Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Generally speaking, I’m not a movie purist when it comes to remakes - to my mind, there’s no reason why a good director can’t pull something fresh and interesting out of a familiar story. Even though the original is still held in high esteem, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in which four survivors attempt to ride out a plague of zombies in a deserted shopping mall, is particularly ripe for retelling. When the original first opened in 1978, shopping malls were a relatively new proposition - hulking, vacuum-formed consumer paradises that seemed to embody the the retail culture of the future. Fast forward to 2004 and the situation’s just as Romero predicted, only much much larger - there’s a mall in every city, and a generation of babies who can recognise the McDonalds logo before they can say “mummy”. You’d think there’s a fascinating survival story to be told there, and there probably is, but director Zack Snyder’s none too interested in telling it; his Dawn of the Dead pays lip service to the original (title, mall, original cast cameos) but is essentially a slick but soulless major-studio action movie of the kind that Hollywood knocks out by the bucketload. It ticks all the requisite boxes for a summer blockbuster, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential. Read more
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I was expecting good things from a movie which no less a critic than George A. Romero unashamedly promotes at any opportunity as one of the finest zombie films he’s ever seen, but even I wasn’t prepared for the quality of Shaun of the Dead. My eyes tend to glaze over when I am confronted with a piece of recent British film-making, which is a real arse as some of my favourite films hail from these very shores (I have only to mention The Wicker Man as proof). I blame it on too much box office success for Richard Curtis and his insidious ‘rom-coms’, which have somehow distracted the cinema going public’s attention from the fact that Hugh Grant a) cannot act and; b) is a tosser. I thus made every effort to avoid Shaun of the Dead at the time of its release in light of reviews describing it as ‘the first romantic zombie comedy’ – no thank you. With several friends recommending it though I finally bit the bullet (having first been assured that Grant was nowhere to be seen) and can only apologies for every shrug of indifference I affected when being told to go and watch it at the cinema. Read more
Boris Karloff
The outline of Boris Karloff in his full Frankenstein makeup remains to this day one of horror cinema’s most enduring images. An immensely versatile actor, he gave accomplished performances in many non-horror movies, but his astonishing performance as the monster in James Whale’s classic came to define his career; but whereas many other actors would have come to resent such a ubiquitous role, Karloff was always proud to be associated with the character, and cherished the acclaim and popularity it brought him. Read more
Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)
It’s nothing new for horror to borrow from other styles of film-making, but even by the genre’s own mix-and-match standards Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is a real curio. As the title suggests, it’s one of the Em(m)anuelle films, a long running series of soft-core porn films the began in France in 1969. By the late 70s, the series was being helmed by Italian director Joe d’Amato, who saw fit to try and incorporate the character into that other late 70s Italian staple, the cannibal movie. The results are odd in the extreme. Laura Gemser plays roving reporter Emanuelle, working undercover at a New York lunatic asylum, where a young female patient has bitten a nurse’s breast off. It transpires that the girl was raised by a tribe of cannibals, and intrigued by the story, Emanuelle puts together an expedition to track down the tribe - only to find that her team are top of the menu… Read more
The Grudge (2003)
The international success of Hideo Nakata’s Ring led to a frenzied search - both in Hollywood and in Asia - to find the next international “J-horror” (as it’s doomed to be known) success. The unlikely candidate appears to have been the Ju-On series, aka The Grudge, which already exists in five screen versions already - two Japanese TV movies, two Japanese feature films and an American remake, with an American remake sequel on the way. Having only seen the first Japanese movie, I can’t really offer any comparison as to what’s the best, but on this evidence alone I can’t really say that the whole Grudge industry fills me with much enthusiasm. The recent US remake, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, was extensively (and rather cynically) promoted as being the “next Ring”, even down to the spooky girl with long dark hair on the posters, and the UK DVD release of the first Japanese film has a rather odd quote from The Metro on the back, claiming the film “scares the socks of The Ring”, which I can only assume is a typo. Hell, you can even buy the Japanese DVD in Woolworths - even Ring didn’t get that treatment, so someone’s obviously banking on making a lot of money out of this series. Read more
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