From Dusk Till Dawn

George Clooney gives a dynamic performance as a professional thief who's on the lam with his crazy brother (Quentin Tarantino). They're headed to Mexico, and on the way they meet up with an ex-preacher (Harvey Keitel) and his two teenage kids (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu). The fugitives take the family hostage and make it across the border, stopping to kick back and drink at a seedy bar. But soon they realize the place is crawling with vampires. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) is a paean to exploitation horror and action films, and it certainly delivers the goods. But you can feel writer Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez patting themselves on the back for their cleverness, and after a while it becomes mind-numbingly repetitive. With Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, John Saxon, and Kelly Preston. 108 min. ★★

Django Unchained

There's something unsettling about Quentin Tarantino's project of providing wish fulfillment revenge fantasies, first to the Jewish people in Inglourious Basterds, then to the American slaves, in Django Unchained. Watching one of Tarantino's films almost always gives me the impression that this director is full of himself, because his movies are so audacious. But it's hard to be too concerned with these thoughts, because Tarantino's movies are generally so much fun to watch. (Jackie Brown remains my favorite.)

The plot of Django Unchained is this: a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz, played by Christopher Waltz (who was so deliciously evil in Inglourious Basterds that you can't help but wonder if he's going to turn bad in this one too) enlists the help of a slave named Django (silent 'D'), played by Jamie Foxx, to find three white men who are wanted for murder. Dr. Schultz works for the government, and is legally permitted to kill any of his targets as long as he produces their bodies. Django worked on a plantation under these men, who once beat his wife ferociously after she and Django tried to escape. Eventually Dr. Schultz and Django form a partnership, after Schultz gives Django his freedom, and they decide to rescue Django's wife, now working a plantation in Mississippi.

This plantation in Mississippi is run by Calvin Candie, and it's called Candieland. The name itself suggests the genteel, gruesome horrors of slavery. When we finally get to Candieland, where we know the film will play itself out in full faux-Shakespearean fashion (Tarantino is maybe the comic book Shakespeare of our time), it's the most terrifying visual in the movie: the cotton jutting out of the fields like white dollops of foam; the slaves working in the punishing Mississippi sun; and Leonardo DiCaprio, never more villainous and enjoyable in his entire career, as Calvin, the Southern gentleman with a murderous temper, who gets his kicks watching black men fight each other to the death.

Django Unchained is the most suggestively violent of the Tarantino movies. The director holds back here more than usual, presumably to demonstrate a little good taste. He's already walking on egg shells by making a movie that tries to retroactively punish white racism, and if you can allow yourself to enjoy its maniacal plot, you're likely to have a good time. The camera, more often than not, looks away from the violent acts, or at least, the most violent parts of them. The suggestion is powerful enough. There's the expected bloodbath, near the end. That's the cookie, the reward for the initiated, who perhaps sit through Tarantino's talky, long-winded plots just for those ten minutes of gory violence. But as much as I was filled with anticipation and suspense for that scene to come, the rest of the movie is what's more enjoyable (although the long-windedness takes a toll: they could have shortened it a bit, I think.)

The performances in Django Unchained are the film's strongest assets: Jamie Foxx turns into some kind of 1850's blaxplitation superhero. His performance is smooth and assured, and his indignation both righteous and horrific. Waltz is a charming participant, perhaps incredulously caught up in the story, but like any good bad movie, necessarily out of place. He's a wonderfully engaging actor, and all the scenes where he talks his way out of being shot by various farmowners and sheriffs and villains, are deliriously funny and amusing. DiCaprio is wickedly good, playing a part that's truly distinguishable from so many of the banal-important roles he's played before. He's colorful, capturing that weird mixture of Southern gentleman-Gothic torturer.

The South, like every other place figured into a Quentin Tarantino film, becomes the director's playground, where he employs any and every ingredient that interests him. Thus we get a movie set in pre-Civil War America full of 20th century Westerny songs as background music (and a few rap songs, too). The anachronism works well for this kind of pop-history-carnival ride. It's not a perfect film, and it's not the director's best film, but it's a fun movie, and I'm always grateful when movies aren't afraid of showing us a good time.

