it’s pretty entertaining and, while the low budget shows a little, perhaps, it’s extremely well executed and the zombies and the ‘shoot in the head and move on’ modus operandi of almost every post 60s zombie film is all nicely represented. There are the usual suspenseful, ‘sneaking around’ moments, coupled and punctuated with the usual ‘everybody run while we switch to hand held camera’ sequences and it’s all very nicely staged. It also makes the smart call and keeps it simple enough that it doesn’t go outside its original set up... apart from a nice revelation which, to be fair, I saw coming right from the start...

At some point in the film, the surviving few humans discover that the near unlimited supply of zombies in the resort are being topped up with deliberately infected numbers of the refugees, the charity being in on it for the profits also. But that’s a nice piece of satire and, although the film is already ten years old, it couldn’t be more relevant in the UK right now, where the recent coronavirus pandemic is fresh on everyone’s minds and you wonder if the current government might have also solved their ‘refugee crisis’ with a simlarly brutal tactic (which is possibly not far from the truth when you think of what the last government have been doing regard to Rwanda and so forth).

So that’s me done on The ReZort, I think. Except to say that the last minute appearance of a second human survivor from the island wasn’t something I was buying at all, considering the impossible odds he had when he sacrificed himself for one of the other characters. Still, I really enjoyed this one and it’s always nice to add another competently made romp of a zombie movie to the list. Definitely worth a look if zombies are your thing.

Mr. Vampire

Jumpire State

Mr. Vampire
aka Geung see sin sang
Hong Kong 1985 Directed by Ricky Lau
Golden Harvest/
Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Mr. Vampire for a while now. Firstly because a friend of mine has been recommending I should watch it since Eureka Masters Of Cinema released it a couple of years ago. Secondly because the main vampire elder in the film appears as a major threat to the main protagonist in Kim Newman’s first Anno Dracula novel, originally appearing as a character in that tome in a chapter called Mr. Vampire (a review of Anno Dracula and various sequels should be appearing on the blog sometime this year, if all goes well). Thirdly, it gets huge accolades and 9 star reviews from people and was successful enough to spawn, not only a number of sequels but also a remake followed by more sequels to that. So, yeah, this film is certainly thought of as something of a classic.

Hmmm... not quite sure why but, it’s certainly an entertaining picture, if not a great one.

The film stars Ching-Ying Lam as Master Gau. Lam would appear in a few of the sequels and remakes, sometimes playing this character and, sometimes not, from what I can make out. He is the head of a local mortuary but when he and his ‘hilarious’ aides try to rebury an old coffin after twenty years, on the instructions passed onto the son, now head of a local family, it turns out there’s an elder vampire in there (presumably the Mr. Vampire of the title?) who breaks free from his coffin and starts attacking people. One of Gau’s crazy little helpers gets half vamped up at some point and a lot of the second half of the movie is about trying to stop him turning completely and also curing the other helper of a ghostly enchantment. Oh... that’s right... if this isn’t enough, there seems to be a ghost lady who is in love with the other helper and has enchanted him with a night of ghost sex.

And, yeah... it’s a comedy but, it’s of the slapstick variety mainly so it’s not the kind of thing I would usually laugh at. People who have seen this movie always seem to mention about the ‘hopping’ vampires (and assorted corpses who I think are technically zombies, compared to the main vampires in the movie) but I wouldn’t say they are specifically hopping. More like jumping in little jumps to get to their destination. And, this action doesn’t seem consistent throughout the film, it has to be said. For example, in the final battle with the elder vampire (which also includes some help from the ghost gal), the vampire no longer jumps and just walks around normally for, well, no apparent reason. Or at least as much lack of reason as to why he would jump around everywhere in the first place, to be honest.

The film looks fine, has nice colours and some agreeable comedy acting, especially from Lam’s ‘straight man’ Van Helsing style role as Master Gau. There’s also some pretty good and athletic fight choreography (plus wire work) which is quite well choreographed and, whatever else you might say about the movie, it’s certainly not dull. As is more normal in the Hong Kong cinema scene as opposed to, say, America... there are a lot of actors and actresses who seem to be doing their own stunts in this one and it all looks good.

One curio is the fact that, when she needs to, the ghost lady has a detachable, flying head. Certainly not the first use of this particular trope, for sure but, to tell the truth, I’m more used to this ‘head flying around and trying to kick your ass’ style shenanigans in Indonesian movies rather than in films from anywhere else. Still, always a nice thing to see so I’m certainly not knocking it.

So, yeah, a short review then, of Mr. Vampire, in which I can conclude, since my dad made me pause it whenever he had to go out of the room, that it’s certainly got something going for it and it’s quite watchable, if not the absolute classic that I’d been set up to be expecting. Definitely worth a watch if you are into these kinds of martial arts comedies but, perhaps, best left alone if the lack of subtlety on such things is not to your taste. I’m pretty much on the fence about this one but suspect I will be watching it more than once in my lifetime.

The Boy On The Bridge

The Gifted
Generation

The Boy On
The Bridge
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Publishing
ISBN: 9780356503561

Warning: Some very mild spoilers.

The Boy On The Bridge is M. R. Carey’s prequel novel to the original novel and film The Girl With All The Gifts (my review of the film is here and the book review is here), which he wrote simultaneously, giving slightly different versions of the same story to different media as he went along. Now, I absolutely loved both the movie and novel versions of that one but I have to say, I expected a prequel to a story which had a very definite and somewhat bleak ending... at least for the human survivors of the post-apocalyptic world depicted... to be somewhat labouring the point as it surely could have nothing new to say. But, actually, I was wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom in this prequel and, well, let me just say that the brief epilogue to the book, set 20 years after the events depicted in this novel, actually acts as an epilogue to the first novel as well... or as a sequel, actually.

So this story is about the crew of the fortified truck/land raider style military vehicle which went out in the world to find a cure but which disappeared long before the action in the first novel/film took place. The vehicle is called the Rosalind Frank, known more affectionately as Rosie, which houses a small team of scientists and military personnel, collecting biological samples from the hungries (the name for the zombies in Carey’s world) in order to try and find some kind of helpful cure or breakthrough against the highly contagious disease which has destroyed the majority of the population... the ‘still human population’... of the planet. You may or may not remember that the discarded carcass of the Rosie was found by a bunch of survivors in The Girl With All The Gifts and was made much use of, by them, for a while.

This is the story of one of the scientists, Greaves, a boy genius who has a kind of high level Aspergers or something similar, who is also the inventor of the blocker/inhibitor that we were introduced to in the first book/film that humans smear on to hide their scent from the hungries. He’s mostly hated, or at least looked on with much suspicion, by most of the others apart from one scientist, Dr. Khan, who kinda rescued him as a young boy. However, Khan is pregnant, as it turns out and really shouldn’t be on this mission in this state... especially after something happens around halfway through the book which puts both her fate and that of the baby’s in a much more questionable state, in terms of how they will be accepted by the rest of the crew.

