#42 Juan of the Dead: Cuban Shaun of the Dead, No Really

First, a disclaimer. Reviewers are really, really lazy people. This is why we spend our time, as it’s often been observed, criticising the work’s of others rather than doing anything productive ourselves. This is why you will so often read reviews that include the phases “An action-packed thrill ride!” or “Fun for the whole family!” And those phrases will always include an exclamation mark, not because the review is particularly enthusiastic about what they’re saying, but because the full stop is smaller and thus slightly harder to find on the keyboard.

This is why when you read the quote “A cross between Indiana Jones, Blade Runner & Star Wars” you should expect not the most mind-blowingly awesome film ever made, but Super Mario Bros, the movie.

A lot of geeks first became disillusioned with the world when they saw The Phantom Menace. For me it was when I was 10 years old and saw this on video for the first time.

I wanted to acknowledge that, because in the face of Juan of the Dead a lot of people have been using the phrase “A Cuban Shaun of the Dead”. On reading that phrase you most probably made the assumption “So it’s a zombie film with jokes in, and it’s set in Cuba, and the reviewer was writing this before knocking off to the pub early”. Firstly- yes, you’re right, every single one of those things is true. It is a zombie film, it is set in Cuba and the reviewer is gasping for a pint, it’s got to be, what? Three PM already?

It's their own fault for using a vaguely similar font.

But aside from that, it’s also true. Juan of the Dead is exactly a Cuban Shaun of the Dead. I’m going to explain how in a second, but first I just want to put our their some of my ideas for “Things that rhyme with ‘Dawn’ Of The Dead” movie ideas.

Prawn of the Dead- Finding Nemo but with zombies.

Porn of the Dead- Obvious.

Pawn of the Dead- The lowly Pawns finally realise they have more in common with each other than the aristocratic chess pieces on either side of the board, and rise up against them.

Gorn of the Dead- The giant lizard aliens seen in the original Star Trek episode “Arena” get infected by a zombie virus.

Juan of the Dead stars a likeable but essentially deadbeat guy with a loveable, chubby and bromantic sidekick. They learn about the zombie apocalypse through the TV and respond in apathetically, not really realising that the world has gone to hell until far too late. Over the course of the film Juan has to overcome his slacker-ish nature to win back an estranged loved one (in this case a daughter, rather than a girlfriend).

And to be clear, none of this is meant as a criticism of Juan of the Dead. As I love mentioning, writers are thieving bastards, and if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. But more than that, Juan of the Dead steals blatantly from Shaun, and then makes it its own.

Ooh, wait, I’ve got some more!

Quorn of the Dead- Vegetarian zombies.

Faun of the Dead- Getting bitten by the infected inexplicably gives you the legs of a goat.

Lawn of the Dead- Zombie grass. More frightening than it sounds.

Forn(ication) of the Dead- See Porn of the Dead.

Corn of the Dead- Sequel to Lawn of the Dead. Zombie ears of corn can only be defeated with hot oil, resulting in weirdly disgusting scenes of them popping on the spot.

Bjorn of the Dead- An outbreak during a production of Mama Mia with terrifying consequences.

Juan of the Dead owns the Cuban Shaun of the Dead label by making the most of the Cuban part of it. Just as Shaun of the Dead makes the most of its London setting, every scene of Juan of the Dead is firmly grounded in Cuba, from the relationships between the neighbours in Juan’s block of flats, to the news’ original description of the zombies as “dissidents” (and in keeping with the “Don’t call them zombies” rule, the survivors refer to zombies as dissidents for the rest of the film).

Even in cases where jokes were lifted entirely wholesale from Shaun of the Dead, Juan pushes them further and puts its own twist on them.

Juan of the Dead is also willing go further and darker with its jokes than Shaun of the Dead. While Shaun was very much set in the version of Britain seen in our sitcoms and romcoms, where you can be a bit of an arsehole but must essentially be an alright guy, in Juan of the Dead there are characters who really don’t think too much about using a zombie apocalypse as a chance to off a couple of people they don’t like too much anyway.

Hey, I just realised something! Rhyming dictionaries!

