zombies

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death Metal Zombies (1995)

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One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.

You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.

The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.

-Brandon Ledet

Day of the Dead (1985)

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One of the more exhausting tendencies of zombie outbreak stories is how they all inevitably devolve into large-scale militarism. Even the more modern deviations on vintage zombie tropes in 28 Days Later, Overlord, and The Girl With All the Gifts are largely military stories, as if there is no way to depict a worldwide zombie outbreak without filling the frame with tanks & helicopters. All zombie roads lead directly to the military, and they all trail back to George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy. Following the suburban invasion of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and 1978’s trapped-in-a-shopping mall satire Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead is a pure brains-vs.-brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse. If violent, crowd-controlling military action is essential to zombie outbreak storytelling, then movies might as well make the conflict between that military and the citizens it supposedly protects a central part of the text. Being more of an Idea Guy who was always eager to dig into the moral & philosophical implications of his films’ supernatural events than someone who could convincingly stage propulsive action or heartfelt drama, Romero was perfectly suited to explore that conflict at length, locking the audience into the bunker with him until he could sort it all out.

Lori Cardille stars as a scientist willing to dedicate the rest of her life to researching a cure for zombie blood infection. Unfortunately, she’s the only woman in the underground military bunker that’s been retrofitted into her research lab, and the heavily armed meatheads who provide her rations are getting tired of her work showing no discernible progress. The only thing stopping them from stripping her of her lab equipment (and more) is the parallel research of Dr. Matthew Logan, a mad scientist whose colleagues mockingly refer to as “Frankenstein”. Having long given up on finding a cure, Frankenstein has instead shifted his research to training zombie captives from the mines outside the military base on how to behave. He rigs their undead, semi-disassembled bodies to machines, stimulating them with electricity to see how their flesh might be controlled by the living’s command. He’s also taken one specific zombie as a pet, a specimen who he’s nicknamed “Bub” in loving, disdainful memory of his own father. Thanks to the power of positive reinforcement, Bub can vocalize simple phrases, operate a Walkman, salute the military officers in the room, and (most recklessly on Frankenstein’s end) fire a handgun. He can also apparently hold a grudge, since he eventually escapes containment to hunt down the bunker’s most fascistic militant in retribution for the crime of being an asshole.

There are three clear MVPs at work here, Tom Savini the most obvious among them. The all-out zombie mayhem of the final minutes (when the military base is inevitably invaded by the horde outside) gives Savini and his make-up team dozens of chances to stage and restage the classic Romero gag where a victim is overwhelmed & disemboweled by hungry zombies’ reaching hands. Before that climactic payoff, the frequent visits to Frankenstein’s lab allow Savini more freedom to construct individual animatronic monstrosities that show the mad doctor’s abandoned experiments in various stages of failure & disrepair, and the results rank among the gore wizard’s most unforgettable creations. The unlikely comic duo of Frankenstein (Richard Liberty) & Bub (Sherman Howard) are also obvious MVPs, delivering most of the film’s memorable character moments. The way Frankenstein wanders into meetings with military officials smeared from face to boot in infected zombie blood while explaining why they should pet-train the cannibal ghouls instead of shooting them dead makes for consistently rewarding comic relief. Meanwhile, his star pupil Bub is initially amusing as a slack-jawed walking corpse who can only vaguely mime human behavior while chained to the laboratory wall, but he ends up carrying most of the film’s effective pathos once he breaks free – just like the original Dr. Frankenstein’s pet creature.

Like with most Romero classics, I found the scene-to-scene drama in Day of the Dead to be frustratingly inert but was greatly impressed by its thoughtfulness in theme and tactility in violence. Maybe the main scientist’s heart-to-hearts with her infected boyfriend or the renegade helicopter pilot who could eventually fly her to safety ran a little dry, but the larger dramatic concerns about military muscle overpowering scientific experts after the breakdown of societal decorum felt true and continually relevant. On the film’s 30th Anniversary, it isn’t especially difficult to find contemporary meaning in a story about scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population but having their research derailed by a few gun-toting fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work. The most Romero stands out as a visual stylist here (outside the opportunities he gives Savini’s crew to run wild in the lab) are during a brief zombie hunt sequence in an underground cave, where he brings back the same extreme red & blue crosslighting he experimented with in 1982’s Creepshow. Otherwise, his artistry is most deeply felt in the philosophical nature of his writing, which finds a way to interrogate the inherent militarism of zombie narratives instead of casually accepting it as a matter of course.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Weeks Later (2007)

