10/20/14 (Part Two): Even Zombies Get the Blues

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31 Days of Halloween, anti-zombie activists, anti-zombie serum, Barry Flatman, cinema, Claudia Bassols, dramas, Emily Hampshire, film reviews, films, flashbacks, foreign films, Hatem Khraiche, husband-wife team, Kris Holden-Ried, Manuel Carballo, Melina Matthews, Movies, Paulino Nunes, post-zombie world, prejudice, retroviral drugs, Shawn Doyle, Spanish-Canadian films, The Returned, zombie, zombies

Imagine a world where zombies are not only real but have pretty much become accepted as a fact of life. Thanks to a revolutionary retroviral drug, those newly infected with “zombieism” have the chance to lead normal, productive lives, provided they continue to receive regular doses of the serum. These walking dead would look, talk, feel, think and hurt just like the rest of us: they would be virtually undectable, these zombies who were once our co-workers, loved ones and friends. And now imagine what would happen if the life-giving serum began to run out…and there was no hope of getting more?

Such is the focus of Manuel Carballo’s somber The Returned (2013), a joint Canadian-Spanish production that takes a hard look at the measures that desperate people will go to in order to get even a little more time with their infected loved ones, measures that will ultimately lead to betrayal and murder. Offering a fairly fresh take on the zombie film (this isn’t the first of this kind of “reluctant zombie” film but it’s not an overwhelmingly large peer group, either), The Returned often plays more like a melancholy drama about (nominally) losing a loved one to a terminal illness than it does an epic of gutmunching proportions. Nonetheless, the filmmakers manage to come up with a pretty decent combination of zombie violence and indie tear-jerking, offering zombie-philes something a little different to chew on.

Our erstwhile hero, Kate (Emily Hampshire), is a medical researcher who’s on the frontlines of helping to development a synthetic replacement to the dwindling anti-zombie retroviral drug: the original drug is derived from the remains of actual zombies, which are, ironically, becoming harder and harder to come by in a post-zombie world. The breakthrough can’t come soon enough, as news of the disappearing retroviral has begun to send shockwaves through society: those who infected loved ones protest, picket and scheme to get more of the drug, while those who take the old-fashioned “kill ’em all” approach to zombies see the loss of the only controlling agent as a sign that it’s time to just start “killing” the remaining undead and put an end to this part of the proceedings.

Kate has a secret, of course: her beloved husband, Alex (Kris Holden-Ried), is infected and their supplies of the retroviral are running out, too. Kate has been buying extra doses on the sly, from a shady hospital colleague, but the black-market medicine is becoming more expensive and more difficult to acquire. Meanwhile, anti-zombie activists have begun to break into the hospitals that are treating the “returned” and are slaughtering the infected, putting everyone on edge. The government wants the infected to “voluntarily” quarantine themselves into special zones, a tactic which strikes Alex an awful lot like what the Gestapo used to do.

Into this toxic mix are thrown Jacob (Shawn Doyle) and Amber (Claudia Bassols), Kate and Alex’s best friends with their own little secrets. Amber is best-selling children’s’ author who’s decided to branch out into thrillers and Jacob is her adoring agent/husband who constantly propels her career from the margins. The friends want Alex to submit to the government’s quarantine request, if only because they take the stated promise of an upcoming synthetic replacement seriously and want everybody on the right side of the law when it all blows over. A stunning act of betrayal will shatter everyone’s illusions of safety, however, leading Kate and Alex to pursue an increasingly desperate and hopeless series of actions that barrel relentlessly to a tragic, if foregone, conclusion.

Despite being well-made and acted, there came a point during The Returned where I was perilously close to throwing in the towel. To put it bluntly, the film has a habit of trafficking in pure, undiluted misery that can, over time, become a bit overwhelming. Similar to the pitch-black tone of Aronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream (2000), Carballo and company (working from a script/story by Hatem Khraiche) keep piling one disaster after the other onto poor Kate and Alex, making the whole film one long, tense game of Jenga to see when they’ll come crashing down. At a point, it almost begins to seem bleakly comical, as Kate suffers one mishap after the other, all while the clock ticks down relentlessly to Alex point-of-no-return. The film’s final twist, in particular, is unbelievably cruel and ends the film on a truly sardonic tone.

Hampshire is great as Kate, bringing a strength to her character that balances nicely with the overall sense of impending doom and helplessness. Holden-Ried, for his part, is rather bland but pleasantly so: he makes Alex seem like the kind of nice, anonymous person that most of us probably know, even if we don’t know that we do. That being said, there’s not much depth to his performance, which is a similar issue with Doyle and Bassols’ rather one-note takes on Jacob and Amber. Doyle gets a few nicely emotional scenes with Holden-Ried but Bassols is one archly-raised eyebrow after the other and her sense of coyness wears after a while.

All in all, The Returned was another film that was easier to respect than to actually like. While the movie is well-made, it’s also a pretty unrepentant downer. As someone who’s always appreciated “bummer” endings in horror films, it might seem a little strange to decry a film for this reason (there are minor things to quibble about, of course…the film is far from perfect) but there’s something about The Returned that often feels rather mean-spirited and lop-sided, as if the filmmakers were setting out to punish the characters, for some reason. While The Returned certainly isn’t a chore to sit through, it’s also not a lot of fun, either.

7/29/14 (Part One): A Totally Wack Experience

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Andrea Runge, ax murders, bad movies, based on a true story, Billy Campbell, Christina Ricci, Clea DuVall, dysfunctional family, famous trials, Gregg Henry, historical drama, Lifetime Channel, Lizzie Borden, Lizzie Borden Took An Ax, murder, Nick Gomez, patricide, period-piece, set in the 1890s, Shawn Doyle, sisters, Stephen McHattie, true crime, TV movie

You’d think that making a film about the murder trial of Lizzie Borden would be kind of a no-brainer: after all, this is a case about a young woman from 1890s Massachusetts who was accused, tried and acquitted of butchering her father and step-mother with an ax. The case is so famous that it even inspired a children’s’ playground rhyme (“Lizzie Borden took an ax / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.”). In certain ways, the media frenzy surrounding the case could be seen as a precursor to modern-day murder trials like Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias: young women who were all considered unlikely murder suspects thanks to their ages, looks and social statuses.

You would think that making a film about a fascinating, real-life case like this would be simple: judging by Nick Gomez’s truly terrible Lizzie Borden Took An Ax (2014), however, you would be wrong…dead wrong, as it were. While the film comes with a fairly huge handicap (it was a “Lifetime Channel original film”, which carries about as much artistic weight as do the terms “Syfy original” or “Asylum exclusive”), the problems (almost too numerous to count) go far and beyond the film’s place of birth. Lizzie Borden Took An Ax is a film that manages to get almost nothing right, managing to be simultaneously over-wrought, lackadaisical, over-the-top and duller than dishwater: no mean feat considering that the film whiplashes tone so often that one could get seriously motion-sick trying to keep up.

The film begins by sketching out (very skimpily) our major players: we meet the obnoxious Lizzie (Christina Ricci), a sort of 1890s take on Macaulay Culkin’s version of Michael Alig from Party Monster (2003); her supportive but numbingly milquetoast sister, Emma (Clea Duvall); her strict, closed-off father (Stephen McHattie), who’s interest in Lizzie appears to border on the incestuous; and Lizzie’s much hated stepmother (Sara Botsford). As far as characterization goes, that’s just about it. We do get a throwaway bit where a couple of town guys argue with Lizzie’s father, Andrew, about being shorted on payment for services rendered but this is never explored any further: I’d be shocked if the information was ever supposed to be more than a MacGuffin. With these characters, what you see is what you get.

So what do we get? Well, we get a ridiculously modern, stomping hybrid of hip-hop and blues for the musical score, which goes superbly with all of the ridiculous slo-mo shots: there are so many “badass” moments where characters stride in slo-mo down the street, accompanied by the over-the-top score, that I briefly wondered if this was the first ever historical drama completely informed by modern super hero movies. We get a performance from Ricci that ranges wildly between “just rolled out of bed stoned” to “every vein standing out in relief,” although the key connecting tissue is that no part of her performance ever feels accurate or real: it’s difficult to tell whether the odd characterization is Ricci or director Gomez’s fault but either option seems entirely valid. Stephen McHattie, who’s normally an incredibly reliable presence in indie genre films like Pontypool (2008) just looks confused here, as does Clea Duvall: both actors have the bearing of performers who are receiving their scripts a page at a time, just as lost as the audience.

While the story doesn’t veer far from the historical details of the murder, the script (which is as reliably awful as the rest of the film) still manages to throw in a raft of completely unnecessary, underdeveloped bullshit: we get another murder, which may or may not be related, although the film doesn’t care enough to explore it further; we get the suitably ridiculous portrayal of Lizzie as a modern-day party-girl magically transported to turn-of-the-20th-century Massachusetts; a stupid “insane roommate” subplot between Lizzie and her sister (the musical stingers and Ricci’s “crazy eyes” are straight out of Single White Female (1992) and enough over-acting to shame an ancient Greek theater troupe.

Picking a single low-point for the film is almost impossible but one of my favorites has to be the astoundingly stupid scene where Lizzie sneaks out to go to a party. The scene is shot exactly like a similar scene in a modern “wild youth” film might be staged: red-lit, thumping music, wild teens drinking…except it’s a period-piece, so all this takes place while the aforementioned “wild youth” are dressed in their best 1890s finery, dancing politely with each other. We get it: kids have always been kids. This doesn’t make it any less of a stupid affectation, however, although it goes hand-in-hand with that ridiculous musical score.

Essentially, Lizzie Borden Took An Ax is completely DOA, flatlining way before we limp in to the inane “twist”ending (spoiler alert: Lizzie did it, after all…duh). Truth be told, there’s virtually nothing to recommend about this film: the cast is pretty bad, including the more established actors like Ricci and McHattie; everything about the storyline is obvious and telegraphed; the score is ludicrous; the acting is too over-the-top, which turns the pulpy dialogue into something resembling film noir for idiots; the courtroom/trial stuff is simultaneously cheesy and boring…truth be told, the only miraculous thing about Gomez’s film is how it manages to be so bad without ever skipping over the line into “so-bad-it’s-good” territory.

If one is so inclined, however, there’s a pretty vicious drinking game that can be applied to the film. To whit: every time you get a gratuitous shot of McHattie’s ax-ruined face, take a drink. Since this happens at a ratio of at least once a minute for the first 30 minutes or so (including a hilarious bit where his face is covered…only for the cloth to be dramatically whipped away, revealing that damn bloody face again…take that!), you’ll either be toes-up drunk by the mid-point or completely unconscious: either way, you win.