Yawn of the Dead- Sleepy people rise up and bite people. They people they bite become sleepy. The people they bite become sleepy, until soon nobody can be bothered to get out of bed.

Fawn of the Dead- Bambi’s dad is back from the grave, and he’s pissed off.

Spawn of the Dead- Zombie tadpoles will fuck you up.

Drawn of the Dead- Zombie stick-men.

Awn of the Dead- Hair or bristle-like appendages on plants spread a deadly zombie virus.

Bourne of the Dead- Matt Damon has amnesia and fights zombies.

Horn of the Dead- An adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros, only done accurately in a way that’s nothing like its previous movie adaptation, Zombie Strippers (true story).

In the end, Juan of the Dead reminded me why I keep coming back to zombie movies over and over again, and it’s not just because I’ve set myself up to have to keep a blog about them updated on a semi-regular basis.

Even when you can tell, really obviously, where a zombie film is getting its inspiration room, that comes side by side with seeing what new things they’re bringing to the table, and how they’re interpreting the things they steal. In an age of remakes and reboots zombie movies are telling the same story over and over again, and every time there’s something new to say. I think there’s something kind of brilliant in that.

Have I already done “Porn of the Dead”?

#22 Community, Epidemiology: TV Shows That Need More Zombies

One of the great things about being self-employed and working from home is that you very quickly become familiar with a number of sitcoms you weren’t familiar with before. I’m still a full four episodes off finishing the first season of the Wire, but in the space of a fortnight I’ve brought myself fully up to date with campus sitcom, Community.

For those who don’t know it, it’s a series about discredited lawyer Jeff Winger being forced to go to a community college after his BA is revealed be a fake. He falls in with a study group of loveable misfits and hilarity ensues. It’s a fun series, while it has a few episodes that rely overly on characters passing The Idiot Ball, and it’s rife with geeky references, or Chris Candy, as I call it. While it has plenty of episodes set around typical sitcom and high school plots, these are interspersed with episodes based around a Dungeons and Dragons game, or a rogue space simulator, or, a staple of the geeky sitcom genre- a paintball episode (Community actually has three).

However, for its Halloween special, the sixth episode of season two, Community went a step further with the geekiness. It actually just flat out had a zombie outbreak in the episode- it doesn’t explain it away or make it a dream sequence, for one episode, and one episode only, Community became a sci-fi horror. A sci-fi horror with an Abba soundtrack and one guy wearing a banana costume, but the point still stands. And it does it the same way Shaun of the Dead does- by playing the zombies straight and letting the characters tell the story.

This brings me back to a point I somehow never get bored of making- that in the zombie apocalypse genre the zombies exist just as a catalyst to see how the characters react. They’re good as that sort of catalyst, because we all know the zombie rules more or less, and so we’re able to keep the camera firmly on the survivors.

Community isn’t the first to do something like this- the Simpsons had an out-of-continuity zombie story for their Halloween special one year, and the Smurfs did a version of a 28 days later style plague with The Purple Smurfs decades ago (Based on a comic which actually predates Night of the Living Dead, but which is usually forgotten because the “Infected” smurfs aren’t purple, but black).

This got me thinking about which other TV series could use a zombie apocalypse episode to spice things up. And because I hate having to think of things, I recruited the Internet for some suggestions as well. Of course, the first few suggestions were all hilarious- Newsnight, the Antiques Roadshow, Waking the Dead (Although seeing Boyd and Dr. Foley fighting zombies would actually be pretty badass). But then, we got to the televisual genius...

House

This one should be a no-brainer really, and not just because we’ve seen what a badass zombie killer Greg House M.D. makes in this dream sequence. It’s because we know exactly how House would respond to zombies- he’d want to know what’s causing it. Since zombie movies are usually pretty shut-mouthed about the cause of the outbreak, this could get interesting, especially as the outbreak gets worse. Imagine all the microscope peering scenes in I Am Legend, only instead of The Last Man on Earth, it’s House and his team bickering the whole time.

On top of that, one theme zombie stories frequently return to is how far our ethics will bend in the face of human extinction. Given how bendy House’s ethics are anyway, we can expect stuff that’ll make the lab in Day of the Dead look like a petting zoo.

