THE WALKING DEAD Review: "The First Day of the Rest of Your Life"

Just got back from watching the Season Seven finale of The Walking Dead. Here are some preliminary thoughts. The following comments are going to be spoileriffic as all get-out, so be ye warned...

The Good

*I did not see the back-stabbing from the Junkyard Gang (the Walking Dead wiki calls them "Scavengers") coming at all. Yes they're really weird and not very good people, but that was a legitimate surprise. The Scavenger leader is named Jadis and that's really appropriate--it's the actual name of the White Witch from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

(And given how the Scavengers' deal with Negan seems to involve twelve--later ten--Alexandrians as slave labor or who knows what, her comment about having sex with Rick after the battle just got a lot more sinister.)

*The arrival of the Kingdom and Hilltop to save the day just as Negan is about to kill Carl was awesome. Negan is about to swing down and suddenly Shiva the tiger just jumps into the fray and kills one of his goons. Mayhem ensues, with the bad man getting away after another near-miss from Shiva. In TVTropes terms, this was a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Maggie, King Ezekiel, and both their respective factions. Good job.

*Negan's theatrical brutality is on full display once again with the whole "Sasha in the coffin" stunt. I knew what Sasha was going to do, but I didn't anticipate the coffin. That would allow for maximum surprise.

*Negan's impromptu freestyle poetry ("a stupid little prick named Rick") was amusing, as was the later portion of his demands.

The Bad

*Way too many shots of Sasha inside the coffin and flashbacks to the last day Abraham was alive throughout the episode, with Sasha's story being told out of order. I understand what they were trying to go for, but they overdid it.

*Jadis shoots Rick and throws him off the top of the gateway, but later we see her marching him through the streets at gunpoint. Unless she immediately jumped down afterward, that's quite a bit of time in the midst of a battle between the Alexandrians and the Saviors for Rick to get away, get a gun of his own, etc.

*Given Negan's bizarre soft spot for Carl, I figured he was going to try to kill Rick when he had everybody at his mercy. Rick had already been wounded by Jadis and Rick has been plotting against Negan the whole time. Although Negan has a thing for punishing the loved ones of people who disobey him or try to kill him rather than the guilty ones themselves (Glenn for Daryl, Olivia for Rosta), I figured Carl was a special case. I guess if they follow the comic plot with Negan and Carl, Carl will have very good reason to rebuff Negan's "I thought we were friends." Negan's affection for Carl was one of the more interesting aspects of his character and to have him throw that away by trying to kill him weakens that.

*The whole of the last half of Season Seven suffered from "let's prolong the buildup to war as much as possible" and this episode had that.

What's Next?

*Negan is rallying his people to war, but he has the traitorous Dwight in his inner circle, as well as Eugene, whom he probably suspects helped Sasha die. Ezekiel, Maggie, and Rick are united against the Saviors, but the Scavengers were able to escape. As allies of Negan, they're going to need to be dealt with.

The Verdict

*Despite the flaws, a fun episode overall. I'm looking forward to Season Eight.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Evil Dead II (1987)

For our podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we decided to watch the movie Evil Dead II, the second film in the Evil Dead series for of our usual horror-themed month of October. It's been a long time since I saw this one--I think I saw it in high school, as part of a Hollywood Video double feature with the original, in the late 1990s. I remember enjoying the film then, especially in comparison to the execrable original film with its gouts of oatmeal-gore. Considering how Starz is putting out a new television series called Ash vs. the Evil Dead, this was a rather appropriate time to do the movie...

How did it hold up? Well, here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda visit a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods for a romantic weekend, but it turns out a professor of ancient history was using it as a site to translate an ancient evil book bound in human skin. Ash plays a recording of the incantation and unleashes all sorts of slapstick-undead horrors just as the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple locals show up completely coincidentally. All of them must now survived the murderous (and sometimes hilarious) horrors of the Deadites...

The Good

*The movie avoids the "a bunch of friends go to the cabin in the woods to smoke weed and have sex" cliche of 1980s horror films. Instead it's Ash and his girlfriend basically breaking into someone else's cabin for the weekend and then the actual owners (or at least their relatives) show up, not knowing the craziness Ash accidentally unleashed.

*Ash's first encounter with the undead is a mildly-effective "Jump Scare." Given how inured I am to most horror films, it's probably a lot scarier for most people.

*At times Ash is remarkably genre-savvy. He knows sticking around a haunted cabin where a scientist recited incantations from a book bound in human skin is a really bad idea and at first chance he gets the hell out of there. Or let me rephrase that--he tries.

*There's a fair bit of good slapstick humor in this one, including a lengthy sequence involving Ash's hand getting possessed. Who's laughing now indeed? :)

*Who knew the book A Farewell to Arms could be so amusing? You'll laugh when you see the context.

*I never really thought about what might happen if you soak a room's sole light source in blood...

