Stuff: Fast food.

Long time readers will know that I'm kinda zombied out at this point. The shuffling corpses have had a hell of run, but I think it's time for the walking dead to hit the showers. I support legislation that would actually pay people working on zombie-themed horror projects to destroy their projects rather than follow them through, the way we control agricultural overproduction by paying farmers to burn market-deflating harvests.

That said, this is pretty boss: The Run for Your Lives 5K zombie run - a 5K run in which runners haul ass through a wooded obstacle course while being chased by "zombies." It's a combination of obstacle run, flag football game, and the opening run-to-the-river bit of 28 Weeks Late.

Mad science: "Activite their Capgras" sounds more humorous said aloud than it reads off the page.

Wired online has a short article and video presentation on the curious work of UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek. Voytek - who is not helping fight the pervasive stereotype that UC Berkeley is some sort of really expensive summer camp for really smart weirdos - has assembled a neurological picture of zombiism by translating zombie behaviors seen in a handful of popular flicks into known neurological conditions. From the article:

Based on that map of the zombie brain, Voytek and a fellow neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen established that the walking dead suffered from a condition they called Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. CDHD is characterized by “the loss of rational, voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, the inability to coordinate motor-linguistic behaviors and an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”

After settling on a brain-model for the reanimated, Voytek extrapolated some survival tips for the zombie apocalypse. Notable exploitable bugs in the zombie-brain: Zack's probably got crap memory, so if you come up with a really neat way to kill zombies, feel free to keep it in rotation as long as you please. Also, Voytek speculates that zombies probably have difficulty visually tracking more than one moving object at a time. Certainly the resourceful zombie hunter could put that to good use.

Movies: I'll give you my Axe Body Spray(TM) when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!

The obvious reference point for Jake West's 2009 lad-inflected zomcom actioner Doghouse is Edgar Wright's 2004 Shaun of the Dead. The loglines are similar enough: Underachieving male lead with relationship problems sorts his life out during a zombie outbreak. The chief distinction between the flicks lies in just what you mean when you declare your life sorted.

The titular hero of Wright's work has a familiar character arc: for all the yucks and guts, Shaun's recognizable from a million dramas and comedies as "the man who needs to grow up." He's got to make peace with a father figure while simultaneously making a definitive break from influence of his parents. He's got to assume the mantle of responsibility and he's got to secure his relationship with the woman in his life. For all Wright's visual and verbal inventiveness, Shaun's journey to adulthood is pretty standard stuff. That only sounds like criticism until you've seen Doghouse.

If you throw a frisbee so that the disk is released with an upward tilt, the frisbee will gain altitude as it flies. At some point, it'll stall out in its ascent and begin a steep drop. Eventually, whatever combo of drag and lift, wind and spin is working on it will give it enough power to right itself and fly back toward the original point of take off. Sooner or later, the disk runs out of power, but if you've tossed it right, you'll be able to catch it without moving. I'm not sure what you'd call the figure traced by the flight of the frisbee. It isn't an arc, because of the looping return. A loop would suggest a more rounded figure. For purposes of the post, we're going to call this shape - an oddly curvy triangle that looks like a child's rendering of a wind-filled sail - the Frisbee Aerial Return Triangle, or FART.

The male characters in Doghouse don't follow arcs so much as they FART their way through the flick. They start out as a set of variably boisterous losers all on the lam from a collection of stereotype women (I think it is fair to say that even the gay member of our stag party has a partner who is, gender aside, essentially a needy, nagging shrew). Their metaphoric/social conflict becomes a violent, deadly one when the boys find themselves stranded in a town where all the ladies have been transformed into zombie-like homicidal monsters - while, luckily, retaining their stereotypical identities: the hair-dresser, the witch, the barmaid, the fat cow wife, etc. The boys reach the peak of their development when they decide to embrace their arrested development and start fighting back against the legion of female archetypes arrayed against them. We learn the valuable lesson that the point of men is that we're irresponsible, not terribly bright, emotionally limited creatures - and we should be proud of it. Finally, we basically end up with everybody back where they started, except for the few lads who were killed along the way.

The "war of the sexes" is a theme that's rarely employed with any sincerity. More often than not, the "war" is an ambush and a slaughter. Few people have picked up pen, paint, or camera intending to document the tensions between men and women with anything like objectivity or impartiality. It is the theme of choice for those with an axe to grind. So it is here. As far as we can tell, the gents that populate this flick are kind of douchebags. With the exception of the sad sack leader of the pack, they are stalled out examples of modern man-boys. It's far too easy to imagine that, yeah, were I a chick, I'd have had it with this JLA of modern male lameness too. West, however, plays the film out like this band of bros is a ragtag Dirty Dozen on a mad near-suicide mission in the battle for gender freedom.

I should point out too, this isn't me stretching for some political subtext here. West made the liberation of Maxim readers everywhere his central motif. When a character tells his fellow bros to grab golf clubs and bash everything "in a dress," its clear that subtext is the whole text here.

Not that I'm personally upset by the absurdly whatever-the-male-equivalent-of-hysterical-is representation of women. It's unclear to me how offensive the movie would be to a female viewer. On one hand, it is clearly giant middle-finger to anything that doesn't have a penis dangling between its legs. On the other hand, I could easily imagine a woman assuming this was some oddly rigorous exercise in satire by an artist so committed to his joke that he never revealed the slightest crack in his character. The latter position, though, she would most take only because the idea that the director was serious would be too pathetic to believe.

If Doghouse were extremely funny, scary, or exciting, then perhaps it could be forgiven for the dumbness of its central conceit. If there's anything the history of genre entertainments teaches us, it's that audiences will forgive a work almost anything provided it keeps manically mashing our pleasure buttons with both fists. Any time you see somebody stop to think critically, you know something's broken down. But Doghouse never achieves that escape velocity. Enamored with its own minimalist take on gender politics, it yammers when it should run, complains when it should scream, and rants when it should joke.

