“Severed” on IMDB

Horror – 2005 – 93 Minutes

This wavered wildly between inspired and insipid letting it land squarely in the mediocre middle. It seems to have fallen victim to a common problem in this space: barely enough money to make a movie, but enough ideas for three.

The setting is a remote logging camp and mill, run by a giant, profit-hungry corporation. The infection is the result of this company playing around with the equivalent of tree steroids. The injections make the trees grow significantly faster, but apparently also cause minor, prolonged cases of zombism in the loggers and environmental activists that populate this little corner of the Pacific-Northwest.

This leads us to our first minor issue: there seem to be a lot of zombies running around here. We only ever see a handful of people at first, but later seem to have a endless supply of zombies. The infection’s actual path of transmission is vague at best, but it’s made clear that the area is remote and unpopulated; so where are all these people coming from? Why are they spread out all over the place?

The zombies themselves are confusing as well. They appear to be hyper-aggressive, infected a la “28 Days Later”, yet we’re told “you have to hit them in the head,” for some reason. Granted, this is said only once and never seems to matter again, but it is said. The infection is, of course, transmittable via bite and this has the same problem as many other zombie properties: if the zombies eat and dismember their prey, how does the infection spread so well? With the lack of warm bodies here, this seems to be a much more important question.

The major issue comes into play about halfway in, when our group makes it way to another camp. Up until this point we were enjoying a decent, but fairly standard, “small group tries to stay alive” story. They ran from zombies, struck back with crowbars and sticks and tried to find a way to escape or call for help. But this new group – and we have to remember that this outbreak is, it seems, not more than a few days old – seems to have already gone full “Lord of the Flies”.

We switch gears completely with only a portion of our run time left. The new camp is controlled by a sadistic leader who rules with an iron fist. They exploit the infected for a dangerous bloodsport. They live in the warped shadow of a civilization that they’ve forgotten. I mean, it’s been, like, over a week since the outbreak started – what else do you expect them to do?! You get the sense that these guys have given up civilization a lot. That one time the the toilet got plugged up or when “Friends” was cancelled, for example.

This segment is interesting, but confusing, incongruous and curtailed. It’s a shame because, had this aspect been introduced sooner and some minor timeline changes made, this could have been a solid exploration of human fragility in the face of disaster. Instead it flits, fickle, from theme to theme never settling on one long enough for the audience to sink in their teeth.

“Mimesis” on IMDB

Horror – 2011 – 95 Minutes

You’d think that a zombie movie with no zombies wouldn’t be very good. I mean, that’s the whole point, right: zombies? You’d be wrong. It’s a bumpy road, but this is definitely a rarity: a clever, smart low-budget horror movie. They should have changed the name tho’: needing to bring a scene to a screeching halt just to have somebody explain the meaning of your title is a big, bloody red flag. Even if the name fits, if nobody other than literature majors knows what it means: change it.

Of course, in this case, it doesn’t fit. Although “Mimesis” has grown to have many meanings in the past couple of thousand years, it most often refers to “art imitating life”. The opposite, “life imitating art” is anti-mimesis. This movie is about the latter, but they call it the former. So not only is the name pretentious, it’s wrong. But the movie’s still good.

A diverse group of horror fans is approached at a convention and invited to an exclusive party at a remote farmhouse. As the party winds down, they’re drugged and wake up in the morning dressed in vintage clothes and unable to remember how they got there. Two are lying in a cemetery, five are locked in the basement of the farmhouse and one is passed out in a pickup truck. The two in the cemetery are attacked by what looks like a zombie and one of them has his throat ripped out.

When they take shelter in the farm house and finally meet, it becomes clear that somebody is trying very hard to recreate George Romero’s classic, “Night of the Living Dead”. Each person is accounted for: Barbara, the middle aged husband and wife with their little girl, the teenage lovers and, of course, the black guy. If that wasn’t enough for horror fans to piece things together, they also find the movie playing on a loop in one of the rooms.

Most of the actual action is fairly standard slasher fair. Dark rooms, shaky hands, improvised weapons and lots of gore. Setting it all against the backdrop of an insane recreation of a horror movie makes it seem fresher and more inventive than it likely deserves to be, but what can I say? It works. The gore is well done using classic, tried and true practical effects and reminds you of how far digital effects still have to come. If you need to stab somebody in the face with a pitchfork, practical effects are absolutely the way to do it right.

As you might expect, things do start to break down at the end, but not so much that the premise wears out its welcome. My only real complaint is that the movie had two more endings that it should have had – the final sequence lacks all of the finesse and focus of the main film. It’s not enough to ruin things, but it does leave a bad taste in your mouth.

There are more nits to be picked, of course . You may complain that the clever premise is hiding a mediocre movie, but isn’t that a success rather than a failure? At this budget level you can’t win on visual effects, or acting or even writing. You can win, and sometimes even win big enough to overshadow all your other problems, with a clever premise and a focused execution. Horror is 99% mental: you can make an easy movie with bare boobs and buckets of blood, but unless you give the brain something to chew on, you’re going to fail. This movie provides your ravenous brain with something nice and bloody to sink its teeth into.