Schlockbusted #13: Stalled

I have the poster for Shaun of the Dead right above my bed. I look at it every day, which is why I know that the poster image for Stalled is a deliberate reference to it, which wouldn't be quite so obvious if the movie didn't also sport a shameless critical plug citing it as a worthy successor to the classic zombie comedy. Beyond that one image, the British sense of humor, and the lighter tone, the movies have little in common, but then that's probably more than enough to engender a comparison. For the record, no, its not as good, as if it could be, but that would be an unfair judgement for any movie, and for what it is Stalled is a surprisingly funny and I would say mostly original take on the genre Edgar Wright all but created ten years ago.

Wow. Has it really been ten years since Shaun of the Dead? It doesn't seem like it, especially since it was the first of a trilogy that only just wrapped up last year. I suppose with the glut of imitators having never really stopped since it premiered, its easy to forget just how long ago it was when we first saw a comedy about zombies done so effortlessly. Perhaps we have been seeking a worthy successor all this time without even realizing it. Stalled is not that. It is however very funny, and surprisingly heartfelt in the end, much more so than you would expect for a movie set primarily in the toilet of a Women's restroom. That would be the double meaning implied by the title, just clever enough to set up a movie that does quite a lot with such a small arena to work with.

The lead is W.C. (get it?), a janitor in an office temporarily waylaid first by some unexpected and possibly gratuitous lesbianism, and then just as unexpectedly by a horde of flesh eating zombies gradually invading the room just outside, leaving him trapped and, at least he thinks at first, alone. The many and varied ways in which he tries and fails to extricate himself from this situation provide the majority of the humor, mostly in watching him flail pathetically as each plan of escape blows up in his face, but the heart of the movie lies in his interactions with the only other major character, a woman he eventually finds out is hiding in the next stall over.

We never see her until the very end, and the reveal represents a twist that I honestly didn't see coming (personally I was banking on her not being real, a symptom of his stress induced psychosis). Instead, he talks to her through a drawing he makes of what he thinks or hopes she looks like, and she fills in the rest with her voice and sardonic sense of humor. Its a burgeoning sort of romance that believe it or not had echoes of Her, and while the way it ends is maybe not quite as heartbreaking, don't be surprised if you don't get a little choked up by how it all turns out. I won't spoil it, except to say that its a somewhat tragic exploration of the often cruel side of office politics that sneaks up on you very nicely.

Speaking of office politics, there's a thread in this movie that goes mostly unspoken and adds so much appreciated nuance to what might otherwise have been a pretty broad comedy. The banality of office life is skewered in a very subtle way when you find that this is all taking place during one of those unbearably sad office Christmas parties, with the various zombified employees showing up in increasingly ridiculous holiday themed costumes up to and including a zombie Jesus Christ himself. Its barely commented upon and doesn't really factor into the plot too much until a somewhat bittersweet ending, but its the kind of little thing that can make a movie so much better when it isn't focused upon.

Stalled is available on Netflix streaming as of this writing and if you're a fan of Shaun of the Dead or any of the zombie comedies to come afterwards, you'd be remiss to not give this one a chance. If only for the accomplishment of being set in a bathroom stall and never in 90 minutes making a single poop joke until literally the last line of the film, its worth a watch. Sometimes it feels more like an extended sketch than a full on feature, but it never overstays its welcome and changes things up just enough throughout to keep you interested. Presumptuous advertising aside, Stalled is at the very least a loving homage to what has come before, and one of the better ones at that.

Schlockbusted #12: Zombie Hunter

You know those guys who like zombie movies just a little too much? I don't just mean the gore fiends like me who like the movies, good and bad, but the aggro types who like to think about how they would actually fare in a zombie apocalypse and visualize the prospect of smashing heads in a desolate wasteland with a glint of mad joy in their eyes. There's something just a bit creepy about someone who actually thinks that kind of world might have an upside; that a world gone mad is like a video game come to life with no responsibilities and plenty of excuses for mindless bloody mayhem. Sometimes those kinds of assholes make movies, and usually they turn out like Zombie Hunter

Zombie Hunter is about a Zombie Hunter named Hunter (fucking seriously) who walks around the post-zombified desert Midwest in a leather jacket clearly too warm for the weather, inner monologuing pointless cool guy asides to himself as he occasionally hacks away at undead beasts in between swigs of tequila. He has a dark and somber past that will be revealed eventually (spoiler: his family's dead and you won't care at all), but mostly he's just a badass who lives to be badass, as if a planet descended into Hell was always more his speed anyway, and the whole apocalypse thing was basically a net positive. Of course, when I say he's a badass, what I really mean is that the movie keeps telling you this without actually showing you; basically the Riddick model of storytelling. Oh, and you want to know the best part? Despite what you may have hoped based on the poster, this guy isn't Danny Trejo.

