Suspiria (2018)

Year 12, Day 298 - 10/24/20 - Movie #3,682

BEFORE: Tilda Swinton carries over from "Only Lovers Left Alive" to complete a horror triple-play (that's zombies, vampires and witches).  Once again, I had a choice to make - do I include the film "Okja", which is on Netflix, and also has Tilda Swinton in it?  It's not completely on-point, it's about a weird new animal, and I don't think that really qualifies as a monster, exactly.  Again, if I were short on the count maybe I'd try to squeeze that one in here and try to justify the inclusion of another "dark fantasy" film - but I'm not short on the count, I'm right on track.  Plus "Okja" links to "Parasite", which won the Best Picture Oscar last year, and it's the only film on my list that does that - so "Okja" could be my only link from that film back to normal Hollywood fare, so I'd better save it.  One option would be to start next year with "Parasite", then "Okja", then I've got options on where to go from there. 

THE PLOT:A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the artistic director, an ambitious young dancer, and a grieving psychotherapist.  Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will finally wake up.

AFTER: Well, the year of weird movies keeps on giving and giving, though the definition of "weird" during the month of October is a loose one, once I start dealing with vampires, zombies and witches.  Even if you put the supernatural aside, this is still a new high water-mark in the Department of Weird. The filmmaking style is very enigmatic, clearly European (same director as "Call Me by Your Name", it turns out) and there are a lot of flash-frames of various spooky and creepy things, some of which seem directly related to the plot here, and others, maybe not so much. 

The action here takes place behind the scenes at a modern-dance company, and by "modern" I mean the style of dance, not necessarily the year, because this is set in Berlin, 1977.  At first I wasn't sure about whether "modern" dance was a style back then, but I did a little research and I think the timeline is legit.  My first real exposure to modern dance came when I was working for my first real film production job, at a little studio with two directors (husband and wife, but separated at the time) and the wife had filmed a modern dance piece with Bill T. Jones.  This was around 1990, but reading up on that dancer's career, he started doing modern dance in the mid-1970's.  

While I'm thinking about working for that company, as a P.A. on several music videos, the first real long-form credit I ever got was for a documentary called "The Eyes Scream", which was about the long-time anonymous band The Residents, known for wearing giant eyeball heads on stage to conceal their identities.  What sort of musician struggles to become famous, while also at the same time, trying to remain anonymous?  That sounds a bit like Adam in yesterday's film "Only Lovers Left Alive".  But it was a good gimmick, and The Residents had like a 40-career and tons of records without anybody knowing their names.  Now I'm going back through their discography and I found a place to download their music for free, and even though I'm late for this party, better late than never.  Early on they covered some Beatles and Stones songs (playing them in a weird, creepy minor key, of course) and then later did the same for Elvis songs on their tribute album "The King & Eye".  And on their album "The Third Reich 'N' Roll", they created what may have been the first real mash-up medlies, before Stars on 45 did some in the disco style.

For years I was able to brag that I knew who two of the Residents were, I drove one of them back to his NYC apartment after the documentary shoot (we shot the bumpers with Penn & Teller, Penn acted as a spokesman for the band back before his magic career took off) and the next day I asked the director who that guy was, and if he was one of the Residents.  Not that this knowledge never did me much good, I'm not into blackmailing people, and a few years later some audiologists analyzed their records and interviews with their managers and determined that the two managers were probably, according to science, the two most prominent members of the band - and they'd been hiding in plain sight for decades, working for the aptly named Cryptic Corporation, the legal entity formed to manage the band and produce their albums.  One of those two founding members died in 2018, so I guess the cat's out of the bag now, but it seems the band is still planning to tour again next year.

You can view "The Eyes Scream" on YouTube for free now, and I re-watched it yesterday, it brought back a flood of memories from when I was 22 years old.  I also took the opportunity to update the film's credits on the IMDB, partially because my name was misspelled in the video's credits, so why not correct that, and also get another credit online for everyone who worked on the piece?  Just paying it forward.  If you do watch the film online, be aware there's a 10-minute segment from the band's unwatchable movie "Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?" - no one will fault you if you skip over that.  I really felt this was filler of the highest order, but at the time I was just a P.A., and had no pull to make editorial recommendations to a director.  This doc needed more Elvis covers and less Vileness Fats, whatever that is. 

I've spent 30 years now working for film production companies, 27 years at one of them as of this week - and when you've been around in one spot that much, you kind of know where the bodies are buried.  Metaphorically, of course.  I believe one day somebody will come to me and ask for my version of what's gone down behind the scenes at this animation company, for a future book or documentary or something.  Now, where the Cryptic Corporation is concerned, if you told me there were actual bodies buried during the course of their business, I might be inclined to believe it.  And that brings me back to the Markos Dance Academy, as seen in "Suspiria". 