This novel also builds on the idea of the Junkers (which were in the first novel but not in the movie version) and, very importantly, the tribe of half hungries/half human children who the ‘special’ pupil Melanie discovers in The Girl With All The Gifts... depicted here a few years before she meets up with them.

And, it’s a very entertaining and certainly gripping novel. Somewhat, it has to be said, because the author has followed a similar formula to the first one. A ‘special’ kid (in this case human) and an adult who sympathises and has a relationship of sorts with him. And then the world is seen through the eyes of Greaves for a lot of it but it’s also much more of an ensemble piece in terms of other characters also having a lot to say and do... Carey limits himself to around five or six characters with which we share the odyssey of the book.

And, yeah, this is a short review for sure but, mainly because it’s a brilliant novel and I had no complaints at all. I do want to say though that, if you’re familiar with the first one in either of its forms, then this tale isn’t just a case of filling in the gaps... it does advance things to the point where a kind of hope can be found out of the ashes of both what happens here and at the ending of the original tale. Also, without giving too much away, the epilogue of the book is where you will find out, definitively, what just became of Melanie and Miss Justineau from the first book. Things tie in a lot nicer than you might be expecting and... well, I’d love to read a third book at some point but, like the first story, I’d be hard pressed to figure out where the author could possibly go from here. But, yeah, he did pretty great with The Boy On The Bridge so, perhaps that’s not just wishful thinking on my part. So... a hugely entertaining and very suspenseful novel which more than lives up to the original. My one warning to potential readers, though, would be to read The Girl With All The Gifts before you start on this one... otherwise that epilogue is going to make no sense and will give away spoilers for the first novel (and film). So, yeah, give it a go.

The Girl With All The Gifts

From Bunkers
To Junkers

The Girl With
All The Gifts
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Books
ISBN: 9780356500157

This is a very short review to highlight the original novel The Girl With All The Gifts, by M. R. Carey. I hesitate to call it the source novel for the amazing movie of the same name, since Carey also wrote the screenplay to that iteration of it while simultaneously working on this novel. So the two parts... novel and movie... grew together as an organic whole, it seems to me. There are some slight differences to the both versions and, the novel certainly is more detailed in the way the story is told, obviously... but the film is very faithful to the novel, as one would expect with such a closely shared conception of ideas.

The Girl With All The Gifts deals with a post apocalyptic Earth where zombies... known to the protagonists in the book as ‘hungries’... and focuses on a group who study/educate/experiment with a group of child hungries who are, to quote a popular childrens song... not like the others. At some point, the cruel and clinical world in which the main hungry Melanie (who is the reader’s POV for they majority of the book), the one we most see the world view from but, not nearly as much as that point of view is dominant in the movie... escapes with her crush of a school teacher Miss Justineau, the cruel Dr. Caldwell and two military men... when the military base they inhabit is breached by ‘junkers’, using hungries almost as a weapon to gain entrance. The book then, like the film, becomes a ‘road’ novel about trying to survive and thrive in what’s left of England, primarily trying to get through London.

The junkers are feral humans uninfected with the fungal virus which has turned most of mankind into eating machines but they weren’t included in the movie version. I actually prefer the cinematic view of the story in terms of this element as it’s simpler and, to my mind, the junkers don’t seem to achieve too much in the story except in terms of just giving the main characters something else to be wary of and think about.

I’m not going to spoil the ending of this novel but it is explained early on about a real life fungal virus which infects insects such as ants called ophiocordyceps unilateralis... which sticks to certain species and then takes control of their brains before making them climb the nearest tree, so a small tree-like substance can grow out of their head to release more spores. It’s a frightening concept and one which is well and truly alive in the world as we know it already. What M. R. Carey has done is to be inspired by this fungus, to some extent.... saying what would happen if something like this was able to infect the human race. Again, without giving too much away, this really made me appreciate the wonderful ending of the movie (which is very much reiterated in the novel) in a whole new light.

Similarly, there’s an early reference to Salvador Dali’s famous painting Autumnal Cannibalism which really pushes the metaphor about the human race, the global chaos ensuing from the initial outbreak and the species’ future trajectory. It’s possibly a bit too ‘on the nose’ right now with the state of global politics both here in the UK and farther afield but I enjoyed the shout out and, yeah, it makes one think about just what the author is trying to say here.

Carey occasionally shifts the viewpoint away from Melanie at certain times but, as I said, it’s primarily about her and the way she experiences the world as a ten year old girl. How long she’s been a ten year old girl, however, is up for debate but she’s certainly, especially in the novel where you are able to share every character’s thoughts, way more intelligent for her years. So she grasps situations very quickly and this makes her a much more dangerous character, in some ways, than the possibility that if she’s not very guarded with her own self awareness, she may accidentally eat the people around her.

And, yeah, this is a short review but I’ve not got too much to say. If you want to know more, I would happily point you to the spoiler free review of the movie I wrote a few years ago (right here) and recommend a read or a watch of this magnificent tale, in any media you wish to visit it in. The Girl With All The Gifts is a truly wonderful and interesting book and, although I was put off by one character in one passage seeming to know something about which she (or any of the others) couldn’t possibly have knowledge of, I found myself fascinated by the use of the child’s viewpoint which the writer throws himself into here. I’ve just discovered that Carey has also written a prequel to this book, The Boy On The Bridge... so that one’s definitely going to have to be a future purchase for sure. Straight onto the Christmas list.

The Stupidest Angel

Dark, The Herald
Angel’s Sting

The Stupidest Angel
A Heart-Warming Tale
Of Christmas Terror
by Christopher Moore
Orbit Books
ISBN: 9781841496184

Warning: Well, I guess you can’t help a few spoilers.

So once again Christmas time is upon us and, also once again, I scrabble around and struggle to find a book to read in December to review. I’ve gotten pretty tired of the Christmas murder mysteries and Christmas horror books I’ve been reading in recent years... mostly because they have a track record of being disappointing. So instead, I stumbled upon a second hand ex-library copy of a book that sounded kinda off-beat and fun called The Stupidest Angel, by a writer I’d not heard of called Christopher Moore. Well, I can tell you that after I read this, I’ve made it my personal mission to read various others of this guys books because, this accidentally became an occurrence of an incident which is becoming frequently rarer as I get older and less accepting of what passes for writing these days... I found a newish fiction writer I actually like a lot.

Subtitled A Heart-Warming Tale Of Christmas Terror, the novel starts off with a mostly accurate Author’s Warning to the reader... “If you’re buying this book as a gift for your grandma or a kid, you should be aware that it contains cusswords as well as tasteful depictions of cannibalism and people in their forties having sex. Don’t blame me, I told you.” So that’s pretty much a good advertisement or recommendation for a book in itself, I reckon.

After the opening warning, just the first part of the first sentence... “Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing...” woke me up to the fact that I might be in the hands of a literary genius and as the story and, more importantly, the breezy and insanely witty writing style of the author began to take a hold of me, I was even surer that this was, indeed, the case.