Take away lesson: Be offensive if you like; but for God's sake, don't be tedious.

Stuff: Pause for reflection.

Over at The Atlantic, they're using a piece by Nathan Fox - artist of the comic ANTSS just posted about - to illustrate a lightweight think piece called Our Zombies, Ourselves. I'm not sure that writer James Parker drops any science the average ANTSS reader doesn't already know, though he gets points for correctly identifying the earliest known English appearance of zombies: William Seabrook's over-the-top voodoo study, The Magic Island. Plus, he opens with an interesting question to ponder. Why didn't the modern zombie arrive earlier?

The most surprising thing about the modern zombie—indeed, the only surprising thing about the modern zombie—is that he took so long to arrive. His slowness is a proverb, of course: his museumgoer’s shuffle, his hospital plod. Plus he’s a wobbler: the shortest path between two points is seldom the one he takes. Nonetheless, given all that had been going on, we might reasonably have expected the first modern zombies to start showing up around 1919. Twentieth-century man was already moaning and scratching his head; shambling along with bits falling off him; desensitized, industrialized, hollowed out, metaphysically evacuated—A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many … Had some trash visionary produced a novel or play about the brain-eating hordes, or a vers libre epic of viral undeadness, it would have gone down rather well, at this point.

Movies: There's no cannibalism in the champagne room.

How can you tell when a trend has lapsed into decadence? Some might suggest that the widespread use of sub-genre formulas is a good sign post. When the creative petrol of a movement is spent, the modern cultural industry, with its accountant's heart and its rat-like aversion to the new, ensures that a trend can coast on the fumes for years. Still, some of the best genre entertainments boldly and sincerely embrace the predictable elements of their genre. Besides, genre works pull so deeply from archetypal forms that it's something of a fool's game to try to separate out laziness from profundity.

The inevitable lapse into self-parody? It is one thing to deploy humor, but the idea of a lapse into self-parody is one did it unintentionally because the restrictions of a genre left you nowhere to go but Stupidsville, U.S.A., and you bought that ticket thinking you were going to Awesome Town. To use a non-horror example, Airplane isn't a lapse into self-parody. It's just a parody. Day After Tomorrow's "we're outrunning cold" scene: that's self-parody. This seems like a no-brainer. When the possibilities of a genre have been so thoroughly explored that any existing avenues basically require that you're an idiot to make or consume the product, then it's time to smack the trend on the ass, say "good game," and tell it to hit the showers. Problem here is, outside of the genre, almost all of the genre looks like self-parody. I don't know whether this is because connoisseurship is prerequisite to genre understanding or whether genre fans are simple too close to know when they're shit's become retarded. Is it that you need a deep and nuanced understanding of zombie films to truly grasp the brilliance of Survival of the Dead or have a small group of true believers convinced themselves that Romero's late career disaster is not a cinematic abortion?

When no systematic approach is available, then the best you can do is pick an arbitrary point and map out the trajectory of the waning trend from your specific frame of reference. So long as you admit your frame of reference is singular, you'll allow others, each observing the same phenomenon from their distinct frames of reference, to make whatever calculations to sync up the observations. Applying this pragmatic solution to the problem, I'm defining my frame of reference thusly: A trend is creatively bankrupt when, within a single year, you get two films mashing-up the trend with strippers.[1] This sounds like a pretty clumsy tool for sorting out the messy field of tropes, but applied correctly, you can really get some fine-detailed results. Take, for example, Robert Rodriguez's 1996 crime flick vampire Holocaust flick, From Dusk Till Dawn. Here two trends, vampires and dead-pan pomo crime flicks, ran up against a stripper in the shapely form of Salma Hayek. There would be no other vampire stripper movies that year, leaving the vampire flick plenty of room to further evolve. The dead-pan pomo crime flick, on the other hand, was also caught slipping Jacksons into the garter of Demi Moore in that year's Striptease. It was the first step on the road to Truth and Consequences, N.M..

From that frame of reference, the year 2008 was officially the year the zombie thing hit intellectual and creative rock bottom. That was the year horror fans were afflicted with Jay Lee's Zombie Strippers and Jason Murphy's Zombies! Zombies! Zombies![2], two films boasting the same log line: zombie outbreak traps survivors in a strip joint.

In the defense of both flicks, the two-stripper-flicks-a-year thing isn't meant as a value judgment. It's simply a law of the universe. The same way the impersonal physical facts of a black hole are imbued with no ethic aspect past vast cosmic indifference, these stripper/zombie movies weren't made to kill of zombie films nor is there something so bad about these films they somehow fatally compromised an otherwise healthy sub-genre. Both films are pitched as nothing more than tasteless horror-comedies. And if you haven't seen worse horror films than either of these offerings, then you simply don't watch many horror films. Nevertheless, despite the manic relentless drive of each of these pics at their best, there's something exhausted at their core. One imagines them personified as one of the strippers they feature so prominently: torn between giving their umpteenth by-the-numbers lap dance to any slob-ola who will fork up enough cheddar and roaming the back of the club listlessly, hoping to run the clock out and remain relatively unmolested until closing time.

