Diary Of The Dead Review

It's inevitable that a lot of reviews are going to compare this subjective-camera horror movie to the Blair Witch Project, so before I start on my stock standard Romero-praise, I may as well jump on that bandwagon. I'll focus on the differences between them, because the similarities pretty much start and end with "there's a character behind the camera".

The first thing you notice is that this film is, in the best of traditions, a melodrama before it's a 'mockumentary'. It's got the type of structure, dialogue and characterisation that Romero always uses. This is both a good and bad thing. The good thing is that it's frequently hilarious, and as usual the writing itself is watertight all-round. The characters all have decent arcs, their dialogue is sterling silver, but they've also got enough entertaining individual moments so that you're never under any illusions as to what you're watching: it's not a "pretend it's real" style fake-doco at all.

That's where a slight problem creeps in: the documentary format is obviously employed for satirical purposes (more on that later), which means that it tends to look a bit out-of-place when no explicit piss-taking is happening. The acting is mostly good, but it's not naturalistic at all. I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of improv on set, and despite the longer shots, the scenes are paced exactly like any other action/adventure/drama. Characters take contemplative pauses in the heat of an emotional moment, gesticulate in wildly unnatural ways - all the sorts of things that you generally don't notice in a regular movie. It's not completely distracting, but sometimes it feels closer to an episode of "24" than a documentary. Again, no bad thing in itself, but you can't help thinking that nobody was entirely sure how far they wanted to take the documentary thing, because the pacing tends to fall back onto traditional film 'beats', rather than those of say, theatre, which would probably be more fitting.

But it's not just in the shooting and the performances. If it was, then that would be fine. I mean, Night Of The Living Dead was effective partly because it was so newsreel-esque; it's entirely appropriate, to be frank, to adapt that sense of real-world immediacy for the post-blog, post-Youtube environment we now find ourselves in.

Romero shoots himself in the foot a bit, though, by also using voice-over narration and using these candid, "out-take interview" style moments, to help us get to know the characters. Ostensibly it's to make the documentary feel more 'authentic', but it actually does the opposite: A documentary is a mass of footage assembled into a narrative in post-production (I know that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean, right?), but in punctuating the storyline with these deliberate 'interruptions', the ultimate linearity (and therefore the artifice) of the narrative is revealed. Put simply, it feels more like the main character is documenting a straight-forward storyline, rather than shaping raw footage into one. This to me is a more significant issue than the acting style employed (I mean, love it or hate it, the lady in the Blair Witch Project wasn't a great actress, but you believed her because the narrative was constructed intimately around her).

It's as though the main cameraman, Jason (other camera people come in later), is shooting people who just happen to be making a zombie movie, rather than people who genuinely find themselves in one.

So the satire, then. The machine that George is raging against this time round is the role of the media. It's a very attractive subject for a media nerd like me, and Romero completely and utterly nails it. I suspect that without the documentary framing device, this could have been my favourite Dead film. The main point is that all media is bullshit, whether it's being manipulated by "The System" or whether it's just due to the composer's individual biases. You know this, and I know this, and I really like the fact that a popcorn-y horror film is making it accessible. The point itself is explored in several ways, but I'll just talk about two, because there's plenty more for you lot to find on your own, and in that regard the film is a very rewarding one.

The film opens with the raw camera footage of a news crew, reporting on a murder-suicide. Returning to Romero's apparent love for watching live TV crews get caught unprepared (exactly the sort of irony that I get a kick out of in his films), as the paramedics are wheeling the corpses away, they naturally wake up and start eating. After a couple of people get bitten, the cops on the scene manage to shoot the original zombies. It's later revealed that this raw footage was uploaded to the internet by the TV cameraman, because he wanted to show "the truth" - that explains how we get to see the reporter lady get chomped in all her uncensored glory, and more tellingly, prior to that we get to see her ask the paramedic meat-wagon not to park in-shot, because it would block the view of the corpses (something to which the driver cheerfully agrees).

This opening sequence is repeated several times on TVs and computer screens throughout the film, edited differently each time to change the context (Romero makes a cameo as a military general spliced into the footage on one broadcast). The point about the artificiality of it all is reasonably well-made, but another mis-step here is that Romero uses the voice-over narration as his own direct mouthpiece, so it becomes a bit heavy-handed: the primary cameraman character zooms into a telly at one point and says "Hey look, they've edited the footage!". I'm reluctant to say that Romero is getting lazy, but he certainly seems to be getting more desperate to get his message across (perhaps justifiably). This film is the closest he's ever made to a pure editorial. It's quite uncharacteristic in that normally he's happy to let the audience extrapolate the 'message' in a more natural way, by simply having the characters play out naturally.

