Forest of the Damned

DVD Review: ZOMBIES
15 – 94mins – 2006
Story by: Boaz Davidson
Screenplay by: Ben Nedivi
Directed by: J. S. Cardone
Starring: Lori Heuring, Scout Taylor-Compton, Chloë Grace Moretz, Geoffrey Lewis, Ben Cross, Craig Vye, Chris Jamba, Julie Rogers, Martin McDougall, Michael McCoy
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[SPOILERS] The quintessential rule of Zombie Film School 101, obvious to any fan of the popular horror sub-genre, is that zombies are the reanimated, braindead corpses of the recently perished; lumbering, rotting cadavers with one sole aim: to feast on your flesh and slurp down your intestines like stringed sausages. They aren't your family or friends anymore, merely people-shaped shells. Shells with teeth.

By that logic, the long-departed juvenile miners in Zombies who haunt the Pennsylvanian forests surrounding the abandoned mine they were buried in 100 years previous aren’t strictly zombies at all. Heck, they don't even pass on their unearthly infliction through biting! Cannibalistic ghosts, yes – ghastly, gore-guzzling ghouls even – but not zombies; even if the petrified locals do (mis-)use the blanket term in lieu of a more fitting description. But trust interfering studio heads not to care a jot about the details, believing a film with a bold-but-generic title would sell better than one called Wicked Little Things. The fools.

Making a Killing

Blu Review: I SELL THE DEAD
15 – 84mins – 2008
Written by: Glenn McQuaid
Directed by: Glenn McQuaid
Starring: Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden, Ron Perlman, Brenda Cooney, John Speredakos, Heather Bullock, Alisdair Stewart, Angus Scrimm, Joel Garland, Aiden Redmond
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Making light work of some truly dirty dealings in much the same vein as John Landis’ tame-but-tolerable take on a true story Burke & Hare, this low budget grave-robbing period comedy – a promising debut from Irish writer/director McQuaid which pre-dates the Pegg/Serkis vehicle by over eighteen months – throws an additional ingredient into the casket some thirty minutes in when the cadavers start coming back from the dead!!

The supernatural/horror elements aren’t overbearingly dominant, but they settle symbiotically with the offbeat characterisation of immoral-but-good-natured dead peddlers Arthur Black (Lost’s Monaghan) and Willie Grimes (Fessenden). However, a throwaway scene in which a peculiarly frozen stiff transpires to be a little grey man who all too quickly is beamed up to his mothership and disregarded with a shrug does feel like a frivolous step too far for the sake of a mild chuckle.

We join the story in media res (that’s in the middle of the action for all those who don’t speak Latin), with Willie having already been executed for the crimes of tomb raiding and murder. Five hours before Arthur is due to follow suit and kneel beneath the guillotine (despite his assertion that he is innocent – of the murder charge, at least), unorthodox priest Father Duffy (Season of the Witch’s Perlman) pays a visit to the condemned man’s cell and we learn of the grisly business that brought him to this point via a series of fragmented flashbacks.

As endearing as these cheeky chaps are, Arthur’s abridged life story does feel a little meandering at times (time is precious as he nears the chop, yet he considers it imperative to describe an ale-chugging contest at the local boozer to his transcribing visitor), but the alcohol-smuggling Father reels him back on focus by demanding to know more of Arthur and Willie’s clashes with rival band of enigmatic corpse hawkers “The House of Murphy” – for reasons that soon become clear…

The film’s low budget is effectively stretched with a profusion of moody, mist-shrouded moonlit locales which are creepily atmospheric if sparsely decorated, while a neat aesthetic idiosyncrasy sees a number of artistic shots and character profiles morph into comic book-style illustrations. It’s a polished touch which helps accentuate I Sell the Dead’s fundamental tongue-in-cheek absurdity, even if it doesn’t lend itself to any narrative function.


In a CR@B Shell: An affable and distinctive calling card for filmmaking newcomer Glenn McQuaid, I Sell the Dead is a charmingly lightweight post pub time-passer which outdoes Burke & Hare on laughs, even if the zombie horror component could have done with a bit more bite.
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Solomon Cage

DVD Review: SEASON OF THE WITCH
15 – 98mins – 2011
Written by: Bragi F. Schut
Directed by: Dominic Sena
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy, Stephen Campbell Moore, Robert Sheehan, Ulrich Thomsen, Stephen Graham, Christopher Lee
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Despite receiving a near unanimous critical mauling upon its theatrical release back in January, I still found much to enjoy in this swashbuckling blend of medieval quest and supernatural horror from the director of Swordfish, based on a decade old spec script which shifted between studios a suspicious number of times before Relativity Media produced it as their first in-house venture.