Of the two films, Zombie Strippers is the better flick. Admittedly, this is a bit like asking which would you prefer: a punch in the crotch or a kick? The answer is a punch, of course, but it will suck big time either way. Even if we restricted ourselves to comparing production values, name casting, and the willingness to show naked breasts, we'd have to give the dubious title of "Best Stripper-Containing Zombie Film of 2008" award to Zombie Strippers. After an oddly low-rent opening action sequence, ZS manages to find some visual pizzazz despite its tiny budget. This is in part because Lee sporadically embraces a color-saturated minimalist aesthetic that gives the absurd proceedings a pop-art feel that 3Z lacks. The visuals of 3 Z are deeply indebted to the "late American indie broke" aesthetic. From the cheapie visual effects to the sheer number of shots that take place in a set the script must of described as "External. Parking Lot where there's nothing in frame that could cost us any money," the movie is what happens when the limits of imagination and budget don't act as a spur to creativity.

But, honestly, the money issues aside, what gives ZS the edge up is its surprising taste in inspirations. ZS really has two stories going on at once. There's the bog standard Beau Geste plot of hold survivors fighting off a horde of zombies, and then there's the plot actually involving the zombie strippers: a plot that owes less to horror film tropes than classic show biz melodrama. And that weird blend is what gives ZS whatever kick it can claim.

The plot of ZS ain't rocket science. In a no longer applicable near future in which Bush was elected four times and launched wars against pretty much every country in the world, in the town of Sartre, Nebraska (the film's first joke in what my wife calls the "Oh, you've read a book" vein of "humor"), a lab experimenting with reviving dead soldiers to further usefulness has a mishap. Of course, the zombification experiment escapes the lab and infects the dancers and patrons of a local strip club (in this alternate future, Bush's 12-year-reign has given the religious right enough juice to make strip clubs illegal and they're something like speakeasies, only pedaling sexual frustration instead of booze). The club, the Rhino, run by one Ionesco - hammed up by Robert "Freddy" Englund; credited and refered to as Ian; and the second "oh, you've read a book" joke of the film - is basically the sole set of the flick. It's the films world and the isolation adds to the pop-art comic book feel of the proceedings. As the virus spreads, two narrative threads unfold. Inexplicably, getting zombified makes one insanely hot as a stripper. I say inexplicably because, visually, zombified strippers get just as rotty and grotesque as any zombie you'd care to cite. (In the world of this flick, zombie stuff impacts men and women differently - in a wonderfully daffy jab at scientific validity, a lab coat states that this has something to do with XX and XY chromosomes - with female zombies maintaining a significant portion - speech, motivations, memory - of their mental powers, and men becoming mindless types.) But, like the mauled sensualists of Clive Barker's many works, we're simply given to believe that being dead somehow give you insights to levels of the erotic that living people somehow miss.

Smartly, ZS doesn't drink it's own Kool Aid on the whole massive-bodily-trauma-equals-hottie thing. In this sense, it links up with the remake of Night of the Demons in presenting Barker's bizarre elevation of fetishization as a goof. Once the strippers begin to zombify (which, by the way, is recognized as a word by my spellcheck), the story bifurcates: one plot involves the zombified strippers fighting for male flesh as a commodity: male attention is the currency that buys one a place in the stripper hierarchy and male flesh is the fuel that keeps the women running. The second plot involves the the pure strain humans fighting for their survival against the zombified byproducts of the strippers' civil war. Sadly, the second, less interesting plot takes up most of the screen time. The movie is most alive when we're watching the strippers go at one another. The strippers live in an almost completely female world: they exist as characters entirely in relation to one another and the crisis of the plot basically gives the diretor/writer and the actresses the ability to literalize every conflict and play it out. In the moments in which this is happening, the film is strangely captivating.

In his infamously honest essay about the "talented tenth," W.E.B. DuBois metaphorically the self-destructive impulse of an oppressed community as a bucket full of crabs. When one crab thinks it can make a break, the others, in a panic, grab hold of it and keep in the bucket. I don't know how many readers have ever actually seen a container of live crabs, but DuBios description of the mad swirl of armored and weaponized limbs is brutality correct. At one point in ZS there's a scene in which two zombie strippers fight for the role of queen of the roost. They literally rip one another apart. At one point, one uses her vagina against the other as weapon. It was meant, no doubt, as a gross out joke, but that doesn't make it any less horrible true. When one reads some trash talk article from Jezebel or the Broadsheet about a femme apostate, you can pretty much imagine that fight from Zombie Strippers as the metaphorical equivalent. In that sense, Zombie Strippers is one of the few real feminist horror films in the sense that it makes a horror story out of women-centric relationships where men are reduced to something like a unit of exchange.

That said, Zombie! Zombie! Zombie! is genuinely more interested in its strippers as people. There's a great line in 3Z in which one of the strippers, on being invited to a post-show grub session, says she has to study for her finals and begs off. The idea that a stripper might have a life outside of stripping would be completely alien to the weird hothouse environment of ZS. There's another delightful bit when, on the occasion of one stripper sheepishly mentioning that she has a child, the other stripper launch into stories of their own children. For all it's faults - and they are legion - 3Z is has lucid moments of sincere sympathy with real humanity. There's a nice bit, about 30 minutes in, when, after a panicked crowd flees to the strip joint for safety, two members of the crowd get into a a lover's tiff. It isn't dramatically important, but it feels so correct as to make one wonder if it is improvised. I don't want to overpraise 3Z. This is a flick whose idea of dialog includes the clunker: "Them ain't crack whores! Them bitches is crack whore zombies!" (Not quoted from memory - Netflix has truly revolutionized film scholarship.) Still, it would be unfair to deny the flick its moments of strikingly real interaction.

