Revisiting Planet Terror (2007)

Going back for a second taste of PLANET TERROR, the first half of the GRINDHOUSE experience, leaves you with much the same feeling as seeing the theatrical version - there's not much there in terms of depth, but what's there is a hoot to watch.

Director Robert Rodriguez channels his inner John Carpenter in a romp that's heavy on the fun and the splatter rather than any any actual chills. The story concerns an outbreak of something called DC-2, a noxious military chemical that turns those susceptible into flesh melting, cannibal ghouls. It's up to a motley crew of misfits including a one-legged stripper, a tow-truck driving ex-Special Forces commando, a sexy set of twin babysitters and a lesbian doctor on the run from her psychopathic husband to stop the threat and make their way to salvation - in this case Mexico.

Or something like that. Does it really matter when everything is this fun and over the top? Not really. Rodriguez isn't as concerned with sticking to the confines of what constitutes a "grindhouse" picture as he is filling the screen with incredible images and action that turn the genre on its ear. There are some serious nods to Carpenter here: the score, done by Rodriguez, is fantastic, pulsing and driving the action forward. The whole beginning of the movie is an exercise in tone, setting up the major locations and characters so that when the shit hits the fan, everything you've seen is revisited in a different light, in the aftermath of the zombie (infected, whatever) invasion.

The real shine in PLANET TERROR comes from its cast. You get two great performances from the "where have they been" category of Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey as brothers warring over a secret barbecue sauce recipe. Josh Brolin gives the most genuinely creepy performance as Dr. Block, the insane doc who terrorizes his wife both as a shitty husband and a flesh-eating ghoul. But the real stars of the movie are the women, who get all the best lines and action scenes. Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling, the stripper turned savior of humanity, embodies a deliciousness that carries over to everyone she interacts with in the movie. Likewise Marley Shelton, facing the double threat of her husband and the army of ghouls taking over. When these two finally meet you get my favorite line in the movie:

"I'm Cherry."

"You sure are."

I think the beginning of the movie works better than the end, where Rodriguez goes completely crazy with exploding bodies, dripping genitalia (courtesy of Quentin Tarantino), and the second movie I've seen this month to feature a helicopter decapitating monsters:

Throw in the original DAWN OF THE DEAD and I'll hit the tri-fecta.

The beginning, however, is all menace and grit, and it's here that Rodriguez really puts the pulp and sleaze into his picture. Low angles, choppy editing, and the wonderful degrading of the screen itself all make for a thrill of a beginning to the movie. Instead of trying to write something new, I'll excerpt what I originally wrote in the theatrical review:

But the real star of Planet Terror belongs to the screen itself. At first glance you might think the pops, scratches, and tinting issues were added more or less at random; a closer look shows that each Snap! Crackle! and Pop! is ingeniously inserted to enhance the mood and tone of what's going in the film. Rodriguez, instead of trying to authentically "grind" up his movie utilizes some of the key components of what makes a film a "grind" film and forces them to propel his story along. Watch the really violent action scenes - the quality of the film jumps and degrades in sync to what's going on. The quieter scenes don't have as much going on, but what does go on is subtle and effective. Take the scene where Tarantino begins menacing the two heroines in an elevator. As he talks, the film slowly turns red, and fades back as they closer to their destination. It's a small piece, but does wonders to the film. The ending is epic and funny, and wraps up what would have been a great single feature all on it's own.

Great gore, great fun, and a truly ridiculous ending that will have you in stitches, PLANET TERROR is the happy-go-lucky side of the GRINDHOUSE experience. And while it might not have some of the depth and dread of DEATH PROOF, it may ultimately have the more replay value.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

I have a little of a love/hate relationship with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. On the one hand it's original, well-shot, and stylish in its very low-budget way.

On the other hand, it is still, more than 30 years after its original release, and with the lights on, the most relentlessly terrifying film I have ever seen.

Every time I watch it I am scared like no other movie has ever come close to scaring me. I'm disturbed, horrified, and apt to hit the Pause button on my remote and walk away for a few minutes to break the steady stream of fear that permeates every frame of this movie. It doesn't try to overdo it with gore, it doesn't try to ingratiate itself with in-jokes and self-referential moments. It's pure Gothic horror in the Americana tradition, and director Tobe Hooper wrings every moment with style and dread.