I mean, there are some real gems of sentences in here like... “searching for a truly meaningful moment of Christmas commerce” or “They rang their bells like they were going for dog-spit gold at the Pavlov Olympics.” This was really good stuff and all these examples were just from the first few pages so, yeah, pretty soon I realised I couldn’t just keep reaching for the notepad on my iPhone every time one of these word gems appeared... or I would be at it until the New Year (which New Year, I’m not guessing).

The setting of the novel is a fictional Californian town called Pine Cove and it tells the story of some of the inhabitants... a local cop named Theo, his large chested ‘off-her-meds’ Barbarian Queen of an ex-exploitation B movie actress called Molly, a nice gal called Lena, a pilot called Tucker, his talking Fruit Bat Roberto and a whole host of others... some of whom we’ve apparently met in other books from the same author as minor or major characters, making up a shared Chris Moore universe (so yeah, I’m practically forced at gunpoint now to go back and read his other works... bugger).

And, of course, there’s a kid called Joshua and the titular character Raziel, the unstoppable, unkillable Terminator-like stupidest angel who has been given the task of finding a kid and performing this year’s Christmas miracle, if he can work out a good one to do.

And that’s where it all goes wrong for everyone, after Joshua sees Lena accidentally kill her nasty ex-husband, dressed in a Santa suit, with a badly timed shovel through the throat. Joshua, of course, assumes that Santa is dead and so, when Raziel decides he’s the kid he’s going to help, Joshua wishes Santa alive again. However, instead of raising just ‘Santa’, his lack of clarification on where the body is buried means that, without Raziel realising until much later in the book, he accidentally raises all the dead in the nearby area. And when I say raise the dead, I’m talking about brain eating zombies who have a plan to feast on the living before all heading off to visit the new IKEA store because, as Mr. Moore explains in the book, “No one knows why but, second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture.”

And it’s an absolute blast. I don’t want to reveal too much more about the contents of the book but I had a real good time with it and grew to love the characters... especially crazy lady Molly, ‘Warrior Babe Of The Outland’, who is a dab hand with a katana and her wonderful ‘narrator’, who only comes out when she’s not sticking to her medication, apparently. If I had one complaint about the book, it’s that it finished too early... I would have loved it to be an absolute doorstop and carry on for another few hundred pages but, I guess the humour and cleverness of the writer’s phrasing is epic enough and probably works better in slightly smaller portions.

Apparently, there was a reissue of this book suffixed with the title Version 2.0 which includes an additional short story at the end... so I guess I’ll be reading that version next Christmas in addition to whatever else I can find for the 2022 Christmas read. In the meantime, all I can say is The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore is absolutely fantastic and I will (and have already, as it happens) recommend it to all my friends. Absolutely give this one a go.

Brand New Cherry Flavour

Once Kitten, Twice Shy

Brand New Cherry Flavour
Season 1 August 2021 - 8 episodes
Canada/USA

Warning: Very minor spoilers to give a flavour.

Okay, so Brand New Cherry Flavour is a series based on a novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. Once again, I have to forewarn you that I haven’t read the novel in question... yet, so I don’t know how good of an adaptation it is... I suspect there might have been some elements which were toned down for TV but that’s just a gut feeling.

The story set up is of main protagonist Lisa Nova, played here by the wonderful Rose Salazar... who also co-produced this show. It’s the early 1990s and she returns to Los Angeles to crash at her ex-boyfriends place while she tries to pitch her first feature film, based on the short movie she’s just made of horrific things going on in the woods. Erik Lange plays film producer Lou, who buys her movie, with her agreeing to that on the condition she gets to direct it. However, after she refuses to let Lou sleaze his way into her panties as part of the deal, he steals her movie and employs another person to direct. Lisa is so infuriated that she hires the services of a local witch, Boro, played by Catherine Keener, to put a curse on him to ‘set his life on fire’ and get her movie back. However, there’s more to things than meets the eye and it’s a long and twisted road until the end game is in sight.

And it’s a fairly okay TV show to be honest. It’s not as weird, dark or sexy as I’d been informed when I got interested in it but it is fairly entertaining. There are a lot of different ingredients to the show which includes the main witch, a faceless lady who may or may not be related to someone in Lisa’s past, the bitter ‘actress with one eye’ who starred in the original short, more traditional zombies, hired assassins, a trail of bloody corpses, sex spells, blood spells and a heck of a lot of vomiting up kittens... Lisa’s price for Boro’s services.

However, with all these elements which go into the show, it manages to not go through any tonal shifts throughout the eight episodes and that’s a double edged sword. It’s great that the show is so focused but the story arc gets a little over explored by about episode five and, although Salazar and a whole bunch of other actors... such as Jeff Ward and Siena Werber... are really great in this, it does get a bit monotone on occasion. Not to say it gets dull but, yeah, the odd tonal shift or two might well have been a way of ramping it up a little towards the end, to be honest.

However, coupled with the great acting are some good special effects (there’s a fair amount of blood and gore on display here), some nice shot designs with some bright washes of Mario Bava style lightning on occasion (especially in the early episodes) and a fair few surprises here and there. I especially liked episode four, which delves deeply into the world of David Cronenberg at one point, even pushing the sexuality in that one a little further than Cronenberg might have gotten away with in his day (there’s some fairly unusual fisting going on in a sex scene but I don’t want to say too much about why it’s unique here because it would be a spoiler) and, for me, this was the high point of the series. Although, on the down side, who the heck takes a bath wearing their knickers?

There’s some great dialogue in here too. I didn’t think of this thing as a horror show to begin with but, after I’d watched the first six episodes, I was describing the plot to somebody and, yeah, they’re right, it absolutely is part of the horror genre. There’s even a scene where you can glimpse George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead playing on a TV set in the corner of a room. And there are also some very fan pleasing genre references such as, when Lisa is trying to coax a good performance out of her lead actress when making the short (something we see later in flashback), telling her, “I need you full on Isabelle Adjani Possession level!”... which is going to bring smiles to a lot of faces of people who remember the ‘milk scene’ from that movie, I suspect. And, also, there are some unusual, epically quotable lines scattered throughout the show such as, “That bitch just puked a cat!”

The series is actually left a little open ended, in a way, although I’m not sure you’d really want to see a sequel to this and I can’t believe there’s a heck of a lot of the book left to adapt, to be honest. That being said, I would be curious as to seeing what the few surviving characters get up to next. There’s also the odd plot point left unresolved which, I suspect, might well have been something shot (and it’s too late to work it in now even if it was, because the specific plot point I’m thinking of had an expiry date in terms of the continuing mortality of one of the characters) but I guess that’s one we’re not going to see cleared up anytime soon. Either way, Brand New Cherry Flavour, while not as ‘out there’ as I’d been set up to expect, is still a fun watch and Rose Salazar, who I’d loved in Alita: Battle Angel (reviewed here) is definitely someone to keep an eye on. This one is worth checking out for Keener’s sense of Baba Yaga too, for sure.

Army Of The Dead

What dies in Vegas,
stays in Vegas!

Army Of The Dead
USA 2021 Directed by Zack Snyder

Warning: Very slight spoilers here and there.