The permeantly unenthused Nicolas Drive Angry 3D Cage and Ron Hellboy Perlman team up as aggrieved knights Behman and Felson who quit their dishonourable order and return from a Catholic crusade (read: bloody massacre) to find their homeland ravaged by the Black Death.

Arrested for being deserters, the pair are charged by a dying Cardinal (Christopher Lee; barely recognisable beneath grotesquely disfiguring make-up) to escort a girl accused of witchcraft (Claire Foy) to a remote monastery to "stand trial" (read: be exorcised) and – in doing so, they hope – rid the land of plague. Well, it sure beats rotting in a jail cell. Right?

Accompanied by a band of priests, alter boys, knights and rogues – including Misfits' affable screwball Robert Sheenan, who impresses on the big screen – Felson and Behman set off on their old school road trip, ever-fearful of the prospect of being in such close quarters to a witch. As they journey on through foreign lands and spooky forests, disagreements rage and numbers dwindle in mysterious circumstances, until the girl’s true form is finally revealed.

If you liked last year’s Soloman Kane, chances are you’ll like Season of the Witch, which could very well inhabit the same universe, so akin are they in themes and tone. While Season would have benefitted from an 18 rating and more unreserved horror (it was toned down in production to be more teen-friendly and, sadly, the home release doesn’t offer a bloodier Extended Cut), there is still much supernatural splendour on offer in this unrelenting escapade.

It’s a minor gripe, but the “twist” in the denouement barely qualifies as such (it’s an issue with semantics, really) and the ensuing battle betwixt good and evil is diminished by the foe being all too obviously a CGI creation. Nevertheless, this is still a decent enough – if frivolous – swords and sorcery romp in the style of a classic B-movie. Season of the Witch may have its detractors but it delivers well enough as a schlocky Saturday k-night rental.


In a CR@B Shell: Sure, it’s high concept fantasy fare which won’t win any awards, but this is no Uwe Boll disaster (and Perlman knows all about those… *cough*In The Name of the King*cough*). Switch off your brain, switch on Season of the Witch and be dazzled by the entertaining barrage of gallant and ghoulish goings on.
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Hotel Paranorma

Blu Review: THE BEYOND (E TU VIVAI NEL TERRORE - L'ALDILÀ)
18 – 87mins – 1981
Story by: Dardano Sacchetti
Screenplay by: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Sarah Keller, Antione Saint-John, Veronica Lazar, Anthony Flees
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Talk about irony: no sooner had I finished ripping Lucio Fulci's 1980 zombie abomination City of the Living Dead a new (hell) hole (you can read my rant HERE), then LoveFilm whisked me the second film in his unholy trinity as if it were a high priority on my rental list (it wasn't). I wasn't much looking forward to diving back into this kooky director's diverse oeuvre *quite* so soon, but for all its thematic similarities to its predecessor, The Beyond is actually a surprisingly steep step up in all regards.

Heroine of the original, Catriona MacColl, returns again (as she does in part three, The House By The Cemetery, also. Yes, that's on my LoveFilm list too!), albeit in a completely unrelated role. Here she plays Liza Merril, a woman who has inherited a long-deserted hotel in Louisiana, completely oblivious to its unholy history: it was built over one of the seven cursed gateways to Hell. Bummer.

Despite numerous supernatural “accidents” (all involving major blood loss, body disfiguring, eye-piercing, and – on more than one occasion – acid burning) and countless ominous warnings from a shuddersome blind woman (Keller) to keep the hell away from the ghostly guest house, Liza is undeterred in her renovation project – until the dead start to walk the Earth.

Of course, yet again, it's all an elaborate excuse to splash the red stuff and feed the director's ocular fetish in ever-more distastefully sickening scenarios, but the smaller character base and simplified linear plot means events feel more cohesive and purposeful to the journey's end rather than incomprehensible abstract diversions from logic as they did in the hopelessly disjointed City.

A black and white prologue set in 1927 revealing the unlocking of the gateway and subsequent mob crucifixion of the painter responsible is wonderfully artistic in a B-movie pastiche sense, working well as a framing device which is counterbalanced by the protagonist's belated arrival in “The Beyond” at the film's futile but open-ended climax; an epically atmospheric swirling mountainous landscape of dead bodies soundtracked by the shrieks of the eternally tortured.