In the first scene, we see Patricia confiding in her therapist, talking about the staff at the dance academy, and how they've taken everything from her, they've taken her eyes and her energy and her spirit and they're all a bunch of mad witches, and we're kind of left wondering if she's speaking in metaphor, or if something else is going on.  After the film then starts following Susie, a new American dancer from the Amish part of Ohio, the announcement is soon made that Patricia has left the company, which for the audience seems a bit at odds with what we saw in the first scene.  Meanwhile, the therapist, Dr. Klemperer, starts reading through Patricia's journal to see if there's anything credible to this witch nonsense, or if Patricia just maybe caved under the pressure.  This leads him to a lot of weird diagrams detailing the management structure of the academy, and others that detail very complex dances. 

Susie, the new student, is already familiar with some of Madame Blanc's more famous routines, and is also eager to please.  This, and her phenomenal audition, have put her on Madame Blanc's radar, so when another dancer, Olga, refuses to take over Patricia's lead dance role, because it's just too soon, and whatever happened to Patricia, anyway? - Susie is chosen to dance the lead.  This is where things start to become clear, because what do young witches do?  They dance in ritualistic fashion, that's what - so the weird arcane modern-dance movements start to make a little sense now, and after a little healing energy from Madame Blanc, the contortions of Susie's dance moves cause horrible things to happen to Olga, who's in another rehearsal room in the building.  

Time goes on, and as Susie advances in the company, another dancer, Sara, starts to voice her suspicions to Dr. Klemperer.  She finds a secret entrance to a back room where there are ritualistic porcelain figures, and evidence of horrible weapons.  Meanwhile, Madame Blanc creates a new routine for the Academy's upcoming recital, and there's some kind of power struggle in the management of the studio, where all the instructors need to vote to elect their leader, either Madame Blanc or Madame Markos, who we only see in strange portraits on the wall, for reasons that become clear later.  There's also a strange floating set of lights that comes to visit Susie at night and somehow levitates her up the walls, or something.  

Look, I get that this film wanted to go out of its way to be weird and "arty" in its own way, but it also takes itself WAY too seriously, and that's just not what I'm about this October.  This year I'm trying to find the films that mix in a fair amount of comedy, or at least ridiculousness, in-between the horror.  "The Cabin in the Woods", "Horns", "Zombieland: Double Tap" and "The Dead Don't Die" - they're all ridiculous films about totally ridiculous subjects.  Straight horror seems rather dull by comparison, and I even managed to goof on the "Twilight" films so I wouldn't have to take them seriously at all.  Was that ever even an option?  No, it wasn't.  But witches and their rituals represent serious stuff.  And if you came here looking for a bunch of naked witches doing ritual dances and/or simultaneous graphic disembowelments, I promise you won't be disappointed.  But then you'll need to ask yourself why you came here looking for that - those are not things that I seek out on a regular basis.  OK, the first thing maybe, but not the second one. 

There's also a cool magic trick involved here, and I don't want to say too much about it - just that if you're planning to watch this film, just go ahead and do it.  Don't Google it, don't look too hard at the IMDB cast list (like I am acccustomed to doing) because those things will give away the trick.  It's not one of those "Sixth Sense" plot things, more of a casting thing.  I had to figure it out halfway through, and then once you learn it, you can't un-learn it.  So try to go in cold, even if that means you'll have to go back after and re-watch a few scenes, it's still better that way.  But "Bravo" to a particular actress, and I'm honestly surprised this film didn't get an Oscar nomination for Best Make-up.  I can't say I thoroughly enjoyed the film, at 2 1/2 hours it's a bit too long, but I do love figuring out puzzles, I can't help it.

Also starring Dakota Johnson (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Mia Goth (last seen in "Everest"), Angela Winkler, Ingrid Caven, Elena Fokina, Sylvie Testud, Renee Soutendijk, Christine LeBoutte, Malgosia Bela, Fabrizia Sacchi, Jessica Harper (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "Laggies"), Jessica Batut, Alek Wek, Vincenza Modica, Vanda Capriolo (last seen in "Call Me by Your Name"), Brigitte Cuvelier, Gala Moody, Anne-Lise Brevers, Sara Sguotti, Halla Thordardottir, Olivia Ancona, Clementine Houdart, Doris Hick, Mikael Olsson, Fred Kelemen

RATING: 4 out of 10 news reports on the Lufthansa hijacking

Only Lovers Left Alive

Year 12, Day 296 - 10/22/20 - Movie #3,681

BEFORE: I don't pay too much attention to the director of each film as I make my linking plans - sometimes I'm aware who directed a film, of course, but most often I'm not.  It's accidental today that I got two Jim Jarmusch films next to each other, but of course that could also be a direct by-product of linking by actor, as some directors tend to work with the same actors again and again.  Why not?  If they had a positive experience working with someone, or are more tuned in to what they can do, it just make sense to keep that connection and try to repeat a success.  

But if, like me, you were saying yesterday, "Jim Jarmusch made a zombie movie?", tonight you'll be asking "Jim Jarmusch made a vampire movie?"  Yes, he did. 

Tilda Swinton carries over from "The Dead Don't Die". 