One of the weirdest aspects of 3Z is a strange conflict between the strippers of the film and a group of prostitutes who ply their trade outside in the clubs parking lot. I'm assuming it's the club's parking lot; most of the film's first half hour takes place in nondescript parking lots. For all the nuance the film allows the strippers, the whores are jokes. Their pimp is a buffoon and they are all grotesques. There's a surreal scene in which the strippers and the whores dine in the same greasy spoon and viewer gets to see the differential treatment of the two classes of women. The strippers have shown up to grab a bit of post-work protein, but the whores have shown up to celebrate the anniversary of one year of a certain prostitute's chattel-slavery to their pimp. The celebration of the whores is treated as a lampoon. Do they have children? Are any of them in school? Who cares? 3Z couldn't be bothered. The film posits some weird scale of nobility where stripping is a fine, perhaps even noble profession, but prostitutes are scum. Which is weird, 'cause it's otherwise a remarkably sympathetic film.

[1] This raises a problem: What if the genre trend is strippers themselves? If we're trending narratives about strippers, then every film in the trend features strippers mashed-up - figuratively or literary - with strippers. So is trending strippers like dividing by zero? Not exactly, the idea here isn't that nature abhors a stripper. The question is not the existence of a trend, but whether the trend is crap. Provided the films in our hypothetical stripper sub-genre never came out faster than once a year, we could, theoretically, have a vibrant sub-genre dedicated to the fine art of removing skimpy outfits for money. If, however, the films come out at a rate of two or more a year, we still get a numerically significant trend of stripper flicks. This trend, however, will consist mostly of vapid, junky, dumb flicks.

[2] There's no strictly textual guidance as to whether the title of Mr. Murphy's film should be bellowed, with echo effects, in the style of radio announcer advertising a monster truck show, or does it have more of a plaintive, whiny Jan Bradyish quality. "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" or "Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!"? Personally, I alternate between the two styles in response to thematic demands. I leave it as a matter of the reader's taste and conscience.

Books: Sure it's the end of life as we know it, but it didn't cost a dime.

From the point of view of a vampire, the zombie holocaust would look like a human version of a global mad cow disease outbreak or, perhaps, something along the lines of current climate change thinking: it's a threat, but the majority of us don't really feel threatened yet, and there are too many short term incentives for too many of us to avoid rallying around such an abstract cause.

This is the premise of "The Extinction Parade," a free online story by Max Brooks, author of World War Z.

That's right, free as in "no money." Yeah, I know! Right?!?!

Movies: Without a paddle.

So Joel Schumacher.

Yeah, I know. Right?

So, this cat starts his directorial career with a Lily Tomlin comedy based on a not-comedic Richard Matheson novel.

He delivers two '80s classics in a row - St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys - and INXS's "Devil Inside Video" (not to mention the stylistically sharp Flatliners).

But before all that, he turns his hand to a stateside attempt at a Euro style sex farce featuring swinger semi-incest.

Then, of course, there's the weird Falling Down, a the sheep in wolf's clothing film that, despite its clear plotting that D-Fens was nuts from the jump, became a political rally point for the sort of genre-guzzling white male middle class jackass who takes a factory-standard antinomianism from every creative work they see as an excuse to play the victim and point out that they're smart enough to read something into a film.

Flashforward to the his bizarro world kamikaze takes on the Batman mythos. Like Burton, Schumacher was smart enough to realize Batman was a pop icon evolved from thousands of influences, serving the needs of millions of fans, rather than, say, a "realistic" figure. Unfortunately, Schumacher seems to have been open to every crappy influence, every shitty idea. The day-glo disasters he delivered are rightly reviled and I can only hope that when the inevitable "rediscovery" happens, by bloggers of future desperate to score hit numbers off the "scandal" of their original take on the films, I am dead and buried.

(Aw heck, somebody should just kick it off. Tired of the lame "Black Swan is teh horrez!!" meme snagging traffic digits, start penning your "Batman and Robin: the Definitive Take on a Legend?" post now.)

What comes after the plastic nipple Batman? Why, a flick about snuff films, of course. And then - what the hey! - a Dogme 95 remake of the first half of Full Metal Jacket!

I bring all this up to point out that Joel Schumacher, director of today's flick - the solid, if unremarkable Blood Creek (2009) - has actually had a hell of a career. And, yet, there are few directors less interesting.

He's an anti-autuer, the last of the workman directors: a weird holdover from the days when you got your assignment, you shot it, and you moved on. Watching a Schumacher movie is to be transported back to a time before French film theory elevated the status of director to make it the equivalent of Artist with a Capital A. He's a technically-proficient skilled laborer working with other skilled specialists to get a product to market. This is director as factory foreman.

And, ultimately, that's what Blood Creek feels like: a competently made product as devoid of the stamp of individual artistry as a lug bolt. That doesn't mean that its devoid of interest, or even beauty. If you've got a set of lug bolts, look at them with open eyes and you'll see a certain futurist glamour there. Still, that's a product of the inevitable gaps that occur whenever a mind considers the work of any human hand, not matter how standardized. It can't be said to reflect the artistic intentions of the guys and gals down at the RAD GmbH factory.

Blood Creek takes its inspiration from a classic American hoax. Inspired by then theories, now since proven, that vikings explored America nearly a century before Columbus's much celebrated "discovery," hoaxers in Oklahoma and Minnesota created rune stones: slabs of stone a few few long and about a foot wide, covered in "ancient viking runes." The first stones were discovered in the 1890s by farmers and sent to the University of Minnesota and Chicago (it's unclear if the farmers were in on it, or if they were the first victims of the hoax). Since the initial "discovery," stones popped up every few years, as late as 1967. The stones caught the public imagination in the 1910s and '20s. Stories of viking raiders doing savage battle with Native American warriors showed up in newspapers and pulp fictions (such a plot inspired a cycle of "Conan" stories, for example). However, nearly every reputable linguist and historian has declared the stones fakes. This doesn't stop hobbyist and local boosters from touting their authenticity; but as much as I think it would be awesome, the stones are utter bullshit.

