So I finally watched Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. It was interesting to watch Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead after having recently watched all of Romero’s films, as well as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later…. I enjoyed the latter, though I admit it didn’t really feel like a zombie film, and the same could be said for Dawn of the Dead ’04. Other than the fact that the “Infected” of 28 Days Later… can be killed like any human while the zombies of Dawn have to have their brain destroyed, there’s hardly any difference between the portrayal of the monsters—they’re fast-moving, violent, cannibalistic savages.
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Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Halloween Grab Bag
Unsurprisingly, our big winner for most comments in October was Ed. Ed has decided to forego the actual Halloween Grab Bag prize in favor of mad props. So, mad props to Ed for his superior ability to run up his comment count.
Still working on Vengeance Upon the Dust, which I think is officially a novella and not a short story. However, I owe it to you all to finish it, and will do my best to do so as soon as possible. I’ve pulled the previous chapters off the site for a few reasons. First, I’ve already done some revising and the website version is no longer accurate. Second, I don’t want to be continually taunting you with an unfinished story. Third, I’ve decided to issue the completed story as a PDF chapbook (I’ll have alternate versions if you can’t read PDFs) rather than post it here. This way, I’ll have the option of publishing it professionally in the future (if I can interest anyone in it).
However, all my faithful readers here will get a copy of the chapbook if they want it. I’ll even mail a paper copy of it upon request.
Intermission
I thought I’d take a break from Vengeance Upon the Dust (it looks like the story will finish up Halloween Month) and provide something a little lighter before the month was out.
I had intended to do a big retrospective on the history of my Halloween costumes over the years, starting when I was a wee tyke, but it looks like I’ll have to save that for next year (which is good, since I can pretty much guarantee I won’t be doing this again—so it’s good to have a big-ticket item to run next October). I’ve been so busy I didn’t even get a chance to carve a pumpkin.
So instead, I thought I’d provide you with a photo of the costumes DG and I wore to a Halloween party last night…and the lengths to which I went in the name of costume accuracy.
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All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Scary Movies
I’m still working frantically to finish the short story for tomorrow, and as such, I ended up one post short. However, in the interests of fulfilling my promise of a post every single day this month, I’m going to hand the blood-stained rudder over to Kate Racculia of Marquee de Sade. The lovely Kate also drew the initial sketches for both the regular Biggerboat logo and the Halloween variant. Today she’s going to enlighten us as to how scary movies have changed her life. Enjoy!
All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Scary Movies
10. Priests are sexy.
Spaced Invaders
Ah, good. After my brief bout of insanity reviewing a good movie yesterday, I’ll return to reviewing films most people haven’t heard of.
Today’s gem is the 1990 children’s flick Spaced Invaders. I haven’t the foggiest notion when I first saw this—it might have been at the theater, but I think it was probably on HBO or something, since I distinctly remember my father cracking up while watching it at home. The film is a comedy about five Martians who accidentally crash-land in a small town on Halloween night. Chaos—and hilarity!—ensues.
Captain Bipto
The aliens, led by the Napoleonic Captain Bipto, include the mad scientist Dr. Ziplock (har har), the Jack Nicholson imitator Blaznee, the hyperactive Giggywig, and Pez, whom I don’t remember anything about. The Martians crashed after overhearing a broadcast of Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio show and thinking the Martian fleet was attacking Earth.
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Dawn of the Dead (1978)
For the most part, I prefer to review films that aren’t necessarily considered classics (by any stretch of the imagination). Some are “cult” classics, a la Evil Dead II, but few of them would be deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress. There are a few reasons I tend to avoid reviewing “good” films, but the main one is that I just don’t feel qualified. I don’t have a film degree; I really haven’t even seen all that many movies. I only recently saw The Godfather for the first time. I’ve never seen a John Wayne movie, and so forth. I do believe there should be some modicum of respectability to the profession of critiquing works of art.