THE PLOT: A depressed musician reunites with his lover, though their romance, which has already endured several centuries, is disrupted by the arrival of her uncontrollable younger sister. 

AFTER: Again, as with yesterday's zombie film, it feels like somebody sat down and really thought about vampires - what are the implications of living for hundreds of years, and being a vampire all that time?  What does that DO to a person, or two people as a couple?  These two vampires have lived their lives, interacted with many prominent people in history, and on a personal level it seems like they've broken up and come back together many times.  There's a reference to their third wedding in 1868 - and when we first meet them, he's living outside of Detroit, and she's in Tangier.  Perhaps they determined that they can't live together, but they also can't live without each other, so they'll spend years at a time on their own.  What are a few years to a vampire, after all?  He gets to live like a recluse and record music (vampires also have a lot of time to master musical instruments) and she gets to explore the Middle East and hang out with Christopher Marlowe - yes that Marlowe, and there's an implication here that he wrote under the name of Shakespeare, I think.  

The similarity to "Twilight" here, and really there's only one, is that these vampires are trying their very best to NOT drink the blood of humans, at least not directly.  The Cullens in "Twilight" preferred to hunt animals for blood, but that really sent a mixed message where animal rights were concerned.  Remember how Bella was a vegetarian at the start of that series?  Tonight's modernist vamps have worked out other solutions, they've had enough time and resources to work out better solutions, namely bribing doctors at hospitals to keep them supplied with "the good stuff", aka non-contaminated O negative.  All this time, and nobody's really thought about what effect the AIDS epidemic had on the vampire community, not until this came out (2013).  

A little more thought applied to the concept of modern-day vampires, and a writer might realize that staying under the radar would be the best thing to do, because too many killings in a particular area would draw attention, and modern forensic techniques would then force that vampire to find a new hunting ground (OK, so that's two plot points this film shares with the "Twilight" movies.). Adam, or the vampire who has chosen to call himself Adam, has chosen to live in Detroit for a reason, because the city is bankrupt and the downtown area is nearly abandoned, and except for a couple of underground rock fans who occasionally follow up on a rumor and ring his doorbell, he's left fairly alone, and only comes out at night to drive aimlessly around the city.  It's the true Goth lifestyle, which seems appropriate - with the teens today wearing black, looking all pale and only going out to clubs at night, it seems Adam was a trend-setter, or perhaps just ahead of his time.

But Eve soon re-enters his life, after having a prophetic dream about her sister.  Another thing that you'd only realize about vampires after careful thought would be, how the hell do they get around?  Without a Renfield-like assistant to arrange transportation of their coffin on a New-York based freighter, instead they have to book a ticket on a plane that only travels by night, and it has to be night in the city they leave from and also in the city they arrive in.  That's contrary to the way most people (people are called "zombies" by the vampires here) live their lives, most people would book an early morning flight just to avoid it being too late when they arrive at their destination.  Still, I know a couple people who might prefer the "red-eye" just because they're so comfortable sleeping on a plane.  I would further imagine that a vampire could then only fly on a plane headed west, in order to remain in darkness and avoid the possibility of flying into the rising sun.  See how thought-provoking this is? 

Sure enough, Eve's sister Ava turns up - she'd been hanging out in L.A. with the Goth kids there, and must have caught a night flight to Detroit.  She gets some of the "good stuff" from Adam and Eve, and they all go out to a show with Ian, Adam's friend and "fixer", who supplies him with vintage guitars and for some reason, a bullet made of wood.  Adam asked for this when he knew Eve was headed his way, but it's a bit unclear whether he needed this bullet for protection, or just to kill his long-time wife, or maybe he thought that getting back together with her would drive him to suicide.  Either way, it doesn't really matter, just another thing to discuss in a film that's got much more discussion over what it means to be a vampire than it has vampires feasting on their prey.  Again, it's more of a think-piece and a relationship film than an action-based affair.  

Long story short, the couple is forced to leave Detroit and Adam has to sacrifice his large guitar collection (Can't he just pay someone to pack up his house and forward the collection somewhere?  Can't he just open up a storage unit somewhere?  Or does that require a credit card or a bank account, which means a paper-trail?  See, more things to think about!).  The couple flies to Tangier on another night flight and arrive drained, and when they track down vampire Christopher Marlowe, who was supposed to meet them, they realize he's on the way out, he also ran out of the "good stuff" and must have got a bad batch somehow.  I kind of feel like John Hurt got typecast as "the dying guy" for maybe 10 years in movies before he died for real. 

So the couple is forced to return, for a short time at least, to their savage ways - so they settle on a young Moroccan couple, figuring that the most romantic thing they can do is to turn young lovers into vampires, so their relationship will also endure forever. (OK, that's THREE plot points shared with "Twilight"...)

Also starring Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Defiance"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "House of D"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Slimane Dazi, John Hurt (last seen in "Dogville"), Yasmine Hamdan, Carter Logan.