That's right. Danny Trejo, that actual badass ex-convict turned actor best known as the man behind Machete is not, contrary to what the advertising would have you believe, the main character of this movie. Oh, he's in it, for maybe about ten minutes of screen time total, and has maybe two legitimately cool scenes of him taking an axe to zombie heads and fighting a giant super zombie respectively, but because the people who made this movie don't quite understand that any hero put up against Trejo will always fail in comparison, our lead is some unknown white guy who grimaces like Snake Plissken without the eye patch and wishes he were half the man as the right Reverend Jesus (yes, that's Trejo's character's name, and yes, he should have been THIS ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE!).

Zombie Hunter is basically wish fulfillment for zombie loving frat boy dick bags who think they'll turn into Clint Eastwood at the first site of the plague even though they only have a vague idea of who Clint Eastwood actually is. Our heroic cypher never flinches whether he's killing zombies or bedding the nubile young innocent girl among the band of the most annoying group of survivors you'll ever see in a zombie movie (and that's saying something). Personally, I would have gone with the slutty one instead, at least before she takes a chainsaw to the gut. Oh, and just so you know, this happens in a town called Dahmer, filled with psychopaths. Cause that's just so cool, right?

Last time I reviewed Battle of the Damned, and it may have sounded like faint praise when I commended that film for simply getting the basics of a zombie action movie right. Zombie Hunter is why the bar is so low as to make Battle of the Damned a highlight of the current state of this genre. Its technically well made, at least in the sense that the zombies look gross enough and the blood spills when and where its supposed to, but there's just a sort of ickiness to the whole thing that pervades it even before the ickiness you're supposed to feel in these movies. When it ceases to be about terror, when living among the dead stops being a bad thing, it doesn't become a good thing, and it isn't fun, no matter how much glee those onscreen might take from the carnage. Especially when you kill off Danny Trejo ten minutes after you introduce him.

Schlockbusted #11: Battle of the Damned

Well, it's another year, and another trilogy of random zombie movies from the recent past. This time around we've got zombie fighting robots, zombie fighting janitors, and zombie fighting Danny Trejos, which we also had last time come to think of it, but fuck it, who doesn't want as much zombie fighting Danny Trejo as we can get? First up, its Battle of the Damned, a surprisingly entertaining and mostly traditional zombie action flick that does the basics right and doesn't try anything too fancy, that is, until the army of robots come out of nowhere. And I mean out of nowhere, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Battle of the Damned was most likely sold as Dolph Lundren Vs. Zombies, or at least it could have been. That's why I bought it anyway, and for the most part, it delivers on that promise. Lundren is one of those 80's era action heroes who strangely never got his due, at least to the same extent as a Van Damme or a Stallone, and while I highly doubt a movie like this is going to do anything for him, its a pretty good showcase of his largely overlooked talent. Now, granted, like most of his ilk, dialogue and pathos aren't really his strong suits, but when you need a guy to believably kick ass and swagger his way through a horde of the undead, or vampires or mutants or whatever, Lundren's got the muscles and the jaw line for it, and unlike some of his more famous contemporaries, I can actually understand most of what he says, which is always a plus.

This battle finds Lundren as a mercenary commando sent into an Asian city that I'm pretty sure wasn't specified by name, perhaps for the best as its due to be fire bombed to burn out the waves of zombies currently keeping it a quarantine zone. Lundren's mission is to find the missing daughter of the Biotech tycoon who inadvertently unleashed the disease and bring her back at all costs, only to find that she refuses to leave, having forged a connection with a group of survivors who aren't part of the mission and who would only slow them down. Again, plot isn't what we came here for, and what little there is is well balanced with Lundren's fists and feet smashing into zombie faces. Its obviously a low budget production with minimal make up effects and some less than stellar CGI in the second half, but for what it is and what you want, there's little to complain about.

