River's Edge and 28 Days Later

In today's exciting extended entry on Superelectric, we cover the movies River's Edge and 28 Days Later.

And, wot's more, I have an actual link, this to an interview with Hunter S. Thompson which is only remarkable in that it appears on Don't It Suck Balls, also known as Ain't It Cool News. I link it simply because it is one very very small redeeming factor for the site, which should never be read regularly and which I visited only out of desperation.

River's Edge

River's Edge stars Crispen Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, and Dennis Hopper. It's an 80's flick, and if you're familiar with Larry Clark's Bully, you have some taste of what the film is like. Lost teens in the pacific northwest, who spend their time listening to Metallica and getting drunk/high sort-of conspire to sort-of cover up a murder of a classmate by a member of their group. Like Bully, it's based on a true story and it has very much a ring of truth about it - you can see how these idiot kids do the idiot things they do, very real in that respect. Fans of Errol Morris' "Everyone's the protagonist in their own internal movie" notion should enjoy the film, particularly Crispen Glover's odd performance, as he plays a character who desperately tries to cover up the murder and help his murderous buddy, even though the murderer, played by Daniel Roebuck who would later go on to play Jay Leno in The Late Shift, seems oddly disconnected and unconcerned by getting caught. The whole movie portrays a very real teenage lack of affect (except for Glover), and is very good.

So Bully was a Larry Clark film. Larry Clark rose to fame for directing Kids offa Harmony Korine's screenplay. Korine then wrote and directed Gummo, which also portrays the particularly American sense of alienation and despair amongst kids in small towns. That film opens with a visual nod to River's Edge, which explores much of the same territory but features a lot less outright wackiness (no bacon is taped to the walls in the movie) and a lot more actual, you know, plot. The younger brother of the Keanu Reeves character is essentially a character in Gummo or Kids, a really scary look at a kid growing up not giving a fuck about other people's lives and turning into a monster due to poverty, a lack of family, drugs, and a bad haircut. Also notable is a token Reagan conservative character who exists in the movie just to be yelled at.

River's Edge was written by Neal Jiminez, who was one of the writer's on Errol Morris' ill-fated The Dark Wind, which I haven't seen.

Anyway, the movie's fucking awesome, tons of twists, plays a lot like Blue Velvet meets Gummo but actually makes sense. I like it best for its portrayal of real America, something you just don't often see. I liked Gummo for much the same reason, and would welcome recommendations for similar films. Glue sniffing and retarded prostitutes optional.

28 Days Later

Well, it's nice to see another Danny Boyle film that I cannot compare (unfavorably, I might add) to the lint and slime that accumulates around the glans of a puerile, pre-erectile, circumcised cock. It's an engaging horror film of the zombie genre, shot on DV and looking quite pretty, I might add, in its DV-ishness. Interestingly, CGI special effects look just as fake in DV as they do on film, so let's all be grateful that this film is mostly an old-school Zombie chiller.

The film is incredibly derivative. After a short, unneccesary, and overly message-y prologue (itself stolen from 12 Monkeys with some Clockwork Orange for seasoning), the action starts with a man waking up in a hospital, discovering that the city is completely empty, having suffered some apocalyptic tragedy. This is the beginning of Day of the Triffids. Then the fellow hooks up with some people who have -so far- survived the zombie holocaust. Two members of the group are found via a light signal from a building window, also from Triffids. The group then goes out and finds a small military band with plans for surviving the zombie nightmare that involve some icky reproductive plans, also a key situation in Triffids.

Unlike Triffids, there are no giant, man-eating, locomoting shrubbery.

At any rate, the film is very much like Triffids, which critics had said explored the impact of disaster on the British middle class, which I guess it does. 28 does not. It's use of horror as social commentary is pretty limited to "Gee, humans can be real monsters, can't they?" For good, socially aware zombie filmmaking, I would have to suggest George Romero's zombie trilogy, particularly Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. You have to do some background research on the imdb to find which cuts are the proper ones to see. Suffice it to say that you want the long Dawn of the Dead and the original b&w Night of the Living Dead and not its remake.

