3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End

2024, Carles Torres (Pet) -- Amazon

Despite not having any evidence to such, I want to say this movie was released because of the trailers for 28 Years Later appearing, with such impactful tension. Not because this movie has the same level of tension or gravitas, but merely because in the world of "zombie" sub-genres, these two share a world. Not literally, just that both "plagues" are people infected with a rage virus. To be clear(er), this is not a movie about the dead rising or walking or shambling. This is about a pandemic that quickly infects people and changes them into running, screaming, biting, tearing, eating monsters.

Oh, and its set just before Xmas, so if I had felt so compelled, I might have included it in the Xmas Leftovers.

So, just before Xmas in Spain, Manel (Francisco Ortiz, Amar es para siempre) is driving home from his sister's place, with his GF, and crashes his car -- she dies. One year later he is a mess, so much so that he just ignores all the news going on about the emerging pandemic. Via said news in the background, and over video call arguments with his sister, we see the pandemic go from "its in Russia" to Spain closing its borders to "shit, its here too". His sister and family, with ties to the government, are evacuated the the Canary Islands and she makes her brother promise to not be sent to any quarantine zones -- "shelter in place" is his best option. Not long after, he and his cat Lúculo are the only ones in his neighbourhood.

My favourite zombie survival movies give me this brief period of reprieve where the survivor can hide away in their home. As long as the water continues to flow, the automated power plants provide some electricity and you have plenty of food stored away, you can go ... for a while. Survival is counted in days, weeks and rarely looks to the future, nor to the reasons as to why you are fighting to survive. I guess, no matter how bleak it is, we always expect things to just "blow over" eventually. Manel has all this, and an additional boon of a side-gig in the solar power business. Even when the power goes down, he can still charge his phone.

Eventually he starts running out of the essentials and has to go outside. And eventually he realizes he has to leave the whole area. Via an elderly neighbour he finds, he learns of boats leaving the coast, bound for the Canaries. While he hasn't heard from his sister, as even with power, cell towers have died, he believes her to be safe. But now he has to find his way to the coast, with his cat.

Zombie flicks are almost always road movies. There are always obstacles and ever present danger, but the point is to get from A to B where maybe there is something better. We know that the 'maybe' is always tenuous. Zombie plagues tell us that, really, there is no where safe. Manel tries to escape by water, but his boat breaks down. He is picked up by Russian sailors, but learns they are more dangerous than the zombies and escapes with one of the less-evil sailors when Manel tells him he knows where a helicopter will be, and the Russian Ukrainian knows how to fly it. I am not sure why Manel thinks the helicopter will just be there, unused, just waiting for them to find it, but sure.... a lot of the movie has Manel acting on faith, an automated belief that safety is around the next corner.

Of course, there are more people at the hospital, and LOTS of zombies (hospital = infected people) and the Russians have followed them... for revenge? They have to make their way quietly through the maze of an abandoned hospital, to the miraculously still-there helicopter, through the hordes, and avoid the Russians. It felt like the end-scenario for a video game, the final chapter in a game where getting onto the chopper precedes the closing credits. And, actually, my favourite zombie game, Left 4 Dead from 2008, had this exact scenario --- get through a hospital, to the roof, to be picked up by a helicopter.

Unfortunately, as the chopper flies over open water, packed with kids, Manel's phone finally connects and.... "DON'T COME TO THE CANARIES !!" The End.

They likely won't get their sequel, but for a generic zombie flick, it was pretty solid. Like in 28 Days Later, they find the balance between survival and the journey and the tension-terror of fighting off the zombies. Most of the thrilling escapades feel plausible, and there is just enough background behind Manel to actually root for him. But it's no Danny Boyle movie. We rewatched that last night and it feels so much like the template for movies, and video games, to come. Obviously this one. Boyle stripped his movie down to the bones, especially with the camera work. The movies that follow will always be bigger, brighter and attempting more, but I hope that this one stands out, in the world of Spanish zombie movies.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): For a Few Dollars More

1965, Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West) - Amazon

The Man With No Name is now called Manco (Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry) and he's a bounty hunter, not some itinerate wanderer. Grab a poster off the sheriff's office wall, track down the criminal, shoot him and drag the body back to claim the reward. That is the way of the Old West.

This one was alright. If the last one surprised me by having more plot than I expected, this one had ... less? If it did anything, it allowed the villain to be more than a dummy who is foiled by our daring & clever Good Guys.

