3 SCENES

 

 

ZOMBIE FLESH-EATERS - 'EYE-POPPING SCENE'

 

Lucio Fulci is a great director of explicit gore films, characterised by little in the way of coherent plot and - perhaps merely as a result of this - a nicely surreal vibe. His films are what I would call 'elevated trash.'

 

Zombie Flesh-Eaters (aka Zombi 2) is my favourite, for its atmospheric setting, memorably haunting score and numerous visually and conceptually striking scenes.

This one I've chosen is Fulci at his best.

 

An attractive woman is taking a shower - he has our attention. She is not so alone as she thinks.

We follow her in a single medium-long shot - no cut-aways, no close-ups - as she is alerted to impending danger by way of exaggerated and rather ambiguous sounds from outside. Or so we assume. But when she retreats to another room and goes to shut the door, it is stopped. The intruder, it now seems, was inside all the time...

We focus, quite brilliantly, on the growing band of light cast on the wall as the door inches open, despite her efforts to close it. 

The entire scene is shot in a simple, pared-down style, far more effective to my mind than the over-wrought style of most modern horror. By this point we're closer to the action and there are more cuts - but still comparatively few separate shots; the lighting is plain, natural in effect; music consists of little more than a few screeching notes, and the soundtrack is instead dominated by the loud and stylised sound effects - the groaning and creaking of the door as the woman fights to close it; the juicy crunching of rotting knuckles; the splitting and splintering of wood...
 

And what follows is one of Fulci's trademarks - a scene of alternating point-of-view shots, and an endlessly-approaching pointy thing - structured and drawn out in such a way as not only to create tension, but also to give us hope. Hope that the Woman will escape her situation at the last moment.

But instead, we're subjected to a pornographically close-up view of her decidedly not escaping. And to her animal-like screams.

 

 

An assault on the eye - both of subject and viewer.

 

 

 *  *  *

 

BAD TASTE - 'DEREK'S FALL'

 

I chose this scene because its an interestingly complex one to have filmed - in this case, literally, with a single camera.

 

 

Peter Jackson's first film was a shoestring splatter-comedy made with a group of friends over four years of weekends. Jackson was director, special-effects technician, camera-operator, and actor. And in this scene he plays both roles - Derek (with false buck-teeth - made by Jackson - and automatic weapon - made by Jackson) and Robert, a retarded alien (with beard - grown by Jackson.)

 

 

Carefully edited together from shots taken months apart, he is able to fight himself - and both wins, and loses.

Filming on a cliff - which apparently never looked as dangerous on film as it did in real life - they employed home-made wooden tracks and camera-crane cobbled together from aluminium rods. The camera was a second-hand Bolex, capable of shooting 30 second bursts of film, once you wound it up. Construction of the crane made it impossible to look through the viewfinder, so they were simply pointing the camera in the general direction of the action. It works fine.

(They had no sound equipment, and so all sound was recorded separately.)

 

 

The editing - like everything else in the film - is very impressive when you consider what was achieved under the circumstances. Continuity is not lost (unless you count the shoe flying off the dummy's foot during the fall, to reappear in the final shot). The accidental breaking of the dummy in the mid-section adds to the illusion. And the fact that a bucket of blood is visibly chucked over the dummy from out of shot at the end adds to the home-spun charm.

 

 

*  *  *

 

CARNOSAUR - 'T. REX VS. BOBCAT'

 

Well, my other reviews have been positive, so I felt like a change of pace.

Carnosaur is a 50s style b-movie with a 90s attitude, produced by Roger Corman to coincide with the release of Jurassic Park, and cash in on the hype.

 

Now I mentioned in a previous post that I rather like Carnosaur. I like it because I enjoy big ideas done cheap; it's dark, nasty, has some comically shady government goings-on, and a ludicrous story involving a plot to wipe out mankind by means of a genetically engineered virus that causes the world's female population to die whilst giving birth to baby dinosaurs.

But it is certainly a bad film. And it has some mesmerizingly awful dinosaurs, created by John Carl Buechler.
The final scene, which I've chosen for its representative badness, is a rip-off of the finals of Aliens, and of a lesser-known 1960 film called Dinosaurus! (As Director Adam Simon said, 'if you don't want to be accused of ripping off a movie, you rip off 10.')

