Zero Theorem (2013)

In Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil, a socially-isolated man in a dystopian society works a seemingly meaningless job while dreaming of a higher purpose.  Assigned to a special project by his deliberately obtuse and obstructive superiors, he meets a special woman, falls in love, and finally dares to fight for what he wants, which puts him on a path that might best be described as having a bittersweet ending.

In Terry Gilliam's 2013 film Zero Theorem, a socially-isolated man in a dystopian society works a seemingly meaningless job while dreaming of a higher purpose.  Assigned to a special project by his deliberately obtuse and obstructive superiors, he meets a special woman, falls in love, and finally dares to fight for what he wants, which puts him on a path that might best be described as having a bittersweet ending.

I'm perhaps being slightly unfair in the above two paragraphs, because plenty of the details of these two films are very different.  But the reality is that it's hard to ignore how similar are the core story and themes of the two.  For me at least, the change of details doesn't really make up for how familiar it all felt.

Of course if you've never seen Brazil then you won't have that problem.  But if you've never seen Brazil ... well, I'd say go watch it, rather than this re-tread of the same ideas.  Though I will give Zero Theorem this: Melinda Thierry is a much more compelling love interest than Kim Greist was.

Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018)

Fifty years ago in the planned community of Seabrook, an accident at the Power Plant resulted in an explosion which caused half the population to turn into brain-eating zombies. Eventually, those that weren't affected managed to construct a wall to quarantine the zombies.

Five decades later, the government has invented bracelets that deliver electromagnetic pulses that suppress the zombies' violent urges.  The zombies now live peacefully in their own community, eating cauliflower in place of brains and raising little zombie children.  I guess they're still alive, despite being called 'zombies'.

A law has just been passed requiring that zombie kids be allowed to attend human school, which is not a popular decision on the human side of the wall.  The zombie kids are made to feel far from welcome, and if you think this sounds like a not very subtle reference to the forced desegregation of schools in the US, you are right, because it is not subtle at all.

Anyway, zombie boy meets seemingly perfect human girl, and there is instant, non-brain eating chemistry.  Will the power of love and heavily choreographed musical numbers heal the wounds of this divided town, or will it get really really Romeo and Juliet in here?  Well, this is a Disney channel film, so you probably shouldn't expect it to head into Shakespearian Tragedy Town.

Imagine Bring It On as an outright musical, and with much more overtly over the top set and costume design, and you're starting to get the kind of movie this is.  I honestly had more fun watching it than I expected.  Fun stuff.

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

I guess on the plus side, when you call your zombie apocalypse movie Zombie Apocalypse you are doing your prospective audience the service of providing advance notice of how creatively bankrupt your film is going to be.

So what we have here is your standard "flesh-eating undead destroy civilisation" type premise.  Six months after the collapse, three young people emerge from the isolated cabin where they've been hiding and go in search of other survivors.  What they find instead is zombies.  One of them is killed, and the other two look set to join him, when four strangers turn up and slaughter the undead in an orgy of badly choreographed melee and gunplay action.  Get used to seeing actors awkwardly swing swords and hammers at zombies that aren't actually on screen with them: it's a really cheap if thoroughly unconvincing way to stage a fight scene.

The six survivors join forces and set off toward Catalina, as the newcomers have heard that there is a safe zone on the island.  Along the way, they will naturally run into a bunch more undead.  Distractingly, the same recognisable extras will be used in a couple of scenes that are supposed to take place many miles apart.  It's that kind of movie.

It's also the kind of movie where they position one character as the audience surrogate / point of view character, set up what looks like the start of an arc for her, and then kind of shrug and forget about her in the last forty minutes when they introduce several new characters and suddenly promote some of the other survivors to more prominent roles.

Anyway, zombie "action" ensues for a while, and the film finally delivers some memorable if extremely random cheese in its last ten minutes, and then it ends.  That final, amusingly stupid scene can't redeem the ninety minutes that came before it, and they certainly aren't enough to make me give the film any kind of recommendation, but they do make me a little less bitter about the time I spent watching this when I could have been re-watching Mega-Python vs Gatoroid instead.

Z for Zachariah (2015)

An unspecified but radiation-related apocalypse has all but destroyed humanity.  A young woman named Ann lives alone in her home valley, which is somehow protected from the fallout.  Her entire family used to be there, but her parents left to look for other survivors, and her brother to look for their parents.

Ann has all but given up on the hope of seeing another human being when John Loomis arrives.  He's a scientist, protected by an experimental suit, though an accident means he is suffering from radiation sickness nonetheless.

