The Feminine Witchstique

What does one do after birthing a horror subgenre that would turn into a billion dollar enterprise of which you barely profit? Four years after the release of Night of the Flesh Eaters Living Dead, George Romero made the logical career move: directing a feminist allegory about witchcraft that got repurposed by its disappointed studio as softcore porn.

And you thought YOU had a bad day.

Quick Plot: Meet Joan Mitchell, a 39-year-old housewife whose daughter Nikki is about to leave home and whose husband Jack is an awful, abusive workaholic blowhard. Her living room is illuminated by very creepy children lamp statues. Life could be better.

Enter a new neighbor and rumored witch. Joan and her gal pal Shirley visit the mystery woman for a Tarot reading, wetting Joan's appetite for a dive into the supernatural. Things get even more tempting when Joan meets Gregg, Nikki's TA and casual boyfriend. Joan is both repulsed by and attracted to him, something Nikki picks up on and angrily runs away. 

Left alone for a few days due to Nikki's escape and Jack's business trip, Joan heads to the nearest occult shop and stocks up on her witchcraft starter kit. First up is a spell to summon Gregg to her home, though a simple phone call seems to work without the added incense ash. 

It's strange to see Season of the Witch categorized as a horror film, since it seems so clear that it's simply using some of those tenants to explore a very simple (yet very dense) subject. I'm sure many a genre fan expecting more flesh-eating witches and less loud '70s print-wearing homemakers left Season of the Witch disappointed, though probably not as much as those who rented it under the studio's slapped on original title: Hungry Wives.

Romero clearly didn't want to make a mild skin flick, nor was he diving back into the brutal well of gore he mastered with Night. While some of his dialogue feels clunky (particularly nearly 50 years later), the sentiment works. Actress Jan White doesn't feel like the most charismatic of leading ladies, but that's absolutely fitting for the character of Joan. This is a woman who's never had much of a self, and through a random combination of events, is finally coming into her own.

Sure, some of the metaphor is heavy-handed (this is the same man who made Diary of Dead, don't forget) but there's a fundamental simplicity (perhaps because of constant studio cuts to Romero's original cut) that makes the film move at the exact right pace. We only need one scene of Shirley making a fool of herself in front of young people to tell us everything we need to know about how Joan sees herself and her future. This is a woman loosely stuck in a crummy, disappointing existence. The freedom she finds in the promise of witchcraft are paired with the dangers that seem to be warning her in vivid dreams to drive her into some very big choices. It all tracks, and while the wild wallpaper certainly helps, I found it riveting.

High Points

I won't spoil it here, but know that there aren't quite enough words in a thesaurus to say just how much I adored the ending and its implications towards the entire film we'd just seen

Low Points

When you fill your frames with constant closeups of creepy Hummel-ish figurine lamps, you owe it to your audience to have them, I don't know, come alive in a nightmare sequence and terrify us all

Lessons Learned

When your daughter is balled in the next room, you handle it by kicking some ass

Take it from Ruth Gordon: if the mousse tastes chalky, don't eat it

In the early '70s, pregnancy tests were 92% accurate

Rent/Bury/Buy

By all accounts I found, Romero was never happy with Season of the Witch. It's definitely a raw film that could have benefited from a revisit, but as a remnant of its time, Season of the Witch feels like a weird hidden gem...or at the very least, stylish bit of costume jewelry that would look fabulous in a flowered mumu. It's streaming on both Amazon Prime and Shudder, and certainly worth your eyeballs.

Who Is That Masked Man?

I’ll say this first: Bruiser, a film written and directed by George Romero, contains no zombies.

And now I’ll say this: Bruiser contains Peter Stormare turning the word ‘salami’ into a verb used to mean sex. Really, what more does one need?

Quick Plot: Henry is a nice guy bound to finish last. His beautiful, awful wife Janine respects her toy poodle far more than her hard-working husband, who in turn toils away at a fashion magazine run by a flamboyant womanizer named Milo Styles.

