Arnold-starring Maggie is a rare zombie movie

The zombie is an ironic metaphor for, of all things, the zombie genre: it shambles forward, meat decaying off its bones, teeth falling from its mouth, unable to die, its only mission to consume. You can shoot it and delay its momentum, but it just keeps coming back for more. 

After every iteration of zombie cross-pollination — zombie comedy (Shaun of the Dead), Zombie rom-com (Warm Bodies), zombie sci-fi (The Last Days on Mars), zombie suburban drama (Fido) — and an increasingly manipulative zombie soap opera on television (The Walking Dead), we must certainly be approaching a zombie zenith. After all, how many zombie movies, shows, comics and video games do we really need?

“One more, please,” begs Henry Hobson’s directorial debut Maggie, a largely unique zombie movie with something to say in an overplayed and babbling genre.

The film plays out in whispers, sighs and reserved mumbles. It’s quiet and contemplative, the kind of movie that doesn’t feel rushed when it looks out a window to wonder. It’s been months, or maybe years, since a zombie uprising has been quelled. Survivors are picking up the pieces and rebuilding, but infected still pop up now and again. They aren’t called zombies — no, they are carriers of a fatal disease called the necroambulist plague — and are treated humanely, more like terminal cancer patients than horror villains. 

The bad ones, the run-of-the-mill walking dead, are killed outright, but the infected who are still conscious and articulate are granted small doses of humanity. They’re allowed to return home, be near their families, eat and drink regular food, and put their affairs in order before the virus’ two-week incubation period gives way to full-blown braaaaaaains cravings. Before patients “turn” they are encouraged to voluntarily enter a quarantine center where they will be housed and later euthanized, or a family member can end it all for them. “I would use that,” the family doctor says, pointing at a shotgun.

This is the world that we enter as we meet Wade, a father of three somewhere in the Midwest. The state of Wade’s world is explained in an overly helpful NPR story — if All Things Considered is still around, then things probably didn’t get that bad. Wade’s teen daughter, Maggie, has been bitten and he’s bringing her home to the family farm. No one is really trying to process Maggie’s fate; it all feels so raw, so they ignore it. They cook and make dinner, she uses a swingset in the yard, she goes to a party … life is mostly normal, except this festering bite and its putrefying aftermath that represents Maggie’s future.

I haven’t yet told you the stars of the movie, and that is intentional. Maggie is played by Abigail Breslin, the young child actress from Little Miss Sunshine and, as luck would have it, Zombieland, who is making waves now as an adult. Wade is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in what might be the most unique role of his career. He holds a gun, but only shoots it offscreen. He’s involved in two fights, and is roundly defeated in one of them. And he doesn’t have a single one-liner. Where other movies are built around this abstract idea of AHNOLD, Maggie casts the former California governor as a regular guy doing mostly regular things. And you know what? It works. By no means is this prestige acting, but it’s a serious role that requires him to act and not stunt. I was continuously surprised by his performance and his pairing with Breslin, who also does a fine job with the minimalist material. 

Maggie is original as a zombie movie and a Schwarzenegger flick, but it occasionally loses its way. There’s a bit with a roaming fox that goes on with little reward, and some of the visual payoffs look like hand-me-downs from The Walking Dead. In one of the film’s only zombie fights, Wade wanders through a deserted gas station, past a bloody mattress, through buzzing flies and into a dark hallway to use the bathroom. Of course there’s a zombie by the toilet that he has to fight off, but why didn’t he read the clues? More importantly, how did he even survive the original zombie plague with instincts like this?

These deficiencies are made up for with Hobson’s careful directing, which (mostly) avoids cheap jump scares and rapid edits for a deliberate, more cerebral story about a father and a daughter as they comprehend the limits of their love. The music is mellow and evocative, the colors are cold and desaturated, the editing is straightforward and direct, and the performances are flat but also realistic — Hobson takes into account what’s already been done in the zombie genre and goes out of his way to tell a different kind of story. And it’s pretty good.

So maybe the genre isn’t altogether dead.

Dance, actor, dance!

Eric Bana is asked if anything supernatural happened during the filming of his new movie, Deliver Us From Evil.

