Zombies on walkabout: review of Undead.
Saw Undead, a 2003 independent Australian zombie movie produced, written, directed, edited and CGI'ed by the Spierig Brothers (Michael and Peter Spierig), on Thursday, 14 July, the last day of its week-long run at one of the local art-house movie theatres.
This has been a banner year for zombie movies for me: what with the long-awaited release of George Romero's Land of the Dead and my finally getting to see Shaun of the Dead, as well as Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby's nigh-legendary 1974 shocker Deathdream (a.k.a. Dead of Night, Night Walk, The Night Andy Came Home, Whispers, and The Veteran) and their earlier effort, the 1972 Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things on DVD, I'd already seen more zombie movies this year than I'd seen in the past two or three years. (As I've noted elsewhere, I'm hardly the world's biggest horror fan, but I do like to check in on various horror movies, books and comics now and again.) And now Undead.
I'd not heard of Undead before I started seeing the trailer for it at the local art-house movie theatre about two months ago. I deliberately didn't ferret out any info before seeing it, in order to maximize any surprises (and shocks) that the film might have to offer. While I suppose I can be blamed for not twigging to the fact that the actors were speaking with Australian accents instead of English accents, I do have a right to be legitimately annoyed with how the trailer was edited to suggest a movie more in the vein of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later ("Honey, I don't think Sandra Bullock's in this...") than Oz's answer to the unbelievably bloody Kiwi horror-comedy Dead-Alive (a.k.a. Braindead: often considered to be Peter Jackson's freshman effort, even though the Internet Movie Database reports that he directed three movies before it). In a way, I guess I can see the distributor's point: if the trailer had been more honest, I probably wouldn't have seen it; but any studio that finds it necessary to wage a deliberately deceptive marketing campaign in order to lure people into buying tickets isn't going to garner much good will for its product. While the screening that I attended had a respectably-sized audience, I suspect that the theatre managers figured that they could get just about a week's worth of ticket sales before word-of-mouth irritation at the misleading trailer caused movie-goers to stay away in droves. Well, the movie biz is the bastard offspring of the carny, after all, and thus is replete with all manner of hustlers, grifters, talkers, sharks, sharpies, flatties, geeks and freaks, no matter how much the studios' publicity flaks would like us to forget that most of the time.
While comparisons to "early George Romero," Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy, and Peter Jackson's Dead-Alive are de rigueur, at least one critic has noted that Undead owes at least as much to Steven Spielberg's early blockbusters as it does to Dead-Alive or, Kali-Durga help us, Dawn of the Dead. It also owes a fair bit to Hong Kong action/horror movies (The Bride With White Hair comes to mind), mid-to-late 1950s sci-fi movies, and such pop cultural takes on HK action/horror as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, Undead is rather like an over-excited sheepdog: charging first this way then that, happily leaping up on you, getting you almost as wet and filthy and smelly as he is, and never calming down enough to let you appreciate that he is a pretty good dog, after all. Or, in Undead's case, that it could be a pretty good movie, had the Spierig Brothers pared their plot down a touch and beefed up the character development more.
Undead opens by introducing us via cross-cuts to the primary characters, all residents of a sleepy and rather seedy Australian fishing resort called Berkeley: there's the winner of the local beauty pageant-cum-town spokesperson, René (Felicity Mason); a charter pilot named Wayne (Rob Jenkins); Wayne's very pregnant wife Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham), who is apparently a waitress as well as an also-ran in the "Miss Catch of the Day" contest that René won; a high-strung, foul-mouthed, wannabe hardcase cop named Harrison (Dirk Hunter) and his asthmatic and extremely nervous rookie partner Molly (Emma Randall); and the town oddball, who is ostracized as much for claiming to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens as for his lack of the social graces, Marion (Mungo McKay; one can't help but wonder if this character's name was a nod to John Wayne, whose real name was Marion Michael Morrison, even if his gunfighting skills are more reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" cross-pollinated with a bushranger ChowYun-Fat). Some kind of interstellar bodies come plummeting to earth in various spots in Berkeley -- in some cases striking people in rather comic CGI fashion -- and soon the dead walk and munch on the living. Though René's the first one to seek refuge in Marion's heavily renovated farm-house, the other major characters quickly congregate there as well, which leads to a fairly bloody shoot-out reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead's zombie siege of the Winchester pub (which is, in itself, a blood-soaked tribute to Assault on Precinct 13, among others) -- except that this all happens within the movie's first half hour, and there are plenty of other movies that the Spierig Brothers are anxious to pay tribute to.
