By D.K. Holm
July 19, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Dead, Again
UNDEAD
Here is my audio review of UNDEAD.
I wanted to like UNDEAD. I really did. I was hoping that it would continue the streak of mostly good zombie movies that horror buffs have been enjoying over the past few years, including SHAUN OF THE DEAD, 28 DAYS LATER, and the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD. But UNDEAD kept fighting me. It fought me every step, every frame of the way, for almost its entire 104 minute running time.
An Australian horror film completed two years ago, and made by a pair of directors credited as the Spierig Brothers, who turn out to be the twins Peter and Michael Spierig. Remember that name, though. It will have relevance a few paragraphs from now.
UNDEAD takes place in the Australian fishing community of Berkeley (is the name an allusion to the intellectual Eden of California's famous campus?). One day, flaming objects begin to plummet to the earth, in some cases incinerating innocent passersby, shoppers, and cricket players. Shortly thereafter, zombies begin to roam the countryside, smelling out living flesh they can consume.
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As is typical of zombie films, a small band of survivors gather in a central location to try and ride out the invasion. Singled out for our sympathy is Rene (Felicity Mason), a former beauty queen turned shill for the city, yet who still can't get by. As the film begins, she appears to be selling or at least losing her farm, with a sleazy guy from the city waiting to drive her away (the Spierig brothers do not make plot exposition entirely clear in this film). She doesn't get far. Abandoned cars clog the road. Zombified Berkeleyans are on the attack. She runs to a local farmhouse just as an acid rain begins to burn her flesh.
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The farmhouse is at first like something out of TEXAS CHAINSAW, but it turns out to be the home base of one Marion (Mungo McKay), the local loon who is an isolationist survivalist with the shooting skills of El Mariachi in DESPERADO. Joined by a shrill pregnant couple who had been trying to fly out, and an inept G. Gordon Liddy-like cop and his raw recruit, Marion leads his ad hoc team from the living room to a basement tunnel, thence to a bomb shelter which nobody likes, and then back up to the second floor, and into a garage, where Marion drives them out into the open landscape. This sequence takes about 45 grueling minutes.
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Marion drives. More rain comes. The trekkers find themselves stymied by a strange barrier with no discernable top layered with large metallic thorns like shark fins (more about sharks in a minute). The stupid cop climbs up and falls back down, a Jack unable to man this particular beanstalk. His ditzy partner is either zombified, killed by the acid rain, or just collapses (it wasn't clear to me).
Throughout this time, Marion has been having "acid flashbacks" if you will, memories of being caught in the rain while fishing. The fish turn deadly and fly at him. He slugs them, shoots them, and then gets rained upon, which culminates in his being scooped up in a beam by the aliens hiding in the sky this whole time. It turns out that the zombification, the acid rain, the barrier, and the abductions have been the work of robe-covered aliens who look not unlike the cute little aliens in CE3K. No anal probes, though. It's not clear what point of Marion's flashbacks serve. He seems to get sick, then cured, then in the end sick again. The aliens, it turns out, have selected only Berkeley, and appear to be playing games with the residents, turning them into zombies then back into human beings, before abducting them, where they float in the air above the cloud cap. The military keeps curiosity seekers and religious fanatics out, as if they were surrounded a more violent Midwich, whose cuckoos are in a literal cloud cuckoo-land.
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As you may have noticed, the Spierigs liked to quote promiscuously from other movies. Among the movies that UNDEAD quotes to varying degrees are INVADERS FROM MARS, THE CRAZIES, E.T., JAWS, and other films by John Milius and George Romero. There is nothing inherently wrong with this Bartlett's approach to filmmaking. One has the same mandate as filmmakers who don't quote, which is to be entertaining and interesting. The Spierigs' movie is too confusing to achieve that, however.
If there is a filmmaker who dominates their attention, it is Steven Spielberg. Bits and pieces like a patchwork quilt are woven into the fabric of UNDEAD. Marion is a form of Quint; the aliens evoke variations on Spielberg's interest in the alleged life form; even perhaps by coincidence, the directors all almost share a first syllable in their last name. They even quote a short jaunty musical phrase from John Williams's score for JAWS, not once, not twice, but thrice, and yet to no specific end I could discern.
In fact, one of the things that fought me throughout the film was the dreadful musical score. Heavy with the oboes and bassoons, it was usually at odds with what you were seeing, amusing when it should have been tense, non-melodic when it could have been pleasing. In over all effect, like a Spike Lee score, laid over a film without diligence paid to the music's relationship to the visuals.