“Absolutely nothing,” he says, destroying all of the marketing for Scott Derrickson’s movie, which is milking the “based on a true story” tagline as dry as the desert Bana is now sitting in during a roundtable interview with four reporters.

He’s flanked by Joel McHale a man so joylessly sarcastic that he drove Chevy Chase out of Community. That’s not the official story, though it seems more and more likely as McHale playfully fake-answers his ways through the longest 15-minute roundtable ever recorded. He’s like Jim Carrey doing his rubberface routines, or Robin Williams riffing on props — the longer he goes on the more uncomfortably awkward, and sad, it starts to get. He’s asked if Derrickson wrote his cop character with McHale in mind. “No, you’re thinking of J.K. Rowling. She wrote the screenplay, and she used her pen name Scott Derrickson … She wrote him with me in mind because I have a lot of knives I personally own.”

He goes on like this for every question. On Bana’s role: “He plays a cop from the future … he’s not Time Cop, though, he’s more like Robocop … and he has a flux capacitor on his suit.” On Bana: “When I heard Eric Stoltz was on board I just had to get involved.” On Star Wars Episode VII: “I want to play the door of the Millennium Falcon that tries to murder Han Solo.”

This is probably amusing on set when he needs to ad-lib through one of Dan Harmon’s Community gags — or on Talk Soup, television anarchy — but here in interviews it’s painful. Bana sheepishly smiles at all of McHale’s dry little quips, but inside he’s probably wondering why he’s here. Certainly he could have been watching the World Cup or reading a John Hillcoat script. Anything but this nickle matinee in Phoenix, Arizona. 

And wait, why is he there? Oh yeah, to hype up Deliver Us From Evil, a movie that is better described by other movies: Seven meets The Exorcist. Bana plays a cop who has a crime radar that starts going bonkers in New York City. His partner (played by McHale), has the seven deadly sins tattooed on his neck so surely that might figure into all this. Wrong. Instead it’s just some Iraqi curse American soldiers brought stateside. One soldier paints the curse on basement walls, bedroom wallpaper and on the lion enclosure at the zoo, and this unlocks demons in people, who do terrible things. Bana has to figure this all out while McHale trolls New Yorkers with a Red Sox hat. 

Someone asks the most obscure off-topic Star Wars question, which gives both men a chance to not talk about their movie. At one point Bana asks us seriously if we use clothes dryers in this desert heat and he seems upset with our answers. I ask him if he likes jumping from genre to genre; from swords-and-sandals epics (Troy) to war (Black Hawk Down) to comics (Hulk) to science fiction (Star Trek) to spy thrillers (Munich) to horror here in Deliver us From Evil.

His answer lasts about 7 seconds before he’s interrupted: “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been very fortunate to have been in many different genres. The one that is safe is musical …”

McHale cuts in to suggest he do “a Rex Harrison thing where you sing-speaks everything.” Bana laughs and says even his sing-speaking is not up to par. McHale again: “Or maybe a remake of Sound of Music … you could be Liesle. I am 16 going on 17 …”

They’re asked their favorite horror movies. Bana says The Shining. McHale says Overboard. Zing. 

Eventually, a PR person tells us to wrap it up and then, taking pity on this sad interview, she asks the two actors to sum up their visit with a closing statement. Mumbles and blanks are all that’s delivered (sadly, no evil). And then it’s over and we’r
e shuffled out so another group can ramble with the talent for 15 minutes. One reporter seems eternally wounded that she couldn’t get an autograph or photograph.

Most roundtable interviews are more productive than this one, but I don’t hold it against Bana or McHale. This isn’t who they are. It’s a business transaction. It would be like the barista at a coffeehouse looking for existential meaning in a random transaction; to the customer it’s coffee without meaning or purpose. Just coffee.

And Eric Bana and Joel McHale are just two dudes shilling for a movie. And failing.

The power of Bana compels you

Deep into Deliver Us From Evil, two police detectives are searching an apartment complex for a demon-possessed Iraq War veteran. One of the men, an Australian with a bad Bronx accent, turns to the other man and tells him, “We should split up.”