Guys, let’s talk about Milo Styles. Because he is amazing.

Peter Stormare is one of those character actors that makes most viewers perk up anytime he shows up onscreen. I don’t know if it was Romero or Stormare’s idea, but his Milo is one of the most over the top creations I’ve ever seen on film. 

It’s not just that he sexually harasses every woman (and man) on his staff or that his wardrobe consists of the kind of silk button-ups that can magically turn into v-necks at the sniff of cocaine. Or that he speaks with the kind of typical Peter Stormare accent that sounds like it comes from a small European nation where mass transit is conducted via oxen and the peasants revolt every five years. Stormare gives Milo 120% of his energy, and all of it is aimed at making the man a cruel, misogynist, oversexed, and incredibly enthusiastic hedonist. It is a glorious thing.

Not so glorious for Henry, who discovers that Janine is not only stealing from his investments with the help of his best friend, but is also shagging Milo on the side. As if things couldn’t get any worse, Henry wakes up one morning with his face covered in a sort of plastic Momenshuntz mask, similar to one his pal (and Milo’s put-upon soon-to-be ex-wife) Rosie made for him. 

Left without a face or wife, Henry embarks upon a mission of vengeance so fierce it requires the police work of the only man fit for such a job. 

Tom Atkins is no Milo Styles, but he DOES refer to women as dames, which makes me way happier than it probably should.

To seal the deal, we spend the last twenty minutes at the world’s most ridiculous late ‘90s masquerade rave. Note that the ‘rave’ in question is technically a work party required for all magazine employees and their children, which sort of explains why its dress code was ripped from The Road Warrior, the entertainment is a Misfits performance, Halloween-themed appetizers are passed about, and it all ends in lasers. 

Yup, Bruiser is an odd one, especially coming from the man better known for shuffling corpses and the occasional medieval times reenactment motorcycle gang. This is more in line with the Falling Down-type story of a mild-mannered man finding his inner badass. 

It works well enough. Henry gets us on his side quickly because his targets really are awful human beings. More importantly, we see that he’s not willing to cause collateral damage. He has a code, and it makes Bruiser much more compelling for it. There’s something strangely sweet and positive in the attitude of the film, as if Romero really wanted to tell a sordid, violence-riddled story where the good guy wins. Just with casualties.

And lasers.

High Points

Storemare for president. Storemare for the next Bond villain. Storemare for the next Pretty Little Liar. Storemare for all.

Low Points

I get that the models in the film were supposed to be dumb, but did they also have to be such terrible actresses?

Lessons Learned

You can always gauge the moral compass of a character by how he parks

Bed may be a gift from the gods, but a handicap port-a-potty is the best place to salami around

Everybody needs a bastard in their life

Fun Fact

When you Google image search for ‘Bruiser’ and ‘movie,’ you are indeed reminded that Legally Blonde happened. Because Bruiser!

Rent/Bury/Buy

Bruiser isn’t quite the treatise on male empowerment that it might think it is, but it’s a pretty darn fun little movie. As Henry, Jason Flemyng makes a likable protagonist worth rooting for, Atkins brings his signature charm, and Stormare sashays away chewing scenery as if it were the world’s most delicious Bubblicious gum. The movie is streaming on Netflix and fine for a good 90 minutes of your weekend afternoon.

The Cleanest Looking Zombies You Ever Did See

Max Brooks' epic World War Z is one of the most unique reads I've had in recent years. Part horror novel, part modern social studies lesson, it could be argued to be the very apex of the undead movement of art. Like so many of us who grew up fantasizing about life in the Monroeville Mall, Brooks saw the concept of a Romero zombie invasion as something well worth exploring, in his case, on a global scale. His novel (a collection of 'interviews' conducted with those who survived an international zombie attack) is simply brilliant.

Cue the angry mob of (somewhat justified) torch-bearing bookworms who therefore considered Marc Forster's loose film adaptation to be a blight on mankind.