Ann nurses John back to health, and in the nature of such situations, at least in media, the two begin to move toward a romantic and sexual relationship.  John at least seems to be thinking in terms of kids, which suggests that whatever sort of scientist he was, he wasn't a geneticist.

The prospective fly in the ointment of this idyll comes in the form of Caleb, another survivor.  He's young, handsome, and socially and culturally much more like the rural, religious Ann than John is.

So, I went back and forth between 'qualified recommendation' and 'not recommended' on this film.

On the one hand, its "two men are rivals for the last woman on earth" plot is not exactly fresh or original.  And it is quite slow paced.  And the symbolism that one of the two is a man of science while the other is a man of faith is rather heavy-handed and obvious.

On the other hand, it has some lovely cinematography and all three members of the cast deliver good performances.  So I was torn, at least until I read a synopsis of the novel on which it is based.

The book of Z for Zachariah, you see, makes Ann its main character, and introduces only one man into her life.  A scientist named Loomis who rapidly becomes domineering and demanding.  Every time Ann tries to compromise and share the valley as separate individuals, he tries to browbeat and control her.  Ultimately, her only option for safety is to leave.

So in other words the writers of the film took a female-led story with obvious themes about abusive and controlling relationships ... and made it all about the men.  Even though they had to add a man to the story to do it.  Sigh.

Zombie Hunter (2013)

If your reaction to the cover image above is "A zombie action film starring Danny Trejo?  Tell me more!" then I am afraid what I am going to tell you is that the cover image lies.

I mean sure, Danny Trejo is in the film.  But he's in a far more minor role than the DVD cover suggests.  He's on-screen for well under ten minutes all up, in short appearances stretched over the first half of the film.  The film's protagonist is actually the guy standing behind Trejo.  Well, most the time, anyway.  Sometimes the film forgets that and makes the protagonist the woman in the white top.  Or at least, it gives her narrative voice overs, which are usually the sole prerogative of the protagonist.

Frankly I wish they'd made the woman the protagonist full stop, because the guy ... well, he's no Danny Trejo, let's put it that way.

So anyway the cause of the zombie outbreak in this film is a highly addictive drug called "Natas".  Yeah, I wonder how they came up with that name. eh?  If you use Natas for too long, you become a flesh-eating member of the undead.  This isn't a bad idea for how the outbreak could spread quickly - tens of thousands of users changing in a short period of time - but you can pretty much forget about it after the opening scene.  Is the zombification an intended side effect of Natas?  If so, who is behind it?  Could a sample of the drug be used to engineer an antidote?  These are all questions the film has no interest in asking, let alone answering.

Instead we get to meet "Hunter", a poor man's Mad Max pastiche in a post-apocalyptic zombie world.  Hunter falls in with a small group of survivors through circumstances too stupid to recount.  Their leader (played by Trejo) then gives him the big data dump of exposition that sets up the rest of the film's plot (such as it is).

One thing that Trejo's character doesn't mention - presumably he doesn't know? - is that there's also this mutant thing with big claws running around the place.  What this is, where it is from (other than being a pastiche of something from Resident Evil, I mean) and other such details are again things the film isn't much concerned with.

There's little to recommend here.  Most of the acting is bad, all of the effects are dodgy, and the script is entirely free of anything redeeming.  It's just dull and tiresome stuff that doesn't even approach "so bad it's good" territory.

Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead (2011)

Pop-quiz time.

It's the zombie apocalypse and you have in your possession:
a) a gun; and
b) a video camera

Which do you keep in your hands?

If you chose b, then congratulations - there may be a part in the Zombie Diaries franchise for you.

So as you may have guessed both this and the original film in the series are "found footage" affairs, when some idiot with a camera blunders about recording everything for no good reason rather than actually doing something useful.  This is a common problem in such films, and they address it with varying degrees of success.  The first Zombie Diaries does a terrible job of it for instance.  This one is better, for a while, but there comes a point where the group is fighting their way through a horde of (the most static, unthreatening) zombies you've ever seen, and camera-guy is still recording, where they clearly just threw their hands up and went "ah, no-one will care that it makes no sense to record this instead of using a gun to help, right?".

That scene is actually a good time to turn the movie off on another front, because it signals that the plot's about to take a hard right turn into rape-town.  For a film ostensibly about the zombie apocalypse, there sure seems to be a lot more time and attention paid by the film-makers to the extended scenes of violent sexual assault that follow.  It's also notable that the leader of the rapists escapes any kind of justice - as blatant a sign as any I can think of that the writer needs a good slapping.

Awful, charmless, witless garbage.  Stay far away.