Obviously no one here has actually seen a horror movie. And that’s the problem with any horror flick: the audience is always smarter than the characters. In Deliver Us From Evil’s case, the intelligence gap is especially noticeable considering these characters aren’t horny teens vacationing at an abandoned cabin in the woods, but veteran detectives who presumably graduated the police academy without shooting their hands off or wrapping their cruiser around a telephone pole in the parking lot.

The cops are Sarchie (Eric Bana), the “we should split up” genius, and Butler (Joel McHale), who’s backward hat bro-ness wouldn’t cut it in a Limp Bizkit video. They cruise the New York streets waiting for the ping of Sarchie’s detective radar, his internal WTF-locator. It starts pinging a lot around three combat veterans from Iraq who may have brought a dark curse back from the warzone. And “dark curse” isn’t a metaphor for PTSD; they actually bring a stupid superstitious demon back with them. The demon is activated when it sees a Latin curse written on pretty much any surface. As luck would have it, two of the soldiers started a painting company after their tours in Iraq, which means they can start painting the curse all around town, but mostly in dank basements, creaky-floored Brownstones and — oh, you know, wherevs — the freakin’ lion enclosure at the zoo.

Bana is a likeable enough guy. He has the face of an everyman, and the seriousness of someone who wouldn’t put up with the satanic hocus-pocus of Deliver Us. But in walks Sarchie to every terrible horror cliché the movie can hit before some unseen buzzer goes off and points are tallied. Cats hiss and jump, lights flicker, flashlights go dead, bathtub water spins and churns, mirrored doors are closed, a piano is tickled in the dark … at one point a Jack in the Box turns up with terrifying motives. This is pretty much the most basic horror package; these gags are sold in bulk at Costco. 

Nevertheless, the film unspools ever forward, the mismatched pairing of Seven and The Exorcist. Poor Olivia Munn makes an appearance as the naggy wife and kidnap bait, and then Édgar Ramírez turns up as some kind of defrocked exorcist priest, who’s too handsome and cool for the priesthood, but there he is in a 30-minute exorcism listening to The Doors (it’s the demon’s favorite band) as some poor actor has to say vile things in a gurgly death-metal stammer. And why do demons talk like the Cookie Monster? A demon with Sam Cooke’s voice could pretty much conquer the world, but apparently they haven’t figured that out yet. And speaking of demons, have you seen those hilarious Bob Larson videos? This movie should have hired those actors.

Deliver Us From Evil is written and directed by Scott Derrickson, who has a lot of experience with horror films, including Sinister, The Devil’s Knot and the The Exorcism of Emily Rose. His career makes a strong case for a theory I’ve long championed: every director should make one horror film, but no director should make two. Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin … they’ve all made contributions to the genre, and yet they’ve never repeated themselves simply because they only made one film from the cursed genre. Now here’s Derrickson, whose entire career has exploited the same jump scares that look pretty much identical from movie to movie. He’s not doing horror any favors by diluting its features.

But horror sells, they’re cheap to produce, and easy to make. And judging by the scripts, they’re green-lit with a shrug from a studio head — “eh, whatever.” By those standards, Deliver Us From Evil is exactly what you’d expect with a modern horror movie. And by that I mean it’s weak and irrelevant.

Carrie remake boringly repeats original

Worse remakes have been made — that shot-by-shot soul-reaping of Psycho comes to mind — but the Carrie remake might be the most audaciously oblivious. It just doesn’t get it.

Never before has a movie missed so many opportunities to actually say something profound within the confines of pop culture. The movie involves bullying and violence in a high school setting, yet it comically plugs its ears to the world around it and la la las all the way back to 1976, when the only teens who were bullied, raped, killed and tortured were in movies about telekinetic girls with mommy issues.

Of course, that’s not true. Teens and young adults from the ’70s were doing bad things, but none as high profile as Columbine, Sandy Hook, Steubenville or this rash of bullying that has led to a number of tragic suicides. This is the world we live in, yet Carrie sticks its head in the sand to avoid anything that strays far from its source material, Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 horror novel Carrie.

I’m not suggesting that this be a message movie — like some big-budget PSA, cue the "More You Know" graphic — but the fact that it avoids anything of substance is suspect, especially coming from its director, Kimberly Peirce, who gave us a much more terrifying exercise in bullying and murder when she made the transgender funeral march Boys Don’t Cry, about a woman who identified as a man and was killed for it.

