Schlock Corridor: Day Two

SCHLOCK CORRIDOR: Night Of The Living Dead Re-Animation

It's a well-known fact among horror cinema enthusiasts that George Romero's original Night Of The Living Dead is in the public domain due to a clerical error on the part of the film's original distributor, allowing it to be released on home video by anybody who wants to make a quick buck. The most notorious of these releases would be the so-called "30th Anniversary Edition" released by Anchor Bay in 1999.

The original film's co-writer John A. Russo shot a bunch of new scenes featuring a cadre of terribly wooden actors and inserted it into the existing film, excising over ten minutes of footage featuring the original cast, completely killing the film's nearly-perfect pacing and generally making the viewing experience a very awkward one. A new and thoroughly mediocre synthesizer-heavy score provided by non-actor Scott Vladimir Licina also helps to destroy any tension this "improved" version of the film could ever hope to build.

Licina also co-stars in this version as a caricature of a southern priest with an anachronistic beard who gets bitten by a zombie early on and never transforms into a zombie himself. This version of the film ends with a reporter visiting the priest at an in-patient care center, asking him about his experiences with the undead. He rambles on and on about fire and brimstone and the wrath of God while he strokes a small dog resting on his lap and it is some of the worst acting I have ever seen in the entirety of my miserable life.

The "30th Anniversary Edition" of Night Of The Living Dead is a complete fucking atrocity and should be avoided at all costs. Luckily, Anchor Bay allowed this particular title to go out of print relatively quickly, and it's become something of a half-forgotten curiosity among fans, which is still more than it deserves. I'm mentioning all of this to provide context. kiddies. This is the absolute nadir of the saga of Night Of The Living Dead. I shudder to think it could get any worse.

This brings me to the realm of remakes, which are all the rage these days. And Night Of The Living Dead, being in the public domain, is a prime target among many opportunistic individuals circling the fringes of the film industry, eager to line their pockets with some easy cash. Perhaps the most notable of the recent spate of Night-related films is 2006's Night Of The Living Dead 3D, starring genre veteran Sid Haig. Directed by some guy nobody has ever heard of named Jeff Broadstreet, the film very loosely follows the plot of the 1968 original, at least up to a point. The introduction of a bug-eyed, shovel-toting funeral home director named Gerald Tovar (Haig) throws the whole affair right off a cliff into strange new territory. You see, in this version of the story, Tovar's funeral home is ground-zero of the zombie outbreak, due (somehow) to Tovar's shady business practices.

Apparently Tovar and his late father had an under-the-table deal with certain individuals within the U.S. government to store some undefined biohazard at the funeral home, and it ended up contaminating some of the corpses on the premises, causing them to rise again. Over time, Tovar started up some experiments of his own, using samples of the biohazard to infect other corpses, seeing himself as chosen by God to resurrect the dead as some sort of holy purpose.

Newsflash: the movie sucks. The script sucks, the actors suck, the direction sucks, the music sucks, it looks cheap as hell, and there's some really dodgy digital effects work throughout. Even Sid Haig, usually a dependable enough actor in low rent genre fare, just seems worn out in this movie, unable to give a shit about what's going on around him enough to commit to a performance. The DVD features an anaglyph 3D presentation, and I had to switch it off less than twenty minutes in because it gave me a migraine, giving the 2D version a watch the next day, after my brain stopped trying to punch its way out of my skull.

So yeah, the movie is terrible, but it's still not as bad as the "30th Anniversary Edition" of the original Night Of The Living Dead. That thing is just an affront to all things cinematically sacred. I eventually forgot all about this completely mediocre motion picture and got on with my life, until I noticed a recommendation under Hellraiser: Revelations in my Netflix queue. What was Night Of The Living Dead: Re-Animation? Then I recognized the name of the film's director: Jeff Broadstreet. Was this... a sequel? I had to satisfy my curiosity, so I pressed the inviting "play" button and settled in for a shit storm of epic proportions.

Re-Animation is actually a prequel to the 2006 3D remake, detailing the genesis of the zombie outbreak at the Tovar & Son Funeral Home. This time, the role of Gerald Tovar is played by Andrew Divoff, the once and future Wishmaster, and I am pleased to report that Divoff is actually invested in his performance for the most part, never sinking as low as Sid Haig's nearly somnambulistic portrayal of the same character in the first film. Divoff knows how to ham it up, punctuating his dialogue with the occasional Grinch-like grin that seems to stretch from ear to ear. There's a twinkle in his eye that informs the audience that he's trying not to waste our time.

Divoff is paired with genre legend Jeffrey Combs as his estranged brother Harold, who comes to visit after losing all of his money through some unexplained means. He's a desperate man, and he still resents his brother for inheriting their father's estate when the old man passed away several years before. So Harold arrives in Hinzmanville (a subtle nod to the original film) to hit his sinister-looking brother up for some cash. Being friends off-screen, the two have a very natural rapport which does wonders to sell their on-screen relationship. They work well together, and it's a shame they aren't paired up more often. Unfortunately, Combs' role is rather small despite his second-billing in the opening and closing titles, and he is quickly (and conveniently) dispatched just when his character becomes really engaging to the viewer.