What can you say about a movie where so much has been said already? There's the terrific prologue by John Laroquette, an early attempt (so often done now) to dupe the audience into thinking what they're witnessing is a true story. A series of flashed images of rotting corpses leads to the first true moment of the film: a close-up of a rotted corpse's face, which then slowly zooms out to reveal an instance of grave desecration while the news report of the event plays in the background:

The next scene is of a dead armadillo - roadkill, something that will take on a new meaning at the film's end. But already we're filled with nothing but images of death, and we're only 5 minutes into the movie. The grainy 16mm film only adds to the authenticity Hooper was looking for when production rolled in the oppressive Texas heat.

The heat and the sun play an important role in the movie. It's palpable, and as our group of youths trucking across the state pick up the mysterious and seriously screwed up hitchhiker, things begin to take an ugly turn. I think that's one of the things that makes TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE so frightening - in most other horror films the daylight hours are the hours where our protagonists gain respite from the horror, when they investigate and search for an answer.

Here the daylight doesn't save anyone. Hooper immediately gets things going, killing off half his group in less than 5 minutes. Kirk and Pam find an old house after looking for a place to swim. They're also looking for some gas, so Kirk decides to investigate the house, which is open. What could go wrong? It's bright daylight outside. He goes in, and hears squealing at the end of the hallway. in a red room adorned with skulls. He's maybe there for 15 seconds when he meets one of horror's most enduring characters:

Two hits and Kirk's done. The scene closes with Leatherface violently slamming shut a steel door that blocks the room. Hooper then moves outside to Pam, who now is wondering what's taking Kirk so long:

It's a great shot, low and following her the whole way to the house. She walks in, hears some weird sounds coming from one of the rooms, and stumbles in to find a crazy assortment of chicken feathers and bones, which wouldn't be so bad except that a lot of the bones are human. Leatherface shows up, and she books, running straight out the door except...

Leatherface ain't having none of that. He drags her back in, hangs her on a meat hook and proceeds to do nasty things with the titular chain saw. There's a great moment where for a second the camera pans down from Pam to see a bucket below her feet. To catch, you see.

There's just so much that works in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE - I could probably write pages detailing each scene, each little nuance that serves to propel the film onwards, never slowing down. The music, a weird blend of low droning tones and jarring percussive noises, was partly composes by Hooper, and instead of using it throughout the movie to falsely set a certain mood, he uses it very sparingly. Whole minutes go by without anything but the background noise. The use of widescreen is great too: despite his limitations, Hooper makes each of his shots exciting and large in scope.

And in Leatherface and his demented family Hooper creates a terror that is at once completely alien yet hauntingly familiar to us. It the family unit, complete with sibling bickering, father/son confrontation, and a twinge of regret. For the father of this clan, the killing's necessary (although they never tell you why, and that's more frightening than knowing), but he doesn't really like it. Of course, that doesn't stop him from cheering when they get Grandpa to heft the hammer up for a killing blow.

Sally, the main protagonist in the movie, undergoes so much pain and torture you almost wish she would have died. My favorite moment with comes when she first escapes Leatherface by doing something that, on paper, sounds like normal movie-fare: she jumps out a window to the ground below. Now when you read that, you probably envision this: she runs, stops, is trapped. She looks around. Only a window. She turns back. Leatherface is right behind her. She turns, runs, and jumps out the window.

Well, I didn't see the 2003 remake, but if they included this scene in it, that's probably how it went. Not so here in 1974. Sally runs top speed up a flight of stairs, down a hallway and full speed out a second story window without pausing once to stop and see if she was being followed. Just full-bore, flat-out running for her life and damn if she's gonna stop until she's 100 miles away from all this madness.

And the end of the movie, where she finally does escape by jumping into the back of a passing truck and Leatherface does his crazy chain saw dance, you get a sense that the world is so much more terrible than you ever imagined, because it wasn't smarts or skill that saved Sally.

