The Zombie Diaries

Of all the standard set-ups of the horror film, the zombie holocaust is probably the most used in recent years. Scarcely a week goes by without a new zombie-centric release. This is because the faithful horror fan such as yours truly snaps them up as soon as they are released. Despite the overall negative tone of our entertainment of choice, the horror fan is relentlessly optimistic that the next zombie movie will be a good one, even if the last 43 sucked. Having just seen The Zombie Diaries, I can tell you that you will have to wait at least another week to break the streak.
The concept is interesting enough, I suppose. A number of “found” videos document the infection-caused zombie outbreak in Great Britain. Instead of following one single camera POV throughout the film, as with Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project and the like, the story here is seen from several different cameras, following different characters, until all the threads converge in the end. In the hands of capable filmmakers, this might work, but the crew here just can’t pull it off.
The first concern in any of these movies filmed with a “handheld camcorder” is the quality of the footage, which has been a big source of complaint in other movies of this type. If Cloverfield’s camera work made you seasick, this one should make you puke blood. The camera relentlessly bobs, and there are frequent scenes where the character holding the camera runs away, giving a jolting views of the ground during the run. The night scenes are so chaotically shot, it is difficult to tell just what the hell is going on.
There also seems to be a rule that in each of the separate groups we follow, one person is a completely useless dick, including one where an Englishman taunts the groups American (who has the only gun) about America’s lax gun laws. Please. No matter where you stand on the gun control issue, when the dead rise to eat the living, you’ll want to be armed.
There is also a bewildering change of focus in the third act, when the movie suddenly stops being about zombies and becomes a standard psycho-killer story, which I suppose is intended to be a plot twist, but comes off as confusing.
Most of the characters are poorly fleshed out (ha ha – zombie movie poorly fleshed. Well, I thought it was funny) and hard to distinguish from one another, although I give one credit for continuing to film even while he is being eaten.
One criticism of the film which seems unfair is that it is a rip-off of George Romero’s most recent release, Diary of the Dead. Actually, The Zombie Diaries began production first. It isn’t as good as Diary of the Dead (which had its moments) but it doesn’t rip it off (although all zombie movies rip off Romero in some way).
If you’re the sort of person who takes quotes on the internet and the boxcover about movies at face value, this might leave you disgruntled. It has quotes around such as “The best zombie movie ever made!” and “Better than Diary of the Dead!” Allegedly, the filmmakers conducted a stealth campaign to fill the web with glowing reviews under false identities. That seems the only rational explanation for positive comments about this mess.

Ghoul

I’ve been a fan of Brian Keene since reading The Rising, and continuing through The Conqueror Worms, Cities of the Dead, and Dead Sea. He has a splatterpunk sensibility, although I think he is a smoother writer than most of them, and a wonderful refusal to look away from the unpleasantness of the situations he creates. I finally got around to Ghoul (an earlier effort to read it was ended when my dog ate my copy, took a while to get back to it) and it is my favorite of his books so far.

Ghoul is something of a coming-of-age novel, in the manner of Simmons’ Summer of Night, King’s It, or McCammon’s Boy’s Life. Three twelve-year-old friends have their summer off from school interrupted by the discovery the nearby cemetery is being plagued with a recently freed ghoul, who is eating the dead and kidnapping woman to breed others of his race. The three kids ultimately have to be the ones to stop him, while dealing with some serious childhood issues of their own.

In Keene’s universe, there is true tension since you have no idea if any of the sympathetic characters will make it, or that Good will defeat Evil (Most of horror fiction is a type of morality play, where you know Good will triumph in the end). And the horror works on two levels. There is the supernatural threat of the title creature, and the human horror of how the damage we receive as children scar our lives. The epilogue, which does not concern the supernatural, is heartbreaking (This is not a criticism, but truly happy endings seem to be anathema to Keene. One of these days, he will write one just to shock his long time fans.).

It was also nice to see a horror novel written around a seldom used beastie, an actual corpse-eating ghoul. I can’t think off-hand of too many other novels to use this.

I would heartily recommend this to those who are already Keene fans, and those who haven’t tried him yet. My dog enjoyed her copy also.

Survivor

I’ve been a fan of horror and crime fiction since I was a kid. This has made me fairly jaded as far as depictions of violence go. A lifetime of reading about the extremes of human behavior will do that to you.