*There's a nice bit of Reality Ensues when Ash starts blasting around with the shotgun. Sometimes you don't know where the shells will end up.

The Bad

*The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film really aren't that entertaining. To be blunt, a lot of the film just isn't entertaining, although there are certainly some good moments.

*Ash's first killing of a possessed character could be played for either horror (it's a brutal necessity that traumatizes him) or comedy (slapstick violence, hammy overreaction to the deed). It doesn't really work as either.

*The film's sense of time is wonky. It doesn't take long for Ash and Linda to get to the cabin from the Scary Ominous Bridge (TM), but Ash leaves the cabin the morning after they arrive and arrives there just in time for the sun to set?

*In the scene where Ash sees a character reanimated after having been possessed and killed, they've only been dead a day or two, if not just a few hours. It would have been better (and likely much cheaper) to have the original actor wearing zombie makeup reviving and misbehaving rather than having a mediocre claymation monster.

*For someone who starts out showing some intelligence, Ash displays some fairly stupid behavior at times, especially later in the film.

The Verdict

Not as funny as I remember and it hasn't aged very well. I wonder if the remake is more technically adept, although a friend of mine tells me it's really, really gory. Unless you really like 1980s horror, 1980s comedies, or combinations thereof, don't bother with this one. 5.0 out of 10.

On Bringing Back a Certain Dead Character (Walking Dead SPOILERS)

This morning while doing some Twitter work for a client, I found the following article:

"Second Half of Walking Dead Promises 'Huge Changes'"

I'm not familiar with the show (I didn't have cable when it started), but I saw the mid-season finale with some of my church friends. The article said it's possible that due to the fan outcry, they might bring back the character Beth.

Here's what happens to Beth in the mid-season finale:



Unless they're doing flashbacks or dream sequences (Maggie tormented by visions of her sister?), Beth is dead. Maybe they have a funeral for Beth that would give the actress one last gig (basically lying around until they can burn her, given how everyone who dies comes back as a zombie) and that would work, but that's it. And I doubt they're going to do this, considering I read an article talking about how sad it was for her to leave the set.

I mean, watch the scene:

1. The bullet drilled right through her head and out the back with a lot of blood and gore flying, as you can see above. She was almost certainly immediately killed.

2. Even if she was on some level still alive when Daryl carried out of the hospital, there's not a hospital that could treat her for that kind of injury. Grady could try (they still function, sort of), but I doubt they'd succeed. That's a lot of brain blown out, and then there's all the shock, bleeding, etc. that would go with it. She would die very quickly if she's not already dead. The Grady people might try to keep her body alive for organ-donation purposes (assuming that's even possible anymore due to the whole "everyone who dies becomes a zombie" thing), but the Beth that is Beth is gone.

So this would be a time where giving into fan demands would hurt the quality of the show.

HOWEVER, I did have an idea for an alternate ending for that episode that could have made this possible.

Dawn shoots Beth reflexively and she goes down. Daryl loses it and blows Dawn to hell. Then we find out that Beth, though wounded badly (shot to chest instead of head?), is still alive. Officer Shepherd (the female cop taken hostage to trade for Beth and Carol who tells everyone to stand down) offers to allow the group to stay at the hospital (presumably as muscle to replenish the police/doctor ruling class, since I doubt they could control a bunch of armed people as enslaved "patients") like she does in the canonical show, and when Rick tells her to go to hell, offers to save Beth.

For Beth's sake and for Maggie's, Rick agrees "for the duration" (until Beth recovers). The group basically becomes part of the hospital's ruling faction. The show could go into all sorts of interesting directions:

1. Nobody in the group is going to tolerate the abuse of the hospital's patients by the police. Even Dawn, for all her sins, called out another cop for beating patients, making rape jokes, etc. before he attacked her and she and Beth threw him down an elevator shaft into (I think) a pit full of zombies. Nor are they going to support raiding survivor groups for slaves (i.e. how the hospital got Beth and Noah). That'll cause all kinds of drama between the remaining police and Rick's group.

2. Dawn likely had friends among the police officers and doctors even possibly among the patients and nurses (due to her comparative benign-ness). They're going to want revenge on Daryl for killing her. Openly attacking him risks a civil war in the hospital that could leave them all vulnerable to the zombies outside or an uprising by the patients, but it'd be a lot easier to poison him or arrange for a zombie-related accident.

3. Word might get out that Rick killed that third cop, the one they'd taken hostage and who tried to escape, rather than him getting eaten by the zombies like they said. That'll likely P.O. some people.

4. Power corrupts--could one or more group members be tempted to drink the Kool-Aid and become as bad as the cops?

5. Noah is not going to be a happy camper, considering he was trying to escape the hospital earlier.

6. Rick can see all these problems, but they can't leave until Beth is healed enough. Maybe he sees all of these problems and tries to leave before Beth is fully healed, putting her at risk? And the remaining cops might try to stop them from leaving, since without them they might not have the numbers to control the patients and/or protect everybody from the zombies?