Those films are particularly notable in that they take place in actual surroundings - they have definite locations and contexts which they're critiquing, particularly Dawn... which takes place in a giant shopping mall. 28, in contrast, sort of takes place in London for the first bit, although it really only uses its location to make the point that a once bustling metropolis has been reduced to a ghost town by the zombie plague. In Dawn..., the zombies gather at a mall outside Pittsburgh. Why? "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives. " Dawn... is pretty heavy in its commentary, though the pokes at rural Pittsburgh hunters in Night... are very good, too.

Anyway, once 28's gang reaches a small military outpost, it turns into a mix of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, some freaky Italian's I Spit on your Grave and Romero's third zombie film, Day of the Dead. The army gang there is unprofessional and half-mad. This part of the film sets up a new horror - the soldiers who want to rape the women in the London survival party. Another member of the party goes on a bloodthirsty rampage to prevent this, using zombies to destroy the soldiers.

Day of the Dead took place in a military facility and, just as in 28, the real horrors are those of the authoritarian soldiers who preside over the small community of scientists with a leer and swagger. Like 28, they're keeping a zombie in chains for research purposes. Like 28, they meet their end at the zombie's hands.

I reference I Spit on your Grave as it's a rape-revenge movie. The menace of the soldiers about to rape the two women is very real and probably the scariest part of the movie, although I wonder if it goes a little too far in the exploitation direction. Unlike ISOYG, nobody's actually raped, and the revenging is done by a male member of the London party, who suddenly turns into John McClane from Die Hard and even gouges out the eyes of one soldier. A bit over the top, and very much like Last House..., Wes Craven's EARLY EARLY (pre-Nightmare on Elm Street, and WAY WAY pre-Scream) revenge horror flick in which a mother and father brutally slaughter some dudes who raped and killed their daughter. That's a pretty fucking disturbing film, by the way. The violence is brutal and sadistic and it numbs the viewer much as one imagines Keanu Reeves' little brother in River's Edge is numbed. Ha! A callback for you motherfuckers!

28's revenge is not, however, as over the top as the ending, which is the most ridiculous escapist fantasy this side of the Universal cut of Brazil. Everybody turns out ok, they're all rescued, the world doesn't end, blah blah bullshit.

Danny Boyle and the guy who wrote The Beach, since they were editing together a horrorfilm megagmix, should've stolen the ending from Night of the Living Dead - far and away the best horror film ending ever. And yes, I'm including The Shining. Oh, and I should note that 28 has a second ending tacked on to it that I'd rather not think about.

Now, this is one pretty unoriginal film, and it really doesn't stand up as a bright and shining light in the horror canon. According to Boyle, the film's real contribution to the zombie genre is that it has fast zombies. OK, word up, dude. If you're looking for the best in classic zombie, go for Night of the Living Dead. For a truly inventive zombie tale, check out Criterion's edition of Carnival of Souls or Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

I've bagged on this film a bunch, so let me get to the real point. I realize that all (one?) of you reading this have seen probably none of the films it steals from. I have to say that 28 steals pretty effectively. The movie is genuinely thrilling, has some excellent surprises, and keeps getting better and better as it goes along. I have seen those movies, and even though I know all the stolen bits, those bits were stolen because they are effective. I very much recommend 28 Days Later. I would say, though, that the film's real saving grace is its DV cinematography. It's nice. Better than fucking Blair Witch, that's for DAMN sho'.

By the way, if you've got DV movie recommendations, I'd like to hear them. I can think of 28, Blair Witch, Time Code, and Julian Donkey Boy. There has to be some good other stuff out there.

But, really, if you've got IFC, watch the Romero zombie flicks when they show them around Halloween.

Posted by mattb at August 13, 2003 03:53 AM