Army Of The Dead is the second new Zack Snyder movie I’ve seen this year (after his new version of Justice League, reviewed here) and it’s his second zombie movie after his quite astonishing ‘reimagining’ of Dawn Of The Dead. Now, tempting as it might be to call this a sequel to that movie (rather than just the spiritual sequel it surely is), the two films are set in very different versions of a zombie outbreak so are definitely not taking place in a shared universe... although, of course, all these kinds of post 1968 iterations of zombie movies owe a debt to Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (with a small shout out, of course, to Hammer’s Plague Of The Zombies, 1966).

Actually, the film starts off with more of a shout out to Return Of The Living Dead when a top secret army cargo is compromised, due to a newly married couples in-car blow job (so it’s a military cargo gone wrong kind of zombie movie). An ‘alpha zombie’ called Zeus, presumably discovered or created by the army, escapes and takes out what’s left of the military escort. Then the credits roll where we see Dave Bautista’s character Scott Ward and a team of soldiers killing zombies by the armful (and becoming disillusioned with their job even as they earn more medals or die in the process) and Las Vegas is totally overrun and walled up by the end of those credits. We soon are also shown a back story where Bautista had to kill his wife in front of their daughter when she turns zombie and, this sets up the background where those two characters haven’t been communicating well for a while. Bautista has medals of honour but has now chosen to live his life flipping burgers in a fast food shop.

However, he’s then recruited, a little reluctantly, by a powerful billionaire who wants him to recover 200 million dollars from a safe in a hotel in Vegas. So he puts together a team and in they go, 24 hours before the final military solution of a nuclear bomb being dropped into Vegas is going to go ahead (in another call back to the denouement of Return Of The Living Dead, of course).

When he gets to the wall, his daughter negotiates to go in with them, due to her friend going in to the zombie city 24 hours before and not returning and, yeah, I won’t say too much more about the plot but it does go through some of the clichés you would expect from this and it’s not exactly unpredictable. That being said, though, it’s still pretty spectacular and plays out exactly as you’d want this kind of ‘zombie heist’ movie to go. Snyder’s direction is great, it looks very glossy and the violence is very gory (they go for that whole, ‘blood on the camera lens’ aesthetic at one point but, that’s okay, it works here). This film also has the two levels of zombie menace which seems to have become almost a convention in recent years. So you have the standard, easy to kill ‘shamblers’, which are basically the Romero type of zombies... and then you have the more ‘alpha zombies’, which are kind of agile, reasoning versions of the undead (the army of the title), who are more like the versions seen in Romero’s Land Of The Dead more than anything else... although they’re much faster.

There are some nice elements about the film too... such as a zombie tiger who is mentioned to have been one of Siegfried and Roy’s creatures. And speaking of a Siegfried, a different one this time, the safe in the film is called Götterdämmerung (at which point I would have been more tempted to title the movie Twilight Of The Zombies). The nice thing is, whenever the safecracker ‘has a moment’ with either the safe or a blue print of it, Siegfried’s Funeral March from the Götterdämmerung section of Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen plays in the background, which is a nice touch. And I don’t know who the idiot who filled in the IMDB trivia for Army Of The Dead is but... for your information, that music is not called ‘the theme from Excalibur’, right? I dunno, the IMDB seems to have been written by three year olds lately... I’m finding more and more wrong or idiotic information on there the more I use it. So much for an internationally respected database. There’s also a nice shout out to the Headpiece of the Staff of Ra near the beginning, for fans of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

All in all though, apart form what I consider to be a not too good cover version of the excellent song The End (originally by The Doors), the film is a sure fire winner. Having Bautista in this really helps. He’s a hell of an actor and, while he does this ‘thinking man’s action man’ stuff really well, I’m still waiting for Hollywood to start giving him some roles less focused on his physique and more on his incredible acting talents. He’s one of the true ‘stars’ with a capital S that Hollywoodland has these days and I think more producers need to realise this. He’s supported here by a fine cast including stand out performances by Ella Purnell as Scott’s daughter and Tig Notaro, who wasn’t even on set with the actors but CGI ‘added in’ later (to replace an actor whose reputation has been ‘compromised’), as the gang’s helicopter pilot. Not that I would have noticed the replacement, to be honest.

The film is glossy and very easy on the eye but also, I’d have to say, quite grim and dark. There aren’t many characters who walk away from this one unscathed (or at all) but, even so, I’d certainly have to recommend Army Of The Dead to anyone who likes zombie movies. I mean, yes it’s not particularly scary and it becomes, in some ways, a bit of a body count movie but, you know, those two elements ('not really scary' and 'count the number of zombie corpses') are pretty much staples of the genre at this point and, like I said, there’s nothing really original about the movie but its nicely done and just works very well. Certainly not a feel good movie but it’s definitely a crowd pleasing one, for sure... depending on what crowd you happen to be in.

Shed Of The Dead

Dawn Of The Shed

Shed Of The Dead
UK 2019 Directed by Drew Cullingham
7DM Studios

Warning: Some spoilers.

Zombie movies seem to come and go with an alarming and ever increasing frequency over the decades since George A. Romero (whose image makes a posthumous cameo as a cartoon figure in the opening titles here) reinvented and popularised the genre back in 1968 with Night Of The Living Dead. I think the reason why zombie films and the majority of horror films made these days are so predominant in the modern cinematic landscape is because they're relatively cheap to shoot and, quite often, have more of a shot at turning a profit on their budget. So, yeah, Shed Of The Dead is another relatively low budget zombie movie which tries to sink or swim with all the rest of them.

Now, I will go on record straight away and say... this is not a terrible movie. It’s well made and it’s got a lot going for it. I think, from my personal point of view, the worst I can really say about it is that it’s just not to my taste. And you have to factor in that I’ve only seen, maybe 50 - 90 zombie movies in my life, so I’m hardly an expert on these things. I think this one may split people though, not because of the way in which it lives and dies by the necessary genre clichés of all the other zombie films made these days... but because of the tone of the writing.

Okay... so the plot is that Trevor (played by Spencer Brown) practically lives in the shed on his dishevelled and untended allotment. His prime activity, since he’s unemployed, is to distil homemade vodka and paint up his role playing game figures. Indeed, the pre-credits sequence of the film is the conclusion of a campaign rendered mostly as static drawings with slightly animated sections and a wonderfully enthusiastic voice-over commentary by Brian Blessed. He plays a Dungeon & Dragons flavoured military table top style game with his best friend Graham (played by Ewen MacIntosh) and suffers the constant nagging of his wife Bobbi (played by Lauren Socha), who has a beauty parlour under the ‘office’ of her sex worker friend Harriet (played by the always watchable Emily Booth). Then he gets into an argument with a guy in the allotment who accidentally falls back onto his own pitchfork which goes through his face and kills him. Trevor, quite stupidly, saws his legs off so he can bury him but, luckily for him... before he can be accused of a murder, the zombie apocalypse happens... although he does have a bit of trouble disposing of the very animate, legless corpse for a bit. Of course, as in the majority of the movies in this genre, there is no explanation given for the sudden zombie infestation and, frankly, none needed.