So, El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, Hercules and the Captive Women) has broken himself from jail and reconnected with his notorious gang. He has exited the jail with a plan to rob the bank in El Paso, Texas, This bank's vault is said to be unbreakable, with lots of armed guards and many layers of barred rooms within the bank itself. Also, the real vault, as in the place that has all the gold, is not a vault at all, but a single safe hidden behind a pretty wooden cabinet. Indio got this knowledge from his cellmate.

After some initial rivalry, Manco and fellow bounty hunter Col Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef, Escape from New York) decide to team up to get Indio and his gang. Rough looking Manco will insinuate himself into Indio's gang while pristine & precise Mortimer sets himself up in the hotel across from the bank. The plan goes decently enough but Indio is smarter than both of them -- he doesn't go in the front door as they expected, but just blows up the wall at the back of the bank, roping and dragging off the safe/cabinet.

The gangsters  run away with their loot, and Mortimer gives chase, anticipating their destination. He shows Indio how to get into the safe without blowing it up. Indio promises the cash will be divvied up after the dust, the ever present dust, settles in a month. Manco and Mortimer both have the idea they can steal the money under Indio's nose but are caught, but not before they actually do steal it, and hide it... by tossing it into a tree. Good thing it wasn't actually gold, but... promissory notes? Anywayz, Indio reveals he knew that both of them were bounty hunters.

Indio is a sly little fucker who has even further plans, including the betrayal of his own gang, framing one for freeing the bounty hunters and setting others against each other. And he knows the bunch he sends after the bounty hunters will just die at their hands. It all ends with the inevitable stand-off, but primarily between Mortimer and Indio, where its revealed that "you killed my sister, prepare to die!"

If anything, this movie suffered from trying to be more. The greater budget is very apparent in the number of extras, the full taverns, the number of characters with speaking parts. And the construction of the El Paso town, a full town that is apparently now a tourist attraction in the wilds of Spain. But in trying to be more, it seemed to have lost some of its focus, on the characters, on the styles that made the first so compelling. 

I realize I am not taking to these "spaghetti westerns" as much as I thought I would, and its primarily the loss of the majestic landscapes of the "proper" America westerns. In my mind, a good Western is about the journeys as much as the action and gun play. The overseas films are distilling some pretty specific stylistic choices which do make for great characters but maybe are not my interest. But still, my long meandering way, I am still interested in exploring the sub-genre.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Xtreme

2021, Daniel Benmayor (Tracers) -- Netflix

Or Xtremo.

The last of the "revenge flicks from other countries" I clicked that day, this one being Spain.

Technically you have a handful more but those were added just because you wanted them on a list, not because you were thinking of them as a contiguous whole.

This movie begins using a trope I have always hated in American movies -- a Pistol of Never Ending Rounds (dude, it wasn't a magical item). The movie begins with a crime boss closing a deal with "The Columbians", his children as lieutenants: blood son Lucero (Óscar Jaenada, The Shallows), recently returned from Japan where he was to learn honour among the Yakuza, Maria (Andrea Duro, The Curse of the Handsome Man) his tech and money handler, and Máximo (Teo Garcia, stuntman's feature debut), his enforcer and adopted son. But Lucero hasn't learned anything from the Yakuza but how to be brutal, and kills all the Columbian representatives, and then his own father. He sends his loyal thug Finito (Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Rambo: Last Blood) to kill Max and his son, as Max was "getting out of the life" with the blessing of Lucero's father. Finito shoots Max a couple of times in the back, and then forces the dying man to watch as he shoots the young boy. And then leaves him to die in the burning building.

But the scene I refer to is when Lucero decides to betray his father's bargain and execute every Columbian himself, walking from person to person, shooting them with his big, shiny .357 Magnum. This is a scene, repeated many times later, where he is a perfect shot, never missing, never reloading, always killing, one bullet, one body, never taking cover, while others cannot even come close to hitting him. If it was That Guy "back in the day", I would have turned the movie off, but I was curious to see it through, to see what could be made of this Spanish John Wick (again, it desperately seeks the comparison) and how Max, who is definitely not dead at the hands of Finito, would play out his revenge.

Years later, Lucero is hiding out somewhere away from Barcelona. The leaders of the rest of the gangs in their syndicate don't trust him, with good reason. Max (almost nobody knows he's alive) and Maria have reconnected, and while Max hides out, all anger and fuzzy hair, in a disused garage, Maria has a mansion in the hills, where she lives off what remains of her father's fortune. Meanwhile Leo (Óscar Casas, HollyBlood), a cocky teen is playing the role of low level drug dealer for Finito, but also as a source of irritant to the Russians, as Lucero hopes to instigate them into response. Why? Oh who knows. The movie wants us to see Lucero as having some master plan behind killing his father, killing the Columbians and then running away, but it plays out mostly like a petulant child. Anywayz, Max interrupts some Russians putting a beat down on Leo, which reveals he is alive to the wrong people.