Glee

Okay, let’s make it clear from the start, when we’re talking about a zombie episode of Glee, we are definitely not talking about their rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which is an entirely different interpretation of how things can return from the dead a mangled, revolting version of what they once were. We’re talking about an episode where real zombies rise and invade the school with lots of songs on the run leading to a climax when they discover Kurt's falsetto can explode zombie heads. This idea came from Anil Godigamuwe.

CSI/CSI: New York/CSI: Miami

Yes, I’m imagining a massive three way crossover for this story, all over the world the dead are rising from the grave, but the CSIs still have a job to do, even if their corpses keep wandering away from the crime scene. Of course, each series would have their own approach to the zombie menace.

In vanilla CSI Grissom (They’d bring Grissom back for this, I’m sure of it) would notice interesting parallels between the zombie epidemic and the effects of a certain mind controlling fungus on ants. 

In CSI: New York we would see how the zombie apocalypse has caused all sorts of zombie-related subcultures, including at least one fetish group and an underground urban zombie killing sport. Mac, Danny and Lindsay would of course do some serious zombie killing.  Jo Danville would die in the most painful and gory way possible, probably while dispensing some sort of folksy wisdom.

By the opening of CSI: Miami Horatio Caine would already be the only survivor, climbing a hillside made up of the corpses of his team mates. From atop his mountain of corpses, he would spot a figure running up the street. In one swift movement Caine would shoot the figure dead without checking to see if it was a zombie, while simultaneously swiping up his sunglasses with his other hand and placing them on his nose before saying “Looks like I got you, dead to rights.” (Click this now. DO IT.)

Mad Men

Even as zombies they will look better than you

This was another suggestion, this time from Tom Hunter. Now, like I said, working from home has got me completely caught up on Community, while still four episodes away from finishing the first season of The Wire- so as you can probably guess I’ve not seen Mad Men yet. All I know about it is that everyone wears amazing outfits, it makes smoking and misogyny look cool and that it has the sexy con-artist lady from Firefly in it. Having listed all these things I can’t really tell you why I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, the only possible reason I can come up with is that it doesn’t feature a zombie apocalypse. Well dressed misogynist zombies! Who doesn’t want to see that?

Gilmore Girls

I work it out as, starting top left, lives, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, lives, lives... ummm... dies.

Okay, so Gilmore Girls has finished- but hope still abounds for the movie version!

The trouble is, making the jump from TV to Cinema is a difficult one. You need a story that feels bigger than just an extra long TV episode- you need to raise the stakes and make everything feel just a bit more epic than before. Many TV series have done this really really badly by simply assuming it’s enough to put their character in a different location- usually Ibiza. This always results in a terrible, terrible movie. However, you know what would work?

Yeah I’m going to skip the rest of my preamble and say it’s a zombie apocalypse. This would be great for Gilmore Girls, because as the series has developed we’ve come to care not just about the eponymous girls, but the entire community of Stars Hollow. You know what that means? Lots of characters who the audience cares about, but who are expendable enough to be killed off!

Can’t you just see it as the community is, bit by bit, forced to retreat to the Inn? I can see Lorelai generating a real Ripley vibe when it comes to the crunch, and Luke, being a generally aimless slacker, will of course end up saving the day (because if zombie movies teach us nothing else, it’s that generally aimless slackers are the best at fighting zombies). Kirk, I’m sorry to say, is probably a dead man, and Lorelai’s parents will likely meet a dignified, but inevitably grizzly end. However, I imagine Lane and Michel will discover previously unsuspected levels of combat badassery.

Come on! You know it makes sense! One of the writers, Jane Espenson, even has extensive experience writing about the undead for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Now, returning to the episode of Community that triggered off this fountain of television genius, it’s time to play the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Yes, the building being Greendale Community College- particularly their study room.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? It’s hinted the army is planning kill everyone off, and it takes them six hours to get there, by which point the crisis has been resolved. So take two shots.

Is mankind the real monster? There is plenty of infighting, and Jeff does point out he likes one character better as a zombie. So let’s take a shot.

