“Life After Beth” on IMDB

Comedy/Horror – 2014 – 89 Minutes

At this stage in the game any attempt at originality in the zombie genre gets points. Real originality, of course. Plopping zombies in a new location – a tanning salon! a brokerage firm! a library! – doesn’t cut it. You need to try harder than that. This does.

Beth (Aubrey Plaza [IMDB] playing herself, as usual) is dead. Her boyfriend Zach (Dane DeHaan [IMDB]) is shattered. That is, at least, until he drops by to visit her parents and finds her wandering around the house. Other than being a little muddled, her funeral doesn’t seem to have slowed her down much. Her parents think it’s a miracle. He’s not going to argue; especially since she can’t seem to remember that she had dumped him the day she died.

She’s also decided that she’s most comfortable in the attic and loves smooth jazz. She doesn’t seem to feel pain, has freakish strength and violent mood swings. Zach tries to take things in stride, but it’s difficult to pretend that this is the same Beth he knew and loved. It’s also difficult to ignore that there’s something odd going on in general when other previously deceased people start popping up. As Beth, and the situation in general, degrade further, it becomes impossible.

The conceit is undeniably interesting: zombies are the reanimated recent dead but, at least for a little while, they’re basically themselves. They have some memory lapses and minor quirks, but aren’t something to be automatically feared. Once the rot and the hunger sets in they get more… “traditional”, but until then they may very well be considered a blessing.

The idea is original (at least as far as I know) and executed well, but the overall story has a slow unevenness that undermines it. It meanders through multiple genres without committing enough to any of them. The audience is unable to find comfortable footing and, in turn, means that many of the gags and emotional touch points fall flat.

Even if it’s just not enough of a horror movie… or a comedy… or a romance… to truly stand out, there’s still a lot to like. The A-list cast (or, maybe, “A minus” list) is excellent and do the best with what they have. A good budget goes a long way in a landscape of no-budget mediocrity. The ideas are fun and implemented with a minimum of cliche. It may sputter out at the end, but at least you passed some interesting scenery on the trip.

“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.

“Thanatomorphose” on IMDB

Horror – 2012 – 100 Minutes

The description of this movie begins: “Thanatomorphose is an Hellenic word meaning the visible signs of an organism’s decomposition caused by death.” Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to name a movie something where you need comprehension of ancient Greek to understand it, but that could be just me. In any case, that’s what’s going on here: a young girl seems to be inexplicably decomposing without that pesky “dying first” part.

The movie has two huge technical problems that will probably be deal-breakers for most. Firstly, the entire thing looks to have been filmed by the light of a single 40-watt bulb in the next room. Many scenes are so completely muddy that you’ll have trouble picking out small details like refrigerators or double beds. Secondly, the camera work is of that skill-less, “artistic” variety normally reserved for Dockers commercials or student films. Everything is shot too close, with no framing or directional transitions and little depth of field.

If you can get past all of that you shouldn’t stumble too badly on the terrible acting and writing. Most of the actors clearly only speak English as a hobby, but there is, graciously, very little dialog. You should then be able to sail past the overbearing artistic flourishes, bizarre filters and heavy-handed score that riddle the rest of the movie. If you’re showing us a movie about a girl decomposing, showing us stock footage of animals decomposing is just, let’s say, “uninspired”. Presenting entire scenes using posterized, embossed video filters is just, let’s say, “stupid”.

After all that, there may be something to this, but if there is, it’s not for everybody. The unnamed girl’s metamorphosis is accompanied by increasing disgusting, often overtly sexualized moments. She spends almost the entire movie nude, although for much of the time she’s also covered in blood, feces and puss. One of the questionable saving graces here is that as the action gets more grotesque, the camera work gets even worse. Extreme, often blurry close-ups become the sole order of business. It’s also clear that a significant portion of the budget was set aside for the maggot wrangler. While this movie is unrated, it’s absolutely not for the kids, even the zombie loving ones.

The transformation and degradation aspect of this may have been a very effective demo reel or short-film. Stretching it out to feature-length, however, just resulted in a slow, jumbled mess. There could be a message and, obviously, the decomposition may be metaphorical for… just about anything, really. This is kind of film that four people will hate, but a fifth will laud endlessly as a perfect parable for their personal struggles with bicycle addiction. There’s likely something here for fans of disgusting, experimental horror as well. Obviously, it may also be a stretch calling this one a “zombie movie” but since I’m making the rules, I’m letting that slide.

“Cockneys vs Zombies” on IMDB

Horror/Comedy – 2012 – 88 Minutes

Two bumbling, gangster wannabes are at a loss on how to help when their granddad’s retirement home threatened with foreclosure. When they decide that robbing a bank is the best way to get the needed cash, they collect a gang of misfits to get the job done. As you might expect, this plan does not go well. Luckily, if you use that word very loosely, some construction workers break into a medieval tomb filled with the undead and the police quickly realize that they have more important things to deal with.

Of course a small, soon-to-be closed retirement home isn’t high on that list, so the gang fights their way across the city to the rescue . Until they do, and even after, Granddad (played by the always solid Alan Ford [IMDB]) is in charge. You mess with granddad’s friends, and you’re going wish you were dead. If you’re already dead, well, that’s just fine with Granddad.

The premise here – working class folks dealing with a zombie outbreak – is a good one and generally works. The only real issue is that there are actually two movie here, and only one of them is very good. The strongest, most interesting scenes are those where the old-folks are forced to deal with the situation on their own. In fact, Ford and his cronies could have easily carried the entire movie. It may have been a harder movie to pull off, but it could have been amazing.

The entire bank-job/rescue aspect was solid, but weak in comparison. We’ve seen so many groups of confused twenty-somethings fighting zombies it’s almost impossible not make it feel tired. It’s unclear if the goal was a laudable attempt to explore multi-generational reactions to insane pressure, or just an excuse to have younger people on screen. Don’t get me wrong: I have absolutely no problem with Michelle Ryan [IMDB] spending as much time on my screen as she likes, and she’s excellent as the only member of the gang with any real sense, but the movie still felt scatter-brained.

In spite of this, this is a solid, fun zombie romp that hits many of the right notes, even if there is a lot of mediocre to wade through to reach them. It’s worth the time for Alan Ford alone, although they take hero worship a bit too far in the end. Definitely recommended, if you set your expectations accordingly.