So I was surprised when, a third of the way through J. F. Gonzalez’ excellent novel Survivor, I contemplated chucking it aside. This had nothing to do with the quality of the book, but it was so harrowing, I was leery of what I knew was to come. Reality based horror, as opposed to the supernatural kind, is usually a bit more intimidating, since you are dealing with something at least theoretically possible. With trepidation, I stuck it out, and I’m glad I did.

Brad and Lisa are two young married lawyers, off for a weekend getaway, when they are stopped by a police officer. It seems another motorist, Caleb Smith, has filed a complaint for a citizen’s arrest against Brad, and he gets to spend the weekend in jail. But the Smith’s real motive is to separate Brad and Lisa in order to kidnap her. It seems that Smith has been commissioned by clients to provide a victim for a snuff film. Lisa is to be raped, tortured, and murdered, for the pleasure of a network of hardcore perverts. But that isn’t even the worst part. That’s what Lisa is willing to do to survive…

My only previous experience with Gonzalez’ work was in reading the enjoyable, B-movie-esque Clickers and Clickers II. Here his work takes a much darker turn. Like at the scene of a highway accident, I found I could not look away. If you can handle it, this is a must-read.

I have a couple of quibbles with the book. It could have used a good proof-reader (this has become the standard in American publishing, I’m afraid), and I felt it could have done with some editing, especially during the last segment of the book, which seemed to meander a bit. But this is not enough to keep this from being a very significant book in the field of non-supernatural horror.

Dark Harvest

Norman Partridge has been touted as one of the rising stars of the horror field, and now that I’ve read Dark Harvest, I have to disagree. He is not rising; he has already risen. Dark Harvest is a wonderful, mature work of horror fiction that places Partridge among the elite of the profession.

This is a lean, spare story, clocking in at just over 160 pages, and readers should be warned: It won’t take that long to read, but you can’t stop once you start. It is set in a small town in 1963, where every year, a pumpkin-headed October Boy rises in a field just outside of town. A resident is there to carve a face in his head, he is stuffed full of candy, and given a butcher knife. He then takes off, with the goal of reaching the church in the center of town. Standing in his way is every boy in town between sixteen and eighteen, armed with clubs and knives, and determined to kill him before he reaches his goal. Each of the boys has been starved for five days to make them “hungry” for the kill. The boy who kills the October Boy gets to leave town (the only way out) and his family receives rewards.

There are many secrets about this ritual, and they are revealed one by one. This is one of the great works of dark fantasy, and the perfect book for Halloween. There are a few anachronisms in the 1963 setting, but that is a very minor quibble. The novel is available as an inexpensive Tor trade paperback.

You should also check out Norman Patridge’s website. Essays there reveal he is one of the few people to share my love of the Universal horror movies of the 30s and 40s.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

I have a long, if not particularly notable, association with Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. It was the first "adult" book I ever read, completed when I was seven. It had been given to me by the teenage girl next door (I like to imagine she thought "it would be perfect for the little creep") and took awhile to finish, partly because I may have been a little precocious but wasn't yet a speed-reader, and partly because my mother kept finding it and ineffectually hiding it, convinced it would give me nightmares (it did). I was entranced by it then, and have loved the novel ever since. I have watched Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, Jack Palance and others portray the saturnine Count with enjoyment, while lamenting that no one ever attempted to make an adaptation that was true to the book.

So I was pretty stoked back in 1992 when Francis Ford Coppola announced he would be making a huge budget, star-laden adaptation. Since he was calling it Bram Stoker's Dracula, surely he would stick closer to the novel. Else why bother? Obviously, I underestimated Hollywood's willingness to "improve" books. Although I remember being very disappointed, I recently picked up the latest DVD edition and decided to give it another try.

First off, the good stuff: The movie looks great. Coppola has always had a good eye, and also done well in hiring cinematographers, and the movie looks great, although Vlad's armor in the beginning makes him look a little like the Crimson Dynamo. Coppola also makes good use of mostly practical special effects, and uses a very stylized approach to the movie which is very pleasing to the eye.

But it still doesn't work. Although Coppola still calls this a faithful adaptation, his Dracula has been transformed from the monster of the original into a tragic romantic figure. So what if he tortured thousands of people to death, and has spent centuries not only killing humans but destroying their souls? The dude's wife died. This has an ick factor to me. I'm sure Ted Bundy had some sort of heartbreak in his life, the world would still have been better off if he'd been stillborn. Since the years since the movie have seen an explosion of cultural entertainment with vampires as romantic characters, maybe I'm out of touch. The middle of the film, where Dracula romances Mina, also slows the pace of the film to a crawl.