Another annoying aspect of the film is its monochrome coloring. The special effects, which the Spierigs created on their computers during nine months of post production, are sometimes nifty, but in the end invisible through the glass of blue that the filmmakers insist that everything be shown.
UNDEAD ends on a note of poised stasis. Like Julianne Moore at the end of SAFE, Rene is perfectly free. She has her farm back, and has a degree of isolation. All she has to do is wear a gas mask at all times, and cling to Marion's three-barreled weapon as she keeps her eyes on the fenced in zombies just across the way. As it unspools, UNDEAD feels like a movie that will never end. Then its conclusion reveals that it really is a movie without end.
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There is a curious moment in ICE PRINCESS (Disney DVD, 2005, $29.95, Tuesday, July 19, 2005; also in full frame). It occurs in about chapter 11 of the disc version. Kim Cattrall as the tough minded skating coach Tina hands something to Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg), the physics whiz with a knack for ice-skating who is about to go out and skate in a regional competition. The problem is that we don't see what it is. Is the object a box of some kind? What's in it? Cattrall's subsequent explanation of what it is doesn't even clarify. It's not until Trachtenberg takes the box, opens it, removes something, and proceeds to stick one in her ear. They are ear plugs. Suddenly, Cattrall's comments about the box make sense. It's such an awkward moment that the actors even point it out in the audio commentary track that comes on the disc.
The question is, why didn't the director, Tim Fywell (I CAPTURE THE CASTLE) do something about it at the time? How was such a crucial moment allowed to be spoiled by inattention?
I have a theory about that. The awkward moment could have easily been fixed by a simple close up. A full frame of the box in Cattrall's hand would have instantly clarified what was going on and the dialogue would have immediately made sense. But I think that a close up didn't even occur to Fywell because directors, especially those out of television like him, don't think in close-ups. They think in flat plain medium shots. They think in dialogue, rather than images. A sudden clarifying insert is not part of their cinematic vocabulary.
The great run of modern directors don't think in pictures. I almost kind of doubt if they ever did, given how mediocre most movies have been for the past 100 years. They don't even think visually when the obvious solution to a narrative problem is a picture. It's odd.
But that's the situation with ICE PRINCESS. It is a fine little film that states an upbeat message for little girls everywhere, and does it for the most part in clear, easy language without any of that hipppity-hoppity music or drugs or sex or craziness or drag strip cruising or sexual dancing or interracial fucking. It is as pure as the packed ice that Casey skates across in the pond behind her house where she lives fatherless with her teacher mother, who is so old fashioned her telephone has a dial.
The only scary aspect of the film is a competitive skater prone to Goth makeup and ice skates that look like jack boots. Other than that, ICE PRINCESS posits a world in which people can change. The harsh coach can soften up. The mom (Joan Cusack) can see her daughter's real potential. And the mean girls in class (it's always a trio) can melt into real people (well, most of them do, anyway).
ICE PRINCESS is more or less guaranteed to induce tears from about the second bar of its opening theme music (at least it did in me, a sucker for teen girl coming of age movies). It appears to have been less of a hit for Disney than the company expected (only $24 million; but it couldn't have cost all that much). I can see why it "flopped." It is too serious. It has a few jokes and some good dialogue; but not enough. It's has the requisite number of songs (though they all sound the same, like any given Sleater-Kinney album). But worst of all, it is too adult. The ending is thoroughly realistic. Not downbeat, just not the mega happy, awe inspiring, joy inducing climax that people seem to want these days.
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The disc will probably do well. The film was really made for the small screen, where quiet triumphs are suitable. It's a good widescreen transfer for a movie that looks like a really good made-for-TV afternoon special, with English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, French Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, and captions in English and French. The main supplement is an audio commentary by Trachtenberg and Trevor Blumas (the obligatory love interest), along with Hayden Panettiere and Kirsten Olson, two real skaters who appear in the film and acquit themselves quite well. Aside from the usual incomprehensible squealing and dull production anecdotes, the track does have some interest especially at the end, when the skaters get on the case of the film for being inaccurate about the way skate competitions are staged (ESPN wouldn't have cover the competition Casey is in, and they don't use spotlights at said competitions — those are for stars on ice). There are also two music videos ("Reach" by Caleigh Peters and "No One" by Aly & A.J.), and five deleted or alternative scenes (an alternate opening that starts with a much younger Casey; "Casey Meets the Snoplow Sams"; "Tina Hands Out Costumes and Gives Casey Advice"; Casey Asks Tina About Her Past"; and "Tina Tells Casey She Wants to Coach Her," which is an alternative version of a scene that Trachtenberg insisted be changed for the finished film, as she explains on the yak track).
