Movies: Nagging persistence of the dead.

The good news about Survival of the Dead is that it's better than Romero's last outing, the truly dire Diary of the Dead. Unfortunately, the makes only the fifth worst "Of the Dead" film.

I don't mind that Romero's lapsed into self-parody. It's that he's grown unbelievably lazy. Survival is a bizarre zombie Western that sets a bloody feud between two inexplicably fresh off the boat Scots-Irish families on a isolated Delaware island against the ever less interesting background of a zombie apocalypse. As bored as we are by concept, Romero phones it in on every level. His characters are paper thin. The leader of his crooked band of National Guardsmen is a "I look out for nobody but myself" type who, of course, has a heart of gold. He has a good natured, baby-faced sidekick who is, of course, the first to bite it. The Latino soldier is constantly offering up prayers en Español to the saints when he's not trying to lay the only female member of the troop. And she's a lesbian nicknamed Tomboy who, in perhaps the only unexpected move of the whole flick, first appears onscreen with her hands down her pants, churning the butter in front of all the other soldiers, who seem uninterested in her masturbatory display because, the film hints, it happens regularly enough. I'm not sure what this scene was meant to suggest to use about PFC Tomboy or lesbians in general. As it never happens again in the flick and nobody even so much as says, "Hey, Tomboy, you're on guard duty. Try not to miss any zombies because you're busy with all the self-fisting." It appears to be a throwaway scene. But that's not particularly shocking: there's so many throwaway scenes in this picture it's the filmic equivalent of The Mobro.

Our AWOL unit from Cliché Company pick up a random teen - who, hold on for the shock, is wisecracking, tech savvy smart ass who warms up the stone cold heart of the unit leader - and follows a youtube video to Plum Island, Delaware. Unfamiliar with digital technology - remember how those digital cameras kept losing their vertical hold and breaking into static in Diary? - Romero seems to believe that new youtube clips will keep appearing long after the zombie apocalypse has destroyed our power infrastructure. In fact, it's completely unclear what rules govern the post-Zed world of Romero's relaunched "of the Dead" series. Nobody seems to sweat conserving power, but everybody's worried about wasting gasoline. Phones don't work, but all your iPhone apps do. People find wifi in random places, and pick up late night talk shows making bad sub-Carson zombie jokes. The oddest bit is the amount of traffic on the roads. Several scenes in the film suggest the roads are deserted, but some shots include a busy I-95 in the background. Maybe that was just laziness on Romero's part.

The soldiers get to Plum only to find themselves in the middle of a shooting war between rival families, one who wants to exterminate zombies as soon as they appear and another that thinks they can tame and contain them until a "cure" is found. At least one character in the film points out that you don't get a zombie until a person is dead, so by definition zombies are a deviation from a state of death, not life; consequently, curing them would mean returning them to a state of death, a paradoxical state of affairs that makes killing zombies and curing zombies the same thing. This character, in the interest of allegedly dramatic plot development, is ignored.

The soldiers end up taking sides with the "kill 'em" family and there's a big old shoot out in which most of our characters are offed. We find out zombies, when hungry, will eat other mammals besides humans; a fact that Romero seems to think is key, but really, who gives a crap if flesh eating zombies eat everything in their path instead of just every human in their path? Besides, even if you could sustain zombie life, what's the point? If the hypothetical cure for zombies just makes them a corpse again, then you've got the cure: a bullet to the head. If the cure makes them living people again (an unlikely result since so many of them carry around damage that would be fatal is you restarted them as Pure Strain Humans), then you've essentially cured death and you've got a bigger problem on your hands than zombies. The repercussions of that would make the zombie apocalypse preferable.

Happily, Romero couldn't be bothered to parse any of this out. The same spirit that moved him not to bother blocking out the I-95 in his night scenes led Romero to simply throw random, seemingly thoughtful problems at the plot line and see if any portion of any random one of them stuck. The result is people saying a lot of meaningless babble with conviction. Still, this beats out Diary, which embarrassingly bought its own crap about the evils of the Internet Era despite its utter ignorance of the actual details of the Internet Era.