The two connect, Max showing Leo some moves, and Leo mocking Max for being a hermit in a garage. But their connection quickly draws Finito, who tracks down and brutally slays Leo's innocent family. They know it will draw Max out, and it does, but with unexpected consequences -- the plan Max and Maria have been working through for years has to be escalated, which is convenient cuz Lucero's own plan involves paying off the syndicate leaders with the cash he has made during his years of unchecked violence. So Max steals it. They end up face to face in the final act, Max claiming he will exchange the money for Maria, who was captured while caring for Leo, injured... when his family was killed? Or later? It is at this point, as has happened in so many other generic action thriller revenge movies, where I realize nothing has really stuck. I barely remember the what's or why's.

I mean, it ends as Max and Lucero fight, with katanas, because swords are cool and Lucero has a cool Yakuza back tattoo and... well, despite some weak attempts at style, I have to admit, that the opening trope should have advised me what I was getting into. Its something that in the 90s would have starred JCVD and would have been relegated to the bottom shelf of the video store. 

It seems I am unable to even draw out the ire I have for movies I find terrible, in these lackadaisical action movies, the uninspired, and yet constantly seeking to steal visuals and tropes from better movies. I mean, this one even goes so far as to make a nod to the now famous lobby scene from The Matrix. But I am sure that just like there were bachelor men who lived off those bottom-shelfers, there are those who will watch this movie with the rapt attention of a better viewer.

Now the question remains -- why the fuck are you watching these?

Double Dose of Dracula

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today: it's two Dracula movies, shot at the same time, on the same sets, but by different people, in different languages, with two surprisingly different results....)

Dracula (1931) dir. Tod Browning - CriterionChannel
Dracula (1931) dir. George Melford - CriterionChannel

I last probably watched the classic Bela Legosi-starring Dracula back around the time that the Francis Ford Coppola version came out, in the early-to-mid 90's.  It didn't make much of an impression. All I retained of the film was what everyone remembers, that incredible dolly shot pushing in on Legosi in his dungeon, and those many insert shots of Legosi's eyes with the light highlighting them.  The rest of the film - any other story or performances - were completely lost to me.  It didn't leave much of an impression.

For October the Criterion Channel is presenting all the main Universal Monsters horror movies, starting with the classic Dracula.  But the classic is backed up with the lesser known Carlos Villarías-starring Spanish-language Dracula that was using the same sets and script.  What resulted was two unsurprisingly similar film, yet still drastically different viewing experiences.

To start, the Browning version clocks in at a should-be-brisk 75 minutes, but the Spanish version is a whopping 1 hour and 43 minutes long.  That roughly 30 minutes does indeed make a big difference.

The Browning version is considered a classic, if only because that's what the majority of the English-speaking audience know as the original Dracula.  The truth is, it's not a great movie.  It's not even a good movie.  It's 75 minutes feel like a very tough watch.  It starts off with some exterior shots and scenes, always a welcome surprise in old black-and-white studio films, as well as some matte painting to establish Trasylvania.  Young lawyer Renfield is on a journey to the keep of Count Dracula, which the superstitious locals warn him about.  The locals, speaking in Hungarian, is also a wonderful thing in the old films, the last bit of naturalism this version of Dracula will have.  

Renfield manages to get dropped off at his meeting point, where Dracula, posing as the carriage driver, picks him up and escorts him to the mansion, where he greets him inside in a different form (to be clear, he transforms into a bat, which then carries Renfields luggage indoors, and he quick-changes into his finest tie-n-tails...it's pretty comical when you think about this charade Drac puts on for Renfield's benefit).  Renfield is there to solidify a legal deal for the purchase/rental of an estate in England for some reason, which, after Renfield is drugged and molested by Drac's wives, he goes nuts and becomes his servant.  While in transport from Transylvania to England by boat, Drac kills all the crew, and Renfield is institutionalized upon arrival.  Drac murders a girl on the street then greets his neighbours at a ballet.  The rest of the film is basically Drac preying upon Mina Seward, and Professor Van Helsing deducing who the culprit of all these neck-bite-murders is (that makes it sound more exciting than it is).