So there’s the set up. It’s got potential I think and at least some of the writing isn’t too bad. The performances are all excellent and, in addition to those four main cast, there are a wealth of good and known actors from the genre joining them, including Michael Berryman (as Harriet’s favourite client), Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley. And they and, pretty much everyone in this, are firing on all cylinders giving some nice performances.

The film is... well... it’s very English and the humour (it’s a zombie comedy, for sure) is probably not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Personally, I found the dialogue and characterisations to be a little bit caustic and grittier than I would have liked. While the fact that some of the characters felt like they’d just stepped out of a Mike Leigh movie would normally be a huge compliment, I just found the language and crudity of certain characters a bit much and, for this kind of film, a little unnecessary (yeah, you probably won’t hear me leveling that complaint at a film very often, for sure).

That being said, there were some nice moments of humour and the goriness which, post-1968, have become a staple ingredient of the genre, certainly didn’t feel too cheap. And, of course, certain of the very UK oriented bits of humour did bring a smile. Like the fact that everybody knows that one of the allotment plot keepers is a serial killer who routinely buries the bodies there but, you know, nobody really cares enough to tell the police or anything and are just happier minding their own business. Very British.

There are some nice one liners in Shed Of The Dead too and, frankly, seeing Emmy Booth dressed as a dominatrix in one scene is certainly worth the price of admission to this kind of an affair. I do feel like I’m in the middle of the road on this one, much to my regret. I didn’t love it but, at the same time, I certainly can’t condemn it because it’s too well made and some of the characters made me smile on occasion. Although they were a bit dumb in a lot of cases, especially when the main weakness of the zombies is made known to one of the characters and used as a joke early on in the film... and then totally ignored, never to be revisited again in the course of the running time. It’s not exactly frightening or suspenseful but, then again, this kind of comedic zombie carnage movie rarely is intended to be, to be fair. And that’s about as much as I can say about it. Not a hit or a miss for me. I wouldn’t recommend it but then, I wouldn’t tell anyone who is into zombie films not to watch it either. Just not something which pushes my buttons in any major way. This might have done better if it had premiered at FrightFest, I suspect.

Overlord

Horrors Of War

Overlord
2018 USA Directed by Julius Avery
UK cinema release print.

Cry havoc... and let slip the dogs of war. Or, in this case, let slip the reanimated corpses of French villagers given a substance which turns them into crazed, mixed up super soldiers.

When I first saw the trailer to Overlord, a month or two ago, I found it interesting that J. J. Abrams was producing what looked to be a new entry into the ‘zombie nazi’ subgenre but I figured, at the very least, that meant there would be some money thrown at it so it might be worth taking a look. It could go either way in terms of quality and the trailer wasn’t really giving a good flavour of what the final product might be. So I went and saw this the opening night of its UK release and... by golly I’m glad I did.

Overlord is one heck of a well made horror movie, directed by Julius Avery and, well, it’s just extremely competently made and is entertaining as you could hope for. As far as it being a zombie Nazi movie... well technically it’s not. Most of the reanimated people in this are not actually German soldiers and the one Nazi officer who does benefit greatly from the effects of the super serum that the typically stereotypical ‘bespectacled German war scientist’ in the movie is developing isn’t... well, he isn’t dead. There are a few reanimated corpses of note though so, while not absolutely a ‘zombie Nazi’ film in its absolute correct definition, the juxtaposition of those two elements certainly throws it into roughly the same kind of area, if genre categorisations are your thing.

The film tells the story of a unit of soldiers flying into France to blow up a communications jamming unit on top of a Nazi controlled church (more like a fortress, truth be told). However, after they are shot down, the few survivors of the incident manage to find each other and regroup to carry on the mission. The main protagonist is Boyce, played absolutely wonderfully and with a fine mix of both confidence, righteousness and vulnerability by Jovan Adepo. Now, the only big problem I had in terms with suspending disbelief in a film about reanimated corpses taking a super serum is that, heck, you would not get that racial mix happening in the US army in the 1940s. The soldiers would have been segregated into different units but... if you can get past that, Adepo really owns the character and gives the audience someone to believe in and care about.

Another member of the troop is Ford, the tough and slightly enigmatic member of the unit. He also brings a nice quality to the film and all the way through I kept thinking how much this character would have been well played by Clint Eastwood back in the 1960s or 1970s. Now I knew it wasn’t Eastwood’s son playing this role (for my thoughts on him, read my review of Pacific Rim - Uprising here) but, once I’d stayed behind for the end credits and found out the actor’s name was Wyatt Russell, it all made sense. Closer investigation showed his full name to be Wyatt Hawn Russell and he is, in fact, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn... so looking back I must have been picking up on a vaguely Snake Plissken vibe to the character. He does really well in this movie too.

Now, it has to be said, the film is pretty intense and brutal in places, even before the surviving troops befriend one of the local French women, Chloe (again, played quite brilliantly by Mathilde Ollivier) and get embroiled with a triple mission of blowing up the tower, stopping the mad experiments which are taking place in the basement of the fortress and rescuing Chloe’s younger brother. One of the reasons it is so intense and, for once, had me on the edge of my seat, is because the whole ‘war is hell’ angle is played up so well that it more than holds its own against the horror element. Scratch that, I would go as far as to say the way in which the conflict between the Nazis, the American soldiers and the occupied French villagers is handled is absolutely what gives this film its edge over a lot of others where they might not necessarily take up the amount of time to pitch the setting right. In fact, apart from a gooey mess of a body found in the early stages of the film, the horror B-movie (with an A-movie budget) doesn’t even start to emerge until about a third to a half of the way through the story. When it does it’s equally fraught, as Boyce finds himself on his own midst the enemy in the compound for a while... something the director really ramps up by using a lot of hand held camera during these passages. Heck, even Boyce’s parachute jump at the start of the movie is an absolutely drawn out, nerve stretching suspenseful sequence and it just keeps getting more intense from there.

The other thing about this is that the film doesn’t skimp on is showing the brutality of war and what both sides are willing to do in the conflict. There’s one sequence in the middle of the movie, when the German officer who is built up as the main villain of the piece is being ‘interrogated’ by the Americans, where Ford is seen to be almost as brutal as the Nazis in his methods of acquiring the information he needs to know. To be fair, you’re definitely rooting for Ford again by the end of the film but this movie really takes no prisoners when it comes to being fair about what people are capable of doing for their respective side of the conflict. For example...

The film is full of clichés such as the soldier who is perceived as nasty but then turns out to redeem himself and have a heart of gold by stopping a bullet for the child he pretends to hate. The soldier in question is played by John Magaro and, like any of these actors, you could see them holding their own in some of the great war movies such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Ditto for the cliché of the war photographer who’s not really a soldier but ends up going through hell (played here by Iain De Caestecker from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD). The thing is, though, because the film is so dark and raw when it needs to be and doesn’t really flinch in the ‘horrors of war’ department, I really didn’t mind the clichés inherent in some of the character types. Indeed it’s kind of comforting that they’re there in a way and, of course, it makes for really useful shorthand in telling the story quickly. And with Jed Kurzel’s wonderful score backing up the visual intensity... sadly unavailable as a commercial stand alone release when I tried to buy a copy of the soundtrack, CD or otherwise... you really do feel it when the action gets going and things get a little insane.