Plus the CGI is embarrassing.

There's a general unspoken rule amongst horror bloggers that you shouldn't speak ill of Romero despite the ever mounting crappiness of his work. Whether this is because people feel early genius forgives later stupidity or because they simply find it bad form to talk smack about an old man, I don't know. The result, however, is that bloggers review Romero's work in bad faith. From here on out, get your reviews of Romero's flicks from the pitiless anonymous hordes of horror site commenters. They've got it right. Romero's later zombie films simply aren't that good. End of story.

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Stuff: George Romero pulls an evil Captain Kirk from episode 37.

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough attempts a Marxist interpretation of the popularity of vampires and zombies:

Maybe Karl Marx, wrong about so much in the real world, could offer some clarification in the realm of make-believe. Could vampires, like the filthy rich, parasitic, aristocratic, and charismatic Cullens, be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of — and wish for — an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Aside from the analysis itself, Keough gives us a little gem of a reaction shot from the father of the modern zombie flick:

Not even George A. Romero, who as much as anyone can take credit for the zombie phenomenon — spawning it as he did back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead — can explain why they do this. “I don’t get it,” he remarked about these undead wannabes when I interviewed him recently about his newly released sixth film in his zombie franchise, Survival of the Dead, which opens next week. “You just want to say, ‘Get a life.’ ”

Wow. The dude responsible for Diary of the Dead thinks you're the one who needs to get over the whole zombie thing.

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"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #13.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Eugene Clark in Land of the Dead, 2005.

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Movies: Wu of the Dead.

Though extensive work has gone into unearthing Christian symbolism in zombie narratives, here's a less analyzed Black Muslim take on Romero's Of the Dead franchise. From the RZA's new book, The Tao of Wu:

When I first saw Night of the Living Dead, I was scared to death. But when I watched it again at the age of sixteen (when they were up to Day of the Dead), I'd gotten knowledge of myself, and could relate to what it was saying about America. The dead were alive, but they were blind, deaf, and dumb. So to me, they were symbolic of black men in America.

The dead in those movies are alive- that's just a description of physical matter, it's active - but they don't have life. Life comes when you have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, when you can see for real, touch and feel for real, know for real. Then you are truly living.

Finally, all the Of Dead films work as metaphors for the Five Percent [The Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as Five-Percent Nation of Islam - CRwM]. The survivors are holdouts living among the mentally dead. And interestingly, they tend to be led by black men. At the same time, though, after the black man survives - he fights off destruction through the whole movie - a white man kills him.

Though factually wobbly at the end there - the black protags survive Dawn and Day - the analogy actually works far better for me than efforts to fit Romero's flicks into a Christian framework. The origin of the Five-Percent name stems from their belief (and this is a profound simplification) that 85% of humanity are blind to knowledge of themselves; 10% understand some of the divine knowledge needed to be fully realized humans, but ignore or lie about this knowledge for personal gain (notably, Christian preachers and scholars who teach about an incorporeal, or "mystery," God to advance their own political agendas - left and right); and a final 5% who understand and spread the truth, known as poor righteous teachers. The idea of a tiny, fully alive and self aware minority surrounded by a globe of the half-alive fits like a glove with Romero's flicks.

I wonder what insights Buddhists, more mainstream Muslims, and other non-Christian religious peoples could bring to the table.

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Music: 'Cause, be honest, you kind of think the end of the world is going to be sort of fun.

The Sprites formed around the core husband-wife team of Jason and Amy Korzen. After the 2001 collapse of the nerd-tastic D.C. indie outfit Barcelona, Jason retreated into his basement with a four-track and, with the exception of Amy's consistent presence, a revolving cast of ex-bandmates and friends. The result was the 2003 Starling, Spider, Tiger, and Sprites (which opens with "Do It Yourself," power pop's greatest anti-band spirit anthem). The band went through a cycle of releases and touring, all the while losing members and focusing in on the Korzens. By the release of 2006's Modern Gameplay, Jason and Amy were pretty much a self-sufficient unit, playing nearly every instrument on every track and producing the album on their own.