That said, here's the link - part of the original defense of the hoax was that scholars couldn't translate the stones because the farmers who found it, not knowing the value of what they'd discovered, used the stones to build their farms. In the case of the most famous stone, it was said to have been used as the stepping stone to the discoverer's granary. This alleged abuse left the stones illegible to experts, thus negating the experts' testimony.

Here's the narrative hook of Blood Creek: During the Depression, Nazi scholars were sent all over the US to use the rune stones that rube farmers have built into their farms to conduct an ancient ritual that would put the ultimate occult power into the hands of the rising Nazi party. One such mission goes pear shaped, and the Nazi occultist is trapped on the farm he was sent to. Decades later, two brothers on a mission of revenge assault the farm and unknowingly unleash the seemingly undying occultist.

Zombie horses show up too.

I'll be the first to admit that the log line sounds promising in a trashy b-movie sort of way. And, honestly, it's hard to imagine that anybody picking this film up won't find enough to keep themselves interested. The visuals are strong; imported talent Darko Suvak (who, oddly enough, did cinmo duties on 8MM 2) washes the screen in inky blacks, deep blood reds, and muted yellows. Go-to-Nazi Michael Fassbinder does as good a job as one can do buried under make-up: the Nazi magi needs to carve runes into himself to keep going, so his body is a nasty patchwork of decay and black metal scar-graffiti. Like so many plots involving magic, the whole moves forward on a series of periodically introduced "oh, I forgot about this rule, but . . ." moments that will either count as world building or a cop out depending on your personal preferences.

What's the take away? I've had Blood Creek in the to-be-reviewed queue for something like a month now. It's been sitting there so long because I simply couldn't find enough to say about it one way or another. It's a film that exists beyond criticism by virtue of the fact that it has this dumb, mute, rock-like factuality. It's there to fill a segment of time. There's nothing else to be said about it.

Well, one more thing. On the directors commentary, Schumacher discusses the effort required by the actors to perform some of the more physical scenes. As he talks, he drops this fabulous line about his feelings regarding asking the actors to do demanding things: "That's great filmmaking, unfortunately." Three of those words totally apply to Blood Creek.

Movies: "It’s disenchanting, but it’s not difficult."

Today in the Grey Dame, Chuckie Closterman take time out from the normal music beat to ponder the oddly reassuring image of the living dead:

"I know this is supposed to be scary," he said. "But I'm pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely informed about what to do in this kind of scenario."

I could not disagree. At this point who isn’t?

Stuff: Don't ask me, I just roam here.

Over a the Texas Observer, Owen Egerton files a jokey pop culture observation piece that leans heavily on the horror-as-current-events-allegory shtick. Right at the closer though, he pulls out a curious - and, as far as I know, previously untheorized - allegorical parallel between the divided American consciousness of our morality as individual actors in the context of our awareness of our nation's moral (or lack thereof) standing in the globe with the group dynamics of zombie flicks. Here's Egerton:

Over the last decade it’s become difficult to tell who the monster is. All too often we are the invaders, we are the torturers, we are the ones who terrorize. We no longer need an alien force or lab-manufactured monster. All we need is ourselves. Of course, it’s not any one of us. It’s our country.

Perhaps this explains the resurgence of the zombie film. The horror of zombies is all in their numbers. You can’t blame any single zombie for the chaos of Dawn of the Dead (2004) or Zombieland (2009), just as you can’t blame any single American for the crimes committed in our nation’s name. Any one of us is just another harmless, fun-loving, pleasure-seeking American. Like zombies, we don’t move that fast or think that fast. We spend our time loitering, every now and then pausing for a quick bite. Like zombies, one or two of us can be annoying, especially when vacationing in Europe, but no real threat. But take us as a mass, as a mindless herd of flesh-eaters driven on by base hunger, and we spell worldwide doom.

Zombies as self-absolving symbol of actorless, emergent evil? Interesting.

Movies: Nagging persistence of the dead.

The good news about Survival of the Dead is that it's better than Romero's last outing, the truly dire Diary of the Dead. Unfortunately, the makes only the fifth worst "Of the Dead" film.

I don't mind that Romero's lapsed into self-parody. It's that he's grown unbelievably lazy. Survival is a bizarre zombie Western that sets a bloody feud between two inexplicably fresh off the boat Scots-Irish families on a isolated Delaware island against the ever less interesting background of a zombie apocalypse. As bored as we are by concept, Romero phones it in on every level. His characters are paper thin. The leader of his crooked band of National Guardsmen is a "I look out for nobody but myself" type who, of course, has a heart of gold. He has a good natured, baby-faced sidekick who is, of course, the first to bite it. The Latino soldier is constantly offering up prayers en Español to the saints when he's not trying to lay the only female member of the troop. And she's a lesbian nicknamed Tomboy who, in perhaps the only unexpected move of the whole flick, first appears onscreen with her hands down her pants, churning the butter in front of all the other soldiers, who seem uninterested in her masturbatory display because, the film hints, it happens regularly enough. I'm not sure what this scene was meant to suggest to use about PFC Tomboy or lesbians in general. As it never happens again in the flick and nobody even so much as says, "Hey, Tomboy, you're on guard duty. Try not to miss any zombies because you're busy with all the self-fisting." It appears to be a throwaway scene. But that's not particularly shocking: there's so many throwaway scenes in this picture it's the filmic equivalent of The Mobro.