Trailers are also included for NARNIA, VALIANT, MY SCENE GOES HOLLYWOOD: THE MOVIE, HALLOWEENTOWN MOVIES, THE MUPPETS WIZARD OF OZ, ALIENS OF THE DEEP, ESPN SPORTS FIGURES, RADIO DISNEY, which gives you an idea whom Disney thinks will be watching this. The disc offers an animated, musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, and a couple of inserts.
Letters
From Thor Klippert:
"Some notes on WAR OF THE WORLDS: I'm not buying the idea that Spielberg's film is a commentary on 9-11. He appropriates some of the imagery in order to disturb the audience, but that's it. As for the 1953 production, I've always thought it had less to do with the Red Scare and more to do with George Pal's personal remembrance of his homeland and the Blitzkrieg. Regarding the explanation for the aliens' demise: I haven't read the book myself, but even if Wells didn't explicitly state disease as the cause, it probably wasn't far from his mind. Tropical maladies were one of the greatest known impediments to British colonialism at the time. One note on THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB: I haven't seen the disc, and I probably won't pick it up any time soon, but I hope there's some acknowledgement that many of those weird novelty acts were moonlighting Disney employees. The members of the Firehouse Five jazz band, for instance, were all senior animators. Check out the extras on FRANK AND OLLIE for added context."
From Matt Clark:
"That fireman's jazz band, in MMC is The Firehouse Five Plus 2, which was made up of the Disney animators., among them Ward Kimball on trombone. They also made regular appearances in Disneyland. Their version of 'Tiger Rag' is considered definitive."
From Mark Flanagan:
"First, a correction: Wells does credit the end of the Martians to bacteria: 'And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians — dead !— slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.' Note also that this line ascribes the bacteria to God; it is this phase that is used in the George Pal version. There, the narrator speaks it; the characters do not know what has killed the aliens. In the epilogue, there is this line: 'At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found.' I'm not sure this is ambiguous, since it means that the only bacteria found was Earth-based (terrestrial), thus the Martians had no reason to know bacteria existed. You're probably a little off-base in dinging Pal's movie as an anti-Commie allegory. UFO sightings went way up in the post WWII years, perhaps as a response to the indefinite dangers of the cold war, and Pal is conflating those fears to an extent. Don Sigel did the same in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, but those aliens had the commie-like grace to be insidious and to creep into God-fearing Americans under cover of night. In both movies, strict one-to-one correlations are impossible to make. Sit any ten people under the age of 30 (or even 40) in front of these films and watch them scratch their heads afterwards the first time someone mentions Communism. It's an historical item, like Oz in the WIZARD OF OZ referring to the measurement of gold. How far away you are from the relevance determines its power. However you slice it, what Pal's WoW shows is that each branch of American certitude — the church, government, the military and science — are all wiped away by the Martians one after another. By the end, the foreign scientists are huddled in a church looking just like the European refugees of a few years earlier. And nothing the powers of good can do can stop the creatures — just as in Wells's book. If it's an allegory, it's an inexact one. Just as in Spielberg's WoW, the aliens are already here, suggesting lightly our current nervousness over the possibility of terrorists housed amongst our Muslim population. Unlike Pal, though, Spielberg bring it up explicitly so as to hide it in plain sight — clever, but Spielberg is as aware as Pal of the use of sci-fi to cloak fearful realities into unreal fears. And be careful lighting into the special effects of older films. The current WoW will look like a cartoon a few years from now, as early CGI films do now. We all tend to over focus on the reality of special effect (including filmmakers, mind you), but the strength of them is the introduction of another source of meaning and aesthetic pleasure into a movie. Hard to quibble with Pal's instincts in this regard, from the ironic beauty of the war machines, to the sheer awfulness of the plasma rays (not from Wells, who only had heat blasts) that render you non-existent, and even to the TV-eyed whatzit in the farmhouse — silly looking, yes, but not before it's got an icky tentacle on Ann Robinson (in what has always seemed to me a rather tender gesture)."
From Keith Giffen:
"Re: THE FANTASTIC FOUR, it really gels if you think of the movie as being inked by Dick Ayers. The first year of the FF was as goofy, mildly irrational, and oddly innocent as the movie. God help me but I actually like it."
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, July 27th, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON:ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, STEALTH, THE ISLAND, MY SUMMER OF LOVE, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!
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