The film, upon leaving Transylvania, gets real boring, real quick.  There's no real character development to any of the players, they have no personality and their motivations are largely absent.  The performers, to a one, are all just delivering lines (or pausing while they think of their next line) and its some of the most stilted acting I've seen in a big Hollywood movie.  It's truly like nobody cared about how this production came off.  

The editing of the film leads to a lot of memorable imagery, but most of which has been co-opted and parodied to such an extent that it all feels kind of hack and corny.  At the same time the editing has trimmed much of the story down to largely its bare bones exposition, which makes for dull, dull viewing.  I'm also assuming there was some censorship as a lot of references to murder, blood sucking or people raising from the dead seem starkly absent (which can be found in the Spanish version).  As a result, the events of the film seem disconnected from scene to scene at times, or laughably disjointed.

Legosi really crafted something unique in his interpretation of Dracula, but unique doesn't equal good.  Dracula, with his slicked-back hair, cape, pressed shirt, cummerbund and tuxedo tails, is supposed to perhaps be debonnaire and suave, but he just seems like a weirdo (which is what Mina tells her friend Lucy who seems ridiculously smitten with him and his bizarre accent).  Dare I say it, I think Dracula is a loser.  This Legosi version is clearly the template upon which Nandor in What We Do In The Shadows was built. 

Dwight Frye's Renfield goes from zero to sixty once he's turned into the vampire's servant. He's annoyingly manic and doing way too much.  Much more than what the film asks for or needs.  The rest of the cast are dull, dull, dull, lacking in any real charm or personality.  Edward Van Sloane's Van Helsing is an exposition machine, and he has zero chemistry when facing off with Legosi.    

The sets of the production, and the accompanying lighting, are all really great, and it's a shame a better film wasn't using them... except there was.

It would be easy to say that the Spanish language Dracula was just a pale ape of the English version, but it's truly the superior picture.  It's not even close.  Don't get me wrong, some of the same problems with the characters and story exist in both versions - motivations are thin, and the story really doesn't ever take off with any intensity - but the performances and the direction are not just different, but really, really good.

Melford was able to see the dailies from Browning's shoot, and in the initial minutes, it seems like Melford is directly aping what Browning had done.  But it becomes starkly clear in the first big reveal of Dracula that he's not going to be content with mirroring, and that he has his own ideas for the picture.  Rather than pan away every time Dracula emerges from a coffin (as Browning does, and it makes me laugh thinking about Legosi's Dracula clumsily crawling up from the dirt to stand so upright trying to present as if he didn't just have that awkward moment), instead Melford cuts to Dracula emerging from behind the coffin lid to a dramatically different effect.

It's also clear Pablo Álvarez Rubio as Renfield is a much better actor than Frye, or at least a more sensitive actor.  He plays Renfield a bit comically in the opening moment, but after his turn, he plays him as a tortured being, which is a much different, more nuanced portray than just playing manic.

With the additional length, there are expanded scenes which allow the characters to breath, and interact more.  While Villarias' Dracula isn't all that different from Legosi's, his performance isn't as cartoony, and there's a bit more menace, though perhaps a little less danger as a result.   But the difference comes in Mina - or rather Ava as she is called here - and her relationships with her father, as well as her boyfirend Juan Harker, 

 In the Browning version, when Mina is recounting her "dream" of Dracula assaulting her to Van Helsing, it's treated coldly like exposition or a victim reciting their ordeal to a disinterested cop taking a statement.  In the Spanish version, Van Helsing and Ava's father enter the room to overhear her telling Juan of her experience, and her father, with great tenderness and compassion embraces her and helps gently convince her to show Van Helsing her wound.  It's a tremendously better and more affecting scene and really underscores the differences between the two films. 

The English version used a lot of rubber bats and spiders in the production.  Melford wisely limits their use.  His bats, as well, swoop around the sound stage, in and out quickly, where Browning's would just flap in place in a static shot, looking every bit as cheap as they were.   

I can't overstate how much more engaging the Spanish language Dracula is.  Just superior in every aspect.  Sure, Legosi is the archetype for the role, but he's pretty much his own punchline at this point.  There's next to nothing in the Browning version that isn't bettered by the Melford version.  It's just taking the whole endeavour more seriously, and it comes across as a much more engaging production as a result.

BUT IS IT HORROR? 
(yes that's right, this Double Dose has just become a surprise horror, not horror column)
I guess it's olde timey horror, but it's not scary in the slightest.  The Browning Dracula is basically self-parodying at this stage, but the Melford version is, if only a little bit, suspenseful.