Our AWOL unit from Cliché Company pick up a random teen - who, hold on for the shock, is wisecracking, tech savvy smart ass who warms up the stone cold heart of the unit leader - and follows a youtube video to Plum Island, Delaware. Unfamiliar with digital technology - remember how those digital cameras kept losing their vertical hold and breaking into static in Diary? - Romero seems to believe that new youtube clips will keep appearing long after the zombie apocalypse has destroyed our power infrastructure. In fact, it's completely unclear what rules govern the post-Zed world of Romero's relaunched "of the Dead" series. Nobody seems to sweat conserving power, but everybody's worried about wasting gasoline. Phones don't work, but all your iPhone apps do. People find wifi in random places, and pick up late night talk shows making bad sub-Carson zombie jokes. The oddest bit is the amount of traffic on the roads. Several scenes in the film suggest the roads are deserted, but some shots include a busy I-95 in the background. Maybe that was just laziness on Romero's part.

The soldiers get to Plum only to find themselves in the middle of a shooting war between rival families, one who wants to exterminate zombies as soon as they appear and another that thinks they can tame and contain them until a "cure" is found. At least one character in the film points out that you don't get a zombie until a person is dead, so by definition zombies are a deviation from a state of death, not life; consequently, curing them would mean returning them to a state of death, a paradoxical state of affairs that makes killing zombies and curing zombies the same thing. This character, in the interest of allegedly dramatic plot development, is ignored.

The soldiers end up taking sides with the "kill 'em" family and there's a big old shoot out in which most of our characters are offed. We find out zombies, when hungry, will eat other mammals besides humans; a fact that Romero seems to think is key, but really, who gives a crap if flesh eating zombies eat everything in their path instead of just every human in their path? Besides, even if you could sustain zombie life, what's the point? If the hypothetical cure for zombies just makes them a corpse again, then you've got the cure: a bullet to the head. If the cure makes them living people again (an unlikely result since so many of them carry around damage that would be fatal is you restarted them as Pure Strain Humans), then you've essentially cured death and you've got a bigger problem on your hands than zombies. The repercussions of that would make the zombie apocalypse preferable.

Happily, Romero couldn't be bothered to parse any of this out. The same spirit that moved him not to bother blocking out the I-95 in his night scenes led Romero to simply throw random, seemingly thoughtful problems at the plot line and see if any portion of any random one of them stuck. The result is people saying a lot of meaningless babble with conviction. Still, this beats out Diary, which embarrassingly bought its own crap about the evils of the Internet Era despite its utter ignorance of the actual details of the Internet Era.

Plus the CGI is embarrassing.

There's a general unspoken rule amongst horror bloggers that you shouldn't speak ill of Romero despite the ever mounting crappiness of his work. Whether this is because people feel early genius forgives later stupidity or because they simply find it bad form to talk smack about an old man, I don't know. The result, however, is that bloggers review Romero's work in bad faith. From here on out, get your reviews of Romero's flicks from the pitiless anonymous hordes of horror site commenters. They've got it right. Romero's later zombie films simply aren't that good. End of story.

Stuff: Because owning a silver cross you could maybe melt down into a bullet isn't really "werewolf insurance."

I don't often get the chance to throw a link to an insurance site up on ANTSS, so when it does happen I feel weirdly elated. Term Life Insurance, of all folks, has actually whipped up the following table of super serious, very real threats for you to ponder when you debate just what sort of coverage you need. Click to read the whole thing.

Via: Term Life Insurance

Comics: Once Smurfs go black . . .

The story is familiar: A lone Patient-Zero is exposed to a dangerous new contagion that alters them into a mindless predator. Efforts are made to contain and treat the infected, but Patient-Zero breaks free and spreads the disease. Soon, the infected outnumber the healthy and things look bleak . . .

You've seen it before.

But have you seen it in Smurf Village before?

Comic Book Legends (one of the maybe 3 comic blogs consistently worth reading) has a wonderful story on the Les Schtroumpfs Noirs: "the Black Smurfs."

I'll let columnist Brian Cronin explain:

The Smurfs (or, as they were known in the Franco-Belgium comics where they debuted, Les Schtroumpfs) first appeared in comic writer/artist Peyo's light-hearted sword and sorcery series, Johan et Pirlouit (Johan and Peewit) in 1958. They were quite popular and by 1959 they were starring in their own back-up stories.

Their first album came out in 1963, titled Les Schtroumpfs Noirs - the Black Smurfs.
And the Black Smurfs, their first solo comic title, was basically about zombie smurfs!!!

You see, a Smurf in the comic is stung by a rare fly who effectively turns him into a zombie (his skin turns black). He then bites other Smurfs, who ALSO turn into zombies!

The comic was never reprinted in the United States (I don't know why - likely the "Black" thing, but perhaps the zombie aspect of it, also?), so I'll have to share with you the French pages (Smurf comics aren't exactly hard to follow, luckily)...

He then gives you every page of the short story. Click through and scroll to the bottom of the page. Bonus: There's a bit about Simon Garth, Marvel's Living Zombie in there as well.

Books: The novel as zombie.

Mark McGurl takes a look at the bumper crop of zombie books in n + 1 and comes up with a novel thesis: Zombies novels are so hot right now because the novel itself is now an undead genre.

To say that the novel is a zombie genre is therefore not only to say that it may have outlived its life as a key cultural form, animated now only by its connections to film and television on the one hand, the university on the other. It is also to say something about what has often been taken, most recently by Benjamin Kunkel in an essay in Dissent, as the novel’s chief claim to our attention and respect and even political hope. This is its capacity for the creation of deep, psychologically complex fictional characters, the kind we find at the center of realist novels like Pride and Prejudice. Their “roundness” makes space for our fondest hopes for humanity, that it might stop and reflect and set a course for a better world. To the extent that these characters continue to appear in contemporary fiction, do they succeed in killing the crowd of zombies gnawing at the metaphorical door?

