A couple of reviews. Enjoy.Title: Evil (To Kako, Greek title)
Director: Yorgos Noussias
Year: 2005
I think this is one of the first Greek horror movies I've ever seen. Evil is basically a low-budget zombie flick, but it is definitely head-and-shoulders above many of its contemporaries because of its ambition and creativity. I think this movie shows what a film maker can do with a small amount of money (something like 170,000.00 US dollars) as long as the creative drive is strong.
While the movie is obviously shot on digital video, the camera work itself is still pretty good, and leads me to assume it was just a logistical cost-cutting decision. It's really the only aspect of the movie that shouts "low budget". The money was quite obviously spent on the effects work, which is nothing short of fantastic. For one thing, I can't figure out how such a modest movie managed to get so many sections of Athens cleared of people for filming. The city really looks deserted! The seams never show, and there are a lot of cool location shoots, including backed up highways full of abandoned cars, and empty streets. You can almost take setting for granted, because it's so well done you don't even notice. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I can't figure out how they pulled off that ending. Evil is a movie that obviously manages to shoot far above its limits (unlike that piece of crap 'zombie' movie The Roost I reviewed previously, which manages to land far below its own limits).
The acting can be hit or miss, but most of the time you don't notice it. Evil is billed as a horror-comedy, but most of the 'dialogue comedy' comes from one or two idiotic characters. This is probably the most jarringly sophomoric feature of the whole film. Half of the characters seem to be dealing with the zombie attack realistically, and the other characters are bizarre comedic foils who mostly fail to garner too many real laughs. The comedy is sort of an unfortunate tension-killer just because it seems kind of misplaced. With the possible exception of the womanizing cab driver's wet dream sequence. I did find that to be a nice blend of comic and disturbing. I think if the real comedy would have been limited to the over-the-top gore sequences this movie would have been a little more polished. As it is, it seems that the screenwriter and director have a bit to learn about character and character relationships. But even so, this tiny flaw is not enough to make sitting through Evil frustrating. I can pretty much accept most of what low-budget film making throws at you, and these tiny inadequacies are par for the course in my opinion.
As for gore, this movie has it. I mean dump trucks full of it. Usually these movies will kind of pick a couple of really gory effects and highlight them as the film's major set pieces. You'll get maybe four or five really cool kills and that's about it. If you're lucky, you get maybe one whole sequence. I'm not complaining, but this movie doesn't content itself with that at all. Evil provides several, ridiculously protracted sequences of zombie slaughter. I can't count the number of people that are killed, honestly, or the number of times blood jets out of a truncated extremity. The kills are pretty hilarious, with a very obvious harkening to Pete Jackson's Bad Taste. While tongue-in-cheek in nature, the violence and gore comes in a high-enough volume to satisfy my own cravings for spewing red stuff.
Any flick that refuses to settle for just one graphic decapitation definitely rates excellent in my book. On top of that, you have a pretty good pull-apart sequence among many other things. Like its bloodthirsty subjects, Evil is a movie that refuses to lie down. It doesn't flinch from its own ambitious vision, and doesn't flinch from pouring gallons of gore on its sense of physical comedy. All in all, Evil is highly recommended, especially for anyone who enjoyed Bad Taste.
Title: The Dead Next DoorDirector: J.R. Bookwalter
Year: 1988
Before I can really say anything about this movie, it must be understood that The Dead Next Door is basically a four-year-long student film project written and put together by a bunch of kids from Akron, Ohio who had just graduated from high school. The cast and crew consist of the entire city of Akron. Many of the 'actors' are also crew members performing multiple duties, and NO ONE, absolutely NO ONE got paid to make this. One cast/crew-member described The Dead Next Door as a four-year-long party that the population of Akron was invited to.
Okay, so I've laid the foundation for my review of what is basically an excellent zombie flick, an enormously successful no-budget student film, and a total cult classic. Some people say this movie is terrible, unwatchable, and a waste of time. I think a lot of amateur film 'critics' know so little about the movie-making process that their considered opinion is devoid of any real insight into film itself. They are just idiots with an internet connection, too much time (not enough time to proofread though, never enough time for that), and a need to feel superior to something by talking down on it. It's hard for me to appreciate a movie without knowing what, exactly, went into making it. The story behind the story, so to speak. Let's face it, you can slam the 'acting' in The Dead Next Door all you want, but when you take into account the fact that no one in the movie was an actor, and of these non-actors, none of them got paid, your attack becomes sort of baseless. Like putting on full armor and attacking a hot fudge sundae, to paraphrase Vonnegut. The whole film was one big labor of love for people who had zero film-making experience. You have to admit that what they managed to do is pretty amazing. I can't emphasize that enough.
The Dead Next Door was shot on 16mm film, so there is no such thing as a "widescreen" version of this movie; it was essentially shot in full screen on video. Probably one of the first things you'll notice. The other thing you'll notice is that the people in this movie aren't all exactly photogenic. If you remember they aren't actors, you'll be able to make a tiny leap and infer that they would probably not be pretty either. The acting is also not necessarily deserving of the term. It's ok. These people aren't even amateur actors. They were regular people who volunteered for their parts! Keep in mind: no one got paid for this.