The movie also inserts historical information showing Dracula as the real ruler Vlad Tepes, an inspiration to Stoker for the Dracula character, which Coppola claims to make his version even more "real" than Stoker's. Which would be true if Dracula was a non-fiction account of Vlad the Impaler, but since the title character is a fictional creation of Stoker, that doesn't really hold up. Actually, tying Dracula closer to Vlad makes him less sympathetic rather than more, since Vlad was one of history's true SOBs.

One of the most criticized aspects of the movie at the time of its release was casting Keanu Reeves as Jonathon Harker, but I think this is more of an example of Keanu-hate than anything else. True, he struggles with his fake accent (everyone in the film seems to, even those who are using their native ones), but I truly think he acquits himself well, or at least as well as most of the rest of the wooden cast. To me, the one awful acting performance comes from the usually wonderful Anthony Hopkins, who portrays Abraham van Helsing as sort of a deranged vaudeville performance. He is so over-the-top that he warps every scene he is in, with the most egregious example coming when he dry-humps Quincy Morris like a dog humping your leg, while giving him instructions to guard Lucy. Just too bizarre.

For all his claims of originality, Coppola steals from other films a little too liberally (although they are often his own earlier films). He juxtapositions the sacred and profane when cutting back and forth from the wedding of Jonathon and Mina to the murder of Lucy by Dracula, but it is basically the same as the baptism/settling of scores scene in The Godfather. And when vampiric Lucy vomits blood over her antagonists, it looks like it was taken directly from The Exorcist.

In the end, it would have been more appropriate for the movie to be named Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, and we are still waiting for a version that will be true to the book, a masterpiece of Victorian fiction.

New Killer Story at Chop Shop Horror Show

I’ve been a little out of pocket lately, so updates have been few and far between. My apologies to both readers.

The big announcement is a new (free) story is up at Kent Gowran’s Chop Shop Horror Show. It is “Best Friend’s Girlfriend” by J.F. Gonzalez, and like the Bryan Smith story which preceded it, is of the highest quality. The Chop Shop Horror Show has become a can’t miss destination for horror fans, and you’ll hate yourself if you miss this story. So go there. Now.

Event Horizon

We all have "guilty pleasures" - movies or books that we know we probably shouldn't like, but we do. One of the movies that fits into this category for me is Paul W. S. Anderson's 1997 sci-fi horror flick Event Horizon. Although I know it has flaws, I've seen it several times, and love it. It is two-thirds of a great movie (more on that later).

In the year 2047, man has moved out into the solar system, exploring and exploiting the resources of Earth's fellow solar orbiters. The ship Lewis and Clark operates as a sort of deep space Coast Guard. Commanded by the conscientious Captain Miller (Lawrence Fishburne), they are sent on a mysterious mission to the limits of explored space, the orbit of Neptune. With the crew, which represents all the English-speaking countries, travels a scientist, Doctor Weir (Sam Neill), who holds the key to the mission.

Seven years earlier, a deep space explorer called the Event Horizon was lost when its engine exploded. Weir reveals to the cynical crew that this was a lie, the Event Horizon was designed to be the first ship from earth to travel to another star. In the requisite mumbo-jumbo exposition sequence, Weir explains how the Event Horizon's "gravity drive" was designed to create a controlled black hole, to enable the ship to almost instantaneously reach across immense distances. Instead of the accident that was the official story, after the gravity drive was engaged, the ship disappeared, and was never heard from again. Until now, when the ship has reappeared near Neptune. The Lewis and Clark's mission is to investigate the Event Horizon and find out what happened.

Once they reach their destination, they find that none of the original crew has survived, and the ship itself has brought back something from the void outside our dimension. What ensues is a classic haunted house story in space, with the Event Horizon serving as the haunted house. This is much the same story structure used in Alien. Each crew member is visited with a sin from their past that still haunts them. Captain Miller sees a crew member who died under his command, Doctor Weir an apparition of his dead wife, etc.

As is usual in this sort of movie, it is creepier when the crew is trying to figure out what is going on. After a tremendous first two acts, it devolves a bit in the third act, when the story falls back on traditional movie devices ("when in doubt, blow shit up"). The cast, which includes Jason Isaacs and Sean Pertwee in addition to Fishburne and Neill, is superb. The basic idea is wonderful, the payoff doesn't quite live up to it. Still, as I said, one of my favorite guilty pleasures.