Ninja Assassin

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Dawn of the Dead

As you will soon find out from reading my mass communications class essay; Dawn of the Dead is serious business.

Dawn of the Dead is a horror film from 1979. It was originally released in 1978 to great success in Europe, but in a different cut than director George A. Romero’s original version. This was due to an MPAA battle that raged over the more controversial aspects of the movie. The MPAA is the ratings board for American film. They wanted to brand the movie with an X-rating due to it’s over the top extreme violence and (on speculation) it’s social satirical content that took on the values of consumerist America. Dawn of the Dead is a zombie film. In it the zombies are explicitly representing the consumer culture that was budding during the time of its release. The majority of the picture takes place in a brand new shopping center, where survivors of the zombie apocalypse take refuge. Long montage sequences of the walking dead strolling mindlessly through the various shops and facilities at a local shopping mall shake the viewer’s perspective on consumerism and the capitalist mechanizations that keep it fueled. Leaving one with its nihilistic brand burned into their brain.

But let’s back track to the beginning of the narrative. At the start of the film we are introduced to the female lead, Fran, who wakes from a nightmare into the chaos of a television station in crisis. The dead are rising up and eating people, and everyone is turning to local media outlets for information on what to do. In the films first of many dark turns, the head broadcaster insists on constantly displaying the rescue stations over the programming, even though they have all been overtaken by zombies. The man is so in tune with his job and its quest for ratings that he does not care if he is sending people to their death, as long as they don’t change the channel. Fran takes the list off the air, and is met with resistance from her boss. The film is siding with the libertarian idea of emphasis on the individual. She took matters into her own hands, and further does this later in the film when she abandons her job to get into a helicopter with her boyfriend and look for another place to wait out the catastrophe. Her defiance is portrayed as admirable, and she is rewarded for it when she survives longer than all but one other character in the film.

The other two main characters are introduced at a raid on a housing project where zombies are being kept alive by their fearful and confused relatives. Mistrusting government and its agencies has never been more justified than in the sequence that follows. A crazed SWAT member goes on a rampage shooting every person he sees while going on a racist rant. The two level headed members of the team subdue the maniac, and soon decide to abandon their posts as well and take off with the couple in their helicopter.

While the group is on the trip that ends at the mall, they encounter some rural redneck zombie hunters. The atmosphere is that of a carnival event, like a tail gate party to battle the living dead. People are drinking beer, and bragging about how many zombies they have shot in the head. This lines up well with the cynical Mass Society theory, holding that as long as you paint the apocalypse in a favorable light (and give people beer) the dumb audience will stay entertained.

Arriving at the mall, Steve (the helicopter pilot, and Fran’s boyfriend) reflects on the hoard of zombies gathering in and around the shopping center. “This was an important place in their lives,” he says. A message can’t be more explicitly delivered than that. So hilariously cynical that it is often met with laughter from an audience. As time passes inside the mall, we see the characters begin to adjust to life after the zombies. They roam the mall, using up their endless free time with arcade games and an ice skating rink. At night they dine in and play high stakes poker games with 50 dollar bills stolen from the bank below them. But as time passes something starts to change. The characters become unhappy, bored with their meaningless shuffling about inside of the mall. They are slowly realizing what the viewers have already been beaten over the head with. The consumption of goods in a protected environment is a life without meaning. The characters trying to survive and keep the zombies out are turning into them themselves through their total immersion in the consumer lifestyle. That a script filled with such a dark and nihilistic message would end up performing so well is telling of the social situation within post-Vietnam America. The public was enraged and invigorated when the films predecessor, Night of the Living Dead, came out in 1968, but now in 1979 they are sick of caring, and want to go to the mall. Here Romero slaps them across the face, telling them to wake up to the grim reality waiting for them at the end of that road. No matter how many trips to the mall you make, you’re just dulling yourself down into another flesh eating cadaver.