The cinematic journey of World War Z is a complicated one. When the first script leaked several years ago, the Internet rejoiced like a band of victorious Ewoks over how it apparently captured the spirit and scope of Brooks' novel in a way that could, sources said, redefine screenwriting as we knew it. Fast forward several drafts later to word of the troubled production, now being produced by (and starring) Brad Pitt with a constantly ballooning budget and pushed-back release date.

Eventually, World War Z debuted to admirable box office numbers, decent critical reviews, and a whole lot of anger from its initial fanbase. Brooks casually disowned the film as having nothing to do with his book. Horror fans growled at the PG13 rating. Readers were disgusted by what was a complicated, global narrative being reduced to 'Hot Brad Pitt Fights Zombies To Save His Family.'

I go through this somewhat long preamble to try to explain where I come from in watching and reviewing World War Z. The novel was one of my absolute favorite reading experiences, and something I was eager to share and push on friends who mostly responded the same. A part of me was crushed to learn about the film's dilution of Brooks' worldwide elements. As someone who thinks The Walking Dead would be a better place without the Grimes' father/son dull spot, the idea that such a fascinating and incredibly developed examination of modern society would be boiled down to 'hot dad saves kids' made me angry.

But as I've said about so many films adapted from beloved works of fiction, a movie is its own thing. There can be nothing wrong with using a book simply as a springboard for inspiration rather than blueprint for cinematic translation. For every No Country For Old Men that adapts its source nearly verbatim and works beautifully, there are just as many The Shinings that take the initial story and spin it into something of its own. With great humility, I swallowed a good deal of emotion and tried my hardest to watch Marc Forster's World War Z as something original with no attachment to the novel whose name it shares.

Here's me trying.

Quick Plot: People Magazine's Sexiest Ex-UN Field Officer Alive is enjoying a regular road trip with his wife and two daughters when chaos breaks out on the streets of Philadelphia. Before you can say cheese steak, people are sprinting for their lives as the occasional twitchy infected lurches on their tail to take a bite.

Well, 'lurch' is such a lugubrious word. It's more like they're being set up in the kind of children's toy catapult contraption every kid wanted for Christmas (be it a pirate ship or wresting ring) and instantly SHOT into the still-living's path.

It's almost cool. I'll give you that.

One Mist-y trip to a grocery store later and Gerry is able to get into contact with his former employers who decide to send him on an international journey to help identify a solution to the now world-wide epidemic of fast running zombieism. In return for his risky work, Gerry's family is to be kept safe on a military ocean rig. The military is awesome and completely trustworthy like that.

What follows are a few episodes of Gerry traveling to a few far reaches of the world: South Korea, Israel, and Wales. If you can divorce yourself from the far more global spread of the novel, you can appreciate a mainstream big budget horror (well, action with touches of horror) studio film integrating different nations into its narrative. Yes, it's ultimately the blond haired, blue eyed, apple pie in his beard Brad Pitt who (SPOILER ALERTISHNESS) is the hunk the seven continents need to save the world, but hey....at least he gets a cute female Israeli sidekick!

I don't know I don't know I don't know, I moan with exasperation. It's probably impossible for me to fully disarm my devotion to Brooks' novel, making the film 'adaptation' such a disappointment. There are strong elements at play: the film LOOKS and SOUNDS quite good, with some incredibly effective fast-paced attacks in its first and second act. For general audiences whose familiarity with the zombie genre ends at The Walking Dead, World War Z is certainly an exciting way to kill two hours of time. For most of us, this is that film that your coworkers and extended family will ask you about, because after all, you're a HORROR FAN!

In most cases, that means you won't like it. World War Z is to the zombie genre what The Big Bang Theory is to geekdom. It's more than appealing to the mainstream, but those with a deeper identity to the subject matter will just find it empty. There have been plenty of PG13 horror films that have surpassed their youth-friendly rating to still provide scares, but for a movie about a mass zombie invasion destroying the entire planet, it just seems like we all deserve better than a hot American saving the world without seeing a drop of actual blood.