One other thing about this movie I should probably warn you about, if you’re not a die hard horror fan... there’s a lot of blood and viscera in the film. You will see a person, for example, shot in the head and then, with his face half hanging off, dose up on the serum before beating everybody else up. This is war and when the bullets start flying, sometimes when you least expect them to, then the director doesn’t look away when it comes to throwing in the guts and gore. Not necessarily an element which I particularly look for in a film but, if the story atmosphere calls for it then I don’t think you should skimp on it and this seems to be the view shared by the film makers on this one, to be sure.

So that’s my take on Overlord, a movie which I wasn’t too hopeful about but which I’m really glad I saw. This is quality B-movie exploitation shocks done just right and with, for once, a big enough budget to be able to pull it all off credibly. If you are into horror movies, or war movies or, as like this, a thrilling combination of the two, then you should definitely put Overlord near the top of your list because it’s all put together extremely well. Oh... and if you have already seen this and you were in the 8.20pm screening at Enfield Cineworld in Row E on the opening Wednesday... get a life. You don’t need to be texting on your phone all the way through the film. Turn the damned thing off and watch the bloody movie.

Dead Snow 2 - Red VS Dead

Dead Mobs N’ Boom Sticks

Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead
Norway/Iceland/USA/UK 2014
Directed by  Tommy Wirkola
Entertainment One Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some comedy spoilers in this one.

Okay, so Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead is Tommy Wirkola’s follow up movie to his fun nazi zombie flick Dead Snow. In between that movie and this one, he also found time to direct an amazing Hollywood movie called Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton (which I reviewed here). Both of those films were pretty great and I was very happy when I heard that he would be doing a sequel to the latter of these two movies. Alas, something threw a spanner in the works and that proposed sequel to Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters, which I really wanted to see, seems to be dead in the water. So after this he went back to his big breakout movie and has come up with a sequel to Dead Snow instead.

Like both the aforementioned movies, Dead Snow 2 is pretty violent and gory and, like the original, is definitely bleakly comic in tone. Although, saying that, it seems to be a much broader comedy than the first, from the little I remember of the original.

The action starts off right from where it left off with the one surviving member of the original movie, Martin (played by Zegar Hoel), sans arm which he had cut off to presumably stop zombie infection, getting the audience up to speed with a voice over narrative as images on screen recap the first movie for us. We then carry on straight from the moment with the zombies attacking him in the car for the very last coin of the discovered nazi gold which caused all the trouble in the first place. After a big tussle where the zombie leader, Herzog (played by Ørjan Gamst) also loses his arm in a car vs zombies chase, Martin gets clear of his enemies but loses consciousness when his car takes a bad tumble down a mountain. When he wakes up, he is in a hospital in police custody... suspected of killing all his friends. Worse yet, the team at the hospital have assumed that the arm found in the car with him was his and have successfully managed to graft it onto him in an operation.

The zombie arm causes some trouble but, after many more deaths, he escapes and manages to get his homicidal zombie arm under control... mostly. It’s also established that a zombie bite doesnt turn you into a zombie at all... so I’ve got no idea why he cut his own arm off in the first movie, to be honest. It might well make sense but I just can’t remember and it does seem quite illogical here.

Meanwhile, Herzog and his nazis don’t return to the ground after all. Instead, Herzog decides they will complete his final mission to travel to and wipe out a town in Norway. Meanwhile, at a war museum where Herzog’s men go nuts killing tourists while Martin and the curator hide in a corner, Martin eventually meets up with a small American group who have flown over to Norway to help him. Known as Zombie Squad, they consist of three nerds known as Daniel (played by Martin Starr), Blake (played by Ingrid Haas) and Monica (played by Jocelyn DeBoer). Monica is pretty fun, actually, because she tries to get as many Star Wars quotes in as possible, wears an “It’s A Trap” t-shirt (quoting Admiral Ackbar in Return Of The Jedi - reviewed here) and has a genuine replica pair of macrobinoculars modelled on the one that Han Solo uses on the planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here).

Our heroes also discover that Martin’s new left arm, which does keep giving him many Dr. Strangelove moments, it has to be said, can also raise the dead to do his bidding so, while Herzog steals a tank and proceeds to take his zombie army towards the town that Hitler originally ordered him to destroy... Blake, Monica and the curator are left behind to distract him en route while Martin, Daniel and their new zombie sidekick go back to the snowy mountains to raise an army of dead Russian prisoners of war that Herzog killed back in the 1940s, their bodies still preserved in the icy, cold ground.

As zombie movies go... it’s not a bad one. It’s quite gory although the gore isn’t as in your face or visceral as what I remember of the first film. As I said earlier, there’s definitely more emphasis on out and out, slapstick comedy in this one and it’s kind of a trade off between that and taking any of the main characters seriously. It somehow manages to de-tooth everyone just a little bit here but, at the same time, it’s still pretty good so you are not going to leave this one without at least being entertained.

Such comedy set pieces include a husband getting turned on by a girl in the newspaper and shouting out to his wife to get herself ready because he feels like ‘a little head’. The next thing you know, one of the nazi zombies has appeared and has literally thrown his wife’s dismembered head into his lap. Another piece of grizzly humour comes when two Nazis each pull the innards out from either side of a man’s stomach and, while he is still connected, use his intestines to siphon petrol into their newly acquired tank. We even have a zombie doctor who patches the soldiers up in the midst of battle during the final showdown scene, replacing zombie innards with bales of straw to keep them going and sticking a sink plunger where a leg is missing on another to allow him to stagger back into battle. So, yeah, lots of comedy moments in this one.

Ultimately, though, I somehow felt kind of let down by this one. Maybe it’s because there’s actually not much snow in this second movie... and I really like movies which feature a lot of snow. Saying that though, the characters are all pretty likeable and well acted and, although I didn’t actually care what happened to any of them, I still found myself fairly amused by various scenes as they played out in front of me. It’s not exactly the best nazi zombie movie out there and, truth be told, not nearly as good as the same director’s previous two films but, having said that, I’m pretty sure that if you’re a fan of the first movie then you will probably be okay with this second one. If you do watch it, though, wind to the end of the credits because the film gives us a little scene which sets up the possibility of yet another sequel. I don’t know if that’s been planned but, yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if the director goes to revisit this genre for the third time at some point in his career. In the meantime, Dead Snow 2 - Red Vs Dead, keeps the nazi zombie sub-genre of film fresh and alive in a decade which is in danger of forgetting that this was ever a genre at all.

Resident Evil - The Final Chapter

The Clone Ranger

Resident Evil - The Final Chapter 
aka Resident Evil 6
2016  France/Germany/Canada/Australia
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Big, major spoilers on this one.
Sorry, but they bring it on themselves.

