“Open Grave” on IMDB

Horror/Thriller – 2013 – 102 Minutes

It’s very difficult to review this movie. One of the reasons that I enjoyed it so much is that I had absolutely no background on it; no expectations at all. All I saw was that Sharlto Copley [IMDB] was in it, and assumed – playing the odds – that it would be great.  As it unfolded I was completely in the dark and it vastly improved the experience. You should go watch it now, before learning anything else. I’ll wait.

See, wasn’t that pretty great?

The movie opens with Copley unconscious and in a open pit full of corpses. He can’t remember who he was, or how he got there. After being helped out of the pit by an anonymous stranger he finds a nearby house with several others and discovers that the amnesia seems to be universal. Mistrust is thick as people begin to make and trust their assumptions. What’s going on? Why is there a pit of corpses on their lawn? Who’s to blame (and wouldn’t it seem like the guy in the pit might have deserved to be there)?

The acting is excellent across the board and the script maintains suspense perfectly. It doles out nuggets of inscrutable information that increase interest, but fail to clarify events. The atmosphere is finely tuned to highlight the relatively few, but very well done, scares. Unfortunately the movie does get a little scattered as it winds down. It’s impossible to clarify without spoilers, but you may, as I did, get the impression that there were two competing concepts and neither was able to win completely.

The ending may be muddled, but getting there is a hell of a ride. Copley continues his streak of picking, smart, interesting scripts and making the most of them. As I started with, the movie absolutely benefits from ignorance. Don’t both learning anything more about it, just find it and enjoy.

“Stalled” on IMDB

Horror/Comedy – 2013 – 84 Minutes

The poster for this film let’s one know in nice, big letters that Kim Newman, reviewer for “Screen Daily” claims this movie is: “A worthy successor to ‘Shaun of the Dead’ [IMDB].” “Shaun” is, as you may have seen me mention numerous times, a perfect movie. Any film that could carry on that torch must be worth seeing, right?

Well, I’m afraid to say, Kim Newman is a damn, dirty liar. Or maybe has never actually seen “Shaun of the Dead”. Or is possibly insane. “Stalled” isn’t a complete waste of time, but a worthy successor to “Shaun of the Dead” it definitely is not.

It’s the office Christmas party and, for some reason, a fumbling janitor is still working. He enters the lady’s restroom to do… something or other, and hides in a stall when he hears others approaching. After a completely gratuitous bit of ridiculously out-of-place titillation the room fills with zombies leaving him, and as we discover, somebody else, trapped.

It’s a bottle movie.  With very few exceptions the entire movie takes place in the toilet. This is completely fitting as much of the humor belongs there, but it doesn’t bode well for the movie’s staying power. The idea may have made an excellent experimental short film, but doesn’t really have the gas to round out 80 minutes. When additionally weighed down with the extended subplot of his never-seen companion survivor, the movie ends up waddling around instead of taking flight.

There are some cute ideas and some passable running jokes, but there’s also groan-inducing silliness and noticeably lazy writing. There are a few decent call outs to classic zombie flicks, but some are incredibly heavy-handed. The big twist ending (oh, how I loathe twist endings) is awkward as hell and not half as clever as they think it is.

I’m likely being harder than I might be on this movie due to the unwarranted comparison to “Shaun of the Dead”. It’s a clever concept and that alone earns it some points. I’ve also got a soft-spot for no-budget, labor-of-love productions, so more points there. It’s not a particularly good movie, bit it’s fun and (sometimes) clever.

“Infected” on IMDB

Horror – 2013 – 95 Minutes

The first hint that this may not be something worth spending your time on is the fact that it was released as “Infection Z” in Europe. Movies released within months of major blockbusters and featuring ham-fisted variations their titles are rarely worth the almost non-existent effort to lay still and watch them.

This one blames a sorta-zombie outbreak on ticks with a hackneyed prologue about Lyme disease and bacterial infections. A bunch of people are meeting up in the woods for a fun-filled weekend of killing animals, doin’ it and family angst. The film features both Michael Madsen [IMDB] and William Forsythe [IMDB], both of whom I would consider myself a fan of.  Both of whom have been involved some amazing projects. This isn’t one of them.

The movie is really just terribly scattered-brained. It may have been decent in that low-budget, interesting idea way but couldn’t decide what it wanted. The infected waver between zombie-crazy and just plain crazy in a way that makes impossible to tell whether mowing them down is action-movie goodness or just plain sad.

The zombies talk, act like they have a headache, eat somebody, then talk some more. I’m being flippant, but the movie is actually strongest here. Sticking with it could have resulted in a moody, tension-filled thriller as the infected moved hidden among us until all hell broke loose. Instead the movie just shifts meaninglessly into zombie rampage mode with no pause or explanation.

There are some good moments here but they are very few and far between. Both Madsen and Forsythe have a lot of talent to offer but it was either outright ignored or, perhaps more likely, they just didn’t care. Neither should you.

“Germ” on IMDB

Horror – 2013 – 82 Minutes

The military (which is apparently based out of somebody’s rec room) has attempted to shoot down a satellite for …reasons.  They miss, for other reasons, and the satellite crashes in the woods near a small town.  The satellite is covered in goo and, for further reasons, touching that goo makes people want to violently eat other people until their brains explode.