And that dovetails into the second example of the media's artificiality that I want to talk about. Far more effective are the scenes where characters ask - or refuse to discuss - exactly why they're filming everything. I vaguely remember this being touched on in an incidental way in the Blair Witch project (one of those bastard campers says something about the camera being attractive because it 'filters reality' or something), but Romero blows it wide open here. You're never quite sure if Jason is refusing to help people in trouble because he's scared, or because he wants to capture everything as it happens without being involved. That's the real strength of the characters here ("are they completely ambivalent about the cataclysm, or are they completely committed to helping people by documenting it"?), and it sort of sums up the film as a whole: on the one hand it's a very uneven film because of the way it's handled, but it's that very same uncertainty that means you're never quite sure where the drama ends and the satire starts. In a sense, maybe the unevenness is sort of the point. Maybe Romero's duping his audience as much as he's taking a swipe at the media as a whole.

There's a lot to be had from this film but like anything worthwhile, it's better that you get it yourself. I'll finish up with some fanboy-ness.

The gore is not extreme and theatrical, obviously, but Romero's obvious love for the horror genre means we still get plenty of little concessions to it, to make sure that we're enjoying ourselves. There's a lot of CGI grue on display, as in Land Of The Dead, but it's handled more creatively here. There's still a (I suspect deliberate) slightly cartoonish look to the CGI (check out the zombie getting his brain dissolved by acid - brilliant and hilarious!), but some artificial camera shake and and motion tracking applied in post-production means that you get the right combination of veracity and comic-book fantasy from those sequences. The film's tone doesn't change during them. Elsewhere, the long, handheld takes mean that there's not a great deal of prosthetic gore: there's none of the trademark throats-being-torn-out-in-close-up, for instance, just because it would be too easy to spot (most neck biting is of the 'turn away from the camera' or 'the zombie's head is hunched over the wound' variety), and that means that instead of big spurts of blood, you just get blood covertly splashed onto the actors by the zombies, etc. The overall effect certainly isn't diminished, however.

Finally, two classic Romero tropes are revisited: the zombie on a gurney leaning over and having his guts fall out is recreated here, with the added benefit of a digital zoom from the cameraman so we can see it up close; and, thank god, the famous Clown Zombie shows up once more.

I can't say this is the classic film I was secretly hoping for, and I suspect people obsessed with Romero's previous output will find it more rewarding than a general audience will. Not to say that the great things in it will go over the heads of the uninitiated, but at times I can't help wondering if you need to be a bit Romero-familiar to get exactly where he's coming from.

If I had to give it a rating (fuckin' hate ratings, me) I'd say maybe 8 out of 10. Thankyou and goodnight.

Hell Bent For Zelda

What do you think of when you picture the American Midwest?

-Michael Myers stalking the streets of Haddonfield.
-"In The Ghetto".
-Meat-packing (I meant "Hog Butcher Of The World...", not gay nightclubs, but I think Chicago's got a few of those too)
-Fargo
-"My Kind Of Town".
-The Candyman.

Speaking of the Candyman, if you answered "Billy Corgan" to that question, even if you only uttered his name once, I'm going to appear behind you and murder you.

There's something appealing about the Midwest. Maybe it's the whole "American Gothic" thing (not least the fantastic TV show of the same name), or maybe it's because when I was younger I felt like I could be a (distant) background character in John Hughes' Illinois-based films.

You know the type: The bored, wasted underage kid who works some shitty job, listening to some sub-Motorhead drivel in an abandoned carpark on a sunday night, smoking arguably the shittiest weed in the world but still insisting it was "fucking awesome" to his equally braindead friends (one of whom would invariably end up getting his ugly, acne-scarred overweight girlfriend pregnant on his already cum-stained mattress while his mum hit the bottle and his dad continued not to exist).

If you replaced "Chicago" with "Glenorchy", and "works some shitty job" with, "wags school to go nick tattered vhs horror films from the video shop", you'd basically have my Glory Days.