One of the challenges with a movie like this is making the survivors interesting enough that they come off as more than just zombie fodder waiting for their inevitable gory deaths, and Battle of the Damned actually excels on this score, at least relative to most low budget zombie trash that typically misses the mark. A good cast allows for the kind of human drama and moral ambiguities that a zombie outbreak can create, and the movie spends just enough time establishing this rag tag group and their cowardly self serving leader that when the conflicts play out in the way you expect they will, they're still satisfying because they don't just feel tacked on or perfunctory. What does feel tacked on is the fucking robots. Oh yeah, I forgot. There are fucking robots in this movie, for like no reason whatsoever.

Okay, that's not entirely true. I know the reason why they're in the movie, or at least I have a pretty good guess. I assume they're here because the production staff had the CGI models and robot suits already built, perhaps for another project that fell through, and just decided to fill out some of the running time and save money on the sly. They literally just show up to punch zombies, explained in one throwaway line as coming from an event that has nothing to do with the zombies or anything, and then they're just there until the end, because won't it be cool to see robots fighting zombies? And it is, frankly, but they could have done a lot more to set this up. Because the rest of the movie is so watchable, I can forgive this, even though it feels like two zombie movies wedged together, if only because it leads to the best line in the movie, when the leader of the survivors begs to be taken along after he's fucked them all over, justifying his pessimism in Lundren's abilities by asking - "who the fuck just finds robots?"

Who? Dolph fucking Lundren, that's who. Battle of the Damned doesn't break the zombie movie mold or do anything really special, but it does what its supposed to do right, which wouldn't be high praise if so many shitty straight to VOD zombie flicks didn't fail so miserably on such a regular basis. The standard is low, but this movie doesn't even struggle to meet and exceed it and does enough to get any zombie fan engaged within the first few minutes. Its at times cheesy and silly, but never to the point of winking to the camera outside of one recurring catch phrase, and its a hell of a lot more entertaining than, say, World War Z, or any of the more recent high profile zombie movies I can think of. Probably only worth it for devotees, but since I am one, I appreciated the effort.

Schlockbusted #10: "Big Ass Spider" Review

Last year, I watched and reviewed a low budget straight to VOD movie called Spiders. Its currently on Netflix streaming as of this writing and if you like giant monster movies, I'd recommend giving it a shot, at least as long as it stays available for free. Its simple, no frills action with very little self referential satire or meta winking at the camera silliness; just a good old fashion big bug flick. A few months later, another, more hyped movie was released called Big Ass Spider, which as the title suggests has a similar set up, but with more of an inclination to make fun of itself. It certainly does that, but as is too often the case, the parody is at the expense of the genre and those who appreciate it rather than in tribute to them, and even as starkly average as Spiders was, there's no contest as to which is the superior film.

Big Ass Spider follows Greg Grunberg, the psychic police officer from Heroes, as a goofy exterminator trying desperately to convince you that he's supposed to be the son of John Goodman's character from Arachnophobia. He quips and bumbles around, affecting a sort of clumsy Vince Vaughn sort of lame coolness (or cool lameness, whichever you prefer), and for no other reason than because the movie wants us to like him, he soon becomes mankind's only hope to stop a rampaging giant spider from destroying the city, which may have been named but might as well be non-descript. We only get one spider oddly enough, gradually growing from about the size of a house cat to the size of a house boat over the course of the film, and in contrast to Spiders' many well crafted action sequences, we really only get about two worthwhile encounters with the titular big assed thing when all is said and done.

The intended draw of the film appears to have been the comedy, but it almost feels like this was an afterthought, emphasized through editing only after it was determined that they couldn't pull off a more straight laced, action-packed, or visually engaging movie. Grunberg seems to be improvising most of his material and so much of it hinges on his limited charm, and the next most important character is apparently meant to be funny because he's Mexican and has a thick accent, all while great deadpan comic actor Ray Wise twiddles his thumbs in the background. To the extent that it lazily tries to parody B movies, it doesn't feel like its coming from a place of love for its target, as much as a desire to pick at what is perceived to be low hanging fruit, to show those cheesy SyFy Asylum punks how its done. Its not a movie for people who can appreciate B movies even with their flaws, but rather for the people who like the idea of taking B movies down a peg, while never actually taking the time to watch them as anything other than MST3K style riff fodder.

