MonsterHunter

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Four people including two white guys, a black guy, and a chick fly around in a helicopter after the living dead have run roughshod over our planet. These four people are holed up inside a rather large structure where they not only have to do battle against zombies with a sweet tooth for arms, legs and pig guts, but also against their fellow humans, thus provoking that often-asked and perpetually not-so-subtle question: Who are the real monsters?

Uh, my vote would be for director George Romero. George made Night Of The Living Dead back in 1968 about a group of people besieged in a farmhouse by zombies. Then in 1978, he had a chance to use a bigger budget, get some color film, and hire Tom Savini to make sure every time a machete found its way into someone’s head, there was ample spewage of blood. That one was called Dawn Of The Dead and involved four people besieged in a mall by zombies.

Fast forward seven years (conveniently about the length of Dawn Of The Dead) and George emerges from his zombie sabbatical ready to unleash his new and exciting vision of his apocalyptic world where the dead outnumber the living and the only hope anyone has is that your best friend makes good on his promise to put a bullet in your head if you turn all zombie on him. If I remember the press coverage at the time (I had a Fangoria subscription back before I knew any better) George wanted to make the Gone With The Wind of zombie films, presumably focusing more on the scenes where Atlanta burns than the ones involving guys named Ashley.

But something went wrong on the way to giving horror fans that epic end-of-the-world feel-bad flick that they so cravenly desired. It turned out that in order to get the budget he wanted, George had to agree to deliver an R rated film, unlike the unrated opus that was Dawn Of The Dead. As I watched the lead actors in this movie, who were as disposable as any of the zombies, I shuddered when I thought about an alternate reality where George took less money and made an unrated Day of the Dead. I’m sure that watching a movie where George and Mrs. George are fending off zombies that looks suspiciously like their children in their Pittsburgh-area house would have its own rewards, but ultimately we wouldn’t have been blessed with that foul mouthed comedy team of Rickles and Steele if he had done it that way, so I’m not pining away for what might have been.

What I don’t mind pining away for though is that after taking a break for almost a decade to mull things over, is the idea that George could have come up with something a bit more original than what he shovels up in this chapter. When this movie isn’t borrowing liberally from Dawn Of The Dead, its collection of jerk characters are so intent on cussing each other out and standing around debating whether the zombies should be domesticated or just exterminated, that you’re ready to “accidentally” leave the back door open so that the zombies can roll in and have lunch.

George commits the cardinal sin of attaching a group of completely unlikable characters to a story that not only is uninteresting, but ridiculous, even in a genre that saw a zombie fight a shark (the fast-paced Zombie) and nude anthropology (the wholly superior piece of trash Hell Of The Living Dead). The idea that three scientists would be living in an underground storage facility with about twelve military men and be working on a project to try and train zombies to behave is reminiscent of other pointless science projects like when Dr. Butcher was doing brain transplants on that island to turn cannibals into zombies in the busy classic Zombie Holocaust.

The opening shot of the movie shows a large city in Florida deserted except for zombies, tumbleweed and newspapers that just happen to blow by with their headlines displaying “The Dead Walk” just in case I wasn’t sure what this movie was all about. And by the way, that single headline would just about be the only information we would get about this epidemic, so don’t go into this one expecting anything further to be explained about this series concept.

The four people that pass for our heroes are on a reconnaissance mission to see if there any other survivors in the area. They see no one and can’t raise anybody on the radio. The movie makes clear that civilization has completely ceased to exist (we know from these three movies that the zombies have taken over at least Pittsburgh and south Florida) so it’s not just a local problem and there’s no sign of anyone trying to aid these cities. (Shoot, in Dawn Of The Dead the problem had gotten so bad that biker gangs had already formed to roam the countryside and the zombies had only been around for like a day and a half.) The scenario that George sets up then doesn’t really seem to allow for a group of people hanging around in a big tunnel trying to teach zombies to appreciate “Ode To Joy” or the pleasures of reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

The movie sets up the conflict between the human survivors at this facility by dividing them into two equally distasteful groups: the angry, dimwitted military guys and the egghead scientists that spend most of the movie covering up for Dr. Logan and his insane experiments on zombies as well as the corpses of recently deceased soldiers.

On the one hand, the soldiers lead by the insane Rhodes (”I’m running this monkey farm now!”) are simpletons that constantly threaten the scientists and make rude remarks to them to the point that their use of profanity (particularly by Rhodes’s two men, Steele and Rickles) turns into comic relief. On the other hand, the scientists are completely out of touch nerds who are wasting time and resources for idiotic experiments and deserve to be threatened. What am I to do as a viewer when confronted by two such sets of unsympathetic characters? Four words: Bring on the zombies!

And no, I don’t mean that big green Frankenstein Monster wannabe Bub, either. Bub is Dr. Logan’s “star pupil” as one of the characters sarcastically puts it. Logan keeps Bub chained up in the lab and gives him things that he may remember from his former life. Stuff like a razor or a telephone or automatic pistol. Dr. Logan made sure it was unloaded, since that’s the kind of safety the NRA preaches when giving guns to zombies, but later on someone goes and leaves a loaded pistol lying around and well, it isn’t guns that kill people, it’s zombies with guns that kill people, right?

For most of the movie, everyone seems content to go about the daily routine of everyday life. Go down to the zombie corral to get some new test subjects for Dr. Logan, complain about how stupid Dr. Logan’s experiments are, make racist comments about the Hispanic soldier, and have staff meetings that usually end with Rhodes pulling his six shooter on someone and shouting a variety of words strong Christians like myself usually reserve for only the most extreme of circumstances such as when our favorite sports team isn’t going to cover the point spread for a third straight week.

That idyllic existence is shattered once Rhodes discovers that Logan has been using his soldiers’ corpses to experiment on. Rhodes then uses Logan to test out his automatic weapon (Yep, works great! Thanks for your help, Doc!) and the Hispanic guy who had his arm hacked off by his probably soon to be ex-girlfriend goes nuts and heads to the surface where he lets the zombies eat him while they’re all descending on a big platform into the underground base.

The remainder of the movie is pretty much the payoff for the zombie fans who have patiently waited through scenes of the Hispanic guy crying from all the stress, the Jamaican guy pontificating about how the zombies are God’s way of showing us we ain’t all that, and the radio guy drinking. As the zombies invade the base, everyone follows the emergency plan and promptly splits up so that we can have several explicit kill scenes where guts are flung about, eyes are gouged and bodies are ripped in half and dragged down the hall. You also have Rhodes who suffers the great indignity of being the only guy in the history of the movies to lose a gunfight to a zombie! I guess Bub’s in charge of this monkey farm now, huh?

This is a much slicker looking film than either of its predecessors, but as the female lead in this movie would probably try to have you believe, looks aren’t everything. Tom Savini contributes outstanding special effects and there are moments when you really believe that a zombie’s eyes are still moving even after its head has been hacked off at the jaw with a shovel, but its all for naught as Romero’s experimentation storyline isn’t believable in the context of his world and the people he populates the movie with are all overbearing oafs.

The addition of Bub, the intelligent zombie, simply nails this one down as an all around failure since the entire idea of these movies is that the living dead are scary because they’re mindless killing machines that operate purely on instinct. Give Bub a name, gun and personality and he’s no longer part of the unstoppable teeming hoard, but just another movie monster like Freddy or Pinhead.

© 2008 MonsterHunter