Audiences across America and Europe received the film with open arms. It grossed 55 million dollars in the United States alone, which was unheard of for a film like this at the time especially since it was released unrated (something now only reserved for DVD releases). The message of a consumerist society gone mad, with no help to be had from religion or science struck a chord with people across the world. Amazing considering how ahead of it’s time the message would turn out to be (with the dawn of the 80’s me-generation and shallow ideal of financial gain about to have a death grip on Reagan era America). It’s a theme that is revisited in other horror films like American Psycho and the remake of Dawn of the Dead that was released in 2004. The context of the film is important, since it lay on the cusp of one of the most excessively culturally vapid decades in history. It’s ironic that social commentary of this high caliber would come in the form of a zombie movie, but there really is no more scathing metaphor for a generation’s complacency and misguided values.

Lifeforce

First of all, how the fuck did I go through the past decade without seeing this movie? I made it my personal mission to track down every movie with animatronic zombie type guys in it, and somehow this big budget bastard got past my robot person radar? People don't talk about this movie nearly enough. I base that solely on not hearing about it until I saw a trailer at a Screening of The Thing by my homies at Dedfest.

Life force starts off with some space action. Slow floatie space action. A team of scientists aboard the Churchill space explorer are investigating Halleys comet, and find a slim phallic ship with some crazy batwing/umbrella thing on the end that opens, just hanging out at the tip of the huge fireball. They go and explore this crazy hoopajoop.

Inside they find a bunch of floating demon bat guys, who are all made of crumbly chocolate (or they were fossilized). But the real find isn't the hershey monsters, its the nude trio of life force sucking vampires! complete with glass caskets!

I got to admit, I got a little excited when they found people who actually look like people inside that seemingly ancient space craft. I'm a big HP Lovecraft fan, and a big Alien fan. Anything that involves monolithic ancient alien beings, seemingly sentient space ships, or naked chicks encased in glass, count me in.

Flash forward some months, and the ship has returned to earths orbit, the interiors gutted by fire and the crew's juicy corpses litter the hull. The spooky alien/human vampire guys are totally fine though, and ready to start turning some british guards into giant animatronic corpses! YES!

This is where lifeforce really begins for me. The movie wasn't going anywhere until the lady vamp decides to make out with an unlucky researcher. She has this magnetic pull that the men in the film find impossible to resist. I can't imagine why they feel so drawn to her, huh.

Let the lifeforece sucking party commence! Things start getting out of hand at the space research center when the nude alien vampire woman decides to strut her stuff around the facilities, making out with every yutz horny enough to get close to her. This works pretty good actually, and not only because she's not bad to look at. It becomes clear that she doesn't reaaaallly look like that, and that this is just her clever ploy to make men easier to approach. Most of them would probably be apprehensive if they knew they'd end up like grouchy here.

Who ends up switching over to dudes to get his fix of blue electricity.

Then the she-demon busts out of scienceville and embarks on her unholy quest to, well I don't really remember what. This is where lifeforce loses points with me. The plot becomes a little convaluted in the middle, where they start chasing around the vampire's life force, and the survivor of the churchill disaster (who shows up in an espace pod, all gnarly and with beard) establishes some mysterious psychic connection with the soul sucker. It keeps you interested, and I felt entertained, but the vampire's rules and properties feel like they are being made up by the actors as they go. It is all building towards a fairly epic conclusion, but the road there is kind of confused and jumbled in places. Luckily they place lots more open mouthed cadavers on the way to keep you visually stimulated.

In a truly unique twist, Patrick Stewart shows up nearly out of nowhere as the head of a hospital for the criminally insane. Any time I see him in a movie it gives it instant cred. The guy can play any role and instantly elivate the proceedings. That makes his scene with Steve Railsback so entertaining. Through hypnosis Railsback gets Stewart to admit the presence of the vampire lady inside him. He's possesed by her. And to Railsback, he starts looking like her. Which prompts this exchange, Illustrated below.

He fucking plants a big ole wet one right on his full, sophisticated lips. The movie treats this epic moment with the respect and fanfare it deserves. Wind begins to whip around the room, and one poor onlookers neck is snapped from the sheer awesome force of this exchange of saliva. Amazing.

