7/10AIt's a guilty pleasure.
I love horror movies. Especially the original Zombie movies by George A Romero (
Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead and to a slightly lesser extent,
Day of The Dead).
Remade in various forms countless times they concern chiefly our fear of death and madness, and the taboo subject of cannibalism and, in some readings, biological contagions of some form or another. All of us hate to be "dirty" or "infected" and whether we like to admit it or not are very cautious about approaching someone who is diseased in any way - it's built in through evolution to abhor sickness and stay as far away from it as possible.
The really nasty thing that separates the zombies from, say, alien invaders or giant bugs or tentacled monsters is that they are, quite literally, us. All that a zombie (in the movie sense) is, is a human being whose brain has been reduced to two primal drives, aggression and hunger.
This really scares you because our 'higher' brain functions, as we are constantly reminded, are all that keep us from such a bestial way of life - we are no longer creatures of pure drive and response - but wth that extra knowledge comes the fear of giving into those primal desires and going, for want of a better word, mental.
As an aside, it's less common for the sex drive to be included here. If I remember it was in Cronenberg's "Shivers" that this was explored and that's something of an oddity. The creatures in most Zombie movies are purely hunger driven, and then, only for fresh meat - something that cannot have evolved since it is entirely unsustainable - they eat faster than their prey reproduce leading, as shown in in 28 days later, to eventual starvation. They won't eat each other as a usual rule of thumb, and I can buy that. You usually keep your ingroup safe if you can.
Now, I've been looking forward to two recent "first person" zombies movies,
[REC] and Romero's "
Diary Of The Dead ". I was entirely expecting that zombie horror sunbgenre, disturbing and claustrophoic as it usually is would be even more terrifying and downright plain ol' scary than before when given the "
Cloverfield" treatment. For those not in the know, this is usually done by having a major character holding a camera for the movie, not literally seeing through their eyes, as in (thanks Gary)
Lady In The Lake.
This offering, from Co-Writer-Directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, along with scriptwriter Luis Berdejo does not disappoint. It is genuinely, arse-clenchingly, pant-wettingly scary.
The horror cues that seem cliché when invoked in a more traditional way (things moving in the back of shot, bodies disappearing and reappearing, sudden screaming attacks etc) just seem ten times less yawnsome and thirty million times more awesome when it feels (as it did for me) like you are looking through the eyes of the poor saps involved.
The set up is almost a classic Romero style moral joke - the "star" of the piece is young Angela, who is presenting a local TV show on the fire brigade and what they do, but on this quiet night finds the whole thing a bit dull, and is wishing for something exciting to happen for her to comment on.
Be careful what you wish for, Angela.
As in Cloverfield we are heightened in our involvement by not seeing the owner of our 'eyes', Pablo. In fact this film goes one better than that movie and you NEVER see Pablo's face at any stage. The insistence on keeping the camera rolling seems also a bit more justified here, as the plucky young reporters insist on recording and showing the situation to condemn the authorities.
They are called to an apartment building where a woman has been heard screaming in her room. All the other residents are downstairs in the hall. The firemen go to investigate and... well... you can more or less guess the rest.
Sure, there are a couple of liberties taken with common sense, and the creepy last location and final sequence seem like they came from a different movie in an attempt to explain or at least raise questions about the origin of the outbreak - this hardly matters because the film never loses sight of its central mission, and that is to be total terrifying bedlam. This is helped by the "neo-zombie" approach where the previously shuffling and pathetic (in both senses of the word) dead are now very, very angry and move like bloodied lightning.
It's easy to try and draw comparison with Blair Witch and yes, there are a few new horror clichés that crop up all the time (night vision being the usual one) but where that (also very good) film pulled its punches and is really a ghost story for the most part, this doesn't and you get the gore you would expect from this type of film, albeit in a sudden and jerky way.
In the short time of the movie (around 80-90 minutes by my watch) we still have time to connect with every character to some extent and sympathise with them. I'd really recommend this to horror lovers everywhere. Oh, and see Cloverfield as well, the people who were down on it, were those who previously attributed more depth to it than was ever promised.
Til the rental folks send me it, I look forward to seeing if Romero's "Diary" can beat this one.
I've stuck an Algo special "A" on it, because while it may not be the best film ever, it was certainly a blast and a half. In its specific subgenre it probably rates a 9 on my usual scale.
Til next time!
A
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