Are the zombies walking dead (No, just infected) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Someone does mention the importance of destroying the brain, so take one shot)

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? Nope.

#8 Braindead: Gore! (Huh!) What Is It Good For?

Hello again. Before you read this blog, a couple of bits of zombie-related news you might enjoy.
Firstly, the good people at Whippersnapper Press have just posted my story of zombies and travel insurance, Recorded For Training Purposes.

The Whippersnapper was also responsible for a rather brilliant evening of poetry and stand up a couple of weeks ago. They plan to repeat this with a Vogon Poetry Slam on the 25th of May in London, to observe the twin geek holidays of Geek Pride Day (marking the anniversary of the release of Star Wars) and Towel Day (commemorating Douglas Adams). Come along to enjoy poetry from the geeky, to the competitively awful. Providing the Earth isn’t destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass in the mean time.

Anyway, now for something a bit more on topic. This contains spoilers, and some really gross bits:

This week we’re going to be taking about Peter Jackson’s Braindead, known as Dead Alive in the States, but we’re not going to use that title because it sounds like it was thought up by Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster.

These days, Peter Jackson is best known for massive, three-hour long CGI-filled epics. However, he started out with nothing but a shoestring budget and an imagination that must have made his parents very concerned as he grew up. It’s a little known fact (little know because I just made it up) that before Peter Jackson was signed on to direct some of Hollywood’s big budget tent pole movies, he was made to sign a contract saying he wouldn’t blow the SFX budget on showing a man being eaten alive by giant, toothy, CGI sphincters.

Nobody tells Peter Jackson what Peter Jackson can’t do.

I have just re-watched Braindead, and it is by far the grossest, goriest zombie movie I have ever seen. I made the foolish mistake of eating lunch beforehand, and I nearly lost it no less than three times.

Now gore is pretty much the stock in trade of the zombie movie. Night of the Living Dead might seem pretty tame by modern standards, but at the time it was incredibly shocking (although this didn’t stop people taking their kids to see it). Whether it’s the classic Death Becomes Her shot in Shaun of the Dead, or Jim gauging out the eyes of one of the soldiers in 28 Days Later, there’s going to be some sort of splatter in whatever zombie movie you happen to be watching.

But when talking about zombie movies in any critical way, the gore tends to get brushed aside (even if it leaves a sticky patch). Night of the Living Dead is about Vietnam, Dawn of the Dead is about consumerism, Shaun of the Dead is about Shaun’s relationship problems. It’s easy to talk about all these films and forget what they actually spend the majority of their special effects budget on.

So, to return to the awesome pun I made in the title of this blog entry- what is gore good for?

Look Mummy! I made a satire!

Well, firstly, as I said last week, zombie movies aren’t just extremely violent- they’re often about violence- and a natural consequence of extreme violence tends to be gore. Personally, I find a bit of gratuitous splatter preferable to the weirdly bloodless gun fights you’d see in old Westerns or Bond movies.

Zombie movies aren’t just about violence though. This might shock you, but if you look at the names of the works that we’ve reviewed so far in this blog, there’s one word that keeps popping up in the title.

Go on, have a look, see if you can spot it...

Figured it out yet?

It’s the word “Dead”. Weird huh? It’s almost like death is somehow a recurring theme in these movies. The zombie, with its slow, clumsy but inevitable approach is a great metaphor for death. We fear becoming zombies because it means a loss of identity, it means becoming a merciless, constantly hungry killing machine and a danger to all those who you once loved. But we also fear it because becoming a zombie means you’ll look really gross.

So on that note, let’s start talking about old people. In Braindead (See? I hadn’t forgotten) the first person to succumb to the bite of the Sumatran Rat Monkey is the mother of Lionel, the main character. Before she starts to crave human flesh it’s made clear she’s already far from a positive influence in Lionel’s life, she’s clingy, possessive and jealous, actively trying to obstruct Lionel’s budding romance.