With Kerry Washington (as Broomhilda--Tarantino must have been waiting 20 years to use that name), Samuel L. Jackson (perhaps the most hated character in the movie, as the self-loathing head-slave, and Mr. Candie's right-hand-yes-man), Walton Goggins, Don Johnson, Laura Cayouette, Dennis Christopher, James Russo, James Remar, Tom Wopat, Cooper Huckabee, M.C. Gainey, Bruce Dern, Ned Bellamy, Jonah Hill (who has a cameo in one of the funniest scenes: a pre-KKK nighttime attack that isn't very well-thought-out by the participants), Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, Michael Parks, and Quentin Tarantino. Written by the director. 165 min. ★★★½

Night of the Living Dead

This 1990 remake of the George Romero cult classic isn't different enough to justify its existence, or bone-chilling enough to rival the original. But the dedicated will likely find things to enjoy in it. Tony Todd, as Ben (who was the strongest and subtlest character in the 1968 Night), is well-cast, and Patricia Tallman makes a convincing 90's Barbara: she inexplicably transforms from a mousy, wimpy schoolmarm-type to a hybrid of Sigourney Weaver from Alien and Sarah, the lead character from Romero's Day of the Dead. (She overacts as the wimpy Barbara, but she's fun to root for when she turns tough.)

Romero wrote the screenplay, which seems silly as this update isn't fresh enough to conjure up any comparison the way you can with, say, the Siegel and Kaufman versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 respectively). With the Night remake, Romero's intent was to try and recoup the money he didn't make from the 1968 film. While the movie was a big hit eventually, Romero and company never saw any of the box office earnings, partly because they failed to copyright the film under its hastily-changed title (it was original called Night of the Flesheaters). But Romero had already made three zombie films, and by now his career had mostly petered out with a number of disappointing releases (including the third zombie flick, Day of the Dead, and 1988's Monkey Shines).

Romero turned the directing duties over to longtime collaborator Tom Savini (the make-up effects guy from Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and a number of non-Romero films including Friday the 13th). Savini doesn't do an embarrassing job, but he's too much of a novice to salvage the material from being just so-so. As a make-up artist, Savini's instincts are garishly disgusting and funny. As a director he seems too careful to invest any of that eccentric monster magic into the movie.

With Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Kate Finneran, and Bill Moseley. 88 mins.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 15-year-old Charlie is recovering from a traumatic event in his life (the recent death of his best friend) and trying to adjust to high school. He soon finds a group of friends who haven't followed the herd mentality of adolescence, or so he thinks, and begins to find himself in them. Actually, when you read the plot of this movie in those terms, it sounds awfully cheap.

Some of the ideas in Wallflower seem so calculated to wrench out your heart that you feel writer-director Stephen Chbosky, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1999 novel, is performing the work of a surgeon, not a filmmaker. His movie resurrects a lot of the old devices and archetypes, including the hip, self-aware English teacher (Paul Rudd, more amiable than he's ever been because he doesn't appear to be trying so hard, nor does he seem as jaded as usual), and the parents who "just don't get it." Yes, Wallflower has most of the cliched ingredients of a teen drama. But yet it also has an effervescent sort of charm to it. You can't really feel any disdain for the world this film creates, because it's authentic, imaginative. Moreover, the relationships between adolescents and grown-ups and between adolescents and adolescents, is shown to be far more complex than "the parents just don't get it" or "the jocks don't talk to the geeks." It's refreshing.

Logan Lerman carries Wallflower with his wonderful performance, one of the strongest by an up-and-coming actor in recent memory. His Charlie feels the pain of everyone he knows, even of those who have caused him pain, and he can't let it go, or imagine it away. He reminded me of young Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Lerman makes it look so easy because he is, often, the most together of his friends (probably because he's hiding all his own problems so he won't fall apart.) The supporting cast includes Emma Watson, as Sam, the girl Charlie has a crush on, and Ezra Miller, as Patrick, Sam's step-brother, a remarkably self-aware young man who's also miserable because he's gay and has to keep his relationship with one of the football players a secret.

Wallflower is a wistful movie, one that makes you slightly depressed to have passed your teenage years, and slightly exuberant because you remember how bad they were, even if they weren't as cinematically bad as in this movie. (There are a lot of lovely moments in between the sad parts, though). I kept going back in my mind to John Hughes' movies, as they were, for me, the quintessential high school movies, even though they failed to reflect my own high school experience, which of course happened later than the 1980s. The high school experience that's reflected in Wallflower isn't in the same territory as a John Hughes movie though. It's more realistic, less sitcomish. You almost wish the John Hughes vision of high school life could be true, because it's such a fairy tale. Full of complications but all of them solved by the denouement. Wallflower won't solve the problems. It illuminates the people and leaves the problems where they are: some will go away with time, some won't. But the spirit that thrives in this joyful movie isn't nearly as temporal as those four years of prison, hell, and torment, or alternately freedom, euphoria, and excitement. And I liked that about it.

With Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie's parents, Johnny Simmons, Melanie Lynskey (as Charlie's Aunt Helen), Mae Whitman, Erin Wilhelmi, Joan Cusack, and Tom Savini. 102 min. ★★★½

Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead (1979) is a garish, exuberant horror movie, one which still leaves me feeling giddy. It's such a half-serious kind of a scare picture that you forget how dark it is under the surface, and that dark nastiness can come up from behind and take a big bite out of you. Of course some will scoff that the special effects in Dawn of the Dead are outdated now, but for me, the comic book-red blood and the pasty-faced flesh-eating ghouls are still enchanting, almost more so because they're
so obviously unreal. Who on earth could enjoy a "serious" zombie movie anyway?

(George Romero, the director of Dawn, had made something more serious in his directorial debut, the cult classic Night of the Living Dead, but that film had the effect of a surreal nightmare and it worked for it. But I can't praise Romero's first three zombie pictures enough. They're woven into the tapestry of my movie-going history. I've seen them too many times to count, which has lessened their impact somewhat, and yet I continue to find new and intriguing things in them.)

In Dawn, the zombie crisis established in Night has escalated, and the film opens at a Pittsburgh television news station, where the commentators, technicians, and program managers are all in a tizzy. The world is ending but dammit if they aren't going to continue competing for ratings. Soon, two of the TV station employees flee the city in a company helicopter, along with two members of the National Guard. They eventually land on the roof of a shopping mall, which is overrun with the walking dead, and barricade themselves inside the materialist mecca, securing it from the ghoul invasion for a while.

Critics have beaten the consumerism theme into the ground, so I won't go into detail about that here. Instead I'd like to point out how Romero's visual sense of storytelling makes this movie work. He's admitted that his screenplays generally contain twice as many shots as most feature films, and one can imagine how difficult this becomes logistically for the director of photography, the lighting director, and anyone else involved in the mapping out of a given scene and its particular actions. But Romero's ability to imagine what he wants, which is tempered by the loosening powers of spontaneous input from his cast and crew, is what makes Dawn of the Dead such a visually arresting movie experience.

You don't really need dialogue to get this movie. You don't need deep characters. Indeed, these characters don't have much more of a backstory than those of Romero's first zombie installment. We're lucky if we even get last names. While I'm no opponent of richly detailed characters, I see the value in utilizing a more shallow representation of people in horror movies. They're functional to the plot, like just about everything else in these kinds of films. This has been used as a slur on the genre, and while it tends to work against your enjoyment of movies like Friday the 13th, it sometimes works out well. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to movies, and so there are no hard and fast rules about genre. What unites the film is a sense of menace and a sense of struggle against that menace. You root for these--sometimes idiotic--characters, even when they make silly mistakes. You jeer at the stupidity of the helicopter pilot who can't kill a zombie to save his life, and you look with derision at the token woman, who's only a cut above the catatonic leading lady of Night, who was so positively useless. (Romero later tried to atone for this by making the lead in Day of the Dead a strong female character a la Sigourney Weaver in Alien.)

But the shopping mall setting, the gaudy gore effects of Tom Savini, the histrionic synthesized score by the Italian band Goblin, and Romero's own sick view of America as the seat of self-consumerism, all conspire to make Dawn of the Dead the classic American horror movie experience. I'll even disagree with my movie critic icon Pauline on this one. Flaws and all, with every new development in movies technically that might threaten to render it less effective, it still works bloody well.

With David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, and Savini in a small role as a biker. 126 mins. (Extended edition, featuring mostly unimportant footage that was rightly excised from the theatrical cut, runs 140 mins, and the European cut, overseen by Italian horror master Dario Argento, runs about 118 mins.)

Martin

This flaky little vampire film, released in 1978, looks at the vampire myth through modern eyes. Seventeen-year-old misfit Martin (John Amplas) goes to live with his elderly cousin (Lincoln Maazel) in a suburb of Pittsburgh. The cousin still holds to his Old World beliefs about family curses and evil omens, and believes that Martin is actually an 84-year-old vampire. Martin, meanwhile, insists that he's not, that all the lore about vampires is the stuff of movies. There's no real magic, Martin assures us. We're never sure who to believe.

We've already been predisposed to be afraid of Martin, for in the beginning of the movie, we witness the brutal slaying of a woman on a train. (It's worth noting that a train brings Martin to his next hunting ground, and in Dracula the train was a symbol of progress, but one that also linked the up-to-date-with-a-vengeance London to the steeped-in-superstition Transylvania. It's a fun, subtle commentary on what technological advances can bring in the way of horrors.) But unlike Dracula, Martin doesn't have fangs, so he uses a razor blade (after drugging his victim so she won't put up a fight).

