March 19, 2004
By D.K. Holm
Mall Rats
DAWN OF THE DEAD
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
What are the tenets of zombie science? I'd like some clarity on that. I'd like to know some of the medical principals involved in zombieism. I ask only because, coming out of a packed and unruly advance screening of DAWN OF THE DEAD recently, with obviously decaying bodies pressing up against me and pushing and clawing to get out, I felt as if I indeed were trapped amid a crowd of untamed undead.
I've seen scores of zombie movies, and though they are more consistent than, say, films in the vampire genre, which drops or adds mirror reflections or daytime sleep requirements or deadly sunlight at whim, there are some variations.
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For example in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the zombies are afraid of fire, unlike some later films. Sometimes they seem to act in concert with each other. And the ghouls don't only eat humans. One starved zombie grabs up a bug off a tree limb and consumes it. Ah, well. Chacun ô son ghôul.
Also, in NIGHT, the zombies don't just walk blindly. They have some rudimentary elements of sight, and push aside impediments. One even tries to use a car door handle. And where do they come from? The distributing entity compelled Romero and the producers of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to tack on an "explanation" of how the dead rose, but no one remembers it now or probably even cares. In DAY OF THE DEAD, through the vehicle of Dr. Logan and his "specimen" Bub, we learn a little more about zombie medical science, for example that they live about 12 years in this state (until the core brain finally erodes) and can be taught rudimentary tasks.
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Zack Snyder in his brilliant, riveting, action-packed remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD harks back to Romero's original silence on the origin of the zombies. They are just there, an immutable fact, something to be dealt with now. And they don't move with somnambulistic gravitas as in Romero's films. Zombie walking is a core issue and a big problem. According to the audio track on the new Anchor Bay DVD of DAWN OF THE DEAD, Romero realized that he couldn't show the extras how to walk like zombies, otherwise they would all do the same thing, so in the end he could only give oral instructions on the matter.
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Snyder's zombies are only interested in human beings. One action sequences centers on a dog enlisted into "St. Bernard" duty, which treads harmlessly among the indifferent Zombies. And in Snyder's version, the zombies move like Olympic track stars, fast and furious (like the diseased mad people of 28 DAYS LATER). One legless fiend even uses the pipes in an underground garage as a walker, like the Morton character in his train compartment in Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.
DAWN OF THE DEAD 2004 begins with a creeping foreshadowing of what is to come and then once the monsters hit the action doesn't really let up for the next 70 minutes (the film is rather short and feels as if it might have been cut down; it also looks like cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti's images may have been printed dark, in order to minimize blood, the old TAXI DRIVER trick; one hopes that the DVD version will be longer and bloodier).
The film begins with Milwaukee nurse Ana (the Uma-ish Sarah Polley) trying to get off her shift. Back in her suburban sprawl, she chats with a neighbor's kid, Vivian, and then has "date night" with her husband. But by dawn, Vivian is in their hallway and the sleepy couple is suddenly awakened to the horrors of what has started between the time they went to bed and now.
When Ana finally escapes the house she takes one look at the chaos around her and knows that something sickeningly big and disastrous has happened. It's a real 9/11 moment, with a beautiful panning shot from behind Ana's head as she takes it all in. A neighbor points a gun at her and says stay there, and then he is squashed by an EMS van. And that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Every plan that anybody comes up with fails in some horrible, disastrous manner, like the neighbor simply trying to determine if Ana is still human.
Without giving too much more away, Ana finds her way to a mall (Cross Roads) where, with about 10 or 12 others, she tries to stay alive, until it seems better to try and escape. The ending is ambiguous (at least to this viewer).
For a directorial debut, Zack Snyder's film is pretty damned impressive. Credit must also go to James Gunn's clever screenplay, but it was presumably Snyder who came up with some of the amazing shots in this film, among them a beautiful maze-like geographical shot from overhead of Ana as she drives home at the start. And I haven't seen such good shots of a car moving through traffic since BLOWUP.
However, it must have been Gunn who came up with the names for the mall shops (Bookmark, Metropolis, Hallowed Grounds — a coffee shop), and funny idea of having not all the last people alive on earth being especially nice, especially the sarcastic lazy rich guy with the sharp tongue ("Were they dead?" "Deadish"). By the way, the script adheres closely to Kristin Thompson's 20-minute four-act script breakdown. And credit must also be bestowed upon Niven Howie, whose sharp ending keeps you on edge and whose final credit sequence says a lot with a little.