What this all boils down to, though, is how you like your remakes. If you prefer them to be modern-day clones of the originals, then you’ll appreciate this Carrie. I prefer them to be something different, but with hints of the original folded in. Michael Mann’s Miami Vice comes to mind: it invoked the spirit of the TV show, but was something entirely different. The ultra-gore terror-fest of Evil Dead from earlier this year is another great example.

This new Carrie stars Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) as Carrie White, the outcast who becomes a woman at the most unfortunate time imaginable. Carrie cries out from the gym shower, “Help, I’m dying. It hurts.” Her classmates throw tampons at her and film it, uploading it later to a social network under a fake identity ("Favorite movie: Blood Sport. Favorite Drink: Bloody Mary."). Although mad at her classmates, Carrie mostly blames her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore), who is so close-minded in her religious zealotry that she forgot to teach her daughter about the birds and the bees.

Moore plays the role like she’s in the gay-bashing, funeral-picketing Westboro Baptist Church, but in the 1920s. At one point, she calls those things under her shirt “dirty pillows,” a term so laughably stupid that you’ll chuckle aloud when you hear her say it. Even Shirley Phelps-Roper, Westboro’s foaming-at-the-mouth court jester, calls them breasts.

Carrie’s mother is a maddening case study in religious fervor. She calls her daughter “my sin,” because Carrie was born out of wedlock. When Carrie shows interest in boys, books or other things “of this world” — OTW if you’re into window decals — Margaret locks her in a closet under the stairs. Inside are the most gruesome depictions of Christ’s crucifixion, proof that Margaret’s religion is based on suffering and cruelty, not love and compassion.

Grace Moretz and Moore are fine actresses, but they really don't go far enough in this movie. I wanted bigger performances, especially from Moore, who plays her motherly whackadoo at half the capacity. It could have, and should have, been much louder and more bombastic. Also, I'm not entirely sold on Grace Moretz, the girl who says the C-word and kills people in Kick-Ass. She doesn't have the chops for acting quite yet; although she may soon learn them. For context, remember that Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both were Oscar nominees for the original film, a rare thing for a horror movie. I doubt we'll see a similar feat here with this bland and effortless remake of a classic.

Another victim in Carrie is the dialogue. Some of it is weird. One character says something like, "One of my boys, Travis, did this thing …" Somehow I doubt teens still say "my boys." In the pig gutting scene, a teen hams it up to his barnyard victim: "Don't worry little piggy, Uncle Jacky is going to bash your head right in." In another scene, the school principal — the great character actor Barry Shabaka Henley — seems to have a seizure every time he tries to say period or tampon. All of this smacks of Stephen King's trying-too-hard-to-be-hip dialogue, which is ironic because this movie is twice removed from King's book. In any case, the dialogue is as socially awkward as the actors spewing it out.

The film builds and builds to its point of nuclear fission: Carrie is lured to the prom so a bucket of pig’s blood can be dumped on her head. The wait for this scene, a scene we all know is coming — a scene that the whole movie was built around — takes forever. And when it finally happens, and Carrie turns into a raging telekinetic monster, the movie seems to slump forward on auto-pilot.

Carrie’s classmates, some of them monsters themselves, have ambiguous motives that cloud the plot the same way they fogged up De Palma’s version. The movie doesn’t make it clear which students were cheering for the blood and which ones were horrified at the callousness of the pranksters. I still think, as I did with the original, if someone had just stepped forward with a towel and showed Carrie kindness that her prom massacre would have not likely taken place. But instead, Carrie stands there drenched in blood as students gawk, their only sins before they’re all murdered.

Let me circle back to my original point: this new Carrie exists in a vacuum. It is so out of touch with the modern world that it’s paralyzed by its own nostalgia. It wants to be a revenge fantasy set in a school, but it doesn’t want to remind you of Columbine, Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech. It wants to be a movie about cyber bullying, but it doesn’t want implicate the way teens use Facebook or Twitter. It wants to depict a cruel sexual assault, but it doesn’t want to invoke the Steubenville rape. These real-life stories aren’t appropriate for a popcorny movie like Carrie, but their messages — revenge fantasies, bullying and teen violence — run parallel to the plot, so why not include them in the drama?