I left off waiting to write a review of Resident Evil - The Final Chapter for a day after seeing it because, as a fan of the first five films (well, okay, the second was a bit ropey in the second half but the others were pretty good), I wanted to see if my disappointment would be tempered and I could find anything good to say about it. However, that didn’t really work because the crushing blows delivered to the franchise due to the poor story content are still haunting me the next day and I am now just very, very angry with the whole thing.

I’ve criticised film series’ before when they don’t stick to their guns and, instead, destroy their own fictional credibility due to sloppy ‘wet paint thinking’ and I think the writers and producers of these kinds of things should be more mindful of the history of their product and not treat their paying audience like they’re a bunch of half wits. Perhaps the dubious honour of the most devastatingly awful lack of story continuity in a modern film franchises belongs to the X-Men films... which are now so notoriously screwed by the absolutely insane lack of internal logic that the film-makers don’t even seem to be trying to explain away the whacking great holes in their films anymore. Indeed, with the X-Men, they seem to be just making it all a heck of a lot worse with each subsequent installment.

Perhaps a similar film series with as little respect for their audience would be the four pseudo-sequels that constitute the 1940s Universal Mummy movies... which are notoriously awful at both the time in which each movie is set and, indeed, the shifting locations which make certain resurrections of the title monster absolutely impossible. However, at least the writers in the 1940s had a certain set of expectations from their audience in that the films were only ever seen when they were released in the cinema and so it was a lot more difficult for audiences to remember the specific details of the previous movie in an age before television, which would be showing these things many years later, not to mention the birth of the VCR and the modern, digital age of home video viewing.

However, the people who write terrible continuity in modern times should be ashamed of themselves for trying to pull the wool over their audience’s eyes because we are, after all, living in an age of DVD, Blu Ray and digital downloads. People don’t forget very much for very long... especially when you have people passionate enough about watching a franchise that you are now up to, in the case of the Resident Evil films, the sixth in the series. That’s just plain wrong since your built in audience are going to be the first ones to spot these glaring inaccuracies.

Alas, that’s exactly the kind of ‘have your cake and eat it’ philosophy at work in Paul W. S. Andersons latest incarnation of the Resident Evil franchise and it’s such a shame that he’s decided to treat his audience like absolute idiots on this one... because the series had been pretty good up until now.

Okay, so the opening of this one starts off with the traditional ‘recap’ of the series but, in this case, it’s almost all new footage which completely changes the back story of certain elements of the previous five films so we can have a new set of reveals at the end of this one. This is wrong for so many reasons... the primary one being that, if you’ve worked so hard for five films to establish a continuity, why insult your audience’s intelligence by changing it for an end pay off that, frankly, is unbelievably obvious before this pseudo-recap is even over. How stupid is that?

Everything we know about the ‘Red Queen’ from the previous films is rendered useless within the first few minutes of this one and it’s a special blow to the second movie in the franchise, Resident Evil - Apocalypse, which had some of the usual suspects trying to rescue/extract the real life template for the Red Queen from Racoon City as their main goal. Here, we are given a completely new girl in the role of the Red Queen and, blow me down if it doesn’t look like a young Mila Jovovich, who stars as the series’ main protagonist Alice in all six movies. So one of the so-called end reveals that Alice was the real life template for the Red Queen, quite apart from rendering the second movie complete nonsense, is obvious right from the opening (and made even more obvious when you realise that husband and wife team, director Anderson and actress Jovovich, have cast their own daughter in the role of the Red Queen here).

And with all this, frankly unnecessary, change to a key element of the series, one wonders why the writer doesn’t think we’ll notice the hasty footprints left in the wet paint around the corner he really hadn’t actually written himself into... to be honest. This isn’t the film's only weakness, for sure, but it is a pretty major one. Especially when it uses characters, actors and other elements of the series as reference points in a storyline which has been altered, seemingly, to fit the current mood of the producers.

Bearing in mind, then, that the majority of the Resident Evil movies tend to leave themselves on a cliff hanger ending to be resolved in the next film, it’s somewhat annoying that the film decides to only refer to the resolution of the previous cliff hanger as an event off screen, rather than show it in what, I suspect, would have been a budget breaker of an opening sequence, truth be told.

In the last movie, Alice had been re-injected with the T-virus which gave her super powers and rescued by her enemies, as part of their specific mission to do so, in order to help them with the final showdown between the spawn of the T-virus and the last survivors of humanity. Here, we are immediately, after the dreadfully compromised ‘recap’, plunged into a story which takes place three weeks after Alice and her ‘friends’ have been wiped out by the battle they lost. What’s more, there’s a throwaway line that basically tells us that she wasn’t really re-injected with the T-virus after all... it was just another lie. At which point you have to then ask yourselves... why? Why would the fact that the villains of the piece go to all that trouble to rescue her and re-infect her with the virus so she can help them... be a lie? Why bother going through what they did in the last film. Okay, so that’s at least two films in the franchise now made effectively redundant and you have to ask, at this point early on in the proceedings, what the heck Paul W. S. Anderson thinks he is trying to do here.

And the film just carries on like this with lots of things that make no sense and also... and here’s the kicker... is about as dull as a bag of bones and barely fun at all. One of the things the previous Resident Evil films had in abundance was their light hearted sense of fun. Here, everything just seems to be dialled back and a bit of a drudge. The action sequences, including the return of the hounds who were conspicuously absent from one of the films and who seem like just an add on here, are all quite plodding, for the most part. I think a lot of that has to do with the editing, to be honest, which seems to be somewhat rapid fire in the worst places and, for me at least, make the action sequences somewhat hard to follow a lot of the time.

There are two good things about the movie that I could find.

The first is a very small action sequence where Alice springs a trap and fights her way out of it while swinging upside down. Honestly, it’s a good little scene and it’s such a pity that the pay off at the end of it, where she is electrocuted to unconsciousness by the security settings on the bike she tries to steal, is so obvious. It also makes the punchline moment to the next scene where she tries to steal a bike even more obvious but... you know what... if you already have a tricked out bike used to lure someone into a trap, why the hell would you not just let them try to steal the bike in the first place? Talk about going the long way around.

The other good thing about the movie is Paul Haslinger’s score. The ex-Tangerine Dream member is a newcomer to the franchise but, while it’s possibly not the best score the series has had, it more than holds its own with them and feels like it belongs in the same ‘shared world’, at the very least. Kind of a shame the film itself doesn’t live up to it but, what can you do?

And that’s the only two good things I have to say about the movie, to be honest. Other than there’s some nice, quite bleak set dressing in some sequences although, I would have to point out that the really interesting sets would maybe seem more at home in a Silent Hill movie than they perhaps do in a Resident Evil film. Apart from this, everything seems to be just a pointless, dull exercise in keeping a franchise going in the dullest way possible, with lots of “why didn’t they just...?” moments and never, really, an interesting minute. Such a shame because the films have usually had a surprise or two up their sleeve and, as I said before, at the very least been heaps of fun. This one, alas, isn’t and I don’t think I would even recommend it to long terms fans of the previous films, let alone those going in with no experience of the others.