A major failing of Undead's is that the Spierigs are more concerned about making a kind of cult movie buff's Stations of the Cross than they are in making even a semi-coherent movie. One doesn't necessarily expect a Robert Towne or the Coen Brothers to write this sort of thing, but one thing that I wish that more would-be heirs to George Romero would remember was how subtle his screenplay for Dawn of the Dead really was: DotD managed to be at once a splatter movie, a surprisingly political action movie (one of the eeriest things about Dawn of the Dead's infamous police/radical/zombie shootout opening is how it presaged, in a way, the 13 May 1985 apocalyptic showdown between the Philadelphia police and MOVE, wherein the cops firebombed an entire city block, destroying not just MOVE's headquarters but 61 homes besides; I've sometimes wished that Romero would make a movie about that, but without letting over-the-top gore effects dominate), a satire, a consumerist fantasy, a social dialectic, and, oh yes, a horror movie. While the Spierigs have every right to be proud of what they were able to whip up on a shoe-string budget and their home computers, it would've been nice had they cut out some of the more painful attempts at comedy (the two cops were singularly unfunny, and Molly's asthmatic hyperventilating was downright offensive), trimmed some of the plot elements for coherency, and developed at least René and Marion's characters a bit more. As it stands, while Undead is a semi-interesting first effort, it's not likely to please hard core gore, horror, action movie, or science fiction fans: while there is a fair modicum of blood spilled, the gore effects are mostly nothing special, and less shocking than the spare effects of Deathdream. An exception: an effect that the Spierig Brothers outsourced to a professional effects studio called "The Zombie Spine" in the end credits (you'll know it when you see it) that they felt was so nice, they had to feature it twice. Still, for my money, this effect, while nifty, is more pointless and far less shocking than the two stand-out, partly vivisected zombies in Romero's Day of the Dead.
Because my interest flagged relatively early, Undead's running time seems far longer than it actually is; and while there are some cool effects shots towards the end -- Wayne's mad flight in his charter plane, and the sight of most of Berkeley's residents floating in the sky, held up by the aliens' spaceships (this latter shot looked as though it could've come from some art-rock/prog-rock album cover of the late 1970s/early 1980s) are stand-outs -- it ultimately means less than even one of the new Outer Limits episodes. (I will concede that the funniest bit occurs towards the end, and features a couple of the CGI'ed aliens.) The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink ending (a song called "Little Green Men" by some AC/DC-wannabes named Buttkrak is prominently featured) is perhaps a bit too pointlessly pessimistic (perhaps in homage to some of those bummer early '70s movies that Hollywood turned out before reverting to happy ending type) and uneven, being a Frankensteining of a classic Western and the set-up for Buffy that makes Undead feel like, ultimately, a pilot for a cable TV series.
Undead is worth a look if you're at all interested in the genres it pays tribute to, but it shouldn't lose anything if you see it as a rental or on cable; and if you need to take a bathroom break or make a snack run, don't worry about missing anything.
This has been a banner year for zombie movies for me: what with the long-awaited release of George Romero's Land of the Dead and my finally getting to see Shaun of the Dead, as well as Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby's nigh-legendary 1974 shocker Deathdream (a.k.a. Dead of Night, Night Walk, The Night Andy Came Home, Whispers, and The Veteran) and their earlier effort, the 1972 Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things on DVD, I'd already seen more zombie movies this year than I'd seen in the past two or three years. (As I've noted elsewhere, I'm hardly the world's biggest horror fan, but I do like to check in on various horror movies, books and comics now and again.) And now Undead.
I'd not heard of Undead before I started seeing the trailer for it at the local art-house movie theatre about two months ago. I deliberately didn't ferret out any info before seeing it, in order to maximize any surprises (and shocks) that the film might have to offer. While I suppose I can be blamed for not twigging to the fact that the actors were speaking with Australian accents instead of English accents, I do have a right to be legitimately annoyed with how the trailer was edited to suggest a movie more in the vein of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later ("Honey, I don't think Sandra Bullock's in this...") than Oz's answer to the unbelievably bloody Kiwi horror-comedy Dead-Alive (a.k.a. Braindead: often considered to be Peter Jackson's freshman effort, even though the Internet Movie Database reports that he directed three movies before it). In a way, I guess I can see the distributor's point: if the trailer had been more honest, I probably wouldn't have seen it; but any studio that finds it necessary to wage a deliberately deceptive marketing campaign in order to lure people into buying tickets isn't going to garner much good will for its product. While the screening that I attended had a respectably-sized audience, I suspect that the theatre managers figured that they could get just about a week's worth of ticket sales before word-of-mouth irritation at the misleading trailer caused movie-goers to stay away in droves. Well, the movie biz is the bastard offspring of the carny, after all, and thus is replete with all manner of hustlers, grifters, talkers, sharks, sharpies, flatties, geeks and freaks, no matter how much the studios' publicity flaks would like us to forget that most of the time.