Romero had made several unsuccessful films prior to Martin (including 1973's The Crazies), and Martin seems like a culmination of them all: he's taken the most interesting pieces of ideas he had been experimenting with before (alienation in suburbia, the difference between the mythology and the reality of the supernatural, and the breakdown of systems--economic, class, theological, familial, racial, etc.) and funneled them into this oddball shocker. It's compact though, and despite its flaws, it's quite striking. Romero is a master editor: his style is quick and throws a lot of business at you, but all of it feels meticulously organized; it's always cumulative, never haphazard.  

That Martin should come to live in such a dead city as Braddock (which is a borough of Pittsburgh) is apropos. The film documents on a small scale what must have been the sheer exhaustion of the country, and the collapse under the weight not only of failed economic policies, but the failed promises of industry. There's a looming sense of decay throughout Martin: it's a cultural decline that this film has captured, a sort of apocalyptic banality that swept the nation post-Civil Rights, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate. If Night of the Living Dead tapped into the vein of that turbulent era of the 1960s, Martin is here to witness the drying up of it. It seems to be asking the question: are vampires a product of economics, or of superstition? All the old systems are still in place, but they have no power ultimately. Romero dances around with all these ideas and images, content to ask a lot of questions and offer no answers. (There are even black-and-white flashbacks of Martin being pursued by a mob with flaming torches and stakes, but are these memories of antiquity, or psychotic hallucinations?)

The acting in Martin is often over-the-top, but the movie is so surreal and subdued that it works for it. Maazel chews the scenery, and it may be his performance that inspired the goofy Van Helsing impression Mel Brooks did in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Amplas is like a mixture of Jackie Earle Haley and Ed Wood: he's got a creepy boyishness mixed with a hammy stage persona, but it too works for the movie. Martin is always equal parts sinister and sympathetic.

With Christine Forrest (Romero's long-time wife), Tom Savini (the make-up artist, who went on to become a kind of cult figure in his industry), Elyane Nadeau, and, in a cameo, Romero himself, as an apathetic young priest. The weird music score is by Donald Rubinstein.

Day of the Dead

The third zombie flick from Pittsburgh writer-director George A. Romero (following 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1979's Dawn of the Dead), Day of the Dead (1985) takes place in an underground military base where a handful of scientists lock horns with a band of macho army thugs. The world has been overtaken by flesh-chomping ghouls, and these are the only living members of society left, as far as we know. One scientist, nicknamed "Frankenstein," has tamed one of the ghouls. Frankenstein believes that wiping out the zombie population is impossible, so the next best thing (and the more scientifically appealing, perhaps) is  figuring out a way to domesticate the walking dead.

Day has some wonderfully freaky moments (especially at the end), and Romero captures a richly ominous mood (with the help of its authentic set, which is a network of underground caves that the government uses to store a menagerie of valuables) and the music of John Harrison.

Romero's penchant for inserting contrived conflict is glaring: Why is everyone so concerned with staying in this gloomy bunker, anyway? And there are moments when the dialogue gets away from him. Some scenes should have been shortened slightly to keep the film from going too far over the top. But it's also a wonderfully apt finale (or at least, it was the final Romero zombie film for a good while), once again bucking the tropes of the genre by avoiding any kind of resolution to the zombie problem. Also, Day features some of make-up master Tom Savini's most impressive (and hideous) effects (just don't watch this if you're turned off by excessive amounts of gore).

Much has been said of Day of the Dead's unfair treatment. It flopped at the box office (competing against the funnier, slicker Return of the Living Dead, a semi-spoof and not a direct sequel to the Dead films), was almost universally reviled by critics who had raved about Dawn, and seemed to usher in a new period of disinterest in zombie movies. In fact, there weren't many noteworthy zombie films after 1985. Romero later worked on a remake of Night (released in 1990) but by the end of the 80s, zombies were largely out of fashion at the movies (having been replaced by slashers a la Jason Voorhies). Now that zombies are in vogue again, it's worth noting that Day of the Dead is far more interesting a film than most of what has been released over the last few years of the zombie craze that has swallowed pop culture. Indeed, the zombies continue to be disturbing commentary on society. And the zombies in Day are perhaps the scariest looking (they've been rotting for quite some time by now).

Featuring a strong lead performance by Lori Cardille as one of the scientists, and the only woman in the cast (she reminds you of Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien). With Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Jarlath Conroy, Richard Liberty, and Howard Sherman.