Naked Lunch
by Steve Dollar 
Vampires have held pop culture's center stage long enough. The zombies are lurching back!
True Blood and
Twilight and
Let Me/the Right One In have cast their spell over the zeitgeist in recent years, notably playing up themes of teen angst and subversive sexuality to tap a perennial romantic vein. With
rare exceptions, there isn't much romance in a zombie. If fangdom clings to a certain gothic giddiness, a fantasy of eternal love or jugular abandon, the undead are simply a problem that won't go away. Ravenous and ragged, they are the perfect metaphor for a failed economy, a stagnant government, the retrograde rhetoric of the GOP presidential field, the all too real apocalypse of abandoned mortgages and unemployment lines. Brother, can you spare some brains?
Everything runs in a cycle, of course. So fresh meat like AMC's hit series
The Walking Dead, which uses the zombie apocalypse as an excuse for a latter-day Western, or Colson Whitehead's compulsively readable
Zone One, which lyrically surveys a depopulated Manhattan whose high-rises are "cleaned" by zombie-busting ragtag military crews, may turn out to be passing fascinations. But they are relentless, and numberless, these creatures. Underestimate them at your peril.
Bill Lustig, the grindhouse guru of Blue Underground, couldn't have picked a better time to reissue
Lucio Fulci's 1979 face-chomper
Zombie in a lovingly restored,
double-disc Blu-Ray edition. (Also newly released is
the Blu-Ray of the director's 1981
The House by the Cemetery). You don't have to be a zombie scholar to know that after
George A. Romero, who all but fathered the archetype of the modern zombie, the Italian gore maestro (b.1927 ? d.1996) lent his own distinctive touch.
Night of the Living Dead got by on pancake makeup and what I'm guessing was chocolate syrup, which its grainy, Xerox-copy, black-and-white palette somehow translated into unfettered terror through its sheer cheapness. The mere
idea was scary enough, and with the nightly news broadcasting live from Vietnam's killing fields, the real-life analogies were blatantly felt. Fulci's zombies, arriving a decade later, seem to have no subtext of their own that I can detect, but they are the nastiest ambulatory corpses in the movies. They put the
dead in undead: typically rotted down to the skull, with worm-eaten eye sockets and flesh scraped away to reveal moldy choppers, these festering shitbags were so unsettling to witness, it finally almost made sense that their idiotic victims would freeze in numb, wordless terror as they twisted and limped, gimp-like, and made ready to chow down. (The film's tagline: "WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!"). I've never seen anything freakier, unless it was the line-up for the breakfast buffet at the
Imperial Palace casino in Biloxi, Miss.
Zombie (1979) is, among other things: a
Mystery Science Theater 3000-ready Olympiad of histrionic bad acting?aggravated by dubbed-in dialogue; an effectively spooky bit of slumming into Caribbean voodoo exotica, returning the zombie myth to the West Indies that spawned it; and a formidable catalog of dread-laden kills orchestrated for maximum squirm factor (in one of the film's agonizingly detailed zombie attack sequences, a wooden door splinter perforates the eyeball of actress
Olga Karlatos?Prince's mom in
Purple Rain!?as if it were an egg yolk). The story is laced with familiar trappings of spook lore.
Spirited young urbanite Anne Bowles (
Tisa Farrow, Mia's kid sister) and cynical tabloid reporter Peter West (
Ian McCulloch) make their way from Manhattan to a remote island after they meet cute while poking around on a ghost ship floating in the East River. The vessel belongs to her scientist father, who has gone missing while researching a strange disease afflicting the natives on the obscure isle of Mantool. What they don't know is that the island already is being overrun by the mysteriously risen dead. There, a surviving Westerner with a sense of grandeur common to the medical profession, Dr. Menard (
Richard Johnson), is racing to uncover the secret lurking in the zombie blood, but it may be too late. Before the New Yorkers even arrive, the undead come to greet them. When the companion (
Auretta Gay) of a pleasure boater they've paid to deliver them to the island goes in for some topless diving, she gets a big surprise. First, a shark! And then, a zombie! After fending off both, she watches in shock as the two predators go jaw to jaw in a kind of deep-sea
pas de deux that would do Ivan Tors proud. The scene, at once ridiculous and utter B-movie genius, was recently appropriated to add geek appeal to an
ironic Windows 7 commercial, Madison Avenue ratifying Fulci's bravura absurdity. "And I am proud to say, that zombie is a Mexican,"
Guillermo Del Toro informs us in a bonus disc interview, in which he recounts his adolescent love affair with
Zombie and the life-changing impression made by its director, whom he admiringly calls a "madman."
After this begins the excruciating, inevitable game of attrition. Silly mortals in over their heads make bad decisions as Jeeps break down, night falls and someone has the bright idea to cool their weary heels in the middle of a 17th century graveyard churning with reanimated Spanish conquistadors. Indefatigable, Anne and Peter somehow escape death, set fire to the village and make their way to the boat with its owner Brian (
Al Cliver, aka Fulci regular Pierluigi Conti), who has now been bitten by his zombie girlfriend and is trembling with a fever. Yet, one zombie you know is easier to handle than hundreds of stranger zombies. As the couple, now full-blown lovebirds, sail into the new day, we exhale a sigh of relief and wonder: What will happen now?
Best not to spoil the ending, because it's worth every minute of the preceding hour-and-a-half. Let's just say it's one of the best uses of an iconic American landmark in a film since
Planet of the Apes and lends a whole new meaning to the phrase "bridge and tunnel crowd."
Posted by ahillis at October 31, 2011 7:49 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment