I was lucky enough to catch Romero’s Survival Of The Dead, and Joe Dante’s The Hole, at the Venice Film Festival last week and here are my, seriously nerdy, thoughts.

Survival Of The Dead.
I love George Romero. I would have liked to have given that big bear of a man a big bear hug. I enjoyed Diary Of The Dead, but was left a bit cold by Land Of The Dead. It came across as rushed to me. Diary played like a fun experiment and I could go along with that, but the hand-held, video camera style seemed a bit below such an icon as Romero. It looked like a bigger idea shot cheaply. Generally he seemed to be in decline and, after watching a clip of Survival online – a less than great scene of the guy catching a zombie on his fishing line - my hopes were low. But the film is a pleasant surprise, or unpleasant, depending on where you stand with gut munching. If anything, it’s his first western.

The story revolves around two feuding families on a small, east coast island, and a group of mercenaries who turn up there looking for a safe haven. The families have different approaches to the epidemic. One wants to keep the zombies alive, train them to eat animals and give them some sort of quality of existence until a cure can be found. The others want to shoot ‘em. The mercenaries, after seeing an advert on the internet, head to Plum Island, picking up an annoying hipster on the way when they rescue him from a bunch of looters who keep zombie heads on sticks for fun. When they get to the island it’s degenerated into a sort of asylum for survivors and zombies alike, which is an idea I’d liked to have seen played out more. The zombies are chained up and repeatedly try to post letters, chop wood, or wander about kitchens preparing imaginary meals. The islanders are trying to reform them, but have gone bonkers themselves in the process. Like I said, the island stuff plays like a western. The islanders and their homes have the look of old school pioneers and the film’s end has a definite Wild Bunch feel to it. There are probably other references that I didn’t catch as Westerns have never really been my thing. There’s even a zombie on horseback, which is better and spookier than it sounds.

The film is not without its faults. The usual Romero quirks are there: dodgy acting/accents, ideas that are bigger than the film’s low budget, odd jokes and clunky dialogue. There’s a twist about the zombie on horseback that seemed like a cheat to me, and the guy who wants to keep the zombies around out of respect for the dead goes a little gun crazy at one point.

The audience loved it. They gave George a five minute standing ovation before and after the film and politely applauded the big kills throughout. Flare gun and fire extinguisher kills stand out, and there’s plenty of chomping, splattery gunshots and gut chewing for the gore hounds. It’s the film Romero should have made when Universal were throwing money at him to make Land, and I think it’s his best since Day Of The Dead. With the glut of sub-par zombie stuff around these days, it warmed the cockles of my undead heart to see the man who wrote the rulebook so appreciated.

The Hole – 3D
I’ve seen Joe Dante’s Hole and it doesn’t stink. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, but happily it’s true. I knew very little about this film going in. I knew it was in 3D and I’d been told it was like Disturbia but with a bottomless hole, which it is for the first ten minutes; then it becomes a dark, really dark, episode of Eerie Indiana. Dante gets to flex his big screen muscles here for the first time in 6 years. He’s been away too long. You really get the sense he’s put everything he’s got into this film and the big set pieces are a master at work.

The story revolves around a single mum and her two kids: a late teen rebel and his kid brother. They move to a tiny town in search of the quiet life, but the kids find a seemingly bottomless hole in their cellar and when they unlock it, with some help from the cute girl next door, the darkness gets out. Remember that bit in Poltergeist where the medium gives a big speech about the poltergeist knowing your fears and using them against you, then nothing really happens? Well, this is what would happen if that promise had been fulfilled. In fact The Hole has a lot of similarities with Poltergeist, including psycho toy clowns, childhood fears and families under siege, but it tries to affect the audience on a deeper level than Hooper’s haunted house ride.

It’s squarely aimed at the PG 13 audience, but gets surprisingly intense and spooky at times. I don’t really want to spoil too much about the plot, but as you probably guessed, the two brothers and the cute girl (sorry, I can’t remember any of their character names) have to confront the hole. So, you get to see three sets of fears dealt with. A child’s, a teenage girl with repressed memories of an accident in her past, and the older kid who claims that nothing scares him.

The 3D is so restrained that at times I was begging for something to make me duck into my seat. You don’t really get that, but Dante spoke before the film about 3D being here to stay and it being up to the film makers to be worthy of it. So, I guess he deliberately stayed away from any of the “coming at ya” stuff. He tries to use the technique to create an immersive environment, but you expect a few cheesy gimmicks from a 3D movie. Well I do anyway. They showed some footage of an upcoming Japanese horror beforehand called Shock Labyrinth and that had stuff flying at you in spades so, I guess you can take your pick. It looked very cool and very Japanese.

I hope The Hole finds a big enough audience to get Dante back on the big screen more often – it deserves to – but my concern is that hardcore horror fans are going to be left wanting more and the Disturbia audience may not know what to make of it. Hopefully they can all get on board for some quality scares.

Finally, there are the familiar in-jokes for fans to spot and cameos from the old favourites. Orlacs glove factory anyone? Bruce Dern pops up and it has the funniest Dick Miller cameo yet.

Ciao!

Head Chef