Month of Horror - Day 26: Zombie

Zombies are the best monsters ever. Vampires are boring. Wolfmen show up as frequenly as periods. Mummies remind me of the Michelin Man. Zombies travel in packs, eat human flesh, and have no qualms about ruining your life.

Along with Ghoulies and Condorman, the movie poster for Zombie has stuck with me since childhood. It's sat on the Instant Queue (isn't it nice how that phrase has entered filmlovers' vocab this year?) for a while, waiting for the perfect time to either sink or swim. Well folks, tonight was the night, and this movie swims. It's the Michael Phelps of Italian zombie pictures. If it weren't for a few lesser scenes, one could argue this movie against Dawn of the Dead as the best late-70s flesh-eating flick.

The blood, gore, and general "grossness" of Zombie put the movie on a fast track toward Video Nasty lists all over Europe. It earned an X rating here in the States. The poster has nothing on the cool stuff you'll see in the movie. Director Lucio Fulci had a thing for letting the characters' insides trade places with their outsides. And then there's the eye-gouging scene. The eye-gouging scene will stick with you into your last days.

Like other Italian horror movies, it's easy to spot which actors are actually speaking English and which ones recorded their scenes in Italian and were dubbed over. All of the performances are equally strong; none of the characters really stick out past one another. But some of the scenes stick out so much further than the others. I mentioned the eye-gouging but I didn't mention the shark!

This is the only movie in existence to have a ZOMBIE VS. SHARK BATTLE! It's okay if you don't believe your eyes, because I didn't at first either. But here's photographic evidence that someone, somewhere, filmed an underwater scene between God's two greatest creatures. And don't just think that they wrestle around a little and that's it. Oh no no no, there's blood, my friends. But I can't tell you whose.

We've watch a lot of good movies this month, but this one gets the El Gringo Official Tip of the Afro. If you don't believe me, take a look at this picture of Danny DeVito right after he watched Zombie.

Month of Horror - Day 24: Fido

Timmy Robinson is a typical 1950s American boy in a not-so-typical 1950s America. The same radiation we hoped would warm our burritos has also had some adverse effects on our country's dead. Thirty years after the Zombie War, a powerful corporation called ZombieCom developed domesticization collars which would allow good ol' fashioned white folk to turn the undead into unpaid servants. It's difficult to ignore that there aren't any black people in this U.S.A. and that's the definitely not in the film by accident. Racial injustice is one of the many issues that Fido tries to touch on. Zombie films have commented on social issues before (Night of the Living Dead and racism, Dawn of the Dead and consumerism) but I don't know if any of them have tried to tackle as many as Fido. And while that sets Fido up to be stronger, the result is a film that's been spread too thin.

Fido is Zombie Lite. The gore is PG-13. The humor chuckle-inspiring. Think "Leave it to Beaver" + Shaun of the Dead + Far from Heaven. Dad works too hard, mom's unhappy in her marriage, child's feeling neglected, dad is replaced by a zombie-minority, corporate America attacks the transformed family who rebels and solidifies their status, which is then misreported by the news media. Whew. Fido tried to be a lot of things but all it really ends up being is a cute, charming, nice, light movie that speaks softly on important issues while lacking the confidence to say what it means.