Make no mistake: this is the Andrew Divoff show. None of the other characters ever manage to rise above their two-dimensional origins from the frankly terrible screenplay, which is not entirely the fault of the screenwriters. A good actor can spin gold from even the basest material if they are so inclined, and none of the actors in this ensemble are really up for that task, Combs and Divoff excluded. We're introduced to Tovar's apprentice, a new hire who brings her tools to the job, an introverted necrophiliac assistant who seemingly hates everybody with a pulse, a derpy orderly who likes to get high on the job, and the funeral home's receptionist, Tovar's pleasant aunt Lou, and none of them ever register as even a blip on the radar. They're just terrible actors, truly terrible actors, so much so that I can't tell if they're even actually trying to act in this film.

Around every corner in Night Of The Living Dead: Re-Animation, you'll find empty-eyed, slack-jawed fiends, shambling around the scenery like walking corpses, but these aren't the extras playing the zombies. I'm talking about actors with lines! Surprisingly, even the zombie actors aren't terribly committed to their performances, looking and acting more like bored and underpaid extras wearing shoddy make-up than zombies. This feels like such a bottom of the barrel film, it's almost fascinating at times.

And the story occasionally acts like it wants to try something interesting, but eventually the screenwriters seem to realize that they're not clever enough to come up with anything innovative and just drop whatever plot thread they were half-heartedly following. Case in point: the film introduces a Sarah Palin knock-off called "Sister Sarah", pontificating about the greatness of our country's burgeoning Tea Party movement on the "Fixed News" channel. Jeffrey Combs and Andrew Divoff are watching the broadcast, and Combs reveals his affinity for the bloviating pundit. Divoff sneers at his sibling for espousing his right-wing views, but Combs will not be swayed: Sister Sarah is the future of the Republican party, and that's the bottom line.

This scene is trying to be funny, I suppose, but it's not even a half-hearted attempt at satire. It's like the dipshits who wrote this scene thought it would be enough to cast a fake Sarah Palin for a short cameo and the rest would take care of itself, but it doesn't work that way. You have to actually try if you want to create a successful satire. Combs and Divoff try their damnedest, but there's only so much any actor can do before you're expecting them to work a fucking miracle with your skidmark of a screenplay.

If the movie had just left it at that, I could have shrugged it off as a noble failure. But no, this fucking movie had to fly too close to the sun on wings of delusion, pushing things too far. For no plausible reason, Sister Sarah just happens to be in Hinzmanville for a book signing, and somehow ends up at the Tovar & Son Funeral Home to meet our cast after a vehicular accident. Two problems with this scenario: 1) Jeffrey Combs, whose character is the unabashed fan of Sister Sarah, has already checked out of the narrative, and 2) before Sister Sarah can even attempt to interact with the other actors, she's bitten by a zombie and disappears until the end of the movie, briefly popping up in the climax to be unceremoniously shot in the head like all the other zombie extras. This is a completely wasted opportunity, and I am astounded that the assholes who made this movie even bothered to include this character at all.

What was the point? It means absolutely nothing, and it just feels like the work of somebody with no understanding of storytelling or narrative. Does Jeff Broadstreet watch this film and think he did a good job? Does he pat himself on the back for his witty inclusion of this stiff, barely-there Sarah Palin stand-in who contributes absolutely nothing to his already terrible film? What a pointless fucking tangent.

And the film's self-referential streak gets annoying (and confusing). In the 2006 film, we briefly see the original 1968 film playing on a television in a few scenes, and that was more than enough. In Re-Animation, Combs and Divoff have a conversation about the zombies at the funeral home, and Combs asks Divoff if the zombies run or shamble. Divoff indicates the latter, and Combs calls them "Romero zombies", implying that the Romero films exist in this fictional universe. Then with his next breath, Combs rattles off a series of zombie outbreaks that the government has covered up throughout the years, in 1968 (Night Of The Living Dead), 1978 (Dawn Of The Dead), 1985 (Day Of The Dead), and 1990 (Tom Savini's Night Of The Living Dead remake), which he claims to be eerily similar to the 1968 outbreak, only gorier. This just makes my head spin. The film can't even bother to get its own mythology straight in the same scene! The screenwriters are winking so hard at the audience with this shit that they forgot to actually do anything with their metatextual garbage.

So Night Of The Living Dead: Re-Animation sucks, and that's hardly a surprise. It's slightly ahead of 2006's Night Of The Living Dead 3D based solely on the performances of Andrew Divoff and Jeffrey Combs, but it's still a terrible movie, and these two titans of low-rent genre fare deserve so much better. Still... it could be worse. It could be Night Of The Living Dead: The 30th Anniversary Edition.

TOMORROW: Breeders