High Points
Self slingshot-flinging zombieism is neat enough in being something completely new

Low Points

Wow, what a climax

I don't mean to insult the asthmatic population, but can we please agree that children with severe breathing conditions in need of holy grail-esque inhalers are a tad forced in cinema?

Lessons Learned

Those annoying children's toys that make battery operated sounds can be surprisingly useful when identifying key features of a zombie virus

Apparently, we are in no way past the point of 'please turn off your cell phone' courtesy announcements before launching super dangerous missions involving the undead

Cardio, cardio, and cardio

Rent/Bury/Buy
Well, considering my below freezing temperature expectations, World War Z was certainly better than it could have been. On the other hand, considering its source material, World War Z was nowhere near as good as it should have been. Brooks loyalists should stay away, but those who enjoy action horror will certainly find this to be a decently made, and for a good 2/3rds of its running time, well paced little mainstream hit. 

Oh Hai George

As some of you might know, the ponytailed national (turned Canadian) treasure is responsible for my favorite film of all time, a little slice of zombie mayhem and mall madness known as Dawn of the Dead. Regarding the rest of his filmography, I can simply say it’s a mixed trick-or-treating pillow case from an economically challenged neighborhood, filled with some tasty, if cheaper store-brand candy, slick but tasteless Good ‘N Plenty, and a heavy percentage of frustrating Milk Duds.

To give a brief summary of my estimation of the Dead sextology, so you know where I’m coming from in reviewing Survival:

Night: Classic, brutal, groundbreaking and still effective. The modern horror movie.

Dawn: I hug it once a day, just so that it knows I still love everything about it.

Day: Though it's grown on me over the years, I still declare Day to be overrated and kind of obnoxious, filled with good ideas (Dr. Frankenstein), amazingly crafted zombies, and a batch of characters I would like to shoot myself

Land: Underrated, the kind of film that gets progressively better for me on repeat viewings. Once I got over my initial excitement-met-with-disappointment in the theaters, I’ve been able to watch this much more objectively to say it’s far more relevant and better made than I had initially thought

Diary: A mess, but not as embarrassing (in my estimation) as others make it out to be. I like the idea of going back to the start with a comparably low budget and believe it or not, I even like some of the themes. Unfortunately, Romero insists on molding said themes into a giant orb and bashing us over the head with it via a bland and awful narrator.

And thusly do we enter 2009’s Survival of the Dead, a continuation of sorts of Diary that mixes shambling “deadheads” with feuding Irish clans off the coast of Delaware (I’m serious). Let us begin.

Quick Plot: AWOL from the National Guard, Sarge (Diary cameo-er Alan Van Sprang) and a few of his cohorts decide to follow a suspicious ‘Net (yup, the same entity that robbed Sandra Bullock of her identity in 1995) advertisement to an island paradise off the coast of...Delaware (cue Wayne’s World clip of "Hi! I'm in...Delaware"). 

En route, the team picks up a moody, if efficient teenager and lands at the dock. Not surprisingly, they meet some opposition from both zombies and humans, in this case, Patrick O’Flynn, an exiled old man looking to send some trouble the way of his former home. I think. 

Anyway, a fairly interesting boat escape sends our gang on a ferry, O’Flynn hopping onboard to give proper directions to the oddly leprechaun-less island. Romero starts to have a little fun setting up the strange society fashioned by O’Flynn’s rival, Seamus Muldoon. Where O’Flynn had attempted to purge his land of all the undead, shooting any soul with gray skin, Muldoon sought to preserve all victims in their former state with the hopes that one day, some smart Frankensoul might discover a cure.

Such a conflict is interesting in itself, especially when we get a peek at chained zombie mailmen delivering some bills and undead farmers fruitlessly plowing the fields. Yes, it’s ridiculous for a rotting corpse to maintain enough tension in her body to ride a horse for three weeks (don’t those ankles give out, Mr. Romero?) but I honestly don’t mind a seasoned, somewhat bored filmmaker trying out new tricks with the genre he created.