It fails miserably even at that, for the record, never quite gelling either as a bad movie or a commentary on bad movies. It just sort of sits there, or at least a majority of the jokes do, and in the absence of even decent humor, the special effects laden giant spider action is so half assed that I question why someone with so little passion for this sort of thing went out of there way to work in this genre. If this had been an Asylum movie, I would understand it and just dismiss it as one of their less interesting efforts, and while the budget was probably a little bigger than the Asylum can usually muster, all that extra money isn't used to make it any better. One of the worst movies I've ever reviewed was a Syfy original giant spider movie called Arachnoquake, but as bad as it was, at least it didn't insult me for liking what it failed to do. Big Ass Spider is the kind of movie that people who hate B movies might enjoy, but I love B movies, and this movie apparently hates me for that.

Schlockbusted #9: "Fright Night 2: The New Blood" Review

I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. The dueling impulses of horror movies to generate endless sequels and invite modern remakes of classic films was a recipe for the kind of confusion brought about by a movie like Fright Night 2: The New Blood. Is it a sequel to the recent remake of Fright Night, or a remake of the original Fright Night 2, or both? Its billed as a sequel to the remake, but features a female villainess clearly evocative of the antagonist of the original Fright Night 2, and otherwise the plot is a reboot of the original Fright Night with no narrative connection to the previous remake. I'm at a loss for how to classify this movie, and even more bewildered by the fact that despite being a chintzy straight to DVD knockoff of one of my favorite 80's franchises, its one of the better vampire movies to come along in a long time.

Schlockbusted #8: "Horrors Of War" Review

Depending on who you are and where you're from, chances are you've probably not heard of this movie. Its rare and even took me a while to track down, and I would never have heard of it and wouldn't be reviewing it at all if I didn't have a personal connection to it. Horrors Of War is a Nazisploitation movie (as I've said before, a genre near and dear to my heart) made by a crew of local Ohio based filmmakers who I have come to know through my participation in the Columbus Independent film scene. I learned of this movie via a dickish review posted to the Mid-Ohio Filmmakers Association Facebook page that I will not link to or reference beyond this point, because the guy who wrote it can go fuck himself for various reasons that need not be addressed here. Still, I felt that just based on the fact that people I knew coincidentally made something so in line with my tastes, I had no excuse not to check it out and tell you all what I thought about it.

Schlockbusted #7: "Return Of Swamp Thing" Review

This is more like it. After what has to be the most disappointing comic book adaptation of the pre-Marvel Cinematic era, the second and last entry in the Swamp Thing film series embraces the silliness of its premise of monster on monster action and at the same time manages to stay truer to the canon of the original source material that makes Swamp Thing such a great character in the first place. The original Swamp Thing was produced just before Alan Moore took charge of the character in print, rendering it incapable of capturing the insane awesomeness readers would eventually come to know as the plant god who once thought it was Alec Holland. Return of Swamp Thing was made much later, but still finds itself hamstrung by the previous film and unable to fully do the comic justice. Even so, it shows itself to be the far superior film in the first five minutes alone.

Schlockbusted #6: "Swamp Thing - The Movie" Review

A while back I took a shot at my first ever Let’s Play of a terrible NES game from my childhood based on the short-lived Swamp Thing cartoon. It didn’t go well, but it did inspire me to take a second look at the Swamp Thing movies that inspired the live action series that in turn inspired the cartoon which in turn in turn inspired the game. Okay, fuck it, I needed an excuse to talk about the Swamp Thing movies, and this was it. So sue me. And yes, I’m aware that I already have a section of this blog dedicated to retrospectives of obscure horror and sci-fi franchises, but my general rule for that is three or more films, and since I’m already three chapters into a five part Chucky review, this seemed like the better place for it. I was tempted to start a whole new section specifically for shitty comic book and videogame adaptations (even had a clever name for it – BADaptations), but as you can see by the Labels section to your right, this blog is already too cluttered with planned sections that have since become defunct or died on the vine. So here we go.