From here the film gets bigger. The scale is amped up as chaos envelopes the streets of London and the alien vampires true power is revealed.

I really enjoyed lifeforce. Even though the running time seems a bit on the long side, and I could see some people getting bored with this. It's hard for me to say I was bored though, since the I find stories like this completely fascinating, and the lead villain walking around naked for most of the movie didn't hurt either. If you've got an evening to kill, and you want to slaughter it with some good sci-fi that you've never seen before give Lifeforce a go. It's a hidden gem of the 80's that's waiting to be rediscovered and given a cult following. Unless im totally clueless and it's got a legion of fans I'm unaware of.

Leave a comment and let me know if you love lifeforce!

Frankenhooker

Frankenhooker. The title evokes an instant mystique of bad taste. When first heard you can't help but smile. If you're revolted , turned off, or think the title sounds stupid, then i ask; whats your deal? When did you decide to stop having fun? How did your sense of humour get crushed? Why don't you like boobs? or sexy hooker monsters? Were you molested by a frankenstein?

Anyway, the movie starts with Jeffrey Franken, a part time mad scientist/electrician, toiling away in his kitchen over a brain with an eyeball in it. The movie dares you to take it seriously from the start.

Then Jeffreys pudgy girlfriend Elizabeth gets fragged by Jeffreys new remote control lawnmower (was this the inspiration for the same device in Honey I Shrunk the Kids?.....probably not, no).

Fast forward through some character development (Jeffrey is bummed about his girlfriends condition, and keeps her head in the freezer, thawing it out once in awhile for a romantic dinner) and the film gets to where its heart is really at, the sleazy 42nd street of New York. The actors and actresses really shine in these sequences where Jeffrey Franken is on the prowl for sexy lady parts. Hennenloter always handles his hometown with an eye for the rough and real gritty dirt, but also manages to make it charming (in a scuzzy, don't forget to wash your hands after kind of way). You can feel the sticky heat coming out of the TV while Jeffrey makes a deal with the goofy and intimidating Zorro, Frankenhookers requisite Pimp Daddy.

Jeff buys up all of Zorro's crack, to make his own formula of super crack, and puts together a party with some hookers in a skeezy hotel room. Franken plans to give his favorite bodacious babe the wonderdrug, killing her with a clear conscious, and then attaching his poor dead girlfriends head to the fresh curvacious cadaver.

Of course everything goes horribly wrong, in one of the most hilariously over the top sequences I have had the pleasure to take in. It's a blast! I saw Fireworks! Hookers blowing up!

But Jeffrey prevails and pieces together a corpse from his favorite parts.

sleazy? Frankenhooker? naaahhh....

After all that, poor Jeffrey Franken get's his wish and resurrects his girlfriend, but she's not quite what he was expecting.

Through the movies own goofy logic, the introduction of hooker parts to Elizabeths brain created a hybrid personality type deal thing where her brain is dormant, and the memory of the body parts is channeled through her brain via nerve endings thought patterns that are transformed into her current conscious......whatever. I hate to say it, but the movies called Frankenhooker, don't expect it to make any sense.......at all.

She looks suspiciously like a lot of girls you see at the goth/punk bar doesn't she?

So Elizabeth, or Frankenhooker, b-lines it past Jeffrey and heads to New York to make some money where the old hooker parts used to make their money. Zorro notices some familiar asses and titties jiggling around the bar and follows Jeffrey and Elizabeth home to exact some pimp slapping revenge. This doesn't go so well for Zorro, and we are treated to some classic Hennenloter what-the-fuck slimy puppet body part creature action!

After that is the real finale, which I won't give away here because it's to good to spoil. Check out Frankenhooker. It's pretty easy to find. I rented it at the lobby dvd shop on Whyte Ave in Edmonton. Grab it there, or at your cities equivalent cult video store!

Also check out everything else Frank Henenlotter has done up till Bad Biology. I can't recomend that one yet, since I haven't seen it yet, and from what I understand it's entirely about fucking/borderline pornographic. So yeah, look for a review of that in the future!