I understand that this movie had some tragedies on set. One stuntwoman had to have an arm amputated after a stunt went wrong and another guy was crushed to death. These things happen sometimes in the pursuit of art and they are always very sad. Must have been very upsetting for the cast and crew to absorb, I’m sure. I hope their colleagues and friends on the movie will always remember them and honour the work they did here.

That being said, although the title of this movie obviously implies it was always intended to be the last, it’s such a shame that Resident Evil - The Final Chapter is such a franchise killer anyway. Especially since the series has now officially become the most successful, in terms of accumulated box office, series of films in history to be based on a computer game. It doesn’t stop this movie being such a bad one, however, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow. One pill makes you larger but this pill makes it small.

My reviews of the previous Resident Evil films can be found here, here and here.

Train To Busan (Busanhaeng)

Desperately Seeking Busan

Train To Busan (Busanhaeng)
2016 South Korea Directed by Sang-ho Yeon
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very, very light spoilers... but, you know, how spoilery can it be? It’s a zombie movie.

Train To Busan is a film I’d heard was pretty good from feedback about this year’s FrightFest screening (I only went to one FrightFest movie this year, as reviewed here) and I was really up for seeing this when it opened in a very limited number of cinemas in London for Halloween weekend. Alas, it was the week where I fell painfully ill and I not only missed this little gem but I also, and this really upset me, had to miss the John Carpenter concert. So yeah, I was a little gutted to say the least. However, when I was sufficiently recovered a couple of weeks later, there were still one or two screenings of the film playing in the Central Picturehouse cinema in London... so I at least got to see this one eventually.

Now, in most other years I would be happily saying this is the best zombie movie anybody has made for a few years now but, while this movie is pretty cool, this is the same year that the incredible and easily instant zombie classic The Girl With All The Gifts came out (as reviewed here) so I would have to say that this little gem runs second place in the 2016 zombie stakes. However it’s still pretty amazing and I was so glad I got to see this in the cinema.

The film is by a director, Sang-ho Yeon, who seems to have worked exclusively in the animation field before the debut of this, his first live action feature film. As such, it would be a little too easy to pick up on the stylistic nuances of this movie and hail them as a crossover from his usual medium. However, I’d have to say that I didn’t see anything unusually stylised about the movie apart form, maybe, the choreography of the zombies when they die and transform into the undead... which looks quite spectacular and which seems all done through the movement of the actors’ bodies. So, yeah, nothing about this movie gives away or hints at the past movies of this director as far as I’m concerned... not that I’ve actually seen any of his other work. People better versed in his body of work will probably be able to cite his directorial signature in the movie but, alas, I have only Train To Busan to go on.

But it’s a pretty good movie to begin with in terms of looking at this director, I think.

The plot is of a divorced father who is taking his young daughter to see her mother, early one morning, on the train to Busan and it just happens to coincide with a zombie outbreak. The film starts off with an unexpected incident of animal road kill which sets up the plot and then we get the set up with the daughter and her father. Then the film becomes a road movie set on a train as the world around the train devolves into zombie chaos very quickly and the passengers have to try and navigate themselves out of trouble and back on the train, when it makes ‘emergency rescue stops’... only to find their cavalry has already been defeated by plagues of zombies wherever they arrive. And that’s all the plot you need or get in this one.

One of the things about the specific sub genre of horror which is the modern zombie film is that they are almost never scary. There are a few exceptions I can think of but, for the most part, they are usually only body count, action horror movies and, frankly, I’m fine with that. Scary would be good but the fun of the action on these kinds of things is also entertaining so you don’t hear any complaints from me. Train To Busan is no exception to this rule, it has to be said. You won’t exactly find anything terrifying about this one, I think... especially if you’re already a fan of the genre. That being said, well done to the director for having some excitingly staged set pieces which do, on the other hand, give a feeling of genuine suspense... such as an elongated stealth rescue from carriage to carriage, trying to find the way through the zombie hordes. Oh yeah, there are zombies on the train too folks and it gets a bit hairy quite a lot of the time. Another artfully staged sequence comes near the end and involves a small group of people trapped between two tilted, delicately balance (but not for long) train carriages about to come crashing down on them, one of which is on fire and both of which have hordes of zombies about to push their way through the windows and explode onto the survivors. It’s pretty intense stuff and, although the film is less than scary, it will certainly have you on the edge of your seat, that’s for sure.

I remember once reading something by Kevin Smith where he was talking about the shooting of Dogma and how hard it is to actually shoot in a train carriage. Assuming Sang-ho Yeon actually did shoot in a train carriage as opposed to a break away set, my hats off to him. He manages to get some amazing and fluid tracking shots going on in this film and it makes for some cracking cinema.

One of the possible problems for some audiences is that zombie and horror movies, and especially disaster movies, which this kind of crosses over into (it’s almost like watching The Cassandra Crossing but with the cast populated by undead creatures, in that respect) is that they can easily fall into cliché and, to be brutally honest. Train To Busan seems to do almost every cliché in the book. We have the father trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his daughter. We have the friendly guy who starts off hating him and then becomes his comrade in arms against the zombie menace. We have the schoolgirl and schoolboy who are just about to find love with each other before they are confronted with a survival situation and...  we also have the shrewd business man who is just trying to save himself at the expense of everyone else and who diverts the popular opinion away from the actual people trying to do some good and becomes their enemy... before the even more obvious thing happens to him. It’s all in here but, honestly, I didn’t mind it a bit because a) the director and actors manage to pull it off very competently and with a clear understanding of the limitations of the genre rules and b) there was enough of the other zombie action set pieces happening that it was all much more distracting from any over ripe dramatic situations so... yeah, like I said... I had no problem with it.

And one of the most amazing things were the zombies themselves. Whenever somebody dies in this movie and becomes a zombie, they go through a transformation where their body contorts to unnatural angles, like rigor mortis is setting in and then declining in a rapid manner which causes their bodies to pop up and about... before they go on their blood lust rampage. There’s one guy I can remember who had his right arm firmly angled behind the back of his head and way past the other shoulder and I wondered if he was a contortionist who had dislocated his shoulder or whether this element had been CGI’d on later. One thing’s for sure, and this was very refreshing, is that the actors playing the zombies don’t just shuffle... or in this case run... along not caring much about what they are doing. They all look like they’re trying really hard to bring some kind of feral, basic instinct to the actions of their characters and I really appreciated the effort even the smaller extras were putting into this. Truly a great piece of zombie film-making here.

And that’s about all I’ve got right now, on this one. My only other slight complaint with Train To Busan would be that there’s a scene near the end involving the death of one of the main protagonists that just gets overtly syrupy and sentimental... a good deal more than was necessary, I thought. However, I can easily overlook this because it’s such a great little movie and it should certainly be lurking near the top of any zombie lover's ‘to watch’ list. I know I’m hoping to revisit this film sometime next year on blu ray and, all I will conclude here is that, if you are a lover of the genre, then you should really have a good time with this ‘zombies on a train’ action movie. So definitely look this one up.