RATING: 5 out of 10 autographed novels in a suitcase

The Dead Don't Die

Year 12, Day 295 - 10/21/20 - Movie #3,680

BEFORE: I faced another dilemma today, with Bill Murray carrying over from "Zombieland: Double Tap", because there's a film on Netflix called "Bill Murray Stories", and it's promote with an image of Mr. Murray's head on the body of a Sasquatch, implying that he's some kind of mythical creature rarely seen in the wild, or perhaps just maintaining an air of mystery about what film he's going to pop up in next, or what film set will be graced with his presence (I've heard that he's hard for directors to contact, you basically have to know somebody who knows Bill if you want to hire him, or pass along a script).  

There's an opportunity to drop this documentary, "Bill Murray Stories", right here in-between, which would also create a triple-play, thus guaranteeing him a spot in my year-end breakdown.  But that would break up the flow of the horror chain, right?  I've done it before, with "Listen to Me, Marlon", so there is some precedent, but I'm going to hold off and reschedule the doc for next year, I think.  He's in a new movie now with Rashida Jones called "On the Rocks", which may hit streaming in the next few months, I could put the doc between that and "City of Ember", or maybe "Ghostbusters: Afterlife" will come out in March as planned, who can say?  I'd be more inclined to watch "Bill Murray Stories" if my count for the rest of the year was short, but it's not, I'm right on target, so no extra slots. 

Besides, how can I pass up linking between two zombie movies that have Bill Murray in them?  You can see how me knowing that this great comic actor has been in exactly three zombie movies, and I have a chance to say I've seen ALL of them, that's a very dangerous thing.  I have to make that happen now.  

THE PLOT: The peaceful town of Centerville finds itself battling a zombie horde as the dead start rising from their graves.  

AFTER: Finding out that Jim Jarmusch made a zombie movie is a bit like finding out that Alfred Hitchcock once made a musical, or that Walt Disney made a pornographic cartoon - it seems very off-brand.  I first became aware of Jarmusch's films back in college, I was in film school a few years after "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Down by Law" came out, though I think I got turned on to those films by my roommate, they weren't part of the curriculum at NYU, but I think they should have been.  Then I didn't encounter another one of his films until about twenty years later, when I started doing this blog and I caught "Coffee and Cigarettes", then "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai".  Last year I watched his film "Paterson" (also starring Adam Driver), and now here comes a whole wave of Jarmusch, two films this week and a third one planned before the end of regulation play this year.  I was in the same room as him, one time in Rafik, which was a film supply and video-dubbing store favored by indie filmmakers, on Broadway in Greenwich Village, up a VERY long two flights of stairs.  Surely that place must have gone out of business at some point.  (Jesus, apparently not, though it seems they may have moved up to E. 39th Street, and they have dozens of terrible Yelp reviews...)

And after a 35-year career, this became the first Jim Jarmusch film to get a wide release - way to go, Jim!  See, if you do something long enough, eventually people realize that you might also be really good at it - very inspiring!  

The thinking man's zombie movie - because somebody took a minute to realize what the effect would be if bodies started rising from their graves in an average small town.  Namely, that's a place where everybody knows, or knew, everybody - so the living humans would probably recognize some of the formerly alive zombies walking around.  If you saw your dead grandmother again, would you be able to shoot her in the face?  There would be a lot of, "Hey, I know those people, but didn't they die?  Oh, right..." and then as your close friends got turned, you'd have to chop their heads off, too - and it's probably a lot easier to chop somebody's head off if you hate them.  Right?  

Also very deadpan - there are surprisingly few freak-outs among the characters in this small town, most people just continue to do their business, at least until the zombies are within striking distance, the police still go out "on patrol" - not to kill zombies specifically, although if that becomes necessary, they will - but their JOB is to go out on patrol, and also maybe work on solving the first couple of murders seen in the film.  Once they see the town is full of zombies, though, there's just a feeling of "Oh, THAT'S what happened..."  Most other citizens who find themselves in a hardware store or supermarket just start killing zombies because, well, it's something to do, I guess, and one farmer kills zombies not because their zombies, but just because they're trespassing on his land. 

Also very self-aware, two of the characters in particular make reference to "reading the script", or "Hey, that song is also the opening theme music!"  Along with this comes a thousand little in-jokes and Easter eggs, like the three kids from Cleveland are driving the same model of car that was seen in "The Night of the Living Dead", and Adam Driver's character has a little Star Destroyer on his keychain, because of course he does.  RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan has a cameo as a delivery driver, but he works for WU-PS!  Other actors play thinly-veiled versions of themselves, like Rosie Perez as news reporter Posie Juarez.  

The film also doesn't fall back on the usual "viral" excuse for the zombies attacking, so this didn't start for sure in any Wuhan exotic meat market - instead there's a news report that something called "polar fracking" has caused the Earth to tip off its usual axis, therefore the daylight and nighttime schedule is all mixed up, it stays light until 8 pm, or is that just the Daylight Savings time?  Then there's a weird glow coming from the moon, so perhaps it's toxic moon radiation?  Does it really matter, when dead people are climbing out of their graves?  Or was the director trying to make a point about the dangers of fracking here, though it could have just as easily been global warming or too much plastic in the oceans, because here nobody has quite figured out the direct cause and effect relationship.  Plus, this may come across as some kind of liberal propaganda here, we either get together and stop fracking and other earth-damaging practices, or we'll eventually have a zombie attack, or worse, to deal with.