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I wasn’t expecting 28 Weeks Later to be as good as it was. It came out during a particularly academically rigorous (and financially unstable) year for me, and I’m not sure that I ever even saw any advertising for this one. Dismissal of the film by Alex Garland, who wrote both 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, also never made me particularly interested in revisiting it, until I recently saw 28 Years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve also always loved Robert Carlyle’s work as an actor, and his involvement also appealed to me. Although a friend let me know that this one is streaming on Tubi—just in time for the sequel’s release—I was able to find a DVD copy at my local video store, and I was pleasantly surprised, even if it isn’t as emotionally fulfilling as either of the films that precede or follow it. 

In the opening scene, Don Harris (Carlyle) is holed up in a rural farmhouse with his wife Alice and a few other survivors of the rage virus, sometime during the early days of the plague’s spread. An uninfected boy appears at the house and begs to be let in, and although they get him inside, the horde of infected who were chasing him then fall upon the house and kill/infect everyone inside. Only Don manages to escape, fleeing across the field to a small boat with an outboard motor and getting away, although not before he sees his wife at a window in the house, not yet dead or infected, as she pleads for help. Moments later, she’s gone from the window — too late. Some six or seven months (or 28 weeks, if you will) later, Don is now living in “District 1” of London, where British Isles residents who were out of the country when the outbreak occurred are being repatriated. The infected seem to have completely died out, having succumbed to starvation and exposure in the half a year since the Rage ravaged the population.

A NATO force overseen by Americans is assisting in the homecoming efforts and maintaining a military presence in order to protect the quarantine zone (epitomized in the form of Jeremy Renner’s sniper character, Doyle) and provide testing on the homebound travelers (represented by Scarlet, the chief medical officer played by Rose Byrne). Don’s two children, twelve-year-old Andy and teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) return home and are reunited with their father, who simplifies the story of their mother’s death by telling them only that she died. Their first night back, Andy confides in his sister that he worries he’ll forget his mother’s face, and the next morning the two of them slip through the NATO defenses and make their way to their old house to gather photos and other belongings. To their surprise, they find their mother there, albeit disoriented and confused, and she is immediately taken back to the base. Once there, Scarlet finds that Alice was bitten and that this means she is an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus, and that her blood may even hold an answer to a potential vaccine or cure. Before she can convince General Stone (Idris Elba) of the potential, however, Alice has already Typhoid Mary-d the rage back into the safety zone, and it’s already too late to stop the spread. 

Despite Alex Garland’s less-than-enthusiastic position, 28 Weeks Later is quite good. It lacks a lot of the more humanistic elements of the first film, which followed Cillian Murphy’s Jim as he, having slept through the downfall of society and thus is awakened into a changed world without witnessing the staggering amount of violence and life-altering horror that made it so, manages to be the vessel that carries some manner of hope from the world that was into the world that is. Further, while 28 Days Later presaged what a modern urban center experiencing massive devastation might look like (according to legend, they were shooting Jim’s newly-awakened wanderings of deserted post-rage London when the news broke about the Twin Towers), 28 Weeks Later is heavily informed by contemporary events. The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called “War on Terror” in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds. It’s also clever in its plotting, first showing us Alice’s heterochromia in the opening scene and then having Scarlet comment upon Andy having the same mutation during his intake to the quarantine zone, establishing that genetic adaptations like theirs are often inherited, slyly foreshadowing that Andy may have the same ability to be an asymptomatic carrier just like his mother. It’s not a movie that was simply slapped together because someone thought “there should be another one;” it’s genuinely a worthy, if different, successor to the first film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