Essentially, to the Midwest has a mythology about it. If Sergio Leone was never born until 2040, and he still wanted to make movies about the American Legend, I think that he'd skip over the wonderfully gaudy, hallucinatory Old West imagery that he's famous for, and exploit instead the almost romantic drear of scummy overgrown backlots and glaciated Ohio plains. The iconic shots of Monument Valley would be replaced with the claustrophobic, austere rolling hills of West Virginia. Charles Bronson wouldn't be a stoic harmonica-playing ghost-man; he'd be a piss-stunk, matted-hair thrash metal burnout who's carved an upside down cross into his arm with a compass stolen from his high school science lab. Instead of the harmonica he'd play a paint-chipped Flying V with a string missing. Peter Fonda would be Buffalo Bill from The Silence Of The Lambs.

You can sort of see how mythology and geography are related. Certain physical environments breed certain types of attitudes, which in turn breed certain types of myths. I even once read that in London the architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches was specifically designed to strike the Fear of God into the city's denizens by dominating the skyline.

Anyway, one interesting addition to (or perhaps result of) the scummy, mutated Midwestern psyche is the sound of Reverend JR Preston, who's managed to work up a minor reputation for himself, thanks to his one- man black metal acid trip Tjolgtjar, who's output I'll go into at a later date (I'm waiting for his newest record to arrive on my doorstep so I can attack his whole catalogue in one wack). Details on Preston himself are remarkably scarce, but I have managed to work out that he's invented a religion called Tjolgtari, into which a scant twelve members have been inducted, and the creation of the records is supposedly some sort of Mass or ritual. There's also some vague, weed-driven notion of Astral Projection that works its way into the ideology too. I can't make head nor tail of it, and I suspect the whole thing is largely a piss-take on his behalf to freak out zine authors and interviewers.

Another fantastic Preston project which I'll have to review later, is Blood Cult, a Children-of-the-Corn marriage of redneck shenanigans and religious tomfoolery, most evident in their album title, "We Who Walk Behind The Rows". Mostly consisting of deafening thrash and vomitous mid-tempo BM grooves, that record contains lyrics such as

Praising Satan Hunting Deer
Watching Nascar Drinking Beer
Raising Crops For The Devil
This Is Redneck Black Metal!

Excellent!

These aren't Preston's only contributions to the sonic destruction of society, however. The man (or beast) lends his musicianship to a bunch of other groups too. I'm going to detail more of his output at a later date, but I'm about sixty-four paragraphs into this post so I should probably start talking about the record I'm here to review.

XEXYZ - PRIMEVAL MOUNTAIN

Less Darkthrone or Burzum, and more like some NWOBHM band drinking a whole bunch of cough medicine, stripping down to their tighty whities and spewing out some lo-fi psychedelic pagan drone, Xexyz doesn't blast like Norwegian bands did, it just kind of buzzes. If a good Darkthrone riff could blow your windows out, Xexyz just sort of oozes out the speaker and corrodes the floorboards like in Alien.

Xexyz consists of The Reverend, and another creature who goes only by the title of Machine. If you Google the name Xexyz, you're most likely to find a bunch of sites about an old Nintendo game:







You can probably see where I'm going with this. Yes, the main distinguishing feature of Xexyz is that it's entirely NES-themed, with song titles like "Metroid", "Rygar's Quest" and "Nightmare On Elm Street". As far as I can tell they're not being 'ironic' or trying to cash in on any perceived geek-chic niche in the BM market. Simply, for whatever reason, the band decided that the catchy, quirky weirdness of what's effectively incredibly simple pop music could be used to their Satanic advantage.

And sure enough, it completely works. When listening to it, I'm reminded, in a roundabout sort of way, of the 'classic' anarcho-punk record (as much as any slightly pretentious anarcho-punk record could be called classic) Pope Adrian by Rudimentary Peni. That record, reportedly written in a mental health facility, features a constant, eerie tape loop of a single repeated phrase throughout it's entire runtime. Nintendo music, by limitations of the 8-bit hardware, is similarly repetitive by nature.

So in a strange sort of way, it makes sense that Black Metal's hypnotic repetition should combine with the lo-fi, cyclical samples from classic Nintendo game theme music. Hell, plenty of other BM bands have tried to make use of 'proper' synth, usually to add a symphonic or eerie atmosphere to the proceedings. Why shouldn't a couple of (by their own admission) drunk rednecks favour the glitchy nastiness of dirty, pulverised 8-bit oscillations? It adds to the bored, suburban misanthropy that epitomises the sound. Much better this than pretending they're in the frostbitten mountains of Norway when they're blatantly not. I haven't played Nintendo for a long time but I get the feeling there's a lot of chopping and re-arranging where the original tunes are concerned. The bits of music that I recognised have been warped, mutated, and sampled out-of-time, so it's not just a case of a black metal band playing along with old childhoodsongs. The band seems more interested in exploiting the sound of Nintendo music, rather than the music itself.