Dude, grunge is so fifteen years ago.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between analyzing the themes of a film for an art journal and assessing how entertaining it is for a general audience, and on that level, I feel I can make a few comments about Dawn of the Dead. Of course, Dawn of the Dead is not exactly Citizen Kane or Requiem for a Dream, but it still has a better critical reputation than most of the stuff I review on the site. So think of this less as a “review,” and more just general ruminations on a topic.
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The Monster Squad
I can’t recall whether I saw The Monster Squad (1987) in the theater, but something makes me think I did. Even as a kid I thought of it then as a sort of store brand Goonies, albeit a very fun, entertaining, and surprisingly violent one. Except for the infamous “Wolf Man’s got nards” line, I more or less forgot about the film until I saw it in 2004 while visiting a friend (thanks, Scott—always the classy host!).
That Gillman suit rocks.
The Monster Squad is basically a kid’s horror film featuring what are traditionally thought of as the Universal Monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Gillman (a.k.a. the Creature from the Black Lagoon). However, unlike other monster mashes like the recent Van Helsing, The Monster Squad wasn’t a Universal film; Universal only owns the trademarks to the character names (meaning you can’t call your movie just “Dracula”). In the case of Dracula and the Monster, the novels are long out of copyright; while the Mummy, the Wolfman and the Gillman are just generic monsters (though I do think they’re on shaky ground with the Gillman, given how much he resembles the Black Lagoon creature).
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Evil Dead: Regeneration
As I’ve discussed before, I became a fan of the Evil Dead films around age fifteen, when the films were so obscure, my parents had to buy used tapes from a Canadian video store to get me the films for Christmas. By the time I got to college, the films had already gone from cult to legendary status, and by the time I’d graduated from college, there were not only a half-dozen different special DVD editions of the three films, but action figures, comics, and a video game.
Anyone seen my sleeve?
To be fair, there was actually a video game even before Evil Dead II; there was a 1984 Evil Dead game made for the Commodore 64. But the first post-ED boom game was Evil Dead: Hail to the King, released for the Playstation in 2000. It was a survival horror game a la Resident Evil, which probably wasn’t the best genre for a game based on Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness. The game tanked, despite a decent ad campaign featuring Evil Dead star Bruce “Ash” Campbell. The next attempt, for the Playstation2 and Xbox in 2003, was a rip-off of the game State of Emergency, and the game was little more than running around killing monsters.
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Creature from the Black Lagoon
From the 1930s through the 1950s, Universal Studios had a run of horror film hits featuring what we now think of as the classic Universal Monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy. As immensely popular as these films were (and still are), Universal has yet to really try and capitalize on them via remakes. Sure, there’s The Mummy, which wasn’t bad (though The Mummy Returns was); and then there was the travesty that was Van Helsing. But if we can get an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink remake of King Kong, why not Frankenstein or Dracula?
Michael Douglas in a rare shower scene.
You might point to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula in answer. Neither of these films was released by Universal, who own the trademark on the titles (for film purposes) but not, obviously, the copyright to the stories. The reason the author’s names were added to the titles of those films was to differentiate them from the Universal trademarks. More importantly, the plots of the Universal films are modified (often significantly) from the storylines of the novels. The Bride of Frankenstein is quite different from Shelley’s novel, yet it’s a classic in its own right.
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Imperial Universal Monsters
If you were a young boy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, chances are you were quite familiar with the crown logo of Imperial Toys.
From the admittedly limited perspective as a six-year-old boy, Imperial was known for one thing and one thing only: rubber dinosaurs.
Imperial specialized in those solid rubber dinosaurs you’d find in convenience stores, pharmacies, and the metal floor bins of toy stores like Child World. They usually sold for less than three bucks. Those dinosaurs were tough bastards; you could throw them against the wall all day long and they wouldn’t get a scratch. The sculpts and paint applications were crude even by contemporary standards and there was nary a point of articulation to be found on them, but when I was a kid that hardly mattered. The rubbery “real feel” of the dinosaurs skin, coupled with their Godzilla-like indestructibility, made them the pre-eminent dinosaur toys of my youth.
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