28 Years Later (2025)

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It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but back in 2017 I attended a screening of 28 Days Later at Terror Tuesday at the now-defunct original “Ritz” location of the Alamo Drafthouse (what occupies that space now I dare not name). For weeks after, I listened to “In the House, In a Heartbeat” on repeat, dozens if not hundreds of times. It was a weird time, and I was going through it, but it’s also a certified banger. It was only my second viewing of the movie after a high school rental of the DVD from the Blockbuster in Natchitoches, and in the intro, the programmer at the time talked about how that very DVD was already out of print and that 28 Days Later was unavailable to stream anywhere. That appears to still be the case, despite the release of this relatively high profile sequel, and the ease of access to the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later on Tubi. (That Blockbuster is now a pawn shop, apparently, and they appear to have lots of DVDs in stock, so you might be able to find a copy of 28DL there, for what it’s worth.) That screening featured a rate 35MM print of the original film, large portions of which were shot on digital on the Canon XL1 and then were transferred to actual film stock, which resulted in 28DL’s novel visual qualities but also, I believe, makes it difficult to stream . . . or maybe too many people would think there was something wrong with the app rather than understand that the film’s supposed to look like that. 

It’s been 23 years since the Rage Virus broke out on screen and half a decade longer since then in-universe. As the opening crawl tells us, the outbreak was contained in continental Europe but that the British Isles were turned into a quarantine zone. After an opening sequence that occurs early in the original outbreak which sees a young boy escaping from his home after his community is slaughtered by rage zombies, including his pastor father, who allows himself to be overrun in a fit of mad religious ecstasy, we cut to … 28 years later. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a twelve-year-old boy living in an island community with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is all but bedridden with an affliction that also affects her concentration and memory. The island is kept safe due to tides in the region making it impossible to swim to, but an easily defendable natural causeway emerges at low tide and allows the islanders to go to the mainland to forage for food and firewood. Most boys are taken to the mainland for a rite of passage zombie hunting trip at fourteen or fifteen, but Jamie insists that Spike is ready, and the two set out with their bows to bag a few undead. 

Spike is awed by the mainland, and he manages to get an impressive first kill on the hunt. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the zombies have evolved, with slightly more intelligent and much more difficult to slay “alphas” emerging (one presumes that, without the internet, these folks never learned that the whole “alpha wolf” thing was bad science), who are strong enough to rip out the spinal column of its prey and also seem to be doing so almost ritualistically. Jamie and Spike are forced to take shelter in a dilapidated, abandoned farmhouse, where they also find the corpse of a man who was hung upside down and left for the zombies to find and feast upon, with the name “Jimmy” carved into his flesh. They manage to make it back to safety, barely, and Spike is celebrated at a ceremony that the town holds in his honor, but he finds his father’s tall tales of Spike’s supposed prowess dishonest and is even more disillusioned when he sees his drunken father sneak away from the party with a woman. When a family friend lets slip that a mysterious fire that Spike saw on the mainland may mark the home of a Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), which Jamie previously denied knowing anything about, Spike decides to sneak away with his mother and take her to find Kelson in the hope that he can diagnose and treat her. Along the way, they witness further changes to the infected and find themselves allied with shipwrecked Swedish sailor Erik (Edvin Ryding), the lone survivor of his downed quarantine patrol boat, who serves to give us insight into what the rest of the world is like. 

Erik adds a wrinkle here that’s quite a lot of fun. After the first film trafficked heavily in images of desolate urban areas as Jim wandered through the empty husk of London, this one follows its day one prologue with a cut to a somewhat idyllic present day, where a close knit community tends sheep and fashions arrows. It doesn’t initially have the feel of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, as having bacon with breakfast is a lavish anomaly but not completely unheard of. The island itself is lush and green but has a bit of the uncanny about it as well, with the recurring appearance of an unremarked upon creepy mask that multiple characters wear implying that they’ve gotten a little weird with it out there, and it’s a dangling thread left to, no doubt, be developed in the next sequel. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has completely moved on from the whole “zombie plague” thing. People work as delivery drivers, they order packages online, and they have smartphones, all of which are alien concepts to Spike, who has never seen a photograph less than three decades old. When Erik shows him a picture of his girlfriend making a duck face in the moments before his battery dies, Spike has no frame of reference for that social media beauty standard and compares her appearance to a girl in the village whose allergy to shellfish causes her to swell up. Back in that same village hangs a portrait of a fairly young Queen Elizabeth II, because these people aren’t even aware that she’s dead (presuming she died in 2022 in their world as in ours and wasn’t afflicted with the Rage Virus, which I didn’t realize I needed to see until this very moment). 

