My Favorite Movies

If movies like "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles" were my elementary school dream of what high school would be like, then "Heathers" is the movie that brought me down to reality in junior high. Even in it's exaggerated and stylized fashion, it manages to be a blunt, savage, and at times uncomfortable, satire of how high-schoolers really treat each other. Required viewing in my book!

The first film produced by Studio Ghibli, and the first Japanese animated film I ever saw, albeit in it's horribly truncated Americanized version, WARRIORS OF THE WIND. Even in that butchered cut (courtesy of the now-defunct New World Pictures) I was exposed to a level of storytelling way beyond what the toy-line-driven Saturday morning cartoons offered. Thanks to Disney- of all people- we can now see Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film for what it truly is: a gorgeous, epic, cautionary tale of environmental and social harmony.

Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER stands as the ultimate cinematic equivalent to opera. Nothing since has been able to (remotely) match the brilliance, beauty, and tragedy of this one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

An abandoned boat sails aimlessly into the New York harbor. When the Harbor Patrol comes aboard, they are met with a hungry, and portly, undead creature. A reporter (Ian McCulloch) catches wind of the event, and then teams up with the daughter of the boat's owner (who's gone missing) to find out what happened to the owner and the missing crew. Their investigation leads to a remote Carribean island where they, along with a couple of vacationers, meet a seemingly mad scientist, who's research into Voodoo has led to the dead coming back to life and feasting on the living.

That's the premise of Italian director Lucio Fulci's first full-blown stab at horror: Zombie. This was one of those cult horror films that I've heard about and read about for years. It was produced in Italy as Zombi 2 to exploit the success of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (which was released in that country as Zombi), is also called Zombie Flesh Eaters and Voodoo in some parts of the world, and was labeled a Video Nasty in England in the early 80's. I never was able to watch the film without puchasing a copy. What if it really sucked? Well thanks to Netflix, I finally got a chance to view it, and boy did I have a good time! Zombie is my favourite old-school horror film so far this year, and I immediately bought it online after seeing it. Entertainment Weekly got it right on the nose when it described the film as, "...both terrifying and hilarious." Zombie has an outrageous plethora of extreme gore, but also has some unintentionally funny moments that keep it from being unbearable, like a lot of Italian stomach-turners that followed in it's wake (Cannibal Holocast, for example).

I can't really go into the gore bits much without spoiling the fun (just in the off-hand chance you haven't seen it), but what makes Zombie a truly creepy film is that most of the movie is set during the daytime. Without the benefit of things such as shadows when filming a horror movie in the dark, Fulci instead enhances the tropical locales, and relies on anticipation (the corpses slowly rising from their graves is a good example) to up the creep factor.

The movie is no horror masterpiece, make no mistake. The dialogue is pretty bad. The plot is very bare-bones, and pretty non-sensical. Who, or what, exactly is causing these zombies to walk and munch on our hapless heroes? Fulci tries through the first half of the film to add a sense of mystery, but one frantic female character spoils that early on ("You won't be happy until I'm one of your zombies!"). Plus, I mentioned the doctor, played by Richard Johnson, is seemingly mad, because in actuality, he looks rather lost. I don't think Johnson himself knew why his character was on that island.

These things can (and usually do) hurt other movies, but in the case of Zombie, they provide the aformentioned hilarity that gives the film a quaint charm. Other examples include the gratuitous nudity, the women just standing and screaming as zombies slowly saunter towards them, and, of course, the famous underwater showdown between a zombie and a shark!

Overall, Lucio Fulci's Zombie delivers on it's reputation as a no-holds-barred gorefest, and has the added bonus of being almost comedic. Zombie's flaws have actually done the film some good over it's 25-plus years, to make it way more enjoyable than, and stand well above, all the imitators that it has spawned.