And once she’s bitten, she actually becomes more vulnerable. Her ability to speak is impaired, her hands become stiff and unresponsive, and her skin has to be literally glued onto her face to stop it peeling off. But just as Shaun and Ed see a zombie and immediately conclude that she must be pissed, when the president of the Women’s institute pays a visit she looks at Lionel’s mother and sees her as someone who’s a bit senile. It’s a parody of old age, and our fear for Lionel isn’t that he’s going to be eaten, but that he’s going to be stuck looking after his zombified mother, old, gross-looking, but basically immortal, at the expense of any chance of a life of his own.

When the Lionel’s zombified mother finally breaks loose and goes on a killing spree it actually drives this point home. In a desperate bid to cover up his mother’s condition, Lionel ends up bringing all her zombified victims back home, feeding them, cleaning them, and keeping them doped up on tranquilisers and as they decompose around him.

Zombies also love Countdown

There’s more to the gore in this movie than Peter Jackson exorcising his fear of having to care for elderly relatives however. One of the earlier and more revolting parts of the film shows Lionel’s mother slowly crushing the rat monkey’s skull beneath her heel after it bites her. Here it’s important that the camera lingers on the rat, sees its eyes bulging out of its skull, and the look of satisfaction on Lionel’s mother’s face. The rat monkey has already been built up as a horrible, unpleasant monster, with a back story involving the slave trade, interspecies rape and black magic. This scene is purpose built to drive home the fact that Lionel’s mother is far worse than any of that.

In Braindead, your innards are Peter Jackson’s paintbrush, and he finds no end of imaginative and bizarre ways to apply it to the canvas. In this movie a dead baby crawls up inside a woman’s skull, sticks his arms out of her ears and rips her face open. In one scene, Lionel is unable to flee from a horde of approaching zombies because the floor is too slippery with blood- he gets to safety using dismembered limbs and heads as stepping stones. At one point he has to fight off being strangled by an animated intestinal tract (Peter Jackson doesn’t give a flat fuck for the Romero Rules), which then somehow manages to appear to begging for mercy before it is vaporised by a lawnmower.

What do you mean it’s not cute?

And while I’m at it, seeing Lionel literally mow down a horde of zombies is one of the most awesome scenes of zombie slaughter in movie history. The gore in the grand, blood-soaked finale of the movie is less a grim parody of human mortality than a piece of gleeful slapstick. Jackson is positively revelling in it.

The trouble is, if you hate gore (Like certain more wussy bloggers I won't name) it’s very hard to look past that first visceral reaction to see how the gore is being used. In Braindead we see gore being used as a metaphor for our fears about old age and mortality, as the basis for a huge, elaborate slapstick routine, leading up to a scene where Peter Jackson shows us that subtext is for pussies by having an old lady literally drags her son back into her foul, rotting womb.

Pictured: Subtlety

So, there’s a lot to be said for becoming desensitised to violence.

Okay, time for the drinking game. Strict interpretations this week, as there were complaints last week that I was being a bit too lenient (Okay, they didn’t spend most of Shaun of the Dead actually in the Winchester, but I still say the Winchester was a big enough character in the story to justify the shot). So this week you only get to drink for mankind being the real monster (Lionel’s uncle and mother are both pretty horrid before they’re zombified), for the zombies being walking dead (One shot) who move slowly (One shot) and then another two drinks for the zombified baby (My favourite character in the whole film).

Now if there’s one complaint often levelled at bloggers who write about zombies (You know who you are!) it’s that it’s easy for us to judge while we’re ensconced safely behind our laptops, but that we never get out in the field and report from where the story is.

Well, to silence the complaining types, next week I will be doing just that, reporting from the front line of the Zombie LARP!

In the meantime, game organiser and award winning journalist Mary Hamilton recently gave a talk alongside the likes of Tim Kring and Graham Lineham at The Story conference. You can read her insights here.

Now get out of here. You sicken me.

#7 Shaun of the Dead: Why You Think You're Badass

So, let’s talk about Shaun of the Dead, the film that started off the whole zombie renaissance that so many people are getting sick of by now.

Oh, you thought it was 28 Days Later?

