Schlock Corridor: Day Thirteen

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Zombie Night

I figured I'd try a little something different for this, the final installment of my SCHLOCK CORRIDOR series, so I decided not to depend on Netflix for my last movie choice, instead choosing to watch the latest so-called "original production" from SyFy, the cable network that seemingly exists for no other reason than to torment me as of late. Premiering a scant few days ago was the shocker Zombie Night, starring Anthony Michael Hall & Daryl Hannah, directed by John Gulager.

I like to consider myself a fan of Mr. Gulager and his work, but I suppose that's not entirely accurate. I like the Feast trilogy of films, directed by Gulager and written by Marcus Dunstan & Patrick Melton. They're not life-changing motion pictures like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films or Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker, but I find them to be entertaining, ridiculous motion pictures that, despite their low budget foundations, manage to rise above the muck of direct-to-video trash. There is something more-than-slightly crazy about these movies, and I respect that. The cast isn't going to win any awards, the writing isn't insanely clever, and the direction isn't setting the world on fire, but I believe this franchise is a superior example of the B-movie splatter-fest, and that's more than enough for me.

Of course, their next collaboration, Piranha 3DD, is fucking terrible. I just couldn't understand how the guys behind my beloved Feast trilogy could screw up so completely with this follow-up. I was really looking forward to this movie, and it broke my heart. It pained me to watch Piranha 3DD the first time, and I can't imagine why I would ever watch it again. It's like Gulager forgot how to  actually direct a movie between Feast 3: The Happy Finish and Piranha 3DD.  So when I learned that Gulager had directed a SyFy Original Movie, I wasn't surprised. What else was he going to do? I can't believe he didn't start doing this earlier, to be honest.

But this isn't a SyFy Original Movie, not really. It's another fine production from our friends at The Asylum! Can you believe it!? I certainly fucking can.

The film's three credited screenwriters are also responsible for such fine films as Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators, the LeVar Burton/Mariel Hemingway epic Rise Of The Zombies, and the Vanessa L. Williams masterpiece A Diva's Christmas Carol. Surely this is the mark of quality.

I noticed Alan Howarth's name pop up during the opening titles sequence, listed as the film's musical composer, but the credit isn't listed anywhere on IMDB, which is shocking, because his score for Evilution is listed, and I would probably be more ashamed of being associated with that movie. For those of you who are completely fucking clueless, Alan Howarth is most famous for his numerous musical collaborations with director John Carpenter, including Halloween II & III, Christine, and They Live. I've never actually cared for the man's solo work, finding it utterly forgettable at best, with the notable exception of his score for Halloween IV: The Return Of Michael Myers, which I enjoy listening to in the middle of the night when I want to feel like I'm being watched by a bloodthirsty maniac.

Where was I? Zombie Night! It's a movie about zombies that eat people, and sometimes they get their heads chopped off with antique sabers by that mermaid from Splash. What? More? Shit.

The story follows two families as they struggle to stay alive over the course of one terrifying night when the streets become overrun with the undead, an event that is given no explanation. It just happens, and people have to figure out a way to deal with it, lest they succumb to the relentless onslaught of shambling corpses. Anthony Michael Hall and Daryl Hannah are middle-aged parents with a teenage daughter, and they share their house with Hannah's aged, senile and possibly blind mother, played by Shirley Jones, who I'm told was good in The Partridge Family, but I never gave two shits about that dumbass show, so I have no idea if this is true. I was always more of a Brady Bunch kid.

And when I say possibly blind, it's because I'm honestly not sure if she's playing her character as blind or just doddering and possibly brain-damaged. Her entire performance is so completely over the top, I just wanted her to die. She's this shrieking, wailing caricature, swooning all over the fucking place like an insane stage actress trying to sell her character's melodramatic plight to the folks in the nosebleed seats who can't really make out what she's doing anyway without binoculars. Do you remember how Redd Foxx used to stagger around while clutching his chest in numerous episodes of Sanford & Son, faking a heart attack every time his son Lamont would threaten to leave? There was so much more quiet dignity in that performance, and it was played entirely for laughs.

Thankfully, Shirley Jones panics herself into a real heart attack and dies relatively early in the film, and her daughter has to blow her scrambled brains out when she rises again, which made me cheer, because I'm a fucked up guy.

So Tony Hall and his daughter are in a graveyard for some reason, and a bunch of corpses claw their way out of the ground before their eyes, and Tony just stares at them with his mouth agape, like a turkey staring up at the sky during a rain storm, and I don't understand why he doesn't just grab his daughter and run the fuck away. The dead are literally rising from their fucking graves all around these assholes, and they're acting like this kind of shit happens all the time. After a few minutes of this breathtaking inactivity, they both kind of lose interest in watching the rotting corpses struggle out of their coffins, and they walk away. They just walk the fuck away! No rush, motherfuckers!

Then some poor young lady is attacked by a legless zombie that fucking levitates like David Copperfield during his stage show in Las Vegas, latching onto her back like a bloated Ozark tick. I understand this woman is noticeably disturbed by the whole "being attacked by a ravenous ghoul" thing, but she still should have taken a moment to recognize and appreciate the miracle that just occurred before her very eyes. The zombie's already breaking so many natural laws by simply being a zombie, so who cares if he defies the law of gravity?

Alan Ruck plays the patriarch of the family that lives next door to Tony Hall, and he crowds his family into a panic room after his oldest son gets his throat torn out by the family's Eastern European zombie maid. He convinces his wife that the boy will rise again and threaten the entire family, and she finally relents to his requests to shoot the kid in the head. Then he just puts his gun down and  seems to forget the imminent danger posed by his pre-zombie son for a few minutes and actually has the balls to act surprised when Alan Ruck, Jr. starts gnawing on his entrails. That's what he gets for refusing to open the door for Tony Hall and his terrified family when they come asking for shelter.

When the terrified family is gathered at Ruck's front door, begging for shelter, he just brushes them off by telling them that he heard some unsubstantiated story from Europe that when the sun rises, the zombies just collapse where they stand, so all they have to do is survive until dawn and they'll be safe. So the zombies in this movie are operating on Minecraft rules? I kept waiting for a Creeper to sneak up on somebody and blow them the fuck up when they least expected it. At least that would have been cool.

So everybody else dies, leaving Tony Hall, Daryl Hannah (who was bitten by her zombie mother, but didn't turn into a zombie herself because I guess that's not how it works in this movie), their daughter, and the late Alan Ruck's other son, who is adorably clutching a stuffed panda toy he stole from some corpse in a mausoleum. The sun rises, the zombies all fall down, and they're all left to wonder what will happen when the sun sets in the evening.

Will the zombies rise again? Will Daryl Hannah fire her agent? Has The Asylum finally made a decent movie? The answer to that final question is a resounding "no". Zombie Night is a sack of flaming shit on my doorstep.

The screenplay, written by three illiterate circus clowns, has its characters constantly making the stupidest possible decisions given their situation, and the dialogue is absolutely fucking atrocious. The cast runs the gamut from "bored" to "what the fuck have I done to deserve this?!", with only our two leads ever managing to not completely embarrass themselves, instead only mostly embarrassing themselves. John Gulager adds nothing to this film as a director, just pointing the camera at the actors and calling it good. I'm pretty sure the man didn't care about the movie he was making, just like seemingly everybody else involved. It's like the entire cast and crew just saw the production as some kind of obligation they couldn't avoid, because Asylum head honcho David Michael Latt called in a bunch of favors and they all felt guilty because he's such a nice guy and he helped them all move that one time and never asked for anything in return. So Zombie Night sucks.

You know one thing I'm tired of? Every fucking zombie movie or TV show or whatever else takes place in a world where nobody's ever heard of zombies in pop culture. It's always "holy shit, the dead are rising from the grave! What do we do?!" This genre needs its own Scream, a clever, self-aware movie featuring characters who know and understand the tropes of the genre but still fall victim to them despite their best intentions. Come to think of it, I guess we already have that movie. It's called Shaun Of The Dead, and I just have just watched that again instead of this garbage.

Fuck me, man. I promised myself I'd never watch anymore dreck from The Asylum, and now I've been tricked into watching two of their movies in less than a week. I feel tired and hollowed-out, like a sagging Jack-O'-Lantern that's been sitting on the front porch long after Halloween has come and gone, forgotten and left to rot by an uncaring family, seen only by the mail carrier every day as she delivers a series of increasingly disturbing and graphic love letters to the woman of the house, the return address on the envelopes listed only as "From Hell".

I'm closing the book on this whole SCHLOCK CORRIDOR thing for now. Thirteen days is more than enough. I may revisit this format from time to time, but I can't watch anymore shitty movies for a while. It's starting to effect my mental health. I'll return tomorrow with my annual Halloween observance, where I intend to celebrate the holiday the only way I know how.

Yes, of course it's a fucking podcast.

TIME MARCHES ON!