The Walking Dead (season one)

Right around the time the comic was making waves, I was reading another, different comic about zombies.  I never did read The Walking Dead.

The announcement that AMC was producing The Walking Dead for TV was big, exciting news--even for non-comic people like me.  The first of its kind, the series features a group of zombpocalypse survivors trying to make their way in a new world.  You'd have to have something seriously wrong with you if you weren't immediately sold on the premise.  And the show's record numbers proved that everyone was on board for televised zombies.

The only problem is that The Walking Dead never did manage to get past its premise.  The show garnered interest because it was new, novel, and different from all other programs.  Banking on these things, The Walking Dead never bothered with story or character development, and motored through its six-episode first season on cruise control:

• E01  Rick Grimes wakes up in the hospital and finds out he's one of the few survivors a zombpocalypse.  He decides to go to Atlanta to find his wife and son.
• E02  Rick escapes a hoard of zombies in Atlanta and meets up with a small band of survivors.  His wife and son are alive and living outside the city.
• E03  Rick returns to the survivor camp and is reunited with this wife and son.
• E04  Rick goes back to Atlanta to retrieve a bag of guns. Glen is kidnapped, then rescued.
• E05  The survivor camp is attacked by zombies.
• E06  The survivors seek refuge at the CDC.  The CDC is about to explode.  The survivors leave.

So very little happens that it's impossible to actually describe what's going on.  It's a serialized television show with no forward momentum.  Little changes from one week to the next; there are no challenges that can't be overcome within the space of 40 minutes, and no real threats to anyone's well being.  Yes, there are zombies but The Walking Dead isn't really about zombies, per say.  It's supposed to be about the people (the title is a play on words), but the people, like the story, aren't exploited to their full potential.

 Pictured: unfulfillment.

While Rick is positioned to be the lead in the show, it's an ensemble cast.  But since we don't ever learn anything about anyone else, Rick is the lead.  This wouldn't be a problem if Rick were interesting, but he's not. Even more frustrating is the fact that Rick is surrounded by potentially compelling characters, but their development is just as stunted as Rick's.  In fact, everyone's problems are so inconsequential to the show that most are addressed and dismissed in the same episode: a wife abuser is killed by zombies; a crazy man kills himself; and a woman shoots her zombified sister on her birthday.  In the final episode, one of the survivors chooses to stay at the CDC and die in a fiery explosion--it could have, indeed should have been a poignant moment in the show, but since we don't really know a thing about this woman, we can't understand her choice.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the The Walking Dead is the haphazard nature of the writing.  In episode 1, Rick meets Morgan and tells him he will speak to him every morning on the radio.  Not until episode 5 does Rick pick up the radio and make the call.  It's one of the show's better moments, Rick speaking to no one, sending his words out into the ether and clinging to the desperate hope that Morgan is listening on the other end.  It would have made for a great recurring theme, but it only happens this one time.  Nor do we ever find out what happened to Morgan.  Another loose end takes the form of Merle Dixon, the resident white trash racist.  He gets chained to a pipe and winds up cutting off his hand to escape what he perceives as an inevitable zombie attack.  Merle, too, is never seen nor heard from again, though his potential storyline was rife with possibilities for real drama and conflict.

I stand by my statement that a show like The Walking Dead was and still is a good idea.  But a good idea needs a good follow through, and The Walking Dead, quite frankly, stalled in development.  The one thing the show does manage to get across is a vague sense of nihilism, but that's due mostly to everyone's lack of agency and action, rather than say, constantly having to run away from fucking zombies.  It resonated with me, though--I have no hope for a promising second season.

 Fucking zombies.

Re-Cycle

Truth be told, I haven't actually finished watching this movie.  And I'm not sure if I'm going to.  I like a slow burn as much as the next girl, but come on.

Ting-Yin is a celebrated novelist working on her new book, a supernatural thriller.  It's her first ghost story.  She's warned that writing about spirits can make them manifest but Ting-Yin isn't that superstitious.  But, sure enough, she begins to experience strange happenings in her apartment and gets sucked into a dark fantasy world.

...and that's as far as I got.

It's not that Re-Cycle is bad, it's just so slowly paced that it couldn't hold my attention.  The worst part of the whole experience is that the film is right up my alley: it's a creepy ghost story with a dark world of make-believe.  In fact, the other world is a lot like The Neverending Story's Fantasia crossed with the junk heap from Labyrinth.  There's even a Nothing-type thing that's slowly eating away at everything--it's the titular Recycle, a force that destroys the other world so its ideas can be remade in our world.