This could actually be really interesting. That said, given the comment I read in another recap about how nobody escapes a season finale unscathed, having Beth killed minutes before she would have reunited with her sister seems like something that's a pattern for the show. Breaking it would harm the show stylistically.

"Warm Bodies" Movie Review (2013) (SPOILERS)

Last Saturday, I finally saw the film Warm Bodies, the teen zombie romance based on the book I reviewed awhile back. Here's my review.

The Good

The stuff that happens after R.'s zombie group attacks Julie's team and especially after R. infiltrates the walled-off portion of the city still controlled by humans is extremely entertaining. I was actually concerned for the characters, which isn't something that happens very often. That half of the movie is also where the funniest jokes were, including Julie and her friend Norah giving R. a makeover so he doesn't seem so pallid and, well, dead.

There's a good bit of social satire, which is more clear in the film than in the book. In the beginning, R. is reminiscing about the days before the zombie apocalypse and how people were able to have real conversations (unlike the zombies, who just grunt a lot). He then has a flashback to everybody walking around on their smart-phones, not actually talking to anybody. We also get the origin of the "boneys," the most corpse-like and inhuman of the zombies. The book hints that people turning into zombies was the result of a lack of human communication and connection and this scene gets it across.

The film also cuts some aspects of the book that I didn't particularly enjoy, like R. having a "zombie wife" and "zombie children" that needed to be trained to hunt humans or R.'s zombie wife "cheating" on him. That slowed down the book and I'm glad they got rid of it.

I like how the movie version spared Julie's father, the human general and apparent ruler of the human enclave. In the book he and one of the "boneys" kill each other just as the zombies start turning human again en masse. I think that's supposed to be symbolic about how he's gotten so overzealous that he, like the "boneys," has become unable to adapt. In the movie, he's a lot more reasonable and even has a really amusing line at the end.

The ending is also clever. The revived zombies are reintegrated into human society by simple expedient of them and the humans teaming up to obliterate the "boneys." The film ends with R. and Julie watching as the walls around the human enclave are dynamited. The symbolism of the walls between people coming down was really well-done.

The Bad

The early part of the movie before R.'s zombie group attacks Julie and her friends is rather dull and not particularly funny. That's not really a good thing for a comedy. That's my one major complaint and that's a pretty big one.

In the book, R. has conversations in his head with Perry, Julie's prior boyfriend who he killed and ate. We don't see any of that in the movie except for a single dream sequence. Although too much of that would have slowed the movie down, it could have been a good concept to explore.

The Verdict

Although it's good to encourage originality in movies, I'm glad I waited for the dollar theater. It was worth $2 to see, but not worth $12. 6.0 out of 10.

Book Review: "Warm Bodies" (NO SPOILERS)

Awhile back, I saw a trailer for the upcoming film Warm Bodies, based on Warm Bodies: A Novel by Isaac Marion. It looked amusing, so I decided to request the book from the library.

Although initially it might seem to be an attempt cash in on the paranormal romance craze started by  Twilight, it's not really a romance novel per se. There is a love story, but the story is more about a zombie named R. rediscovering his humanity than the romantic relationship.

One of the things I liked about it was its creativity. For starters, it gives the zombies something resembling a culture and community, which would explain why zombies in more traditional zombie media cooperate with one another to attack humans. It also differentiates between the different types of zombies, the "Fleshies" (the ones still resembling people) and the "Boneys" (ambulatory skeletons, who seem to operate as a leadership caste). It also explains why the zombies go for brains specifically, although I won't say why to avoid spoilers. That aspect of the story is played for comedy at one point, which I found amusing, and it also provides a major reason for why the events in the story actually take place.

The book also depicts a rather realistic survivor society in the unnamed city where the story takes place. The survivors have barricaded themselves into fortified compounds, the most prominent one being an old sports stadium. When I was in college, I took a course on the archaeology of Rome's provinces and I remember learning about an old Roman arena where a town grew up after the fall of the Western Empire. Although I don't remember clearly, I'm pretty sure it was the Arles Amphitheatre. A structure of that size would have the space to house a large number of people and would extremely defensible, with only a few ways in or out. The survivors in the stadium raid the surrounding city for supplies and build walls to connect the stadium to other fortified survivor enclaves, another clever defensive measure.

It's also a very quick read. I read through it in two sittings and it was never dull.

However interesting it is, though, it's not especially memorable. It's a fun book to get from the library, but I wouldn't buy it. 7 out of 10.

"World War Z" First Look Footage

Here's a clip I just found online. Entertainment Tonight will be having a "first look" at Brad Pitt's upcoming adaptation of World War Z




They move awfully fast for zombies. The first verb that came to mind describing how they move is "boiling."