According to this film, first our cell phones will all stop working, then our pets will all suddenly leave us, and only THEN will the zombies rise up.  And they'll all sort of gravitate toward the things they used to do in life, like if they used to play baseball, then as zombies they'll go hang out on the ball field. If they used to hang out in coffee shops, then that's where they're headed as zombies.  Great, now they're going to be up ALL NIGHT eating human flesh. 

Jarmusch really painted himself into a corner with this script, it seems he didn't realize that he might need a viable ending.  Just having a character that says "It's probably going to end badly" several times doesn't really count as an ending.  When you get your characters into a situation, it's maybe a good idea to not consider the script done until you also have a way out, that's a pro tip.  It's kind of telling that Jarmusch comes from the world of indie film and usually doesn't have to worry about such things - just having characters talk about interesting stuff around a table has worked for him in the past, and those are cases where things didn't really have to be resolved. Or I guess the film needed to stick with a downer of a message, because if the good people triumph over the zombies, then the environmental anti-fracking message loses its bite?  Is that what we're dealing with here? 

Meanwhile, one of the political parties apparently is denying that polar fracking is what caused the Earth to tip off its axis, and that party is probably also denying that there IS a change in the Earth's rotation, and will ultimately deny the zombie attacks, too.  You probably can guess which party I'm talking about, Righttttt?

Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "The Report"), Tilda Swinton (last heard in "Uncut Gems"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Steve Buscemi (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Danny Glover (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Tom Waits (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "American Made"), Selena Gomez (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Austin Butler (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Luka Sabbat, Rosie Perez (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Eszter Balint, Iggy Pop (last seen in "We Are Twisted Fucking Sister"), Sara Driver, RZA (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Carol Kane (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Larry Fessenden (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Rosal Colon (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Sturgill Simpson, Jodie Markell, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Maya Delmont, Taliyah Whitaker, Jahi Di'Allo Winston (last seen in "The Upside"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 missing cows

Zombieland: Double Tap

Year 12, Day 294 - 10/20/20 - Movie #3,679

BEFORE: Well, I was going to post this on Monday, but I've held off for Tuesday, which is my birthday.  The reason?  I looked back at my post for the first "Zombieland" and realized I also reviewed that film on my birthday, exactly five years ago.  Look at the numbering - the two films' numbers are just one off from being 1,500 away from each other - that's five years at 300 films a year, or very close to it, though I did not plan this, it just happened by accident.  Anyway, I'm turning 52 today, with best wishes also going out to my birthday twins - Bill Nunn, Danny Boyle, Viggo Mortensen, Snoop Dogg, future vice president Kamala Harris, Dan Fogler, John Krasinski, and thoughts for the late Jerry Orbach, Tom Petty, Art Buchwald, Mickey Mantle, Bela Lugosi and Dr. Joyce Brothers. 

Birthdays are different during the COVID pandemic, and one would assume, different during a zombie apocalypse too.  (There's still time for zombies to surface in 2020, as we've had just about every other terrible situation happen this year...)   My wife's birthday was one week ago, and we spent most of the day at home, except for a trip out to her favorite steakhouse, which had just re-opened for indoor dining two weeks before.  I had a cake designed to look like a steak delivered to our house, so that was dessert, but then everyone working at the steakhouse wanted to see a photo of the cake that looked like a steak!

Today's film is what would have followed those three horror films I deleted from Plan C, so originally Zoey Deutch would have carried over from "Beautiful Creatures".  But I went with Plan D, so Thomas Middleditch carries over from "Replicas", and I still ended up exactly where Plan C would have put me. This is where the linking gets really tricky, when a film is both a horror film AND a comedy, and/or features a bunch of actors better known for being in romantic films, which normally appear in February, so I really have to dig deep to find some people in this cast who have more than one horror film on their resumés...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Zombieland" (Movie #2,178)

THE PLOT: Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock move to the American heartland as they face off against advanced zombies, fellow survivors and the growing pains of their snarky makeshift family.

AFTER: I'm only half joking here, because so many zombie movies treat this theoretical threat to humanity as if it's virus-based - how else can you explain that the bite from a zombie turns each victim into another zombie?  I just don't know if this replicating process is sustainable at all, because if a zombie takes a bite and keeps on eating, how is there enough of a victim to form a new zombie?  Admittedly, I'm not an expert, because I don't watch "The Walking Dead" or its spinoff show, and I haven't watched the really classic films like "Dawn of the Dead", I've only seen a few, like "28 Days Later", "World War Z", "Shaun of the Dead" and "The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse".  And they tend to make me ask the same questions over and over, like what happens when the zombies run out of people to eat?  Do they eat animals, or each other, because they used to be people, right?  Can zombies starve if they don't find food, and if so, how long does that take?  