The essay focus's almost entirely on the canon of American zombie film and literature (I think Shaun of the Dead might be the only non-US production mentioned), but McGurl manages to get quite a bit of stuff out of the relatively slim sample. First he zeros in on the idea of the "zombie" as a character in a very specific genre sense:

Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can speak of “the zombie” in the first place, and why the specter of the ludicrous hovers even over the realist commitment to character. In his book on laughter Henri Bergson observes, “In one sense it might be said that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves.” When “clockwork” characters show up in popular genre fiction, as they so often do, critics are apt to take them as an aesthetic offense to the human. It might be more accurate to say that our aesthetic displeasure in hackneyed types records our confrontation with a truth about the human we would rather deny, but which the zombie brings to the fore. As a kind of character, then, the zombie is a pure negation of the concept of character at the heart of Austen’s realism.

From there he goes on to discuss how the absence of anything like traditional characterization basically forces us to treat zombies as allegories.

So: Zombies are anti-characters, but they do make for good allegories, their very flatness propelling us into speculation about what they might mean “on another level.” Since one thing they mean on that other level would seem to be “flatness” itself, it will not do to criticize zombies for being stiff and uninteresting, as allegorical characters have been for at least a few hundred years . . . [Allegory's] intellectual virtues are too essential to be dissolved into realism and that its most vivid modern manifestations are to be found in genre fiction. Above all, in a way that realism rarely does, allegory gives us a kind of vivid speculative access to the superhuman designs, whether spiritual or natural, that structure consciousness from without. This is especially true of science fiction and horror. These designs may constitute the ultimate reality, in comparison to which ordinary experience is only a kind of dream, but when they are rotated into the space of representation they can look very “unrealistic” indeed. Their realism is what we might call a speculative realism.

Before he finally comes to the punchline:

Once upon a time the designs of allegory were understood by direct reference to theology, and more than a hint of end-of-days religiosity remains in recent evocations of the otherwise secular zombie “apocalypse.” Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the best known and certainly the classiest example, trading up from the zombie to realistic-seeming depictions of postnuclear cannibals who want to eat a suspiciously Jesus-like boy. But look closely, notes Fletcher, and you will see that modernity brings about a basic reversal in the direction that allegory now tends to move. What used to take us higher toward celestial structures now takes us downward to the physical truths that determine our organic being and give it a hard deadline. McCarthy’s high seriousness as a writer has always coincided with a certain attraction to genre—in his case the western—but in a way the “badness” of actual genre fiction, the kind that never wins big literary awards, is a more authentic expression of our lowly, pulpy state. Real zombie stories are more honest about our essential stupidity than works like The Road, drowning out the last yelps of human pride in the tide of their own mediocrity.

I love that last line.

Which brings up this only semi-related issue. I found the image that kicks off this post GISing for some suitably zombificated imagery to use as an illustration. How f'ed up is that image? Sometimes I feel like the zombie holocaust just can't come fast enough.

DON'T STOMP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW! If you haven't entered ANTSS Killer Kaiju contest yet, you freakin' should! It's as easy as stomping on your favorite scale-model city.

Stuff: George Romero pulls an evil Captain Kirk from episode 37.

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough attempts a Marxist interpretation of the popularity of vampires and zombies:

Maybe Karl Marx, wrong about so much in the real world, could offer some clarification in the realm of make-believe. Could vampires, like the filthy rich, parasitic, aristocratic, and charismatic Cullens, be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of — and wish for — an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Aside from the analysis itself, Keough gives us a little gem of a reaction shot from the father of the modern zombie flick:

Not even George A. Romero, who as much as anyone can take credit for the zombie phenomenon — spawning it as he did back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead — can explain why they do this. “I don’t get it,” he remarked about these undead wannabes when I interviewed him recently about his newly released sixth film in his zombie franchise, Survival of the Dead, which opens next week. “You just want to say, ‘Get a life.’ ”

Wow. The dude responsible for Diary of the Dead thinks you're the one who needs to get over the whole zombie thing.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #19.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer, and assorted cast members from Dawn of the Dead, 2004.

Comics: Buried alive.

Tomorrow night, you could do you normal Friday thing and soil handfuls of tissue while whispering sweet nothings at Suicide Girls downloads. Or, you can save your dignity and your tissues by going to Desert Island - one of Brooklyn's finest post-Android's Dungeon era style comic shops - and celebrate the first ish of We Will Bury You.

Brought to you by the creative team of Grant, Grant, and Strahm, We Will Bury brings the Roaring Twenties to a screaming halt. Set in an alternate version of the Silent Cal years, the comic follows the adventures of a thief and an anarchist escort as they struggle for survival in a zombie-ridden Manhattan. The signing is from 7 to 9. Be there or be L7.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #13.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Eugene Clark in Land of the Dead, 2005.

"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #12.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Frances Dee and the shadow of Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie, 1943.

Mad science: Zombie animals.

Scientific American, a magazine whose title increasingly sounds like a deliberate and almost provocative anarchronism (like the CP in NAACP), has a nifty article and slide show on behavoir-changing parasites: parasites that not only infect a host, but hijack existing behavoirs and twist them to better serve the spread of the parasite. Here's two examples from the article:

In the case of the spooked spider (Plesiometa argyra), a parasitic wasp (Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga) lays her eggs on the spider's abdomen. Just before the larva emerges, the host spins a strange, new type of web—one that looks nothing like its usual wide nets. This silk platform, however, is perfectly suited to supporting a cocoon for the vulnerable young wasp larvae, which have been feasting on the spider's innards as they grow.

The snail-manipulating flatworm (Leucochloridium paradoxum) grows and multiplies inside the snail. Once ready to move on to its next host, the worms push up into the snail's tentacles, making them swell and squirm, mimicking the action of bugs that birds like to eat. As the snail crawls, blindly, into the sunlight, a passing bird is likely to swoop down to snatch a tasty tentacle or two. The worm-infested meal will then infect the bird, which passes it onto other snails via dubious droppings.