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Buffs will enjoy the homages to the previous DAWN, such as the inclusion of previous cast and crewmembers, including Scott Reiniger (here as The General), Tom Savini as The County Sheriff and Ken Foree as The Televangelist. Other viewers may be a little startled at the presence of Matt Frewer. There are several minor film allusions, so integrated into DAWN that they might not even be allusions. I counted citations from DEAD CALM, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and SORCERER among others.
The cast is uniformly excellent, from Ving Rhames as a hardened cop, to Jake Weber (who usually plays villains) as the quick-thinking white guy, to Mekhi Phifer as a guy who really wants to change his life, and Michael Kelly as a security guard whose character subtly changes through the course of the film.
Polley has kind of an Uma action-thing going, and QT may enjoy the lavish shots of her feet at the start of the film. But she plays a character who has no time for sorrow; everything happens so fast in this film that she has one brief crying jag in her car and that's it. When Rhames's character first comes upon her, he orders, "Say something," and she replies "Please" with the last bit of human softness she can muster.
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Like most horror films, DAWN OF THE DEAD is essentially comic. And it seems to offer no hope for frail humanity in the face of whatever caused the zombification. In its wake, families, friends, institutions turn against each other. In order to emerge from the film without being thoroughly depressed, you have to figure out if it is really about something else, such as the visitation of a religious justice on secular humanity, or as a diatribe against human incompetence, or a protest against vulgar over-population. The meaning of the film may reside in no better repository than its beautiful images, its overhead shots, its close-ups, and the poignant beauty of the inert, useless exercise machines that the film's mall rats run past for their lives.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume 15
KILL BILL VOL. 1
As mentioned briefly in last week's column, some KILL BILL-knocking Internet posters decry the film because it is, they say, almost wholly derived from SHURAYUKIHIME, from 1973, otherwise known in English as LADY SNOWBLOOD, or BLOOD SNOW. I decided to take matters into my own hands and investigate the charges that Tarantino completely swiped KB from LADY SNOWBLOOD.
I walked down the street to my local video shop, Mike Clark's store, Movie Madness, one of the few near-complete video shops in this town, and nearly on the level of Scarecrow Video in Seattle (Clark's store is also filled with class-enclosed memorabilia, such as Orson Welles's suit coat from TOUCH OF EVIL). I quickly found a video tape of LADY SNOWBLOOD in the Samurai subsection of Japanese Film, and watched it a couple of times in the course of a day.
Tarantino makes no secret of the SHURAYUKIHIME's influence on him. After all, at the end of KILL BILL VOL. 1 he uses the theme song from it, "Urami-Bushi," written and performed by the star, Meiko Kaji. But the parallels are striking — and so are the differences.
SHURAYUKIHIME (I think the title translates literally as "Netherworld Snow Lady") tells the story of Yuki (Kaji), who has been raised for vengeance. Her mother, Sayo Kashima, watched as her husband, the newly arriving village schoolteacher, and her son, were brutally killed by bandits. The time is 1874, and Sayo's husband is a victim of the Keetsuzei riots, in which gangsters such as these murderers ran a draft-dodging scam. Officials employed in monitoring the draft, who were in danger from such thugs, dressed in white, as does Sayo's husband on this grim day of arrival at the new village.
There is a lot of back-story in SHURAYUKIHIME. Sayo is kidnapped by the hoods and for three days is held prisoner and raped in a water mill, where the sound of the wood upon wood is like the clacking water measure during the snowy final fight of KB. One of the four thugs, Shokei Tokuchi (the one who wears a scarf over his head), takes Sayo off with him as a love slave, but she manages to stab him to death in bed one night (this scene is slightly reminiscent of O-Ren's cartoon killing of her parents' slayer). While on a trek to then find the other three she is arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the slammer, she has sex with any man who comes along, inviting the scorn of her fellow inmates, who think she is a slut. But Sayo has a goal in mind. She must give birth, and that child must grow up to avenge Sayo (her grim prison sex evokes thematic tangents of the Bride's life as an unwilling and unknowing comatose hooker).