Zombieland (2009)

I was reluctant to see this film because I had been disappointed by Shaun of the Dead.  I know that statement's probably going to trigger howls of disbelief - the latter film is pretty highly regarded in geeky circles.  I found it to be one half very funny comedy, and one half pretty decent zombie flick, but overall somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Eventually some friends persuaded me to give this movie a go, and as you might have guessed from the fact that I went on to buy it on DVD, I rather enjoyed it.  It's by no means a perfect film, you understand: I think the introduction of the two female characters is pretty weak, for instance.  I don't want to spoil details, but let's just say that for two supposedly smart ladies, they have a really dumb plan (it won't be the only time, either).  Also there's a section involving a 'surprise' guest star that feels a bit indulgent (though admittedly some of it is quite funny).

The 'quite funny' thing is important.  While I don't think Zombieland elicits as many laughs in its first half as Shaun of the Dead does, it sure as heck elicits a lot more in the second half.  Zombieland never forgets that it's a comedy, and even if not every joke hits home, it slings out enough of them that some are sure to land.

Columbus - so dubbed because that's where he is trying to get to - is a neurotic shut in whose survival in the zombie apocalypse can be traced back to his extensive list of Rules, such as 'always double tap'.  Don't be stingy with bullets, he tells us in voice over: better to use an extra round and be sure a zombie's dead than have it munch on your ankle.  He has some 31 of these rules, and given that they've kept him alive for two months, they've obviously got some merit to them.

Now, Columbus himself credits his survival partly to the fact that he was pretty much alone in the world before the zombies came, and his lack of ties made it easier for him to adapt, so he admits it's a bit out of character for him to buddy up with the stranger.  Yet this is what he does when he meets the zombie-killing maniac Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, apparently having the time of his life).  Their duo will become a quartet later, and if you think that in the course of all this Columbus is going to avoid Learning An Important Lesson About What It Means To Really Be Alive, then I have some swampland you might be interested in buying.  It's a pretty minor addendum to the film's main agenda, though, which is bucketloads of zombie-fightin' hijinks.

This is well worth a look if you're interested in a zombie flick that doesn't take itself as seriously as so many of them do.  The cast is strong enough to cover most of my - relatively minor - quibbles with the script, and you should walk away from it with a smile on your face.

Zipang (1990)

Imagine if Indiana Jones was a swaggering, not-terribly bright bandit from the Shogunate era, and you've got an idea of what sort of film Jipangu (as it is known in the original Japanese) is going to be.

Jigoku is the swaggering bandit mentioned above, a braggart and scoundrel but - in the manner of movie heroes everywhere - not entirely bad underneath it all.  With his entourage of kooky sidekicks, he stumbles across a magical sword that can unlock the door to the mythical Land of Gold, Zipang.

Alas for Jigoku, there are literally hundreds of bounty hunters after him.  And the small matter of an army of ninja who want the sword.  On the plus side, at least if you ask Jigoku, one of the bounty hunters is Yuri the Pistol.  He's rather flattered to be chased by such an attractive young woman.  Even if she is only after his head.

Yes, of course they're going to end up together.  Zipang may be a pants-on-head crazy movie with NinjaCam binoculars and people punching out their own rib cage to make a weapon, but it's got fairly traditional story beats under all the nuttiness: boy meets girl.  Girl tries to kill boy.  Ninjas and evil gods attack.  True love wins out.  You know, typical stuff.

I'm not going to go into detail about the film's plot, or all the wacky hijinks en route to the conclusion.  I do want to call out the neat design though.  There's a segment where the entire cast of good guys and bad guys converges on a massive, spiralling staircase several hundred feet high, and the whole scene looks and feels like they really are on such a construction.  It's very well done.

As for whether I'd recommend the film?  If you were at all intrigued by any of the above, you should see this movie.

Zoolander (2001)

I don't generally watch a lot of comedies.  Not intentional ones, anyway.  And I'm certainly not a fan of the crass, bodily fluids kind of comedies that originally launched Ben Stiller to stardom: I've seen the trailers for Meet the Parents and There's Something About Mary, and that's more than I need to see of either film.

Despite that, I like this film a lot.  It's by no means a subtle or especially insightful example of humour: "models are vain and not very bright" and "a lot of 'fashion show fashion' is deeply stupid" are not exactly observations of stunning perspicacity.  But the film commits to its jokes 200%, ramping them up to such utter levels of absurdity (and simultaneously sending up various tropes of fiction with much the same energy) that it's hard not to smile as you're watching it.

The plot?  The new prime minister of Malaysia plans to raise the minimum wages of garment workers, a policy that will have dire impacts on the profitability of the fashion industry.  The secret cabal that runs the industry appoints the eccentric Jacobim Mugatu to find and train a male model as an assassin: but not just any male model.  Only the most vapid simpleton could be brainwashed into a killer in the scant 14 days available to Mugatu.