It's not really fair to say that Preston and co. don't take the music seriously, because they're evidently dedicated to creating some of the most uniquely textured BM around, but I imagine a few people would write this record off as a joke-band, due to the innate silliness of a couple of hicks playing satanic black metal with Nintendo sounds over the top. That's a bit of a shame, because beneath all the psychedelic, pot smoke-shrouded buzz and clutter, there's a really fascinating record. Like all the best Black Metal, it works as background music while you're working, it works when you're getting high, but if you decide to dedicate your full attention to it, it's insanely rewarding.

(Oh, sorry that the promised Napalm Death review didn't show up. My house burnt down and I lost both my original LP and the Dualdisc cd/dvd version. I didn't really want to write it without it being fresh in my head. Bear with me while I get ahold of another copy)

Ice-T Earth - the darker side of multiculturalism.

Heavy Metal. Arguably the most prominent post-punk voice of urban discontent among white kids.

Rap. Arguably the single largest voice of urban discontent among black kids, or indeed, any youth culture, ever.

It was always a mere matter of time before the two voices converged in unique duet. The flow of disaffected rhyme and the rhythmic groove of rap/hip-hop might, in theory have bonded perfectly with the aggression and melody of metal...

But rather than produce some heavenly heavy harmony, the dischord is frequently (and obscenely) deafening. I mean, sure, we all like that version of Bring The Noise with Anthrax on, and Walk This Way was fairly significant in pushing rap into the spotlight that had beforehand been solely occupied by Hard White Boy music (even if Run DMC would have been better off just sampling the guitar hook themselves, instead of getting Aerosmith to play it), but for the most part, rap and metal crossover is perhaps the single most compelling argument for permanent racial segregation.

What here shall miss, this blog strive to mend:

(bear with me on this mp3-sharing business: i think you have to left click and save to the hard drive when the pop-up, uh, pops up. Pretty sure you can't right-click>save target as. Sorry!)

Six Feet Under featuring Ice-T - "One Bullet Left"

Oh God. Ice-T is a reasonably easy bloke to respect. He was the first anti-homophobic rapper to position himself squarely within the mainstream, but he also had enough integrity to remove "Cop Killer" from the admittedly awful Body Count record (the token argument against rap/metal crossovers, one which needn't be repeated here), once he realised that the song could never live up to the mainstream controversy that surrounded it.

But come on, man - doing a song with Six Feet Under? A band fronted by a guy who's main claim to fame is that he used to be in Cannibal Corpse? It's like Ice-T woke up one day and decided there wasn't quite enough tedium in his spotted and varied career (evidently he forgot about that film where Rutger Hauer is a priest and Garey Busey is a nigger-hatin', tobacco-chewin', all American hero), and thus decided to record a song with a guy who's trademark is to sing about the multitude of ways there are to make a woman bleed. What's the big deal there anyway? Women bleed like, monthly. They don't need your help, Six Feet Under.

Anyway, the song is hilarious. The first verse is just normal death metal grunts courtesy of the singer, Chris Barnes, but if you can actually make out the lyrics, you'll be rewarded with gleeful (if nonsensical) promises to "Kill all the haters - they'll never stop their deaths" and to "Reduce their heads with lead".

After a ho-hum chorus, the impressively uncreative rap verse chimes in. Even for Ice-T, the liberal use of "fuck" as line-filler is excellent. This verse appears to tell a convoluted but charming tale about:

1. shooting a man
2. shooting his wife
3. abusing his children
4. calling the police on himself
5. throwing his kids' corpses onto the lawn, and then
6. shooting himself when the cops show up.

Or something. What a day! Anyway, it contains the line "You motherfucking critic-ass bitch motherfuckers", which is ostensibly the greatest piece of literature ever crafted. From God's tongue, to Ice-T's pen, it seems.

Lil' John - Stop Fuckin' Wit Me

Have you ever heard of Lil' John? Me either. Wikipedia informs me that he had a single with Ludacris on it, which is enough to make me think he's reasonably rubbish. I've not heard any songs of his, other than this Rick Rubin-produced wonder. Judging by it's lyrical content, he's sort of similar to that stable of flamboyant, moustache-twirling and theatrically "evil" rappers like Necro and Ill Bill. I guess you could call them the hip-hop equivalent of Six Feet Under.

Anyway, the reason for this travesty's inclusion here is because all melody in this song is derived from samples of Slayer's immortal Raining Blood, one of those songs that you always kind of figure is untouchable. It's a song that prompts the question, "how could you possibly go wrong with this?".