Those are the major hurtles one has to get over in order to fully appreciate The Dead Next Door. Because once you swallow all your Hollywood-fed movie prejudice, you can goggle at the sheer ambitious scale of this flick. It's shot on multiple locations! A ridiculous number of them, in fact! From zombies trying to storm the Whitehouse lawn, to zombies infesting downtown Akron, to zombies climbing onto moving vehicles, The Dead Next Door doesn't screw around trying to establish the sense that the entire country has been overrun by zombies. And it does a pretty convincing job! The Whitehouse sequence and the zombie car-stunt sequence alone are absolutely retarded in the magnitude of their ambitiousness. And these fucking kids pulled it off! How many no budget student films have a full-blown car-stunt sequence, with people hanging off fast-moving vehicles and getting thrown off of them? None come to mind.
Besides some pretty excellently executed set pieces like the aforementioned sequences, and the highly ambitious plot, the area where The Dead Next Door really shines is the gore. I'm convinced that one of the movies Robert Rodriguez watched while penning his ideas for Planet Terror was none other than The Dead Next Door. This movie doesn't provide just a little gore. It doesn't provide a moderate amount of gore. It pours on thick layers of retardedly good gore effects. Once you see the infamous severed head sequence at the beginning of the movie you know you're in for something special. The Dead Next Door is pretty much about as over-the-top as Planet Terror, but obviously done on no budget, more than 20 years earlier, and without real actors. And yet, in spite of all its obvious flaws, Mr. Bookwalter's genius shines through pretty heavily.
In sum, you can't call yourself a fan of zombie flicks if you haven't seen this. You can't call yourself a true geek if you don't own this. And you'll probably have an easier time keeping a girlfriend if you don't love this movie as much as I do, but who the fuck is counting, anyway?
Title: The Beyond (AKA: The Seven Doors of Death) Director: Lucio Fulci
Year: 1981
I'm not really reviewing this movie. I don't have to, because it's a classic, it's a Fulci movie, and doesn't really need my opinion.
But I do want to say that I'd been looking for a copy of it for awhile and my search finally bore fruit. And such delicious fruit it was. Amazon has the DVD up for $22.00. Twenty-one dollars and ninety-nine motherfucking cents which I refuse to drop on anything that doesn't say "SUPER DOUBLE EXTRA LIMITED UNCUT UNRATED WIDESCREEN DIGITALLY REMASTERED AND RESTORED 40-DISC SPECIAL EDITION WITH 8 VERSIONS OF THE MOVIE, 5 EIGHT HOUR LONG DOCUMENTARIES, AND 4 OTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FEATURE LENGTH MOVIES" on it. So when I found the same DVD Amazon is selling at the aforementioned criminal price for only FOUR DOLLARS (!!!11!!!) at F.Y.E. of all places (this is why it can be a good idea to occasionally drop into these horrific mega-chains) I had to snatch it up.
The only thing this DVD version of The Beyond (The Seven Doors of Death) has going for it is that it is in widescreen. Other than that the picture is so-so, not particularly good, but not unwatchable either. However, as for the movie itself? I can see why a lot of people say that this movie is Fulci's masterpiece. I have to agree. If Fulci's aim is to disregard cinematic decency and thoroughly disgust you, then this movie has achieved this aim far above Zombie or City of the Living Dead. People have accused this film of making no sense. They have accused Fulci of directing extremely wooden performances out of his actors. They have accused The Beyond of just being gory for gore's sake. I think these reactions are merely the rationalizations of people who were disturbed by their experience watching this. I say 'FUCK THEM'.
I'm not going to go into any real detail here. Suffice to say, I think The Beyond has two of the all-time best scenes in cinematic history: A girl being attacked and killed by her own seeing-eye dog (graphically, of course, as only Fulci would do it), and a gun battle against zombies in which a little (possessed) girl is shot and the entire top portion of her head is blown off (again, as chunky and splattery as only Fulci would bring us).
Both these scenes are present-day cinematic no-no's. No director, not even a horror director, would really go there (except maybe Eli Roth). My immediate reaction was something like "Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, MAAAAAAAAN! I can't believe he went for it!" It's this tendency to go for broke and just show you what you really don't want to see that makes Fulci's The Beyond such a goddamn masterpiece. It's less a movie with a coherent plot than it is a series of psychotic, dream-like vignettes loosely strung together by some disaffected and numb characters and a vague plot about the Book of Eibon (Lovecraft reference, anyone?) and one of the Seven Doors to Hell being discovered in the basement of an old Louisiana hotel.
And it works for all that, or rather; it works because of all that.
Also, if you have an eye-phobia, you definitely shouldn't see this. Eyes get gouged, eaten out of the socket by tarantulas, and one woman has her head impaled on a spike which pops through her eyeball.
I've read in several places that the US release of The Beyond was heavily cut to secure an R rating. I haven't been able to figure out which version of the movie I now own, because the movie is rated R on the package. And yet, if this is the cut US version, I can't imagine what they cut out of it. Nothing is left to the imagination, and I can easily pick out the scenes that I imagine would have been cut. So, I'm leaning towards this being the un-cut international release and not the US version. Though I don't know for sure. If my version is in fact the hacked-up US version, I'd love to see what they cut out of it. I can't even fathom what could be more graphic than the brutal crucifixion in The Beyond's opening sequence.
Maybe protracted scenes of poultry bestiality or a dance number featuring hobo-clowns and a man eating raw beef. That would be worthwhile to do some editing magic on, just to spare me the agony.
All in all, if you are awful like me, see this.
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