 

 

Corman said he hated stop-motion (probably because it takes time and money) and he hated optical effects. So all the dinosaurs were live action beasts. The T. rex is played by three different models - a 16ft-tall pneumatic (and rather static) creature; a 7ft-tall man-in-a-suit version, and a mechanical 3ft model with the ability to walk. Kind of. (The movements of all the dinosaurs are stiff, and strangely uncontrolled.)

The smallest T.rex is often integrated by means of forced-perspective, with variously unsuccessful results. The 'miniature action' involved a Bobcat made from styrene and card, and a camera on a skateboard was used for the 'driver's P.O.V.' shots.

  

The thing is, I love this low-tech, 'pull-it-out-your-bum' style of film-making. But I have to admit, the result here is a little embarrassing. The scene is poorly edited. The use of a lot of quick cuts does nothing to help the illusion that a fierce battle of life and death is taking place. The action is repetitive. The synthesised score is cheap and generic, and the dinosaur sound-effects are unrealistic and non-threatening.
But what a one-liner at the end...

ON RIPPING-OFF

So how, I'm sure you're all eager to know, do I feel about copying other people's work?
Well, this is a complicated issue. I think that what hurts is the thought of someone else taking credit for your idea - your little stroke of genius. But that assumes that the other person - the copycat - had more success or recognition for the idea than you yourself had.
I doubt that Steven Spielberg's sense of identity was much dented by an obscure Roger Corman film called Carnosaur, whipped up and released before Jurassic Park was ready to change the world.

Of course I naturally identify with the little people on this matter. And its not just about whether or not, in fact, plagiarism took place. I know how it can hurt to find that someone, somewhere, has stolen your idea before you'd even so much as voiced it - let alone realised it.

But it's also true that imitation can be taken as a compliment.

Case in point: Zombies.

Zombies are a huge part of popular culture. The Zombie movie is one of the most over-crowded sub-genera; there are well-attended annual Zombie marches in many places in the world; the Zombie Apocalypse is a deeply embedded idea - an alternative reality in popular imagination.
But the Zombie of modern popular culture is the creation of one man - George A. Romero.

Before Night of the Living Dead (1968) there were relatively few films featuring Zombies - and they were invariably the traditional Zombies of Voodoo folklore.
Is Mr Romero pissed? Does it annoy him that he's lost control of this creation in such an epic way? Well, actually, I wasn't able to find out. But I doubt it, at least by now. Everyone has heard of Night of the Living Dead, he's recognised as the father of the genera, and he's done very well out of it - the ever growing popularity of Zombies has allowed him to continue making films in the genera even to the present time. I suspect he is rather proud.

In truth, there is nothing new under the sun. I'm always creating in my mind, and of course my ideas are heavily influenced by the things I like. I notice what I find effective, and I copy.
Stephen King said that a new idea is usually just two old ideas put together for the first time.
I think that's true. Or sometimes they are simply stripped back - the basis for a popular idea can be pulled from beneath the mounting piles of self-propagating and increasingly divergent cliché. You can go back to source, and from there spring out in a different direction.
Then there's preconceived ideas that turned out to be wrong - seeds planted by misleading trailers or misinterpreted write-ups.
And finally there's dreams. Especially useful in the case of horror - your subconscious knows best how to scare you.
But of course, these dream images were themselves probably influenced by things absorbed while awake - the ideas of others. It is all but impossible to create something that cannot be likened to something else, by someone else, somewhere.

I've also thought a lot about the fine line between homage and rip-off. The definition lies, I think, in how closely you imitate, and to what effect. For example: in Paul, when we realise that the final scene will take place beneath the Devil's Tower in Arizona. This is loving homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

We see the tower in a single shot, and are then left to forget about it. Its iconic image is not used to enhance the final scenes of the film. It is homage only.

Then again, I'm not saying that in never okay to steal outright. What about if an idea was wasted the first time around? Is it fair game?
And besides, even blatant rip-offs - while most are simply embarrassing - can be fun.
Personally, I enjoyed Carnosaur.