Zombies: The Beginning

My New Era Of Reviewing (aka post-Netflix DVD) has not gotten off to a good start. I had always made a point of checking out reviews on the Netflix web site before putting a film on my queue, but that’s not as easy to do with Amazon Prime. I made an assumption. I paid a price for it. ($3.99 plus tax, two hours of my life I can’t get back, and my pride)

Everyone knows I enjoy horror movies, especially of the zombie variety. They are often poorly made and I do enjoy a bad movie (thanks to my father). The problem with zombie films is that they can get SO bad that even I can’t stomach them. Typically, if that happened with a DVD rental (or 50₵ yard sale purchase) I would just ship it back or throw it on my Sell At Yard Sale Someday pile. But no, now I’m stuck with the purchase price and if the movie is Really Bad, I am stuck with a dilemma. Do I continue watching an utter piece of trash, even if it’s so bad it’s not good? Or do I stop watching and write it off to my current learning curve?

I was just about to do the latter when I noticed that Zombies: The Beginning is not quite a typical awful movie starring D level actors made by a director who’s not so much phoning it in as maliciously springing this crud on an unsuspecting world. The story is simple. A search and rescue team plucks a stranded woman out of the ocean and whisks her back to dry land where the corporation she works for grills her for a while and says they don’t believe her story of ravaging undead on the island she escaped from, and that she’ll never work again. For months she has constant nightmares about the undead she barely escaped from and then the corporation calls her in to consult on a military incursion into their facility that has stopped answering the phone.

*screeeech*

Hang on just a danged minute. Is she standing in front of a PowerPoint scrawl of character files playing behind her in the boardroom? Did I just hear her say, “All this bullshit you think is so important.”? Does she wake from a nightmare and stand in front of a mirror, splash water on her face and stare at herself introspectively?

Yeah, she did do all that, and more. She is the dime store version of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and they have remade that movie almost beat for beat, set on an unnamed island somewhere on Earth instead of somewhere in space, with zombies instead of acid-for-blood aliens. I had to finish watching the danged movie so I can see just how “closely” they copied a classic sf action film from the 1980s, and I was not happy about it.

The title is based on (stolen from) the famous 1979 movie Zombie by Lucio Fulci, an infamous Italian director who helped make giallo (a particularly vicious kind of horror film, with a heavy emphasis on style and color) famous. The original has its own history and sequels and followers and whatnot.  I was shocked to discover that the maker of Zombie: The Beginning is apparently well known for stealing from Aliens and other films, and has a fan base.

One of the first things I noticed is that the director made a point of lingering on images that cost money. Got a helicopter for a day? Spend a lot of time with that heli, with the badly rendered military speak over the headsets and shots of people getting in and getting out and flying through the air and landing. Did you pay a group of non-speaking actors to have the makeup director smother them in paint and wear Halloween candy monster teeth? Well that cost a pretty penny, let’s show those zombie shots at least ten times, and don’t bother to mix up the order of their appearance. Just show that “nightmare” sequence several times. Slow motion is better! Gonna shoot automatic weaponry at the monsters? Just have the “soldiers” shake the gun and no one will notice the lack of muzzle flash. They’ll hear the “gun shooting” sound effects and make assumptions. Fake bullets are too expensive!

But it got so much worse! The “military” unit sent in is a comic book level pastiche of the actors portraying military in Aliens. They spend all their time smarting off and acting dumb and being as military as a sweet sixteen cotillion. Bunched up, they shuffle through the alien…sorry…zombie held areas of the island facility, spouting famous lines and making my jaw ache from being dropped open for so long. The Vasquez substitute is an older New Zealand actress if I heard her accent right. I think the fake gun was too heavy for her to handle, so they gave a lot of her scenes to someone else. What really ticked me off was how they portrayed the great Bill Paxton’s character Hudson, subbing in a stupid looking guy with non-stop dialogue of the kindergarten bully variety.

Strangely, the sub-plot of finding a girl hiding from the aliens at the facility was completely cut from this remake. Guess child actors cost more than helicopters.

There is nothing good in this movie, except the actress is good at screaming. Yes, I need to start googling movies before I rent them, which means I’ll have to know a fair bit about them before watching. That’s going to change how I watch and respond. More learning curve.  I wasn’t going to review this movie at all, but I was astounded at how totally this no rent Italian director utterly stole a complete, famous film. Do I respect his chutzpah? No. Am I amazed or respectful of any aspect? No.

This review is a warning. A public service. A written reaction by a shocked patron of the arts.

LINKS:

• Zombies: The Beginning – IMDB
• Note: No Wikipedia or Official Website

CFR: In Addition:

Dear Mildred: I thank you for your service to the world by recommending NO ONE SEE this movie. I know I won’t. Although I am Italian, I am not a fan of Italian cinema.

Seriously, avoid Italian cinema. Or should I write “cinema”?