Schlockbusted #5: "Battlefield Death Tales" Review

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s it seems like a great deal of my favorite movies and television shows were in an anthology format, showcasing multiple stories rather than one single narrative. On TV you had shows like the 80’s Twilight Zone, the 90’s Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, and Amazing Stories, and on screen you had the Darkside movie, Body Bags, and the Creepshow franchise. If you can even call it a genre, it’s one that seemed to go out of style for a bit, but in recent years has made something of a come back, mostly in movies like Grindhouse, The ABCs of Death, and what I hope is now the annual found footage VHS series. As they are becoming more prevalent, they are also becoming more esoteric. One movie available on Netflix I plan on watching and reviewing here pretty soon is called Barrio Tales and features three horror shorts based on aspects of Spanish and Mexican culture, sort of a Hispanic version of Tales from the Hood. I guess it was only a matter of time before they got around to anthologizing my favorite kind of movie, though after watching the collection of Nazisploitation shorts in Battlefield Death Tales, I kinda wish they’d taken a little more time to get it right before throwing out such an enticing, but ultimately disappointing offering.

Schlockbusted #4: Devils Of War

There was a time during the innocence of my youth when all it took for a Nazisploitation movie to excite me were the default tropes of the format. As long as I got Nazis and zombies, or Nazis and demons, or Nazis and some other supernatural or science fiction element mixed together, I’d usually end up satisfied. Apparently I have now officially seen enough of these kinds of movies to where that isn’t enough anymore; I now require a good story on top of all that. Sickening, I know, and given how poorly written and dependent on fan service many of these movies are, well, it’s entirely possible that I’ve finally managed to watch myself into a corner with this genre. And so it goes with today’s entry in this little impromptu Nazisploitation review trilogy I’ve started, Devils of War, which ten years ago might have knocked my swastikas off with its low-budget charm and earnest sense of badass fun, but try as it might, it never quite makes it over the top.

Schlockbusted #3: "Frankenstein's Army" Review

As I've mentioned on this blog many times before, one of my favorite film genres is that of the often maligned and ignored Nazisploitation movie. Though we have recently been treated to a relative plethora of high concept Nazi movies in the recent past including Manborg and Nazis At The Center of the Earth, its new found success especially in the straight to DVD realm has led to a glut of increasingly silly and poorly made stabs at an already silly concept that have given ideas like Nazi Zombies, Nazi Cyborgs, and Nazi Zombie Cyborgs a bad name (if they didn't have one already). In the coming days I'll be reviewing three examples from the past year that I've chosen mostly at random from what's available in the Nazisploitation marketplace, to showcase how far we've come in the world of campy sci-fi fascism. First up, a movie I've been waiting for for a long time ever since I heard the title– Frankenstein's Army.

Schlockbusted #2: "The Philadelphia Experiment" Review

I normally have an arbitrary cut-off date for movies I'll review under the Cinema File banner, to enforce a measure of self-discipline in only featuring movies released in the current or previous year. Today's movie is probably the oldest Syfy Channel Original movie I have saved in my queue that still falls within this range, which is the whole reason I started the Schlockbusted series, to give me the opportunity to examine some of the older examples of Syfy's catalog  among other "classic" schlocky movies on the underside of Netflix. Though I happened to come to this decision around the time I watched The Philadelphia Experiment, the level of excitement that inspired said decision is a total coincidence, and should in no way suggest that today's movie is anything other than a boring, completely pointless piece of crap.

Schlockbusted #1: Sharknado!

(A quick production note: You'll notice this isn't under my normal Cinema File banner used for movie reviews, but under a brand new one that sounds vaguely similar to my Mockbusted series. That's because I've decided to take this opportunity to unveil a new review series I've been planning for a while, specifically for movies too schlocky to really fit in the Cinema File, but ones that aren't directly mockbusting any mainstream film. Unlike the Cinema File, there will be no year old cut off date, so this will be my chance to explore the schlock of the recent past, mostly from the dark and fun side of Netflix and Hulu Plus. First up, I thought it was only fitting that I pop my Schlockbusted cherry with a movie everyone's rightfully excited about - Sharknado!)