That's a question Lil' John was obviously very eager to answer. Imagine if Megadeth decided to record a cover of Fuck The Police, only instead of doing it faithfully, they do it with manic riffing, double-kick blasting, and Dave Mustaine's nasal warble. That would be preferable to this.

Until next time, kids! Coming soon are articles about the multitude of levels on which Napalm Death's "Scum" record works, and a review of the new Kanye West album.

Don't try to imagine what's ahead.

Good evening, citizens of Earth, citizens of Earth origin, or any other planet in the Solar System.

And thus, it begins.

The decision to start blogging wasn't because I had anything in particular to get off my chest, so I guess you could be thankful that for the most part, this won't be one of those 'issue' blogs, where I take big business to task on shady business practices, tell everyone how sad I am that I've been cheated on, or ask people's opinions on what to wear to the prom.

I figure the best place to start, though, is with something fairly definitive. Something that continues to influence who I am, how I feel, and how I perceive the world (those second two ultimately inform that first one though - I guess I should warn you now that I'm very big on bumping up my wordcount with tautology).

Call me crass, but the closest thing I ever had to a religious experience was watching Night Of The Living Dead as a child. It's hailed now as a masterpiece, and I think it honestly deserves that title, for the way it deftly dances between making deliberate concessions to genre expectations (ie, Romero knows that if you watch a movie about dead people coming back to life, you want to see a few guts here and there), and painting - in relentless detail - a picture of modern social collapse.

On top of that you've got genuine DRAMA: the characters aren't always the most logically-behaved of folk, but the conflicts between them, and the allegiances/feuds that develop, are never short of compelling. Harry Cooper, the boneheaded, pride-driven family man, is an arsehole. You hate that guy. You want his wife and daughter to be saved, but you want to see that coward die.

Until you realise that he was right about the physical situation all along. You root for Ben for the entire movie, because he's caring, he's heroic, and he keeps his shit together. Then you start to notice that he's actually vastly overestimating himself, to the point where he's got to be a bit of a moron, and you wonder if maybe the only reason he's survived this long is because of sheer, dumb luck.

It was the movie to show me that there aren't evil people, and there aren't saints. There's just filthy, blood-, sweat-, and shit- stained people trying to survive. There's no bigger picture, there's no clear-cut scenarios, there's no salvation, and you're just a stupid fucking kid who's alive until he dies, so get used to it.

Also, speaking of genre, the "zombie movie" as a subgenre didn't really exist in 1968: there was the old voodoo horror movies of the 30s, certain visual elements of which carried over into a few Hammer Films in the 60s (Check out John Gilling's "Plague Of The Zombies", one of Hammers most lavish and underrated productions - it's got Andre Morell from the third Quatermass serial in it too!), but for the most part, the lurching, moaning "zombie character" who behaves exactly as you'd expect him to, didn't exist so firmly in peoples' minds. Night Of The Living Dead is a movie about dead people coming back to life. It's also a movie about people eating other people, and I think part of it's success is in its chilling simplicity.

And yet, it's not simple. The film is an assault. It's nasty and it's mean and it wants to harm you and it's not going to let you think "it's only a movie" because it's not - those people on the screen that just want to harm you? They're not make-believe, man. They exist.

I was about 6 or 7 years old. For the first time in my life, I realised that just beneath the surface of 'normal', there lies something else. Something sinister, something that genuinely wants to hurt you and upset you, and when it's 'over', things aren't going to go back to being ok again. The world is a nasty, disgusting, destructive place and there's nothing you can fucking do about it, kid.

There's no cure, no antitdote, and there's absolutely nothing to suggest that you won't PERSONALLY be targeted by it. These fucking monsters will look up your address if they have to, kid. Sure, you can hope that maybe you'll be ok. You know they are going to hurt you, and you know they're going to use everything in their power to do so, but maybe there's a change they won't kill you... right?

But hope, Night Of The Living Dead so astutely informed me, is pointless exercise. It gets you nowhere. Even that happy-go-lucky posse of zombie hunters at the end, headed by Sherriff Good-Ole-Boys, aren't going to win. They're going to get killed, and then the threat is going to go to their houses and kill their wives, and then it's going to kill their children, too. And if you don't like it, well that's just too fucking bad, kid.

None of this is going to work, guys. We need a whole new system because we can't fight this problem head-on. That's the first real lesson I ever learnt, and I learnt it from George Romero.