It was pure blind luck, plain and simple. And perhaps that more than anything else is what makes THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE so frightening. No Good triumphing over Evil, no lessons learned.

Just dumb luck, and nothing else.

Mad Love (1935)

When you think of 30's horror, you can't help but bring to mind classics like DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, and THE MUMMY. But there's a special place in my heart for MAD LOVE, directed by THE MUMMY's Karl Freund, and featuring Peter Lorre in his first Hollywood role as the sinister and quite insane Dr. Gogol. It was a featured film in my college film criticism class, and seeing it for the first on the big screen is one of those cinema moments I treasure as much as the first time I saw STAR WARS at the drive-in, or KING KONG with my Dad on a hot Sunday afternoon.

MAD LOVE is a twisted, surreal tale of madness and unrequited love. Peter Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a brilliant surgeon who nightly visits the Theatre des Horreurs, modeled after the famous Grand Guignol in Paris where he sits in the same box every night, mesmerized by the beauty of Yvonne Orlac, an actress in the gruesome drama.

The opening scene as he enters the theater is wonderfully evocative of Freund's expressionistic background in the German cinema - among other works he was the cinematographer for Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS, and also for Tod Browning's DRACULA. Here he works with another great D.O.P. - Gregg Toland, who would make a huge splash a few years later filming CITIZEN KANE. The film opens with a close-up of a hanging man, and slowly follows Gogol into the theater, becoming more surreal by the minute, each images passing lazily by like some nightmare made manifest. Doormen wear frightening masks and carry bones to open the doors. And the coat check girl? Let's just say her head's not in the game.

One of the most startling images in the film is Gogol's half-eclipsed face in the midst of ecstasy as Yvonne's performance ends in a scream of agony as a hot poker is placed in, shall we say, a delicate area. I know a lot of this may sound tame in 2007, but in 1935? This was some crazy stuff, believe you me!

Elsewhere in the story Stephen Orlac (played by FRANKENSTEIN'S Colin Clive), Yvonne's husband and a gifted pianist, is riding the train to meet his wife and finally start their honeymoon. Also on the train is Rollo, a convicted murderer who made his living as a knife thrower in the carnival. One train wreck later, and Stephen's hands are crushed, as are his chances of every playing the piano again.

Or are they? After Yvonne runs to Gogol, he secretly grafts the hands of the executed Rollo onto Stephen. The operation is a success, and no one is the wiser until Stephen's hands begin to show some peculiar habits, such as the ability to throw a knife...

From here you can probably guess where things go, and that's okay, because the brilliance in MAD LOVE is not in it's story but in its execution. Freund lays on image after image of surreal horror. And in the face of Peter Lorre he has the perfect tool. The movie is full of close-ups of Gogol, exhibiting every kind of emotion, from curious inquisitiveness after witnessing Rollo's decapitation...

...to his final descent into madness while operating on a young girl:

Gogol's obsession with Yvonne leads him to convince Stephen that his hands, and him by extension, are dangerous to everyone around him. After murdering Stephen's step-father, Orlac meets a disguised Gogol, who tells him that he is the resurrected Rollo, and that Gogol has re-attached his head. Then, from out of the shadows perhaps one of the creepiest moments in film:

This is just one of many creep-out moments in the film. Shadows play across faces, accentuate and distort corridors and alleyways. There's a running motif of duality in the movie as well - numerous scenes make excellent use of mirrors (the operating room mirrors especially) to display the warring sides of Gogol's mind. Duality is made even more explicit in the climax of the movie, as Yvonne goes to confront Gogol, only to find a wax figure of herself in his drawing room. Gogol's madness by this time is complete - Yvonne, trapped in Gogol's drawing room looks on in horror as he slowly comes up the stairs:

Long tracking shots, dissolves from gargoyles to hideous masks, innovative use of shadow and light, and above all the totally twisted performance of Peter Lorre all serve to make MAD LOVE a delight watch over 70 years after its initial release. No, there are no real scares for an audience fed on torture horror and CGI splatter, but for pure mood and quirkiness MAD LOVE is hard to beat.

Well Now I Just Feel Lazy...