The following track – a tribute to '70s horror film legends titled "George Romero" – is off the 2006 platter. Modern Gameplay features a full sweep of the Korzen's geeky obsessions, from the wonderful "I Started a Blog Nobody Read" to the slightly more esoteric "Huygens versus the Werewolf," which namechecks the 17th Century Dutch polymath who argued that light consists of waves, discovered centripetal force, and is considered the first dude to use a formula in his physics work. Pretty geeky, sis.

Despite the shut-in Muzikbunker otaku vibe this thumbnail bio might give off, the Sprite's sound is classic indie pop. Though the instrumentation tends towards the minimal, it stays bright and organic feeling. The lyrics are clever and the irony comes off as goofy instead of world weary. It's fun times.

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Movies: Aw, Hell – 3 random observations on "Drag Me to Hell."

1. The Anti-Diary of the Dead

The prodigal son trope one finds in nearly every review of DMtH is a little deceptive. While the film does indeed mark Sam Raimi's return to horror, it oddly implies that he was, before the lure of Hollywood superstardom steered him wrong, predominantly a horror director and that he's been away from the mater genre for long time.

In fact, less than a third of Raimi's directorial efforts have been horror films. The characterization of Raimi as a horror director has more to do with horror fandom's perpetual surly provincialism than any full assessment of Raimi's directorial career. As for Raimi's 40 years of wandering the Hollywood desert, the length of the break between Army of the Dead and DMtH is just a couple years longer than the break between Army and Evil Dead 2. Or the break between ED2 and the original evil dead, for that matter. Raimi just doesn't make many horror movies and he certainly doesn't make them that often.

That said, a comparison between another "return of the master" flick yields some interesting results. Much as Raimi's latest was given a strangely indier-than-thou moral gloss and framed as the director returning to a simpler, purer style of filmmaking, George Romero – perhaps more validly considered a horror master – was thought to have lost his way in the big budget excesses of Land of the Dead, and diary was framed in terms of a sort of aesthetic purification. Both films were linked, either explicitly or implicitly, to the franchises that made the director's names.

But Drag Me to Hell works and Diary of the Dead is a dog. When it came time to see if Romero still had the juice, he came up dry. Raimi, however, took a swing at something easily within his wheelhouse and connected. The difference is, I think, the latter's commitment to making a fun film. An entertaining, if mostly silly and forgettable, spookshow of jump scares and slime FX, Drag never lapses into tedious lecturing or drinks the cool-aid of its own mythology.

2. The First Lynch the Banker Movie of the New Depression

In the early days of Depression 1.0, Hollywood was divided over just how to handle the class distinctions the economic crisis brought into plain sight. Early filmmakers treated it as fodder for comedy. The rich, while foolish, just needed a good Godfrey to straighten them out. As the crisis wore on and then shaded into war, however, the bubble-headed wealthy began to yield way to poisoned-minded, literally twisted predators of the Mr. Potter variety.

Though Raimi claims to have written Drag Me to Hell before the current economic crisis, it is virtually impossible not to see a reflection of our current crisis in the character of Christine Brown, the loan officer who is, in the end, dragged to aigtch eeee double hockey sticks. The plot, for those who have not seen it, involves a loan officer who denies a gypsy woman (who lives in modern Los Angeles) a third extension on her mortgage payment. The gypsy woman falls to her knees, begins kissing the skirt of the loan officer, begs Ms. Brown to reconsider. Christine panics and she calls security. Later that night, the gypsy woman mugs her in the parking garage near the bank and places a curse upon her. Ring-like, Christine will be tormented for three days by a demonic spirit. At the end of the tormenting process, she'll be offed and dragged, well, you know.