The movie really tries and actually puts it’s budget (clearly in the hundreds of dollars) to decent use.  The special effects are about 50% splashing faux blood around and 50% quick camera cuts to reaction shots but in context work they work well enough.  The infected are ripped right from “28 Days Later” with a longer incubation time.  They run around screaming until they grab somebody, then they eat them messily.

The acting is mediocre middling to pedestrian poor but that’s fine because so is the script.  The storyline only follows a few characters and they spend most of their time running or screaming.  There are nice touches, as when one wounded character is moving down the street and hearing off-camera gunshots and screams.  Many low budget movies ignore the overall environment that they’ve created; that this one didn’t is a plus.

The real problem here, the thing that truly pulls it south, is the completely terrible camera work.  Not only are most scenes are shot way too close but it’s pretty clear the cameraman was suffering from some advanced palsy.  Conversations are shot over-the-shoulder but so tight and at such an acute angle that the face of the speaker is nearly always obscured by the person in the foreground.  The few establishing shots are either too far, too close or two… weird, to be of much use.

Considering the budget it’s difficult to fault this one too much.  It’s not good; but it’s not good in that way that you know they tried hard and simply met their limitations rather than gave up.  It’s the kind of movie that earns some credit just because the folks involved had enough gumption to get it made.  If you can relate to that you might enjoy this a bit.  On the other hand if you’re looking for polish then you’ll be very disappointed.

“World War Z” on IMDB

Action/Horror – 2013 – 113 Minutes

There were a lot of hopes and expectations attached to this project.  At nearly 200 million dollars, it was the first blockbuster-budgeted zombie movie.  Starring Brad Pitt and headed by “Quantum of Solace” director Marc Forster it had superstar power to spare.  It was based on the beloved cult classic book, “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” by Max Brooks.  On paper, at least, it had everything.

So, did it rise to the expectations?  Was all that money worth it?

Well, kinda. There are two big issues with the movie that drag it down.  First, and simplest, is that to gain a more marketable PG-13 rating much of the potential horror was neutered.  There are still some jumps here and there but the overall tone is rather tame.  You’ll see significantly more disturbing images on television’s “The Walking Dead” than you do here.

That’s not to suggest that you absolutely need gore to make a good zombie story, but it does lead in to the second problem: that this is, in no recognizable way, based on the book.  The book is a selection of intensely interesting scenarios across the entire history of a world-wide zombie outbreak.  We hear about the early days of confusion, the years of survivors living isolated with the infected and finally the heroic efforts to turn the tide and reclaim our civilization.

The movie ignored the “big questions” of zombies so well covered in the book.  Instead it took the simplest view available.  Despite the obvious, the infected were dead.  Period.  There was never discussion of a cure or treatment.  All focus was on a vaccine for the uninfected.  As the movie only covered a few weeks, there was no opportunity to cover issues of extended survival, environmental issues or the psychological costs.  The movie is purely an outbreak story.

(As an aside, producers: the book, as written, would make an excellent long-form anthology television series.  You’ve been looking for something to compete with “The Walking Dead”, right?  Get on it, will you.)

Pitt is a former United Nations investigator blackmailed back into duty to protect his family.  His goal is to discover “patient zero” of the outbreak and discover a vaccine.  The premise may have worked as a way to introduce some of the variety found in the book but as we only visit three locations in our search – let’s call them “Expositionland”, “Actionville” and “Resolutionopolis” – we lose all of the scale and depth that the book painstakingly crafted.

Expositionland is the most traditional segment.  After an excellent extended introduction to the situation we get down to business with a visit to a South Korean military base.  A dark and rainy night, trained soldiers and the living dead.  We learn what we need to know and we trim the cast down a bit.  On a small scale the zombies are truly no better or worse than any other quality movie, but on the large scale they’re a sight to behold.

That’s where Actionville comes in with the overrunning of Jerusalem.  We see hundreds, or even thousands, of agile, voracious undead overrunning the city.  The movement is gorgeously choreographed and reminiscent of an insect swarm or flowing water; inexorable, alien and without remorse.  The complex, multi-layered action rewards multiple viewings.  Truly, Actionville is the soul of this movie.

Resolutionopolis returns to a more intimate, traditional approach as our hero, after an aerial misadventure, ends up at a partially overrun W.H.O. facility in Wales.  The whole sequence is, of course, all about wrapping things up.  This is the longest segment and unfortunately the slowest as well.  This is also where concessions made to the ratings board are most obvious.  Where the earlier segments were able to hide the more adult imagery under darkness or grand, sweeping, long-shots, this segment is well-lit, up-close and personal and conspicuous for lack of focus on the action.

The final few minutes of the movie present a narrated, quasi-montage bringing closure to the world-wide situation. While many of these seem drawn from the book, all they really do is remind you how much better it might have been to have spent the last two hours with them instead.

This is far from a bad film and is a definite must-see for genre fans.  It’s also, undeniably, a movie designed by committee to be more marketable than effective.  To leverage the name of a popular book while discarding everything that made it interesting.  Those who were hoping for a “Spiderman” style genre Renaissance and a flood of high-profile, high-budget, high-quality zombie movies will likely be disappointed.