28 Days Later

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: Science project gone wrong.  Ultra-contagious CrazySerum set loose by well-meaning animal lovers.

SYMPTOMS: People go crazy and turn into crazypeople.  Everyone dies.  Cities of England empty.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?  For now, just try to survive.  That’s bleedin’ hard enough, innit?

THE MILITARY, SUCH AS IT IS, HAS A PLAN, SUCH AS IT IS: Lure people to their military base and forcibly impregnate any females who wander by.  Who knows?  In a few weeks maybe all the crazypeople will keel over from starvation.  Good plan, huh?  Huh?  Hey, where are you going?

WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS?  We learn, in time, that the crisis is passing, that the crazypeople, if not starving to death, are at least getting weaker and less scary, and that England is, seemingly, the only affected country.  Ah well.

NOTES: I love, love, love the first 75 minutes or so of this movie.  It’s deeply upsetting, haunting, nerve-shredding entertainment.  The creatures are wicked scary and unpredictable and the movie bristles with unexpected moments of beauty and poetry.  I love everything up to the point in Act III where the Army Guy In Charge mentions in passing that he intends to toss the women to the army guys.  What had, up until that point, been a really, really smart movie about resourceful people doing their best to survive in a really, really fucked-up world then becomes a movie about how the Military Is Bad.  Which it is, don’t get me wrong.  But for instance, we’ve got the female lead, who has proven herself to be an astonishingly effective badass with a machete, and in Act III she’s reduced to Protecting The Innocent Girl, Wearing a Party Dress (!), and Being Rescued By The Male Protagonist Who Learns To Kill And Thus Proves His Manhood (sigh).

I’m also not sure about the decision to shoot this on video.  I think it’s supposed to add “realism” to the event, and it certainly helps with the discomfort level, but for me it just keeps taking me out of the story because it doesn’t look like a movie, even though it is, obviously, a movie.  It feels self-conscious.

Day of the Dead

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: Well, no one knows.  It just kind of happens one day.

SYMPTOMS: The dead come back to feast on the living.  This creates problems.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? A group of scientists have been teamed up with a group of army guys and put into an underground storage-facility-cum-laboratory for the purposes of studying the zombie problem and coming up with some solutions.  Solutions have not, as yet, been forthcoming and this is stressing everyone out a little.

THE ARMY GUY IN CHARGE says “Forget about our mission, let’s just get out of here.”  (By “us” he means himself and his fellow army guys.)
THE OTHER ARMY GUYS say “Yee haw!  Let’s kill some zombies!”
THE MAD SCIENTIST says “Let’s socialize the zombies as we would children or domestic animals.”
THE RATIONAL SCIENTIST says “We have to figure out a way to reverse the process.  That will take time and patience.”
THE JAMAICAN HELICOPTER PILOT says “Why you want to waste your time wit’ dat, mon?  Scientific knowledge an’ record keepin’ ees pointless mon, let’s jes’ find a nice island somewheres, make some babies an’ enjoy the rest of the time we’s got ‘ere on dis Eart.”
THE IRISH GUY drinks whiskey and says “Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph” at every opportunity.

WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS?  George Romero is a populist and secular humanist.  His head is with the rational scientist, but his heart is with the Jamaican helicopter pilot and the Irish guy.  (Strangely, the Jamaican and the Army Guy both have the same plan, but the Army Guy is a selfish, autocratic bully whose plan includes shooting everyone else before escaping, so we don’t like him.)

AND THE BEST DEATH GOES TO: It’s hard to top the Army Guy whose eyelid gets torn away and the Other Army Guy who keeps screaming after his head is torn away from his body (not to mention the zombie who’s decapitated with a shovel-blade — man, I’ve always wanted to try that — but the winner has to be the Army Guy In Charge who lives to see his own intestines dragged away by zombies and still has the gumption (and the lucidity) to scream “Choke on ’em!” before he succumbs.

NOTES: This movie is a lot more compelling than I remember it being.  Especially since it doesn’t have much of a plot, or very good acting.  It’s pretty much: Act I: introduce everyone and delineate the situation they’re in, Act II: gather and sort theirconflicting viewpoints and theories, Act III: set the zombies loose and see who survives.

The scenes of zombie carnage still carry an undeniable punch of profane revulsion.