This sequel is set 10 years after the first "Zombieland" film, which does correspond neatly to the release dates, 2009 and 2019.  I was willing to guess that the actors only looked about five years older, but I must be wrong.  In the first film, our heroes made it to Los Angeles and found zombie Bill Murray in his mansion, but this time they're closer to the East Coast, and have decided to settle down, for a while, anyway, in the White House.  Thankfully it's zombie-free, although you've got to figure there must have been a President at some point who failed to stop the zombie problem, perhaps by denying it, then getting infected himself to prove to the country that the virus was no big deal.  I guess we can see now how that all turned out - not well. 

Columbus and Wichita are still a couple, and they take up residence in the Lincoln Bedroom, while Tallahassee declares himself President - well, who's going to disagree?  Of course this far into the Zombie Apocalypse, there's no organized government to speak of, all the cabinet members probably became zombies after some official staff super-spreader event.  Gee, this film was really just a year ahead of its time, because except for the eating flesh bits, a lot of this feels like it maybe could come true!  But after a while, all of Tallahassee's talk about making a pilgrimage to see Graceland gets into Little Rock's head, and she and her sister Wichita head out on the road.  Columbus trying to take his relationship with Wichita to the next level might also have had something to do with this.  

Columbus and Tallahassee hit a local mall for supplies, and find a girl who's been living in the safety of the food court's freezer since the attack began.  She's Madison, as everyone post-zombie seems to be named after the city they're originally from.  (Personal names just allow people to form attachments, and nobody wants to get too attached to people who may die soon from zombie attacks.).  Nevertheless, Madison and Columbus hit it off and she joins him at the White House.  And of course, this would be a terrible time for his old girlfriend to come back...

The group all sets off for Graceland (which is just outside of Memphis, I was there 3 years ago, minus five days) in a minivan to find Little Rock, and when they arrive, they're disappointed to see Elvis' former home in ruins.  (Plus, they're still charging over 50 bucks admission!). Bucket list item achieved, well, sort of. So they de-camp at a nearly Elvis-themed hotel, where they meet the owner, Nevada, and are soon joined by Albuquerque and Flagstaff, another zombie-battling team that seems very familiar to them, almost too familiar.  Columbus has his "Rules" for battling zombies, while Flagstaff has a similar number of "Commandments" to follow.  This is no doubt a sort of tongue-in-cheek in-joke about how there are only so many character archetypes in action and horror movies, and probably the actors who play Flagstaff and Columbus have been up for the same smart, nerdy, Jewish twenty-something roles time and time again.  

Meanwhile, there are new types of zombies evolving, ones that are smarter than "Homers", faster, stronger and very resilient, one team calls them "T-800's" after characters from the "Terminator" series, but the other team insists on calling them "Bolts", after Usain Bolt, and this leads to one of those insane theoretical arguments like whether the chicken or the egg came first, so bottom line, these characters are all much too alike to work together as a proper team.  They're so alike that they can't ever see eye to eye, if that makes sense.  Besides, as with "The Walking Dead", I assume, the life expectancy of extraneous characters is always very low.  

Eventually they learn that Little Rock and her hippie/hipster boyfriend are heading for Babylon, a commune-like enclave that's protected itself from zombies by building a large wall, which might be another blatant reference to our current political system.  (Zombies = Mexicans?). But it's an enclave full of peace-minded people, who don't allow weapons into their facility, and they melt down any weapons that people bring in.  This, of course, could only be a problem if there was eventually going to be a zombie attack there.  So guess what?  Now, how are our heroes supposed to take down a horde of super-fast, super-resilient zombies with no guns, no axes, no traditional weapons?  It's time to get creative...

The lesson here, and it's a good one, is that tough time call for tougher people, and only by sticking with one's family and working together can people defeat the virus.  Also by following the rules, even though the rules here are things like "Beware of bathrooms", "double-knot your shoes" and "Ziploc bags", some things are universal.  In our reality, in the time of the pandemic, we also need to follow rules, the big ones of course are "wash your hands often" and "wear a mask in public", but some rules are applicable in both situations, like "Don't be afraid to ask for help", "teamwork", "mind your manners" and so on.  Things to keep in mind, because we really want to nip this coronavirus in the bud as soon as possible - because if I'm keeping it real, we still don't know for sure if this thing could mutate into the zombie virus.  Right?  

Be sure to stay tuned until the very end, because there's a bonus scene that explains how actor Bill Murray got zombie-fied, back in the very early days of the zombie pandemic - it occurred during a press junket for the (fictional, thank God) film "Garfield 3: Flabby Tabby", which shockingly was NOT subtitled "The Fat and the Furry-ous".  Seems like a lost opportunity there for another in-joke. (Zombies = Entertainment Reporters?)