The movie had a chance to say something that wasn’t already said by Brian De Palma in 1976. Instead it said only this: “Ditto.”

The Burden of Zombie Dreams

Zombie Ishtar lives!

And better yet: Zombie Ishtar, aka World War Z, is great. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s hardly the disaster that the Vanity Fair article, the one that drew comparisons to Warren Beatty’s Moroccan mess Ishtar, seemed to suggest. I will say this, though, about the troubled production: I would love to a see a Burden of Dreams-style behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of this movie. Something tells me more work went into making this presentable than we’ll ever realize.

The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry, a husband and father of two who’s caught up in a global zombie invasion. Before you start rolling your eyes and huffing out “Ughh, another zombie movie,” World War Z takes a different approach. First of all, Gerry is some kind United Nations panic guru. When bad shit goes down, he’s the boots on the ground to make sure people are evacuated, protected, fed, clothed and otherwise safe. So when an advanced rabies disease starts sweeping through Newark, N.J., and everywhere else, Gerry knows exactly what to do: he walks up to the first abandoned RV he finds — the one that might have starter trouble and some bald tires — so he can ferry his family out of the city. Oh, the RV has no acceleration and the turning radius of tramp steamer … oops. In all fairness, Gerry never needed an RV in the Congo or that time in Pakistan or when that dam burst Thailand, so we can cut him some slack.

I’m being hard on poor Gerry, although I’m not sure if it’s because he picks bad zombie-proof cars or his name is in direct violation of that quasi-secret Hollywood pact that specifies “always Jerry, never Gerry.” The thing is, Gerry is a gnarly dude. He’s cool under pressure, he knows all the angles of government diplomacy, he can handle a gun and he can perceive important details in the chaos. In one scene he counts in his head the number of seconds it takes a bitten man to “turn,” zombie parlance for “register with the Zombie Party of America.” (It’s 12 seconds, by the way.) In another scene, Gerry witnesses a wee human child get swept up, but never bitten, in the zombie wave.

What does it all mean? Well, leave it to Gerry, who saves his family and then hops on a military plane to jet around the world to investigate the earth’s single largest crime scene. He starts in South Korea, where some soldiers found a doctor with a strange disease. Gerry is walked ominously into a room filled with ash and burnt corpses, some of them still wriggling. “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” someone says. He gathers leads and heads off to Israel, which has braved the zombie swarm remarkably well behind 80-foot walls built during the Biblical ages. An Israeli agent launches into a Jewish history lesson about why Jews were destined to overcome the zombie horde, and then they’re overcome by the zombie horde in a spectacular wave of undead that act more like army ants than humans.

I appreciate that Gerry is smart enough and calm enough to work his way through problems without being a blubbery mess. I think AMC’s Walking Dead, a once great but slowly failing zombie drama, needs a Gerry character to spirit the cast away from Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes character and all his hopeless inner turmoil. If I hear him say “for the good of the group” one more time I might lose it. To contrast Grimes’ wrecked psyche, look at a stupendously awesome sequence in Z: When an airplane’s entire economy class is zombified mid-flight, Gerry makes a carry-on suitcase fort between economy and first class. Ever so slowly, the wall goes up and up as quiet as possible to not alert the feeding frenzy in the rear of the plane. It’s a terrifically thrilling sequence and it ends with Gerry making a hasty, but necessary decision involving a hand grenade. Walking Dead would have labored with these split-second decisions for entire episodes, but here’s Gerry detonating hand grenades in commercial airliners.

Pitt’s Gerry has a number of other remarkably simple, but entirely unique, scenes that will add further footnotes to the zombie encyclopedia. Once after getting zombie blood dripped on his face, he stands on the edge of a tall building counting to twelve to see if he’ll turn. In another scene, he has a Pepsi at the worst time to have a Pepsi; the audacity of his beverage craving is almost worth the product placement. He chops off arms, injects himself with random vials of Ebola and typhoid, and gives butterfly kisses to a lipless zombie. Best of all, the character is framed within a zombie detective thriller, which gives it another original edge.