I really didn't get far enough into the film to comment on its themes and whatnot, but I suspect the film will eventually touch upon love, loss, and regret.  Ting-Yin was deeply in love once upon a time and then suffered terrible heartbreak when dumped.  Now her ex is back in Hong Kong and looking to reconcile.  Since the other world is largely composed of old ideas and things thrown away, there's a good chance Ting-Yin will eventually encounter some manifestation of her old lover.

But I'm just guessing.

I've seen a handful of Pang Brothers movies, which have been hit and miss.  The Eye I enjoyed and The Messengers was good up to a point (that point being Kristen Stewart).  But I thought Bangkok Dangerous (2009) was pretty dull.  Not a great track record for Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, but maybe it's my fault for not choosing to watch any of The Eye sequels or Forest of Death.

Regardless, I'm a little underwhelmed with Re-Cycle even though I should be, by all accounts, in love with this movie.  It's even got a couple of good creep-outs, and the other world is wonderfully strange and dangerous.  The pacing, however, is just too slow and whatever forward momentum is gained by the introduction of the recycling force is halted by the film's and Ting-Yin's meanderings.

That's Doctor Acula To You

Vampires

Suddenly, I want to watch Fright Night.

Truth be told, I saw this movie quite some time ago, but realizing I didn't want to ever watch it again, I wrote this entry back in April and sat on it till I caught up with myself*.

*I have since watched this movie again.

James Woods is a vampire hunter. Not only that, he was raised by the Catholic Church to be their premier vampire hunter; it's a little known fact that vampires exist, and the church has been slaying them since the 14th century. After finding and killing all the vamps in a nest, James Woods is somewhat perturbed that he failed to find the Master, the lead vampire. That night, the Master rises and arrives at James Woods' motel where he and his crew are partying. The master kills everyone, sparing Daniel Baldwin and James Woods, and bites one of the hookers. Also, he seems to know James Woods' name, for some reason. The prospect of having been sold out is a little disconcerting, but it takes a back seat to James Woods' vampire hunting. Using the hooker as a kind of remote sensor, James Woods and Daniel Baldwin zero in on the Master. With the help of a priest, the pair learn that this particular vampire happens to be the first vampire, and worse yet, was accidentally created by the church in an exorcism gone wrong. Valek, the Master of master vampires, is now searching for a special cross that will immunize him against sunlight. It's up to James Woods to stop this evil!

Spot the vamp.

Sounds promising, I know. It's based on a book, which I'm unlikely to ever read, so I'll never know if the story is really all that good. The film, however, in spite of having a lot going for it, is actually kind of dull. Even the action lacks, well, action. It's almost as if John Carpenter was already bored with the film before he started making it. I myself got bored watching it. It wasn't so much the watered-down action or the even more watered-down Daniel Baldwin, it was the overly simplified plot.

First of all, and I've already alluded to this, James Woods has been sold down the river. This doesn't bother him nearly as much as it should. Secondly, both James Woods and Valek come into knowledge way too easily. There are no obstacles in their way, no struggles to learn more about themselves and each other. The two adversaries literally follow a map to their final destination. The story has a lot of down time and the plot is uniformly (read: slowly) paced. However, you don't get the feeling, like with Memoirs, that a lot of the action is happening between scenes. Rather, everything in Vampires happens on screen--it's just that not a lot happens in this movie.

James Woods on James Woods: You have got to be kidding me with this shit.

Vampires has some of the look of and a lot of the sound of From Dusk Till Dawn, but none of the feel. James Woods quips from time to time, but the jokes seem out of place. The film takes itself much to seriously for boner jokes, and because James Woods is the only one who fires off the occasional one-liner, the humour is lopsided and end up falling flat.

*Upon second viewing, I've reassessed the humour and found the movie to be kind of funny. I think this is due entirely to James Woods doing his best to lighten the mood with his constant swearing, tough guy attitude, and off the cuff penis jokes.

A later entry in the John Carpenter catalog, Vampires is really more boring than crazy. On the plus side, it does feature a dig at Anne Rice: "[Vampires are] not romantic. Its not like they're a bunch of fuckin' fags hoppin' around in rented formal wear and seducing everybody in sight with cheesy Euro-trash accents." Considering the film is so bizarre and Carpentery-yet-not, and co-stars a Baldwin, I have to side with crazy. And you'd have to be crazy to make a vampire movie boring.

craze-o-meter: 3.5, boring but nuts

I'm pretty sure this person does not appear in this film.