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As it happens, Sayo gives birth to a girl, Yuki, and then she dies in childbirth. Nevertheless, Yuki is raised to seek vengeance. She is trained non-stop for 20 years in martial arts by a harsh monk (in scenes that are, or at least once were, copied slightly for what is now KILL BILL VOL. II — certain stills and trailer bits indicate their presence). Then, in the year 1894, she sets off on her trek for street justice.
Shokei Tokuchi already being dead, Yuki goes hunting for the three remaining hoods, Takemura Banzo (the one in a fedora), Tsukamoto Gishiro (who wears a headband), and the sole woman, and perhaps the most vicious of the lot, Kitahama Okono. Perhaps just to keep her hand in, she also kills one Shibayama Genzo, a gangster of some kind apparently unrelated to the others (it's hard to tell), but whose death early in the film introduces the viewer to Yuki's powerful bloodletting skills.
Banzo, once crudely stylish in a fedora, Yuki now finds to be a drunken gambler with a selfless daughter, Kobue, who secretly sells herself to finance his "life-style." Yuki mercilessly slices him up on a rocky beach, announcing, "I will neither forgive nor spare you." Her killing someone with a child in the equation is of course similar to the first kill in KILL BILL, with speeches that echo Yuki's.
In the longest sequence, Yuki goes after Okono, and that bloody, dark, and gruesome scene (which features a relentless torture session) leads to Yuki's confrontation with the final hoodlum, whom she thought was dead, but who is now a prominent citizen. The last shots are ambiguous. Yuki, once again outside in the harsh elements, stumbles to the ground, where the blood from her wounds mixes with the cold white snow. She seems to expire, and then be re-energized. Sequel, anyone? (There appear to have been two.)
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Director Toshiya Fujita does a fantastic job with this material. The film is visually lively, with unexpected and intriguing angles, excellent inside-for-out studio sets, and a lushly sentimental and tragic surface that doesn't undermine the action.
The KILL BILL parallels are fairly obvious. SHURAYUKIHIME is divided up into chapters ("Vengeance Binds Love and Hate," "Crying Bamboo Dolls of the Netherworld," and "Umbrella of Blood, Heart of Strewn Flowers"), has (male) narration, tells part of the story in manga-style (not animated) illustrations, and has a non-chronological format. There is also lots of spurting blood, an arm hacked off, a blade across the face, and there is a shot of the four villains looking down on Sayo with contempt (with a terrific reverse shot of Sayo looking up at them with a breathtaking expression of growing hatred on her face).
But there are significant differences. The sex of the individual gang members is flipped. Tarantino has added and subtracted numerous plot points (inspired by other movies?). Music is a bigger presence in Tarantino's film. And the tone of KILL BILL tends to be humorous. Tarantino is totally behind The Bride; whereas Fujita indicates at what cost Yuki's vengeance demands from her, and how degraded the whole society happens to be (when the schoolteacher dies, he cries in shock, "How can such things be?").
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Personally, I've come around to the notion that cinema is a magpie art and that it does Tarantino, a true film lover, no discredit to borrow from whatever inspires him. In any case, SHURAYUKIHIME isn't the only film to have links with KILL BILL. You could argue that THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and even the Dirty Harry film SUDDEN IMPACT bear some similarity, intentional or not, to KB. Outright theft and taking credit for ideas not one's own is, of course, horrific, but Tarantino is always careful to announce the influences on KB; and in fact, he and his fans may very well enjoy the guessing game of tracking down allusions.
For the reader's further edification, here is an English translation of the SHURAYUKIHIME theme song, copied from the subtitles of the tape I watched:
"Begrieved snow falls / In the dead morning. / Stray dog howls, / And the footsteps of Geta pierce the air. / I walk with the weight of the Milky Way on my shoulders / But an umbrella that holds onto the darkness is all there is. / I'm a woman who walks at the brink of life and death, / Who's emptied my tears many moons ago. / All the compassion, tears, and dreams / The snowy nights … and tomorrows … hold no meaning. / I've immersed my body in the river of vengeance / And thrown away my womanhood, many moons ago."
NEXT TIME: DOGVILLE
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