For a film billed as a “zombie horror” it must be noted that the shuffling stiffs don't actually show up en mass until five minutes from the end, but don't let that deter you; there are plenty more unrestrained paranormal atrocities to keep horror nuts happy – including a bonkers scene in which (for reasons completely unclear) a concussed man (Anthony Flees) is attacked by a clutch of tarantulas which proceed to sting his face and bite his flesh! It's a monstrously visionary notion which would have been all the more terrifying if half the arachnids hadn't been laughably puppeteered props! Still, half the fun of these vintage cult oddities is chuckling at the cheese...


In a CR@B Shell: Despite being produced just a year after City, The Beyond feels like the work of a far more experienced director; the script is sharper, the scares more complimentary to the narrative and the ghastly effects more polished (well, except the spiders). I still think he's barmy, but perhaps I was too hasty in writing Fulci off...?
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Galloping Cadavers

Blu Review: CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (PAURA NELLA CITTÀ DEI MORTI VIVENTI)
18 – 93mins – 1980
Written by: Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Fabrizio Jovine
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I didn't rush into transcribing my initial reaction after watching this bizarre – and understandably controversial – 1980 zombie flick on Monday night; I had to mull over my thoughts, suppress my rage and attempt to make some semblance of sense of cult Italian director Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead before writing my review. Of course I failed, because I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible to make sense out of a work so unconcerned with narrative cohesion that it may as well be a medley of ever-more shocking visual scares instead of even bothering to feign interest in a logical narrative structure.

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns the attempts of two concerned couples who – for reasons all their own – must travel to the remote village of Dunwich, New England to locate the tomb of a priest (Jovine) who hanged himself and thus, by committing such a grievous sin, opened the Gates of Hell (incidentally, that is an alternate title for this many-monikered monstrosity). Can the four clued-up citizens – among them journalist Peter Bell (George) and psychic Mary Woodhouse (MacColl) – close this portal to the underworld before All Saints Day, or will the undead rise to take over the earth?

Despite it's derivative title, please do not confuse this glory-stealing shambles – the first in a trilogy, no less – as a part of George A. Romero's infinitely superior "Living Dead" series. Whereas Romero used his zombies as a cleverly striking metaphor for his harsh social commentary, Fulci doesn't seem to have any clear idea of what the hell he is doing, instead throwing a plethora of grotesque set-pieces at the camera in the hope that everyone is too busy freaking out at the gore to notice nothing makes a jot of sense! Well, I did.

Okay, to be fair, as the film progresses and the two couples converge and formulate something vaguely resembling a plan, the disjointedly fragmented shards of narrative do start to fuse together somewhat, but by this point in the film I had lost all hope of logic and was simply watching in a gore-thirsty braindead state akin to the reanimated dead, who, I may have forgotten to mention, seem able to beam themselves in and out of thin air for no reason whatsoever – and you had a problem with zombies who could run?!

As well as teleporting zombies who seem more concerned with crushing skulls than eating them, Fulci also gets carried away with all manner of other illogical visualisations of the macabre: Mary dies – of fright – at a séance and awakens to find herself buried alive, a squatter with a fetish for self-inflating sex dolls (don't ask) finds the decomposing corpse of a baby then never mentions this again, a woman is forced to vomit up all her internal organs simply because she looked at the spirit of the dead priest, our protagonists find themselves in a storm of maggots, a wall is pierced with shards of glass and starts to bleed, a man's head is impaled on a rotating drill, and on more than one occasion women start to cry blood. Why? Heck knows, but Fulci does seem to have a tiresome obsession with eyes...

I'm sure gore-hounds will have a field day with this gleefully unrestrained freakshow (the censors certainly did), but as a film fan who appreciates a bit of meat on his cinematic bones, City of the Living Dead was an abominably shallow mess which has little to recommend it beyond an atmospheric score with funky guitar undertones. Much like Craven's sorrowful My Soul to Take, this cult “classic” feels like a lot of extremely visceral ideas were cobbled together and a “plot” worked around the carnage. And don't even get me started on the scream which heralds the end credits; as an attempt to insinuate the horror isn't over (despite it unquestionably being so) it fails spectacularly and just adds to the list of confusing illogicalities which plague this rotten drivel.


In a CR@B Shell: Sickeningly sadistic set-pieces and an atmospherically fog-shrouded ambience barely rescue Fulci's nonsensical Euro-trash from being an all-out disappointment, but don't go looking for any symbolic depth in this bizarre surrealist nightmare of a “narrative”. Avoid like the (un)dead.
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