It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we? We’ve all lived through the rampant spread of a virus that killed millions of people, and once everybody got vaccinated (well…) and we reached a point of “well, most people won’t be at risk,” most of society simply did move on, and we’re still driving delivery trucks and ordering packages online and getting new smartphones. Disability advocates have talked for years about how our necropolitical  institutions have decided that the wheels of commerce must turn, even if they must be greased by the blood of the chronically ill or otherwise highly susceptible. We also live in a society where horrible, awful, genocidal things are happening “over there,” out of sight and, for many, out of mind; “It’s awful that children are being burned alive by phosphorus ammunition and that huge numbers of people have been abandoned to certain, horrifying death by the rest of the world, but I don’t see what that has to do with me or my need for a frappuccino.” Erik shows us something about the world beyond these quarantined islands; it’s obvious that Spike has grown up never knowing a world before the Rage, but if Erik is even approximately the same age as the actor portraying him, so has he. In Erick’s world, the long term, hands off approach to dealing with the infected is baked into society as something that happens over there and is a simple, sad fact of life, and the wheels just keep turning. 

Although he’s only a child and therefore gets billed in the credits after a man who’s on screen for mere moments, the MVP here is relative newcomer Alfie Williams. There’s a quiet resilience to him, and he carries a major, if understated, emotional journey that begins when he returns to the island from his hunting trip. He’s surrounded by the trappings of the village’s celebration of his hunt, including that weird mask thing, but as he watches his father carry on the time honored tradition of exaggerating their bravery and marksmanship, a crack in the foundation of his belief in both his father and his society begins to form. He already has his suspicions about his father’s denial of knowing what the fire in the hills on the mainland might be, and once he sees Jamie getting adulterous and learning that his father knows about Dr. Kelson (and then leaping to the conclusion that Jamie is refusing to get help for Isla from the mainlander), he resolves to put a seemingly doomed plan into motion. Williams pulls all of this off very well for a performer his age, and you never for a moment doubt that Spike is a kid who’s never seen a frisbee or an iPhone. That’s not to denigrate the performances of Comer, who is excellent as always, or Taylor-Johnson, who is very effective here as a husband and father maintaining a brave face despite the clearly imminent death of his ill wife while also living through the end of days. Fiennes is also great here as the broken Dr. Kelson, who makes a great deal out of what amounts to not much screen time. 

This film ends on such an overt tonal shift that I think it’s turning off some people. A couple of friends of mine to whom I had been recommending the film happened to be coming out of a screening of 28 Years just as I was headed into a screening of The Materialists. They found the film messy, and although we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about where they felt that it failed, they mentioned that the sudden genre shift was unexpected and jarring. I would also wager that the brief jumpcuts at the beginning of the film that serve to set some of the tone will be off-putting to some, although I rather enjoyed it as a shorthand for the myth-building within the community of the island. Set to the 1915 Taylor Holmes recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” we get to see a little bit of the culture of the island: their use of archery as their primary method of hunting and anti-infected defense, their fortification of the island, and the training of their young to carry on, all of it interspliced with footage from monochrome war films, Technicolor Robins of Locksley, and other bits of film and video that pass by so quickly that some of the images are almost subliminal. The idea that these people have been reduced to a medieval level of technology in the modern era is an interesting one, and this gets it across in a great visual way but one that is definitely not going to be to everyone’s liking. That’s what makes Danny Boyle Danny Boyle, after all. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Zombi Holocaust (1980)

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There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet

Burial Ground (1981)