Derek Zoolander (Stiller's character) is that male model.  He's hysterically stupid, vain and self-absorbed, making him the perfect patsy for Mugatu: but he's also questioning his place in the fashion industry after losing the Male Model of the Year award to newcomer Hansel.  Will Derek accept Mugatu's job offer and become an unwitting assassin?  Will the film pile ridiculous stunt cast after ridiculous stunt cast on top of one another?  Will there be incredibly nerdy gags buried in the blizzard of stupid?  Will Derek ever perfect the new 'look' he's been working on for the last eight years?  The answer to these questions will never really be in doubt, but surprises are most definitely not the point of this film.

If you're in the mood for a deeply silly, deeply absurd bit of cinematic nonsense, you could do worse than Zoolander.

Zombie Honeymoon (2004)

This is my 300th review for the blog.  There won't be a 'skip' day tomorrow, though.  I've decided to save that for the one year blogiversary in about eight weeks.  And now, on with the review.

Zombie Honeymoon begins with newlyweds Denise and Danny bailing on any of that reception nonsense and heading straight off into the sunset to enjoy their life together.  Also, to have sex in the backyard of the place where they're staying, which seems like it would be quite uncomfortable.

Anyway, the next day they're at the beach, when a man staggers out of the water, vomits black stuff all over Danny, and then dies.  I liked this scene.  It's a lot more intense than that summary suggests, and I appreciated that Denise gets in there, kicking the guy and trying to drag him off her husband.  It's good to see a female lead with some gumption.

Danny's body goes into arrest from whatever the black stuff was, and he dies at the hospital.  But then, ten minutes later, he sits up, feeling fine.  The hospital staff are perplexed, but Denise doesn't care how he came back, just that he did.

She'll be rethinking that position a few days later when she finds him eating the corpse of a jogger in their bathroom, but first we get several scenes building the pair's relationship and establishing that they're very much in love.  It's nice to see a film take a moment to deal with a character reacting to not losing someone: often fiction kind of glosses over the stress and horrified "what ifs" that accomplish a near miss.

Honestly, I think this is the best part of the film.  The two leads work well together, and when - in a rush of adrenaline from Danny not being dead - they quit their jobs and apartment and pledge to follow their dreams by moving to Portugal, you'd probably feel excitement for them if you didn't know from the title of the film where things were going to be heading.

But flesh-eating zombiedom cannot be denied, and soon Danny is succumbing to the irresistible lure of human flesh.  He promises Denise he would never hurt her, and when he says he can't live without her, her own pain over his recent death prevents her from leaving.  But as the days go by and Danny finds it harder and harder to remember the events of his life, and his kill count mounts ever higher, Denise has to ask herself if she can rely on his promise.

The zombie portion of the film is not special, and the ending is a little too pat for my tastes (though, reading the story that inspired the script, I can see why he wanted an 'upbeat' conclusion to his tale).

This is much, much better than the average Indie zombie film, and it has good performances, but it's kind of uncomfortably straddling a couple of different genres and it probably isn't going to work for most audiences.

Pathogen (2006)

Somewhat unusually, I bought the Zombie Girl DVD for the extras. Specifically, for this extra.

Zombie Girl, you see, is a 2009 documentary about the making of the movie Pathogen, and in an unusual turn of events it is the documentary you have to buy in order to get the original film as an extra, rather than the documentary coming as an extra on the film.

But then, Pathogen is not your typical zombie movie.

I mean, in many ways it's very much what you'd expect: an accident at a medical research facility leads to a mysterious contagion. As authorities flail ineffectually, hordes of flesh eating zombies take to the streets in search of succulent human snackage. An ever dwindling group of uninfected try to stay ahead of the undead munchies.

What isn't typical, however, is that Pathogen was written, directed, produced, shot and edited by Emily Hagins while she was in middle school. Now to be honest, the movie shows the youth of its creator with its clunky script and technical deficiencies. But seriously, she was twelve years old when she started making it (13 by the time she actually got the film finished). There aren't many 12 year olds who could put together a feature-length film, I'm thinking.

So yeah, by all standard metrics this is a bad film: the acting is clearly being done by amateurs (with one exception you'll spot pretty easily); there are many continuity issues around what time of day it is; the dialogue sometimes becomes inaudible, etcetera and so on. But I don't care. Hagins's enthusiasm shines through it all, and I had a blast watching this.

PS: The Zombie Girl documentary itself is pretty good, and I recommend watching it before Pathogen itself. Also the Q&A from the world premiere is pretty interesting, though I suggest you save that until after seeing the film.