Or the general atmosphere of apocalyptic doom and despair that’s been prevalent since 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Well, they might have helped, but the reason that for the last decade nerds have been crafting intricate strategies for the hording of food and the decapitation of their neighbours (especially Neil, because fuck that guy) can be traced back to this film. This is the film that convinced you all that no matter how big a loser you are, the day the dead rise you will metamorphose into a cricket-bat wielding badass.

Some of you have completely lost touch with reality

Shaun of the Dead is different from the other movies we’ve looked at so far. Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and I Am Legend aren’t just violent stories, but they’re also stories about violence. In one way or another these are stories about how violent people are, and the human cost violence has for the perpetrator as well as the victim. Even Pontypool is littered with references to the war in Afghanistan, and makes a major plot point of the guilt that comes from killing the obligatory kiddy zombie.

Shaun of the Dead gives a couple of nods to these themes, in the creepy look on Ed’s face after he’s smashed someone’s skull in with an ash tray, in that most of the improvised weapons and projectiles the characters use- records, swing-balls, and boxes of assorted throwing objects, turn out to be a bit shit and in that someone who spends hours of his life shooting down people in Timesplitters 2 will actually turn out to be a bit crap when he gets his hands on a rifle. But that isn’t Shaun of the Dead’s primary concern. Shaun of the Dead is a story about an aimless twenty-something struggling to grow up and get over his hangover. I can’t imagine why I like it so much.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s script is littered with foreshadowing and throwbacks, and one of these is that the entire plot of the movie is summed up with the drunken Shaun’s to-do list scrawled across the fridge:

Not long before, Ed also describes the plot of the whole movie in the form of a plan for a pub crawl:

“A Bloody Mary first thing, (the zombie they kill in the garden is called Mary) a bite at the King's Head, (Shaun’s stepdad getting bitten), couple at The Little Princess, (fetching Liz), stagger back here (the Winchester) and bang... back at the bar for shots. (Getting the rifle).”

The characters see the whole outbreak in terms of their everyday lives, relationships and trips to the pub, never even thinking about the larger political, philosophical and theological aspects of the zombie (not quite) apocalypse. When they flick through the TV channels and get nothing but blank, the response is a rather glib “There’s never anything on is there?” rather than wondering if we’ll see the lights turn on again in our lifetime.

I’ve already talked about the way zombie apocalypses have of narrowing the action down to an extremely small stage, then giving us hints and tips about the larger story through radio broadcasts and background action. The first part of Shaun of the Dead is littered with this. We see military trucks moving around in the background, people passing out at the bus stop, half-glimpsed headlines, a man eating a pigeon, a guy face down on his own steering wheel, and none of it is referred to by the characters directly. Shaun even manages to walk right to the corner shop and back through smashed up cars and scattered zombies without noticing that anything is wrong (incidentally, I’ve been to that corner shop, and they do a great strawberry Cornetto).

Edgar Wright has already gone on record as saying that this was partly inspired by his own discovery of the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK.

He’d missed the news for a couple of days, then turned the telly on to see mountains of burning cows. But it could just as easily be anything in the news. The movie came out while I was in uni and the Iraq War was getting into full swing, and my memories of that time are made up of sitting in the Union Bar, chatting about the usual bollocks students talk about, but with this constant background hum on the TV screens of tanks moving through deserts, reports of car bombs going off, and over-excited reporters in blurry, pixellated footage. Shaun of the Dead slots neatly into the Romero canon because like his films, these are characters at the periphery of the world-changing events. But unlike Romero’s characters, even as the world is falling apart these characters are still driven by the same pre-apocalyptic concerns- Shaun’s rivalry with his step-dad, his toxic friendship with Ed, and his attempts to win Liz back.

The real question at the end of the film isn’t about the aftermath of this huge, world changing cataclysm. Globally, the worst consequence of the apocalypse seems to be the return of It’s A Knockout.