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One of the great joys of Italo zombie schlock is the genre’s chaotic, anything-goes unpredictability.   In Zombi, a zombie has an underwater fist fight with a shark.  In Cemetery Man, a zombie’s severed head becomes a gravedigger’s loving bride.  In Demons, the zombies emerge through the silver screen to infect a horror-movie audience in their theater seats. In the most preposterous scenario of all, The Beyond imagines a New Orleans home with a basement (which, of course, opens a portal to Hell for the zombies to crawl through).  1981’s Burial Ground features none of that chaotic energy.  Narratively, it’s a by-the-numbers zombie invasion story that’s only extraordinary in its efficiency.  The film opens with an archeologist disturbing the ancient burial ground of the title and awakening the flesh-hungry zombies within.  This inciting incident is immediately followed by the arrival of several romantic couples at the estate who don’t seem terribly concerned about their missing archeologist friend.  They waste a little time exploring the musty mansion grounds (mostly looking for places to have sex, naturally), but it’s not long before the disturbed zombies arrive on the scene to eat them alive.  There isn’t much story to speak of from there – just an army of the undead slowly hunting down their soon-to-be-disemboweled victims one at a time.  It’s more commendable for its excess and its expediency than it is for its delivery of weirdo Italo-horror anomalies.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  There is one anomaly worth singling out in Burial Ground: a little boy named Michael.  Since most of the houseguests at the zombie-infested estate are adult couples, Michael stands out as the only child on the premises, which the movie frequently exploits by putting the vulnerable little chap in grave danger.  What really makes him stand out, though, is the casting of the 25-year-old actor Peter Bark in the role, playing a small child with an adult’s face.  The idea was to get around child labor laws that would have limited daily shooting schedules by casting an adult who could work more grueling production hours, but it’s a decision that adds an intensely absurd layer of menace on top of everything Michael does & says.  When he complains that the estate “smells of death” or suggests that his mother light an encroaching zombie on fire, his adult facial features undercut his childlike vocal dub with pure, ancient sadism.  Burial Ground intentionally leans into that discomfort too, spending a lot of time detailing Michael’s childlike curiosity about the adults’ sexual habits – at first as a Peeping Tom, then as an incestuous suitor for his freaked-out mother.  He is undoubtedly the star of the show, and once he inevitably joins the ranks of the zombie hoard you can’t help but leap out of your seat to cheer on his uncanny reign of terror like your favorite football team just scored a 100-yard touchdown.

I’m convinced that Burial Ground would still be recommendable as a late-night zombie horror even without the Michael weirdness.  It’s an all-killer-no-filler affair, not wasting any time explaining why zombies are attacking these horny couples or even why those couples gathered in the first place.  Instead, it invests that energy into making its zombies as grotesque as possible on a tight budget.  Tons of care went into costuming the ambling ghouls with a wide range of gnarly latex masks so that they all have distinct personalities.  Their faces drip with hanging worms and maggots.  Their victims bleed lipstick red as zombie hands tear out their guts in retro Romero fashion.  Not as much care went into making those zombie hands look gross enough to match the latex masks, though, leaving most of them fleshy and intact so it appears as if they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.  And yet, they clearly have a strong work ethic.  They tirelessly invade the palatial vacation home in search of gross-out gore gags to entertain the audience watching at home, each set piece scored in droning, arrhythmic 80s synths.  Peter Bark’s jarring performance as little Michael is an anomalous element of the film that makes it a must-see entry in the Italo zombie canon, but it’s not entirely reliant on his eerie novelty for its entertainment value.  I don’t know that I could say the same about a scenario where Zombi didn’t depict a zombie fighting a shark.

-Brandon Ledet

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990)

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There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects.  Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking.  While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video.  Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens.  When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass.  At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze.  There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout.  However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.

Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance.  Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines.  It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower.  Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs.  Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama.  Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau.  She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.

Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips.  During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!”  Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!”  Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno.  Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits.  She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all.  The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool.  It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven.  It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance.  Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable.  At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm).  It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.