Much of the movie is spent looking for Patient Zero, that first poor chump who was gorging himself on infected tapir meat and contracted the zombie plague. And this is where much of the plot falls to pieces. Gerry jets around the world looking for Zero, and just when I thought he was getting close — and just when the mystery had relentlessly consumed me — the film switches gears. It’s all Patient Zero, Patient Zero, Patient Zero … hey, let’s find a cure. Now, the cure is interesting, especially how it is applied, but I wanted to finished that Patient Zero thread out. Instead, World War Z cut it completely. So when the end of the film rolls around, everything seems a little rushed, as if frantically ending the movie with open plot holes was better than the original ending, which was apparently a plot-killing mess. Again, though, I would love to see the other versions of this movie, to know if this Patient Zero plot was ever resolved. By the way, this movie is based on Max Brooks’ popular novel, which also had a limp, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ending.

Another frustration are Gerry’s children, who are so incompetent — even by dumb movie-children standards — that they seemed to be thrown into the movie to serve as some kind of new birth control device. “Look at what unprotected sex will do to you!” the movie screamed at you every time one of the little twerps ignored every instinct to survive. One kid won’t crawl out of a car that’s being swarmed by zombies, so there Gerry kneels coaxing her out. Any other dad would break her arms prying her out; better than having a zombie daughter, right? The other one just screams in empty hallways, which alerts every Zeke (that’s what they call the zombies sometimes) along the eastern seaboard. The wife isn’t much better: she knows he’s in the field, possibly around zombies, so she decides to cold call him on his satellite phone with its ringer apparently plugged into wall of Van Halen amplifiers.

I guess these minor complaints all touch on a similar theme: the audience of a zombie movie will always and forever know more about zombies than anyone in the actual movie. We learned about zombies from Walking Dead, George Romero, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and Dead Alive; the characters of zombie movies don’t have that same education.

In any case, I enjoyed World War Z despite its obvious faults. Stay tuned for that director’s cut. It’s going to be an interesting lesson in film editing. 

Evil and dead is no way to go through life

There are movies that claim to be horror, and then movies that simply are horror. Evil Dead falls assertively in the latter camp.

After decades of wandering through supernatural gimmicks, increasingly trivial remixes of urban legends, Freddy and Jason ’80s nostalgia, a stream of mediocre remakes from Japan, the found-footage fad and a torturous haul through all those icky torture-porn movies, the horror genre might have just re-discovered its footing and orientation with a remake of a 32-year-old classic that will blow your socks off, fold them up into nice little cotton bundles and then murder them with glee. So what does a back-to-the-basics horror overhaul look like? Gore. Mostly just raw, unfiltered gore broadcast at a startling volume and frequency. Oh, and it’s also kinda funny. More on that later.

The setup doesn’t veer too far from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead from 1981: five friends meet at a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation. Underneath the floorboards they discover a book bound in human flesh — a Necronomicon-like graphic novel called the Book of the Dead — that unleashes a demonic spirit that terrorizes the cabin and its inhabitants. The book is found wrapped in plastic and barbed wire, and underneath several litters of strangled and mummified cats. The whole time the book is being unwrapped, with rusty wire cutters no less, I kept thinking, "Shoulda brought a Kindle." The updated movie involves characters David, Eric, Mia, Olivia and Natalie. The first letters of their names spell “DEMON,” which is, all by itself, a big woven basket full of “nope.” The only more appropriate character names for a horror movie this legit would be Franky, Ursula, Uma, Ulrich, Ulysses, Ulla, Upton, Umberto, Charlie and Karen.

The earlier version of this film was mostly an experiment in horror filmmaking, with Raimi (Spider-Man) and star/legend Bruce Campbell improvising their way through effects shots and home-made gore machines. If I remember the lore correctly, they even hammered two-by-fours together to create a Steadicam system; it was very much a low-budget, guerrilla-style movie. This new one — produced by Raimi and Campbell, but directed by Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez — has some spit and polish and generally looks terrific, especially those dreadful shots of low-lying mist flooding over the cabin as the DEMON collective gets settled in for a long, violent night of face scraping, knife licking and OSHA-not-approved carpentry. 