Also starring Woody Harrelson (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Emma Stone (last seen in "The Favourite"), Abigail Breslin (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Zoey Deutch (last seen in "Set It Up"), Avan Jogia (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Luke Wilson (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Victoria Hall, Victor Rivera, Ian Gregg (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Lucas Fleischer, Bill Murray (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Al Roker (ditto), Grace Randolph, Josh Horowitz, Lili Estefan

RATING: 6 out of 10 blown-out tires

Replicas

Year 12, Day 292 - 10/18/20 - Movie #3,678

BEFORE: OK, so I took stock of what's left unseen in terms of Stephen King movies - after I review "It: Chapter Two" next week, there's really just "Pet Sematary" (the recent remake), "Children of the Corn", and something called "A Good Marriage", which is on AmazonPrime.  Also some lesser works like "Graveyard Shift", "Creepshow" and the original Salem's Lot, which is technically a mini-series, and I usually try to discount those, but the original version of "It" was a TV mini-series, and I counted that one.  But then if I let in all the mini-series, I'd have to watch "The Stand", "The Langoliers" and "The Tommyknockers" - but those longer series don't really feel like movies, so I guess the cut-off is that any mini-series longer than two episodes doesn't belong here - I may still watch them at some point but this is a movie review site, not a TV series review site.  (Though apparently I'll make an exception for two-part TV movies...) 

All in all, that's not too bad, I've already knocked out a ton of movies based on King's stories over the years.  However, with the recent success of the "It" films, there are many more currently in production - so the struggle continues.  Something to worry about next year, for now I just want to get to the end of October and then not think about horror films for a while - I've got a few months before I need to think about possibilities for a 2021 horror chain, based on what I didn't get to in 2020.  

"Replicas" is another film like "Birds of Prey", meaning that it's been rescheduled several times this year - I was going to include it with "River's Edge" and "Between Two Ferns" back when I thought that the "Bill & Ted Face the Music" movie might get released on time, but then of course movie theaters didn't open up in June.  Then when "Bill & Ted" got re-scheduled for a September release, I could have used this one to link between "Once Upon a Time in Venice" (via Thomas Middleditch) to "Bill & Ted 3", which would have linked back to "Killing Hasselhoff" via Kid Cudi.  Then, since movie theaters in New York City didn't open up like they did in other cities, I had to drop the plans to see "Bill & Ted", which meant dropping "Replicas" from the schedule, too, and fortunately Ron Funches was in both films on either side of the Keanu double-play, and thus the chain just closed up around where this one would have gone, and the linking was preserved.  Moving "Replicas" to October was the next best move, combined with "Birds of Prey" and "Doctor Sleep", all three films replacing three OTHER films that I would have had to rent from iTunes.  With a little effort, the schedule just finds a way to work itself out, it seems. 

Emily Alyn Lind carries over from "Doctor Sleep".

THE PLOT: A scientist becomes obsessed with bringing back his family members who died in a traffic accident. 

AFTER: Because this film ended up in October, when all was said and done, I'm going to regard it as a spin on the classic "Mad Scientist" story, of which "Frankenstein" may be the most well-known example, however there are plenty of others.  I ran out of Frankenstein-based movies years ago, so this may be the closest I get to anything like that this year.  (How else can I work in my annual reminder that the book's title refers to the SCIENTIST, not the MONSTER.  If you see that big figure with the green skin and the bolts in his neck, and you call him "Frankenstein", you are wrong.  He was not officially given a name in the classic novel, though he made a reference to wanting to be called "Adam". I find myself correcting people on this point every single year.)

Doctor Frankenstein, of course, took many body parts from different sources, stitched them together, and allowed that new-fangled thing called electricity to bring his creature to life.  Modern medicine has come  a long way since then, and here we find our mad scientist, William Foster, working to bring dead subjects back in a different way, by placing their brain patterns into robot bodies.  The success rate is not good, however, every cyborg implanted with human brains seems very confused and has an urge to self-destruct.  With a funding deadline looming - somebody must need a cyborg army very badly, is it the company that will someday become Skynet? - Foster decides to get away with his family on a boating trip. Sure, if it's crunch time, logically that means it's a great time for a vacation, right?  

But the family never makes it to the boat, a car accident takes the lives of Foster's wife and three kids, he's the only one who walks away from the crash - but instead of calling the police or an ambulance, he calls his lab assistant to come and record the brain patterns of his family, so I guess he has the intent of putting them into robot bodies?  Already this isn't making much sense, because over the next few days he manages to perfect human cloning by instead growing new bodies for them in "pods", but if the company was working with cyborg bodies, why did they have cloning pods on hand?  Isn't that a completely different approach to body-making?  And if cloning was possible, why wasn't the company doing that instead?  So many questions here, but the chief question among them is probably - HOW?  