The Projection Booth is running one zombie movie review a day for the month of October. Man, he even has a cool graphic:

Here's the link to the feature to check it out. Cool stuff.

28 Weeks Later (2007)

In a split second you make a choice. Sacrifice or Salvation. Don, holed up in a farmhouse with his wife and a few other survivors in the beginning of 28 WEEKS LATER, makes that choice when a group of people infected with the Rage Virus begin ripping apart the farmhouse. Torn between jumping out a window to freedom or staying to try and save his wife, Don jumps and, in what looks to be an act of self preservation turns into something a whole lot worse in this sequel to the popular 28 DAYS LATER.

For anyone who hasn't seen Danny Boyle's re-examination of the "zombie" picture, the universe of both DAYS and WEEKS concern the spread of something called the Rage Virus, a highly contagious disease that turns anyone coming into contact with it, either through the blood or saliva, into a raging fiend within 20 seconds - bloodthirsty and completely apeshit. 28 DAYS LATER tells one man's story as he wakes up from a coma 28 days after the outbreak to find his country falling apart. 28 WEEKS later follows the fate of one unlucky family as Britain attempts to rebuild and re-populate, only to suffer another outbreak.

Nerds and geeks everywhere argue relentlessly as to whether or not these films actually should be classified as "zombie" pictures. Can you call it a zombie movie if the zombies in question aren't actually dead, don't return to life, and run faster than most Olympians? While I greatly prefer my zombies in the Romero style, shuffling and groaning their way inevitably toward you, I think the spirit of the zombie film, of being oppressed by huge numbers, the terror of holing up while the rest of the world collapses is very much on display in these films, and the argument is really besides the point.

Fellow Nerds and Geeks, you may commence your flaming.

In the 6 months since the initial outbreak, the American military has come over to assist Britain in the re-building process. A large section of London has been cleared and people are beginning to move back in. Don, reunited with his two children, tries to cope with his decision at the farmhouse, telling his children that he tried but was unable to save their mother. Don's children Tammy and Andy head outside the "Green Zone" in an effort to retrieve their belongings and mementos of their mother, only to find the real thing hiding out upstairs, somehow surviving the Infected attack. Upon being brought back to the protected zone, scientists discover she's immune to the infection, but still acts as a carrier. One repentant kiss later and Don finds out how quickly the virus can spread, and like that 28 WEEKS LATER takes off.

Everything is filmed in a gritty documentary style, and echoes of Iraq and a post 9/11 world reverberate throughout the story. After a terrifying and frantic opening, things begin to move at a more measured pace, and the real tension oftentimes comes not from impending Infected attacks, but from the military, whose "Code Red" focuses on extermination when containment fails. The danger comes from two directions at once: in one scene our main group locks themselves in a car not only to escape the Infected, but to seal themselves off from the chemical weapons being used by the Army to eradicate a menace they can no longer differentiate.

And then there's the presence of Robert Carlyle's Infected Father. Another innovation of the sequel is to track the progress of one of the Infected, and Carlyle's actions are more brutal and horrifying than anything I remember in the first film. His transformation and subsequent first killing jump off the screen. I squirmed in my seat. And his constant tracking of his kids makes a weird kind of logical and thematic sense: he abandoned his wife and family once, and he's determined never to do that again. So what if now he now wants to rip their throat out? Since we've already established that we're playing outside of the accepted zombie genre, there's nothing to say that these characters don't have some sense of memory, of purpose. Their very movements and actions denote purpose - why else would they be running so fast?

If 28 WEEKS LATER suffers, it suffers from merely fleshing out a concept instead of being innovative itself. 28 DAYS LATER turned in a refreshing new type of horror film, and it's style of shaky handicams have permeated every other genre of film. But what I liked about 28 WEEKS later is that it doesn't try to give you bigger and better: it strives instead to flesh out the existing world, and tell a story that focuses more on humanity's response to the situation rather than the situation itself. Moody, scary, and filled with some really intense moments (the scene in total darkness with only a night-vision scope, the awesome fire-bombing of London) make 28 WEEKS LATER a sharp, surprising little film.