Raimi has actually said that he wanted to make sure that Christine's "crime" was disproportionate to the punishment she faced. This was necessary, he claims, in order to ensure viewer sympathy with her.

I believe, however, this doesn't give his character enough credit. Christine's "crime" is not a minor act; it's no crime at all. It isn't, I think, even a moral infraction. Some critics have decided that Christine is an avatar for the wildly irresponsible financial institutions that have led us into the current financial meltdown. This shows both a profoundly limited understanding of the financial monkey business that took place on Wall Street and grotesquely stunted notion of morality. According to the film, the bank's handled the gypsy's mortgage for several years. By defaulting on payments twice and then asking for third extension, it is the gypsy who is acting in bad faith. She was happy to take the bank's money, using her house as collateral. But now that she can't hold up her end of the deal, she wants the bank to essentially give her a free pass. She wants the bank to be okay with unilaterally breaking a contract. Christine suggests to alternatives to the gypsy's financially untenable situation, both of which are rejected by the gypsy out of pride – a pride she then throws away to beg for help, a pride she then accuses Christine of stealing.

In contrast, what was going on in at various banks and other financial institutions was that loan officers, not unlike Christine but on a much larger scale, were bending the loan guidelines to quickly store up the mortgages as assets that could then be used as the basis for derivatives – a sort of pseudo-insurance in which parties essentially make bets on whether or not loans will default. In theory, the bank doesn't want the loan to default, because then they get the loan payments and the derivative payments, without ever having to pay anything out except the original loan. In practice, the short-term gain on derivatives was so attractive that banks rushed to make as many housing loans as they could, taking insane risks on truly bad loans. These bad loans were then packaged up as more derivative fodder. When the crappy loans feel through, not only were the banks out the original loan, but they also had to pay off the derivative bets. These problems were further compounded by what we now understand to be the deliberate falsification of the value of the assets at the base of the derivatives.

If that second part is convoluted, here's the short story: If banks had been rigorous about administering their loans – which includes not giving loans to people who can't afford to pay them back and refusing to carry the burden of potentially toxic assets in the form of shaky loans – then none of this crap would have gone down. If Wall Street had been more like Christine Brown, we wouldn't have the current financial crisis. But Drag Me to Hell touches a populist nerve by showing what Americans have always secretly felt: Debt (if not credit, which we love like crack) is a conspiracy of heartless bankers. We enjoy making beds, but we sure to hate to lie in them.

If the lightly likeable Drag Me to Hell gets a footnote in film history, it might we be as the opening shot in what I can only imagine will be a slowly growing stream on increasingly shrill populist screeds against the evils of banking.

3. The Hollywood Evil Dead

While Drag Me to Hell definitely aspires to the slapstick spirit of Raimi's Evil Dead flicks, there's something bloodless (in a literal and emotional way) about the undertaking. The film feels like Raimi is copying his earlier work. Instead of evoking the spirit of the Evil Dead films, he makes contextless winks and nods to his fanbase. References to cabins in the woods followed with the line "there's trees, you'll love it" are meant as sops to the insider.

This is faded-copy-of-the-original feeling is further reinforced by the PG-13 bloodlessnes of the film. Other than a particularly violent projectile nosebleed, there's not much in this film to remind us of the fact that Raimi once used a literal geyser of blood for a sight gag. Certainly, this isn't to suggest that "real horror needs extreme bloodshed" or some such. Raimi was always more goofy than gory. Rather, I think it is a sign of how happy Raimi is to repackage his old material as mainstream stuff. Raimi's still big on geysers, but now they're CGI'ed puke-goo or a vomited up cat.

Finally, there are the product placements. BMW, iPhones, and even Mrs. Fields Cookies get bizarrely intrusive close ups. Despite the theme of "returning to the purity of horror" theme, it seems Raimi's picked up some particularly unseemly mainstream habits and the return to horror didn't help him shed them.

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