And ask yourself this question: Assuming the premise of the first amazing development, how did the San Francisco police department know exactly which dark and isolated pier these three people were on, and how did they arrive in sixty seconds (by car, truck, motorcycle, and helicopter), and how come the cops who arrived were precisely the same cops who have already been established as characters in the story? And isn’t it convenient that, fast as they arrived, they considerately left time for the Talking Killer scene, in which all is explained when all the Killer has to do is blow everyone away and beat it?
The movie does at least draw a moraclass="underline" Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.
U
Undead
(DIRECTED BY MICHAEL SPIERIG AND PETER SPIERIG; STARRING FELICITY MASON, MUNGO MCKAY; 2005)
Undead is the kind of movie that would be so bad it’s good, except it’s not bad enough to be good enough. It’s, let’s see, the sixth zombie movie I’ve seen in the last few years, after 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, Shawn of the Dead, and George Romero’s Land of the Dead. That is a lot of lurching and screaming and heads blown off.
Undead is the work of two brothers from Australia, Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, who wrote, directed, edited, and produced it, and are of the kitchen sink approach to filmmaking, in which zombies are not enough and we must also have aliens and inexplicable characters who seem to have wandered in from another movie without their name tags. It’s comedy, horror, satire, and sci-fi, combined with that endearing Australian quality of finding their own country the nuttiest place on Earth. If the Australian cinema is accurate, once you leave the largest cities, the only people you meet are crazies, eccentrics, neurotics, parched wanderers in the Outback, and the occasional disk jockey who is actually a fish.
This tradition continues in Undead, which even includes some zombie fish. It takes place in the hamlet of Berkeley, in Queensland, a fishing mecca that has just held a beauty pageant to crown Miss Catch of the Day. This is Rene (Felicity Mason), an adornment to any bait store. Excitement such as the crowning of Miss Catch of the Day is interrupted by a meteor shower; rocks from space rain down upon Berkeley, some of them opening up platter-sized holes in the chests of the citizens, who stagger about with daylight showing through them, and have become zombies.
In the obligatory tradition of all zombie movies, a few healthy humans survive and try to fight off the zombies and preserve themselves. Rene is on her way out of town when the attack occurs; she has lost the mortgage on the family farm and is fleeing to the big city, or a larger hamlet, when she runs into a traffic jam. All attacks from outer space, natural or alien, immediately cause massive traffic pile-ups, of course, and the only functioning cars belong to the heroes.
In War of the Worlds, for example, Tom Cruise has the only car that works, after he and a friend peer under the hood and say, “It’s the solenoid!” And so it is. This moment took me back to my youth, when cars could still be repaired without computers. They just had gas lines and spark plugs and things like that. I never understood anything about engines, but there were always kids in high school who would look under the hood and solemnly explain, “It’s the solenoid.” The solenoid, always the solenoid. You could impress girls with a line like that. “It’s the solenoid.” Works every time.
But I digress. Rene hits a traffic jam on the road out of town, and meets a bush pilot named Wayne (Rob Jenkins) and his girlfriend, Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham), who was runner-up to Miss Catch of the Day, which means, I guess, you throw her back in. Sallyanne is preggers, so that she can do what all pregnant women in the movies and few pregnant women in life do, and hold her stomach with both hands most of the time. There is also a cop named Harrison (Dirk Hunter), who if you ask me should be named Dirk and played by Harrison Hunter, as Dirk is a better name than Harrison for a cop whose vocabulary consists of four-letter words and linking words.
They wander off the road and into the company of a local gun nut and survivalist named Marion (Mungo McKay), who if you ask me should be named Mungo and played by Marion McKay, as Mungo is a better name than Marion for a guy who has three shotguns yoked together so he can blast a zombie in two and leave its hips and legs lurching around with its bare spine sticking up in the air. For him, every shot is a trick shot; he’ll throw two handguns into the air, kill a couple of zombies with a shotgun, and drop the shotgun in time to catch the handguns on the way down and kill some more.
Marion/Mungo hustles them all into his concrete-and-steel underground safe room, where their problems seem to be over until Marion announces, “There is no food or water.” He didn’t think of everything. Meanwhile, on the surface, the nature of the attack has changed, and some actual aliens appear. Who they are and what they want is a little unclear; I am not even absolutely certain if they were responsible for the meteorite attack that turned people into zombies, or have arrived shortly afterward by coincidence, making this the busiest day in local history, especially if you include the Miss Catch of the Day pageant.
There is a sense in which movies like Undead ask only to be accepted as silly fun, and I understand that sense and sympathize with it. But I don’t think the Spierig brothers have adequately defined what they want to accomplish. They go for laughs with dialogue at times when verbal jokes are at right angles to simultaneous visual jokes. They give us gore that is intended as meaningless and funny, and then when the aliens arrive they seem to bring a new agenda. Eventually the story seems to move on beyond the central characters, who wander through new developments as if mutely wondering, hey, didn’t this movie used to be about us?
Still, the horror genre continues to be an ideal calling card for young directors trying to launch their careers. Horror is the only non-porno genre where you don’t need stars, because the genre is the star. Undead will launch the careers of the Spierigs, who are obviously talented and will be heard from again. Next time, with more resources, they won’t have to repeat themselves. You see one set of hips and legs walking around with a spine sticking up out of them, you’ve seen them all.
Underclassman
(DIRECTED BY MARCOS SIEGA; STARRING NICK CANNON, ROSELYN SANCHEZ; 2005)
Underclassman doesn’t even try to be good. It knows that it doesn’t have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it’s a combo cop movie, romance, thriller, and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they’ll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).
Cannon plays Tracy Stokes, a bike cop who screws up in the title sequence and is called on the carpet by his captain (Cheech Marin), who keeps a straight face while uttering exhausted clichés. (“You’ve got a long way to go before you’re the detective your father was.”) He gets a chance to redeem himself by working undercover at an exclusive L.A. prep school where a murder has been committed.
Turns out the murder is connected to a student car-theft ring, which is linked to drugs, which is an indictment of the rich students and their rich parents. It is a melancholy fact that a brilliant movie about high school criminals, Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), got a fraction of the promotional support given to this lame formula film. If the teenagers going to Underclassman were to see Better Luck Tomorrow, they’d have something to think about and talk about and be interested in. Underclassman is a dead zone that will bore them silly while distracting them with the illusion that a lot of stuff is happening.