-Brandon Ledet

Cemetery Man (1994)

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No one understands dream logic quite like an Italian horror filmmaker.  The 1994 horror comedy Cemetery Man might visually recall fellow zombie splatstick titles like Evil Dead & Dead Alive, but it updates that sensibility with a distinctly 90s sense of apathetic cool and then heavily distorts it through the Italo-horror dream machine.  Director Michele Soavi’s calling-card films Stage Fright & La Chiesa unmistakably belong to a tradition of post-giallo schlock in which the surreal scene-to-scene whims of his narratives are an expected part of the territory, but Cemetery Man is just generic-looking enough that those impulses feel remarkably out of place.  A contemporary of fellow horror-dreamers Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci, Soavi makes films that are just as logically sound as Suspriria or The Beyond, which can be confounding when you’re expecting the standard beats of a non-Zombi zombie film.  It’s the perfect midnight movie in that way, its lingering memory indistinguishable from the movie your dreaming mind would have assembled if you fell asleep halfway through.  It would be redundant to say that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream, since it very clearly is a dream that just happens to be on celluloid.

Rupert Everett stars as the slacker caretaker of a small cemetery where the dead have an annoying habit of rising from the grave within 7 days of burial.  He’s been working the job long enough that he’s bored with the routine, barely bothering to turn around from his writing desk to shoot the undead ghouls in the head and put them out of their supernatural misery.  That indifference to his work is somewhat surprising, given that there’s no real consistency to the zombie phenomenon.  Some of the “Returners” can continue talking & operating as a severed head, while most just groan incoherently and die the instance their heads are damaged.  The 7-day rule also has no real effect on who rises when, since Soavi is much more invested in the momentary pleasures of a visual gag than he is in the overarching logic of his narrative (an attitude a lot of movies would benefit from adopting).  The part of Everett’s job that really bothers him is that he has to pretend to be impotent so that local townies don’t assume he’s being sexually inappropriate with the corpses.  This gets in the way of his romantic life, of course, placing the handsome young bachelor on the same level of desirability as his unwashed, mentally disabled assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro).  Cemetery Man starts with standard zombie attacks, then swerves into sweaty nightmares about male sexual performance anxiety, then swerves again into existential crisis for a last-minute stab at profundity.  I haven’t been this jostled by a movie’s narrative trajectory since I watched Argento’s Opera in the exact same movie theater last October, a huge smile beaming on my face in both instances.

If there is any unifying theme to Cemetery Man that ties it all together, I do think it’s lurking somewhere in its detached, apathetic 90s slackerdom.  Everett spends the entire movie grumbling about working a boring job where nothing he does natters, to the point where there’s “no difference to being alive or dead.”  Later, he tests this theory by actively sending fresh corpses to his workplace as a mass murderer (after some quippy negotiations with Death itself) and is frustrated to find that there are no consequences to his actions.  Every time he confesses his crimes to the local detective, he’s met with bemused chuckling.  Overall, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of the plot, but that pointlessness plays directly into the disaffected nihilism of the slacker era.  Everett’s line reading of “I’d give my life to be dead” first sounds like a clever play on words until you realize it doesn’t actually mean anything, and then that lack of meaning starts to mean Everything.  When he spends his evenings reading the phone book as if it were literature, it’s mostly a joke about how he only sees other living people as potential Returners that he’ll later have to execute, but it’s also a joke about the banality of his daily routine.  All jobs and lifestyles are ultimately boring, I guess, regardless of their supernatural circumstances.

The poster for Cemetery Man promises “Zombies, guns, and sex, oh my!”, and I suppose the movie technically delivers on all of those promises.  Anyone looking for a non-stop splatstick free-for-all based on that tagline would likely be much better served by Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though.  Cemetery Man is a much calmer, more slippery kind of vintage zombie novelty: the kind best experienced half-awake on late-night cable, so that you’re tormented for years with vague questions if the movie actually exists or if you made it up in a dream.  Its limited distribution over the past couple decades has only amplified that effect, but there’s now a Severin restoration making the theatrical and home video distro rounds, so there’s evidence that this movie does, in fact, exist and is just as weirdly dreamy as you remember.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beyond (1981)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Lucio Fulci’s surrealist horror whatsit The Beyond (1981), set at the gates of Hell just outside New Orleans.

0:00 Welcome

02:22 Halloween Ends (2022)
09:14 Halloween II (1981)
14:10 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
16:22 Hellraiser (2022)
19:10 Bride of the Re-Animator (1989)
24:38 Smile (2022)
29:09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
33:20 Dark Glasses (2022)

46:09 The Beyond (1981)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew