The B-Masters Cabal

Hey! Our Month of the Living Dead entry is in with a whole day to spare!

Grapes of Death
Jean Rollin’s sort of zombie movie in which inhabitants of France’s bleakest countryside catch an infection from contaminated wine that turns them into murder happy zombies. Well, sort of zombies, anyway. Rollin was better known for weird vampire films with no scripts or logic, but Grapes of Death represents at him at his most accessible and coherent. And because I don’t want to offend anyone on this family-friendly board, rather than post a snapshot of a gory zombie with oozing forehead or a topless woman in the process of also becoming headless, I present to you instead this photo of a contemplative older gentleman smoking a cigarette.

Terrifying, suspenseful, exciting—- These are just a few of the words you will find nowhere in my review of Revolt Of The Zombies (1936). An entirely fitting conclusion to my contribution to MONTH OF THE LIVING DEAD since, having watched it, I now feel like one of the living dead myself.

Fitting into both Month of the Living Dead 7 and the Halloween roundtable organized by Badmovies.org:

Cemetery of Terror (1985) — “Hey, we can make horror movies in Mexico just as stupid and nonsensical as those we get from America, and we wouldn’t even have to dub them!”

Something old, something new, nothing really all that good:

City of the Living Dead (1980) (aka The Gates of Hell), in which Lucio Fulci adroitly divides the audience reaction between “Whuh?”and “Eww!”

Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005), which deserves as many “Law of Diminishing Returns” quips we can throw at it.

Our readers requested it…and now I hate them all.

New reviews at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:

City of the Walking Dead (1980), in which Umberto Lenzi does 28 Days Later 22 years earlier…

Cosmic Voyage (1936), in which we see that those dirty, rotten, stinking reds were ahead of us in the space race long before there was such a thing as a space race…

The Headless Horseman (1922), in which we have to wait waaaaaayyyyyy too goddamned long for a guy to get beamed in the head with a pumpkin…

Ruslan and Ludmila (1972), in which the deranged genius who brought us The Day the Earth Froze dumps everything that ever happened in a fairy tale into a blender, and then blows it up with one of those plunger detonators that Wile E. Coyote loves so much…

and

The Zombies of Mora Tau (1957), in which the amphibious undead aren’t reanimated Nazis for once.

Three young people find themselves stranded in the Monastery of Silence, where one of the monks just won’t stay buried. Mexico’s second horror film, El Fantasma del convento (The Ghost of the Monastery, 1934) is a true rarity: not only because it’s so difficult to find & see, but also because it still packs a punch after three-quarters of a century. The Living Dead in this film are not the kind you’re used to… and what’s more, this is one of the few horror films of the era that tries to be realistic in depicting death and bodily decay.

Count Yorga, Vampire

So far, our examination of old fashioned vampires in modern day settings has covered Dracula, in the Hammer Studios films Dracula AD 1972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, and some guy named Count Sinistre, from the previously obscure British horror film Devils of Darkness. But this trend of placing traditional vampires in a modern (well, 1970s) setting actually started in America, with a low-key film called Count Yorga, Vampire. At the time of Yorga’s release, there were very few people making vampire movies. Hammer was pretty much the only game in town, and they were still setting their vampire films in the Victorian era. Devils of Darkness was one of the first vampire films to transport a vampire into the current era, at least since the 1932 Tod Browning production of Dracula, which was set in what was then modern-day London. However, one can argue that the differences between the London of 1870 and 1932 is markedly less than the difference between 1870 and 1970, and so for our purposes here, Devils of Darkness is more substantial to our little foray than Dracula. It’s also less substantial because almost no one saw Devils of Darkness, Which means that Count Yorga, Vampire, is really where we can say this short-lived trend began.

Well, I said in my review of Jason X that I was feeling nostalgic for Crystal Lake. That feeling has led me to take a long look back at the Friday The 13th franchise in all its gory—uh, glory. See Friday The 13th – Reconsidered, new in Etc., Etc., Etc.

Redneck Zombies (1987) is a guilty pleasure for me; I can’t tell you that it’s good, but I also can’t tell you that I don’t enjoy it. If I had made this movie, I’d be proud of it. I’m sorry if that disappoints you. I know it would disappoint my mom.

On the other hand, there’s no guilt in my enjoyment of 28 Weeks Later (2007), though “enjoy” might not be the best word to relate to a movie centered on brutal, unrelenting, non-exploitative violence. The good news for me is that its imagery is haunting enough that I don’t think I’ll need to rewatch it any time soon.