It's notable that Foster asks his assistant to dispose of the bodies, so he doesn't seem to have much respect for his dead family members, but perhaps that's because he's so focused on bringing them back in some fashion.  There are a lot of Tony-Stark like shots of Keanu Reeves working with 3-D models of what are supposed to be his wife and kids' brains, because he wants them to wake up with no memory of the crash, so that means getting in there and removing specific memories, which of course is completely beyond the scope of current technology.  My understanding of how the brain works is limited, I'll admit, but I'm pretty sure you can't scan a human brain and locate and remove specific memories, that's a bunch of hogwash. 

What's worse is that he's got four dead family members, but only three pods.  So he can't bring them all back, because he's decided that he's only got one shot at this.  But WHY?  NITPICK POINT here, if he's only got one shot to get this right, that's a very non-scientific approach.  Why not try resurrecting ONE family member as a test case, then if that works out, he could then use the three pods to finish the job.  OK, that would take twice as long, but then there would be less need to get into all of their brains and move memories around (which, again, is impossible) - or there's no valid reason why he couldn't bring back the other daughter in the second round, after using all three pods once.  It just feels like an unnecessary complication here, because then he's got to go around the whole house and remove photos of the younger daughter, plus get rid of her bed, plus the very large prominent pillow with her name on it.  (It was so prominent, I was sure this was where he was going to slip up...)

NITPICK POINT 2: Instead of tinkering with the memories of three family members, wouldn't it have been easier to just tell those three people that there was a car crash, they were injured and therefore don't remember it, and the younger daughter died in the crash?  Sure, this might be a little painful for them to deal with, but it seems easier than causing them the distress of feeling like they lost something without being able to quite put their finger on why, or risking possible brain damage to them by deleting pieces of their memories.  

For a scientist, Foster's also not very smart, apparently - while hiding his family's deaths, he didn't think for one second about the effects of his wife not showing up at the clinic where she volunteers, or his kids not showing up at school, or nobody in the family being on social media for like two weeks.  So he's got to sign on to all their accounts, log into their phones (umm, how does he know their passwords?) and try to keep the illusion of having a family going while their clone bodies are growing.  Then he's got to take those brain engrams and implant them into the clone bodies so they can just wake up one day and continue on with their lives as one big happy but slightly confused family.  And that's essentially what happens, they move forward as if nothing had gone wrong, and live happily ever after.  Just kidding.  

Eventually Foster's wife and kids realize something is off, when nobody can find their cell phones or remember what they did over the last fortnight.  Which leads to some interesting questions - like if you can't remember last week, did it really happen?  Or did you become a clone at some point without anybody telling you that you died?  I recently watched the whole Netflix series "Living With Yourself", where Paul Rudd plays a guy who gets cloned against his will, and that covered some of the same dilemmas seen here.  In that show a clinic claims to rejuvenate people, but they're actually creating a younger clone, similarly imprinting the same brain patterns and memories into the clone, and disposing of the original body.  Only in that case the original was only mostly dead, came back to find himself buried in a shallow grave, and then came back to society to confront his younger, better (in some ways) clone.  

Something similar is also going on right now in X-Men comics, where after the last story reboot, all mutants (heroes and villains alike) have dropped out of human society to live on the island of Krakoa, and a combination of the powers of five specific mutants works to insure that no mutant ever really dies, their brains are constantly backed up by Professor X, and if any major character should die in battle, they'll just clone a new body and put the last back-up into that clone's brain, so bingo, in a few days that superhero is back in action.  Essentially it's an admission that this is what comic books have always done, kill off this hero or that one as a shock event to drive up sales, and then find some new creative way (time-travel, magic, teleportation just before the moment of death) to bring that hero back a year or two later.  Some clever writer just devised a way to do this on the regular, which really just streamlines the whole process. 

But in all these cases, there are valid scientific and ethical questions. Sure, we've theoretically undone death from a story standpoint, but even if it were medically possible in the real world, is that really the practical application of this?  Is the cloned body with implanted brain patterns the same person as before, or should that be considered a new being, from a legal standpoint, or even a medical one?  Secondly, undoing the effects of the death doesn't mean it didn't happen, because it did.  You can rebuild your house after a fire, but it's never going to look or be exactly the same, even if you try to make it so - and a human body and brain is probably a lot more complicated than a house.  Something's always going to be a bit OFF, even if you could imprint brain patterns and memories from a specific point in time, pre-accident.  A clone body is identical, down to the genetic level, sure, but once it starts living and thinking on its own, there's bound to be some form of divergence, you can't just snap your fingers and go back to the way things were before.  They would know, or SOMEBODY would know, deep down, that this person is just a copy, right?  

We may never know for sure, because the scientific community has forbidden all experiments in the human cloning arena - however that doesn't mean that somebody isn't doing it somewhere...  There's no rapid aging of clone bodies like in the movies, so we might not know for decades if some scientist pulled this off.  So I can't really take this film seriously, it's little more than a thought experiment to me.  

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Alice Eve (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), John Ortiz (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Emjay Anthony (last seen in "Krampus"), Aria Lyric Leabu, Nyasha Hatendi (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Amber Rivera, Luis Gonzaga, Jeffrey Holsman, Sunshine Logroño, Angela Alvarado. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pancakes