Of course, ‘not minding’ the idea of experimentation doesn’t mean anything when it’s executed so poorly. Survival is a weirdly awful film, one that tries to be funny without telling any good jokes, then attempts to make a statement by forcing its who-cares narrator (another narrator? HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM DIARY OF THE DEAD???) to deliver a lazy diatribe on What It All Means. The final image of Survival is interesting; it didn’t have to explain itself.

You can understand the uncomfortably picklish Catch-22 Mr. Romero has found himself in. For forty years, film fans have been crying for more zombie movies, but by most accounts, Romero ended that era with Day of the Dead. He found new ground with Land then, I imagine, realized he was out of gas once more. Rebooting the zombie myth with Diary made sense...it was just poorly done. So now, at the age of 70, everybody's favorite newly declared expat seems to say "Whatever. I like Westerns. They like zombies. Here's my compromise." The attitude is refreshing. The film is not.

By far, the worse thing about Survival is not necessarily its acting--none of which is particularly good, but hey: Romero’s always been more about presence than performance--but the ridiculous broad nature of its characters. It’s fine to have a diverse cast, but not when each is defined by their ‘thing.’ You know you’re in a bad low budget film, for example, not when there’s a lesbian character, but when said lesbian insists on telling you with every line of dialogue that she likes to have sex with women. Are all lesbians as horny as they come off in bad horror movies?

High Points

Considering the vast use of stereotypes to define virtually every character onscreen, I’ll give Romero minor credit for having a spunky Irish brunette that wasn't named, as most spunky Irish brunettes in film are, Kate. Also, it would have been so easy to add a leprechaun so you know...restraint.

At first, "Survival" of the Dead seems like an arbitrary word pulled from a dictionary to replace the already used times of day in the title. However, I will say that it actually fits the film and its storyline. So that's something.

Low Points

I don't want to hop on the boo-hoo-CGI train, especially since I think most of the Survival zombie kills looked fine. But did the first major headshot have to be more digitalized than something out of Left For Dead?

SPOILERS

I understand that ever since Barbra whined her way through the farmhouse and silly Judy went up in flames, George Romero has attempted to atone for Night's not-too-bright-or-brave female characters. Still, aside from Gaylen Ross's Franny, has there ever been a realistic or likable woman to survive his dead films? Making your female tough doesn't make her real, a trend continued here with the ridiculous, bland, and aggressively butch (and obviously named) Tomboy, played by Athena Karkanis (Saw IV-VI).

THUS ENDETH SPOILERS

Lessons Learned

With that, just in case you didn't know, this movie taught me that lesbians dig hot chicks

Handguns do indeed work after being submerged in water

People who grow up in Alabama will not in any way develop a trace of a deep Southern accent. Perhaps it's beaten out of you in the National Guard

Um. Zombies bite people. Just in case you forgot, despite living on an island with them for three months


Killing yourself is a one way ticket to hell

There is a magical Irish-filled isle off the coast of Delaware where all inhabitants dress like John Wayne or extras in the Oregon Trail

Rent/Bury/Buy

I so wanted to like, or at least not mind this film. Sigh. Maybe hybrid fans of cheesy Saturday morning Westerns and old school zombies will get the humor. I didn't. Then again, I do believe Romero, unlike someone more stuck in a bygone era of filmmaking like Argento, has a weird Cassandra-like power of making movies that look and feel better twenty years down the road. I do indeed cite Land (now 5 years old) as a prime example of a film that is simply stronger with so much time between its initial release. Perhaps Survival will follow?

So do I recommend the film? I can't tell you not to watch it:it's a Romero zombie movie for goodness sake. But be prepared to be baffled. Those who simply hate the idea of a childhood hero now slumming in a weird land of make believe may want to skip it. Better yet, if you were a Star Wars fan who considers the prequels to be dangerous to your health, then avoid Survival of the Dead. At the same time, you're a curious movie fan who needs to open Pandora's box. Maybe it won't be that bad. For you.


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