Although in all fairness, I would totally watch this

The more dramatically important question at the end of the film is whether or not Shaun has moved on at all. In Simon Pegg’s memoir (which I’ve been reading to better to learn his ways so that I may eventually kill him and steal his life) he mentions that it’s left deliberately ambiguous whether Liz knows that Ed is being kept chained up in the garden shed (something else foreshadowed at the start of the film). If she doesn’t know, then Shaun hasn’t really changed and the idyllic post-zombie existence they’re enjoying may not last all that long. If she does, then she’s complicit in allowing him to carry on as he did before. Either way, Shaun remains the same person even in face of the zombie invasion, the petty tendencies and the bravery in the face of danger were equally a part of him all along. I believe that the fact that he remains the same ineffectual schlub even when he’s kicking zombie arse is a big part of the reason why this film is so popular, and why more geeks have a plan for the zombie apocalypse than a plan to escape their home in the event of a house fire.*

Right, let’s get to Winchester and line up some shots. The characters spend most of the story under siege in a pub (take a shot). We could argue over whether mankind is the real monster, but from the opening credits onwards the parallels between your average Londoner and your average zombie are made abundantly clear, and the characters spend plenty of time pointing guns, broken glass and bottle-openers at one another, so take a shot. Ed cries out “We’re coming to get you Barbara!” so take another two shots. These are proper old school zombies, who are dead, move slowly and can only be killed by a shot to the brain, so take four shots for that. We don’t know if the naturally dead rise, but given Pegg and Wright’s reverence for the Romero rules, I feel safe ordering a couple of shots for that as well. There is a kiddy zombie, so two shots for that. And while the word zombie is mentioned numerous times, character’s are explicitly told not to, so you can have one shot for that.

However, the two surviving characters are rescued by the army, who turn out not to be either insane or evil, so that is the one shot you’re not allowed to take this week.

How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

*Not an actual statistic. Someone should do the research on this.

#3 Pontypool: Orally Transmitted Disease

So, we’ve looked at the film that set out the rules for all the zombie movies to follow. We’ve found a zombie movie in denial and pointed out that yeah, it’s playing by the same rules as everyone else. Today we’re going to look at a film that’s well within the territory of the zombie movie, but does something completely original with the zombie apocalypse idea. Oh, and there will probably be some spoilers here, but hopefully not too much.

Okay, so we’ve already established that zombie movies tend not to focus on the big picture. They’re rarely interested in Frodo and his friends journeying to Mount Doom- they’re more likely to focus on the story of some anonymous Middle Earth peasant who gets his farm fucked over by orcs but never finds out why.

The majority of zombie films like to lock their main characters up in a room together, only giving them hints of the wider story through radio and TV broadcasts.

A Second Hand Apocalypse

Even the adventures of our main characters are often relayed to us second hand: In Night of the Living Dead we hear Ben tell us in detail about a gasoline truck he saw being chased down by a horde of zombies. In 28 Days Later Mark describes how he lost his family when Paddington Station was overrun. Telling us these stories second-hand does important scene-setting work. If it’s set in the early days of the outbreak, it helps give the impression that we are only seeing a fragment of a larger national or global narrative, set in the aftermath, it lets us know that we missed the party- that the war for survival happened long before the opening credits rolled, and we lost.

So it’s actually surprising it took this long for someone to think of telling the story of what happens in one of these radio stations, with the apocalypse relayed to us entirely second hand as the world finally goes to hell. Oh, we see a bit of it in Dawn of the Dead, as the TV station struggles to stay on the air while the city burns, but only long enough for our main characters to realise everything’s going to shit and decide to make a run for it.

With Pontypool we find out what happens to the characters who don’t make a run for it. Set in the small, snowbound Canadian town of Pontypool (That the setting is Canadian will prove important later) this film follows washed out shock jock Grant Mazzy, his put-upon producer Sydney Briar, and “technical cowboy” Laurel-Ann Drummond.

One of the first things we find out is- at the radio station Ben, Barbra and co were listening to, desperately hoping for an answer to the crisis, the announcers had no more idea what was going on than the poor folk stranded in the farmhouses, shopping malls and the Winchester Pub.

For the first half of the film, we only hear fragmentary reports, a doctor’s office getting mobbed by what looks like a protest or riot, a BBC journalist asking if the rioting and military roadblocks are the result of separatist terrorists, and the DJ isn’t convinced it’s not all some War of the Worlds style radio hoax. Anybody who’s seen a zombie movie will recognise the signs, but you won’t see a zombie directly until over 50 minutes into the film, and it’ll be over an hour before the horde appears.

Everything else we hear from listeners calling in, from the pilot of the radio station’s traffic chopper (which is actually a car parked on a hill) and from the news wire. It’s a claustrophobic, doom-laden film and if that was all there was to this movie it would still be a great addition to the genre. But that isn’t what makes this film stand out.

It’s the nature of the infection. This epidemic isn’t brought about by a crashed Venusian space probe, or by some sort of hyper-rabies. In Pontypool the infection is spread by words- specifically, the understanding of words.

Despite the sprinty/not undead nature of the zombies, these zombies are much closer to the Romero zombies of old, because they are as much objects of sympathy as fear. When we see an infected person hurling herself at the glass of the recording booth until the glass is smeared with her blood, we’re not frightened she’ll break in, we just don’t want to see her killing herself. When the military come in and begin putting down the infected, Mazzy’s outraged cry is that “You’re just killing scared people- it’s what you always do.” There’s none of the usual self-justification that “he’s not the person he was” when a zombie gets killed. We see the terror in their eyes as they lose their ability to speak, and when they finally turn to violence it’s almost understandable.

Everybody’s Heard About The Word

There is a theory that in the event of a Rage virus style zombie outbreak, it would go something like this:



I would watch this movie.



But a virus spread by words? Well let me make my point in the most painful way possible: The Game.

For those of lucky enough not to know what that means, and are therefore not swearing out loud and trying to punch your computer monitor in the face click here. I’m sorry, there’s no going back.

In a wider sense, words behave virally all the time, the infection stands as a metaphor for memes, ideas, religion, you name it. But purely in the terms of the film, it also presents a host of unique problems. Certain words are infected- but how do you find out which ones are infected. If you find which words are infected, how can you communicate that to anyone else?

This is where it becomes important that this film is set in Canada. The military that moves in to put down the outbreak (and who turn out to not be much help- don’t worry, we’ll tally up the shots at the end of the blog) is explicitly stated to be the French Canadian military. When the radio station’s broadcast is interrupted by an announcement in French, telling people to avoid terms of endearment, baby talk and “rhetorical discourse” it also warns people to avoid the English language, and asks that listeners not translate the message. To contain the disease, there is an attempt to actually quarantine the English language.

But we’re never in any doubt about how effective this strategy will be. If there is an effective way to contain an idea I haven’t heard of it (So, you know, well done!) and this is a film fascinated by language and ideas and the way they propagate. When zombie movies show you anything of life before the outbreak, it will usually be a shortcut to whatever themes it wants to explore. 28 Days Later starts with stock footage of riots and wars and the everyday violence humans inflict on one another regardless of any “virus”.

Shaun of the Dead opens with shots of people lumbering about their everyday lives, doing the same tasks over and over, looking like zombies. Pontypool starts out with Mazzy’s producer telling him that his attempt to spread the truth in a small town is pointless because “Gossip is way ahead of you”. The film opens on a monologue from Mazzy, talking about the meanings and etymologies of words, repeating them until they lose all meaning.

Zombie movies never being afraid to stick their subtext up on a fifty foot high billboard, we see plenty of examples of the kind of dangerous, viral ideas they are talking about. From the dangerous inflammatory rumours of booby trapped marijuana farms Mazzy is spreading at the start of the film, to the singers of a Lawrence of Arabia musical that come to perform in the studio, and feature a black-faced actor playing Osama Bin-Laden.

Pictured: Satire

Perhaps the lesson of this film is that some of the worst things humanity can produce are simply spread by words, and it forces the audience to ask itself- have you heard the word?

Right, let’s bring out the drinking game shall we? (Yes: You just lost The Game again)

Our characters spend most of the story under siege in a radio station (one shot) where the French-Canadian military coming to contain the situation are incompetent, and more dangerous than the zombies (two shots) because mankind is the real monster (one shot) also, there is a kiddy zombie (two shots) and nobody ever calls them zombies (one shot).

Next week I’m going to be writing about the Left 4 Dead games, and also Batman.