Movies: Like the actual experience of war, I just wanted it to be over.

I picked up George Hickenlooper's Grey Knight - shilled overseas with the infinitely cooler title of The Killing Box - with low expectations. I was expecting a hammy Southern revanchist horror flick about crazed hillbillies, with a schmeer of post-Glory Civil War class and Apocalypse Now guerra matto.

What's actually in the Grey Knight package is an odd fusion of Ken Burn's Civil War docu-epic and Victor Halperin's sadly under discussed Revolt of the Zombies. And, honestly, as far as inspirational shotgun weddings go, that's not half bad. Plus, on paper, the flicks got a pant's load of talent of talent to thrust that premise with gusto. Director George Hickenlooper was fresh off his brilliant documentary Hearts of Darkness. Monte Hellman, elder statesman of independent American cinema, was holding the editor's razor. In front of the camera, there's a cast full of competent actors: Corbin Bernsen, Adrian Pasdar, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, David Arquette - admittedly not the greatest show ever assembled under one roof, but certainly enough talent to get this strictly B-grade fright flick off the ground.

So, why do the results feel so lackluster?

Grey Knight suffers because it can't commit to its own weird premise. Either because Hickenlooper didn't think a monster pic was worth the effort or because he simply grew interested in narrative threads and themes peripheral to the main plot, the finished product feels schizo. In fact, the divided intention is so strong that one can almost tease out the other flick, the one I suspect Hickenlooper really wanted to make.

Let's talk about the movie that actually ended up in the can. Set at the height of the War of Northern Aggression, the stories centers around two principles: A union tracker named Thalman and a former Reb officer turned-POW named Strayn. This duo gets put in charge of the effort to find and neutralize a rogue group of Confederate and Union troops who are attacking Northern and Southern forces in Tennessee. Aside from showing the minimal effort at target discrimination that we use as the thin moral line between "just war" and "inhuman slaughter," this rogue group further distinguishes itself by crucifying the men it takes prisoner. The prisoners are hung upside down, nailed to a crude X of wood.

As it turns out, the renegade group is actually possessed by evil African spirits called the Makers. Once trapped in a well by the warriors of a tribal village, these spirits were freed by slave traders. These traders than brought the spirits to North America where (from what I could understand of the backstory) enslaved descendants of the original warrior tribe trapped them in a underwater cave in Tennessee.

We get all this backstory from Rebecca, a mute psychic ex-slave who comes long on the expedition to 1) give the viewer exposition on a need to know basis and 2) provide Strayn with a highly dubious shot at racial and historical redemption by becoming his love interest. Unable to speak for herself, she exists mainly so that the white characters in the film can position themselves with regards to the race issue. This embarrassingly clichéd character is all the more painful to watch because she's played by the talented and fiercely beautiful Cynda Williams, whose participation in this film was a brief pause between the sad end of her promising early career (Mo' Better Blues and One False Move) and the start of her transition to cheesy softcore (Wet and Condition Red). That filmmakers couldn't find anything better for Williams to do than to play a mute liberated slave who falls for a Confederate officer says something deeply sad about Hollywood.

But back to the film.

The Makers were released by a cannon blast during a short near-massacre of Strayn's forces. Strayn himself was carted off to Bowling Green prison, but his dead me are resurrected and, zombified, start to march in search of blood and new recruits. I should mention here that Grey Knight's undead are a curious breed: Like vampires, they drink blood and increase their numbers by feeding on the blood of their victims. They're also unable to cross running water, vulnerable to silver, and only come out at night. However, they've got no fangs. They all wear white smears of what I suppose is meant to evoke the face paint of African tribal warriors. These undead are also vocal and intelligent, even emotional: They mourn when their own get killed.

After a few one-sided encounters, the remnants of the Union scout group end up teaming with the remains of a Confederate rear guard unit to fight the undead troops. There's a battle. Some people die. The end.

Questionable as the racial politics may be, far more crippling are the films visuals. Though Hickenlooper and Hellmann have a study and functional sense of narrative, the film has a dull, washed out feel to it. Whether this was the unfortunate result of an effort to give the film a faded, historical look or simply the result of a lousy color transfer, I couldn't say. The result is a milky, muted palate that drains life from the film far more effectively than the movies pseudo-vampires. Hickenlooper also fails to bring his combat scenes to life. Although early film effectively presented the madness of Civil War Era combat, filmmakers from the 1960s and on have too often relied heavily on the assistance of Civil War re-enactors. The result, aside from fielding armies of retired white collar workers, is that the combats have a sort of stagy calm. Hickenlooper's fight scenes feel leaden.

That said, there's something interesting in Hickenlooper's faint commitment to the story he's shooting. Despite setting up the clear premise that the undead troops are (literally) bloodthirsty monsters, Hickenlooper gives a handful of them some key speeches that, I believe, suggest the outline of the film he would have rather made. Strip away the monster movie trappings and, instead, imagine a band of Southern and Union soldiers who have gone rogue because they refuse to fight for either cause. The Southern boys don't want to die so rich folks can keep slaves. The Union boys don't want to die in a far off field for a cause they don't sincerely care about. Instead of putting down a semi-zombie outbreak, the scout unit is meant to find these dangerously freethinking individuals and crush their rebellion before it spreads to other troops. That story is, I think, what Hickenlooper wanted to do. His speeches about finding a third way out of the war, his attention to curious historical details, his refusal to embrace any of the larger moral issues of the conflict at the cost of an oddly myopic populism - it's when he's focusing on what he cares about, the flick gets a shot in the arm. Sadly, those bright moments aren't enough to carry the whole film.