Evil Dead is the best horror movie I’ve seen since the marvelous claustrophobic nightmare The Descent from 2005. It’s certainly the goriest since Peter Jackson’s comically gruesome Dead Alive from 1992. As soon as that barbed-wire wrapped book is opened and read aloud — in creepy Latin — the gloves come off and Evil Dead promptly bombards the screen with one horrifying stunt after another, each more wince-worthy than the one before it. By the end, it is raining blood. Literally. Before that, needles are jammed into faces, nails into kneecaps, broken mirrors into cheekbones and electric meat carvers into forearms. It’s a relentlessly visceral stream of blood, guts and gore that is not for the faint, squeamish or queasy.

Though the spectacular violence and carnage will certainly appease the gorehounds and horror fans, the real terror of Evil Dead is in its main villain, a demonic spirit that can inhabit any infected body, living or dead, in the rustic weapon-filled cabin. The always-on threat of Exorcist-style possession creates an undulating schism of terror quivering beneath the shock and awe of Evil Dead’s most chilling moments: at any second a friend, sibling or significant other can be lunging at your face for a deadly nibble. Or maybe just carving some extra weight off their side with a kitchen utensil — these demons, such creatures of habit. Most of the characters aren't just killed off either; they often have several stages of injury, mutilation and then finally death, only to pop back up and inflict more damage on the remaining cast. Poor Eric, the school teacher who reads the book's blood-scrawled pages aloud, has so many injuries that he starts laughing when new ones are inflicted.

All of this is appropriately scary and terrifying, but like the first Evil Dead — and its sequels Evil Dead II and the slapsticky Army of Darkness, or even Raimi’s super-hilarious Drag Me To Hell — this movie has a sense of humor as dark as the thrills. Some of the humor resides in the matter-of-fact staging of the violence, which is so over the top that you have to marvel (and recoil) at its unblinkingly ironic presentation. For instance, the repeated shots of characters using duct tape to bandage up deep lacerations or on a stump where an arm once was. Mostly, though, I laughed at the imagery, especially of the possessed woman — the M in DEMON — who cackles and gloats from beneath a trap door, her blistery smile beaming from behind a curtain of chains keeping her locked in the cabin's depths. She’s the film’s mad court jester and when she wasn’t puking demon spore into the other characters I found her to be a jolly little imp. And proving at how adept the movie is at humor, and plot twists, this vile witch eventually becomes the ultimate heroine. Now there’s a laugh.

Evil Dead couldn’t have come at a better time for the horror genre, which has been quietly dissolving from the screen for a number of years. Most studios have stopped even trying to make decent frightening movies because horror fans will pay to see bad ones just as much as good ones; “Why bother put any effort in?” a producer said after each new Saw film. Last year’s meta-horror Cabin in the Woods — a movie that didn't entirely win me over, but I applauded for its efforts — certainly set the tone for a renewed interest in the genre, so I hope Evil Dead continues the trend of inventive horror offerings. Though I kind of hope that the next movie, like the original series, gets sillier as it progresses. 

Evil Dead enters the world already a step ahead of other horror movies simply because of its story of demonic possession, a theme that rings with clarity in some of cinema’s scariest pictures: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and even in a more modern movie such as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, about another doomed cabin in the woods. This new Evil Dead works on the same levels as those films because it involves characters confronting these demons even as they reside in the bodies of loved ones. It’s a terrifying idea, and that’s probably why zombies are all the rage right now; the zombie apocalypse also deals with the terror of a loved one trying to use your skull as a cereal bowl. It’s a glorious departure from all the run-and-hide movies such as Friday the 13th and all those Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes that were so ill conceived that most people were cheering on Leatherface and not his innocent victims.

Evil Dead is not the end-all/be-all of the horror genre, though I certainly enjoyed its vaudeville-like performance of gooey thrills and jump-worthy effects. I do think Evil Dead does represent a new age of horror, but now it’s up to the films that come after to continue to frighten us in clever new ways.

And one more thing: stay for the end credits. You won’t want to miss the last bit at all. 

And you thought your OkCupid date was bad

The world is ready for a zom-rom-com. That's zombie romantic comedy. It sounds more like an identity crisis, but just roll with it; Warm Bodies will surprise you.

Just when I thought our civilization couldn't hold another piece of the as-yet-to-take-place zombie apocalypse — from video games, comics, podcasts, books, movies and TV's rapidly decomposing Walking Dead — George Romero's famous genre, with its lumbering living dead shuffling around for braaaaaaains, has come up with something fresh, downright charming even.

The film begins with narration that casts a non-judgmental eye on society's deteriorating state: Here is the world now. Here is the chaos. Here is a zombie. Here is a zombie eating someone. "And, oh, by the way, I'm a zombie." The narrator is R — just the letter R — because he's been dead so long that he can't really remember the rest of the letters. Though he speaks to us with wit and a splendid self-deprecating sense of humor, R can only manage a grunt or two within the world he inhabits. He does have interests, though ("Yeah, I'm a hoarder"), and even a zombie friend who stands next to him at a demolished airport bar and grunts during their daily bro-date.

R's wandering zombie routine is interrupted when non-zombie Julie is sniffed out in a nearby pharmacy. Against R's primal zombie instincts, he saves Julie (after munching on her friends) and walks her back to his curio-stocked zombie lair on an airplane, where he tells her in one-word sentences that she'll be safe until the roaming undead scatter. She, of course, is mortified of him — his cold skin, his hazy eyes that often stare uncomfortably at her, and a gaping chest wound that she created in a fit of panic — but then he starts forming rudimentary sentences and they struggle through conversation. The movie doesn't throw her into his arms; he really has to work for it until he earns her admiration. "You're very different than all the others," she says. What she doesn't know is that her warmth and compassion are healing R's cold, dead, mucus-y zombie heart.

There are other moving parts to this machine, including John Malkovich, playing Julie's father, who is hunting for a zombie cure yet finds it unbelievable that R might be curing himself with his daughter's affection. Another subspecies of zombie also turns up: the bonies, super-feral creatures that have un-evolved even past their undead counterparts. These are the film's real villains, and Warm Bodies must have had a tight budget because the CGI models for each one are identical, as if only one were created and then ctrl-v'd in the background. The subpar effects are noticeable, yet also forgivable once you start getting attached to R and Julie's Romeo-meets-Juliet-in-a-cannibal-kitchen romance.

R is played by Nicholas Hoult, who played the curious little boy sharing the screen — correction: owning the screen — around Hugh Grant in About a Boy. He plays a convincing zombie with an impeccable shuffle and his taste in vintage vinyl is noteworthy. Julie is played by relative newcomer Teresa Palmer, a lovely actress whose job, falling for a decaying corpse, is a grueling task that she pulls off with heartwarming believability. I loved these two and their awkward moments.

Warm Bodies, a title that sounds more like a late-night feature on Cinemax than a quirky horror-comedy, takes some zombie liberties that purists will grumble at — "Zombies can't open doors! Blasphemy!" — but considering the film is so richly humorous I think the zombiephiles will forgive some of the genre-bending sequences as they did with the last original zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead. And just listen to all the fantastic music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chad Valley, M83 and many more. Each song fits the scenes they appear in perfectly. In one sequence, R puts on "Patience" by Guns N' Roses, a playlist choice so fitting it's as if the whole song, sad whistling and all, existed to prop up this scene. A gag with a Roy Orbison song and a Pretty Woman reference also turns up with a rewarding payoff.

The movie is directed by Jonathan Levine, a young filmmaker with a knack for movies about young people — alive and dead — treading their own path in complicated worlds with rules dictated by others. His 50/50 and The Wackness are exceptional films that showcased his unmistakable skill for the language of filmmaking. Warm Bodies is more of Levine having fun and letting loose, and I enjoyed the places he took me.

Warm Bodies asks a lot from its audience, but don't all zombie movies? Certainly if you can accept a movie where the dead rise from the earth and start eating people, then you can also accept that perhaps, just maybe, a zombie and a human can put aside all that bitter violence to fall in love. It's not that much of a stretch, and Levin guides you to that point with careful cleverness. This is the first hit of 2013, and it could not have been more unexpected.

Zom-rom-com will not be alone long, though. I predict a zombie opera before long. A zopera. Or maybe a zombie western. Hey, the more the merrier.