While comparisons to "early George Romero," Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy, and Peter Jackson's Dead-Alive are de rigueur, at least one critic has noted that Undead owes at least as much to Steven Spielberg's early blockbusters as it does to Dead-Alive or, Kali-Durga help us, Dawn of the Dead. It also owes a fair bit to Hong Kong action/horror movies (The Bride With White Hair comes to mind), mid-to-late 1950s sci-fi movies, and such pop cultural takes on HK action/horror as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, Undead is rather like an over-excited sheepdog: charging first this way then that, happily leaping up on you, getting you almost as wet and filthy and smelly as he is, and never calming down enough to let you appreciate that he is a pretty good dog, after all. Or, in Undead's case, that it could be a pretty good movie, had the Spierig Brothers pared their plot down a touch and beefed up the character development more.
Undead opens by introducing us via cross-cuts to the primary characters, all residents of a sleepy and rather seedy Australian fishing resort called Berkeley: there's the winner of the local beauty pageant-cum-town spokesperson, René (Felicity Mason); a charter pilot named Wayne (Rob Jenkins); Wayne's very pregnant wife Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham), who is apparently a waitress as well as an also-ran in the "Miss Catch of the Day" contest that René won; a high-strung, foul-mouthed, wannabe hardcase cop named Harrison (Dirk Hunter) and his asthmatic and extremely nervous rookie partner Molly (Emma Randall); and the town oddball, who is ostracized as much for claiming to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens as for his lack of the social graces, Marion (Mungo McKay; one can't help but wonder if this character's name was a nod to John Wayne, whose real name was Marion Michael Morrison, even if his gunfighting skills are more reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" cross-pollinated with a bushranger ChowYun-Fat). Some kind of interstellar bodies come plummeting to earth in various spots in Berkeley -- in some cases striking people in rather comic CGI fashion -- and soon the dead walk and munch on the living. Though René's the first one to seek refuge in Marion's heavily renovated farm-house, the other major characters quickly congregate there as well, which leads to a fairly bloody shoot-out reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead's zombie siege of the Winchester pub (which is, in itself, a blood-soaked tribute to Assault on Precinct 13, among others) -- except that this all happens within the movie's first half hour, and there are plenty of other movies that the Spierig Brothers are anxious to pay tribute to.
A major failing of Undead's is that the Spierigs are more concerned about making a kind of cult movie buff's Stations of the Cross than they are in making even a semi-coherent movie. One doesn't necessarily expect a Robert Towne or the Coen Brothers to write this sort of thing, but one thing that I wish that more would-be heirs to George Romero would remember was how subtle his screenplay for Dawn of the Dead really was: DotD managed to be at once a splatter movie, a surprisingly political action movie (one of the eeriest things about Dawn of the Dead's infamous police/radical/zombie shootout opening is how it presaged, in a way, the 13 May 1985 apocalyptic showdown between the Philadelphia police and MOVE, wherein the cops firebombed an entire city block, destroying not just MOVE's headquarters but 61 homes besides; I've sometimes wished that Romero would make a movie about that, but without letting over-the-top gore effects dominate), a satire, a consumerist fantasy, a social dialectic, and, oh yes, a horror movie. While the Spierigs have every right to be proud of what they were able to whip up on a shoe-string budget and their home computers, it would've been nice had they cut out some of the more painful attempts at comedy (the two cops were singularly unfunny, and Molly's asthmatic hyperventilating was downright offensive), trimmed some of the plot elements for coherency, and developed at least René and Marion's characters a bit more. As it stands, while Undead is a semi-interesting first effort, it's not likely to please hard core gore, horror, action movie, or science fiction fans: while there is a fair modicum of blood spilled, the gore effects are mostly nothing special, and less shocking than the spare effects of Deathdream. An exception: an effect that the Spierig Brothers outsourced to a professional effects studio called "The Zombie Spine" in the end credits (you'll know it when you see it) that they felt was so nice, they had to feature it twice. Still, for my money, this effect, while nifty, is more pointless and far less shocking than the two stand-out, partly vivisected zombies in Romero's Day of the Dead.
Because my interest flagged relatively early, Undead's running time seems far longer than it actually is; and while there are some cool effects shots towards the end -- Wayne's mad flight in his charter plane, and the sight of most of Berkeley's residents floating in the sky, held up by the aliens' spaceships (this latter shot looked as though it could've come from some art-rock/prog-rock album cover of the late 1970s/early 1980s) are stand-outs -- it ultimately means less than even one of the new Outer Limits episodes. (I will concede that the funniest bit occurs towards the end, and features a couple of the CGI'ed aliens.) The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink ending (a song called "Little Green Men" by some AC/DC-wannabes named Buttkrak is prominently featured) is perhaps a bit too pointlessly pessimistic (perhaps in homage to some of those bummer early '70s movies that Hollywood turned out before reverting to happy ending type) and uneven, being a Frankensteining of a classic Western and the set-up for Buffy that makes Undead feel like, ultimately, a pilot for a cable TV series.
Undead is worth a look if you're at all interested in the genres it pays tribute to, but it shouldn't lose anything if you see it as a rental or on cable; and if you need to take a bathroom break or make a snack run, don't worry about missing anything.