Because it is impossible to have too much Buckaroo Banzai in your life, I give to you the best ending credit sequence of all time:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqJ3iGBdOo

• Title: Swamp Thing
• Year: 1982
• Rating: PG
• Director: Wes Craven
• Writer(s): Wes Craven (comic: Len Wein, Bernie Wrightson)
• Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Louis Jourdan, Ray Wise, Dick Durock, David Hess, Nicholas Worth

When a horrible accident transforms Dr. Alec Holland into a half-man, half-plant juggernaut, he uses his strength to protect the woman he loves, and defeat the power-hungry maniac who would use his secret formula for evil.

Rewind . . .

. . . and Swamp Thing is the stuff of long, rainy Sunday afternoons and grilled cheese sandwiches in front of the TV. I can still picture the VHS tape — curling label kept in place by scotch tape, security tab busted out, the titles Swamp Thing and Every Which Way But Loose printed with childish precision in blue ink. My father and I must have watched it twenty times when I was a kid, in those preteen years before so many other distractions began to pull at my attention. Swamp Thing, for some reason, was a readily agreed upon mutual favorite of ours, low-budget campfest that it was, and it had something for us both. For me it had monsters and gunplay and a fun scifi premise. For Dad it had monsters and gunplay and a fun scifi premise and Adrienne Barbeau running around the swamp in a tight t-shirt. It was a comic book movie long before such things became ubiquitous, and it was unapologetically brainless fun.

Swamp Thing, based on the long-running DC comic, takes the no nonsense approach to story, and moves quickly once we get past the creepy intro shots of the bayou. Barbeau, a government agent of an unspecified sort named Alice Cable, arrives in the swamp to see how some super-secret research is going, while at the same time scene cuts to a cadre of lurking mercenary types indicate that trouble will soon be in the offing. Cable meets Dr. Alec Holland, played by Ray Wise, who endears himself to her through some botanically-themed flirting. Holland is working on a formula to end human hunger (and we are told that be the year 2001, even bloggers won’t be able to feed themselves), but his formula is seen to have some other, weird properties — namely rapid plant growth and regeneration. Just at this eureka moment, the mercs bust in and destroy the hidden research base, and bad rich guy Arcane (Louis Jordan) takes Holland’s research notes. Holland, trying to resist, ends up dowsed with his own formula and set on fire — he runs off into the swamp and isn’t seen again.

Until, that is, he returns as an eight-foot tall plant man to kick some ass.

And so we get motorboats and machine guns and grenades, stunts involving men and explosions flying all over the place, and a big guy (Dick Durock) in a green rubber suit lunging and roaring. It’s great, good guy vs. bad guy b-movie fun, and doesn’t ever pretend to be anything more than that. Cable herself alternates between superchick and damsel in distress, throwing punches and blasting away with an assault rifle one minute, and tripping over her own feet the next. Arcane is deliciously evil, Jourdan’s effete and urbane performance elevating him into a world class jerk. The whole thing works as well as it could, and stretches the resources it has to create the best looking movie you can get for three million bucks — probably the cost of the trailer rental for a supporting actor in a modern Hollywood production.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . and nobody looks down their nose at comic book movies anymore, least not the suits in movieland who all know that superheroes, monsters, and scifi action equal big bucks. Wes Craven himself has gone on to enjoy a lot of success with his Scream franchise and other films, building on the success of his breakout 1984 hit A Nightmare on Elmstreet, but Swamp Thing doesn’t really fit in with his oeuvre of teen scare movies. The tradition of low budget movies of this kind still survives in numerous made for TV and direct to DVD releases, but now the rubber monster suits are as likely to be replaced with equally as dodgy CGI. Maybe some ten year old kid out there now will, in a few decades, write with fondness about all those syfy channel original movies he managed to watch in his own misspent youth.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

In rewatching Swamp Thing for the first time in what had to be twenty years I wasn’t really under any illusions that I was revisiting a genre classic. While I was somewhat pleasantly surprised with how entertained I was by it over-and-above the strong rush of nostalgia that informed my viewing, I didn’t come away with the feeling that this was a movie that deserved to be studied or passed down and impressed upon a new generation. And that, frankly, is just fine — because no amount of classic status could really measure against my own personal appraisal of the film, and those rainy Sundays with my Dad.

But it is a fun movie done in an effectively workmanlike style, and seems more of a throwback to the old creature feature films and 50s double-feature fodder, than an early outlier of the modern superhero movie. It’s much better than equivalent films of the era, and hits a pretty good balance between camp and thrills. While the later part of the movie does seem to fall apart a bit and feels a bit flat, the great opening sequence has already done its job of investing the viewer in the outcome of the flick, and the environment of the swamp itself is filmed with a higher degree of artistry than one would expect. For those of us that remember it from childhood, I think Swamp Thing can happily occupy the niche of guilty pleasure without having to aspire to true cult classic status — and, really, that’s better than most rubber suit monster films can ever hope to aspire to.

• Nostalgia Rating: Monstrous Huge
• Rewatch Potential: Low, lest the tint of nostalgia fade in the cold glare of the present.
• Wilhelm Scream?: Yes, when Swamp Thing throws a mercenary off a boat.
• Unexpected Cameo: Well, not exactly a cameo, but I had totally forgotten that Leland Palmer was the Swamp Thing!
• Verdict: Though perhaps only truly appealing when seen through the lens of nostalgia, Swamp Thing should satisfy aficionados of b-movie camp, and may be of interest to fans of modern comic book movies as well.

What I Learned: That there’s a monster within us all and, if you’re really bad, yours will have a pig-dog head and wield a sword.

Top Marks: Jude. Played by Reggie Batts — who has appeared in no other film before or since according to IMDB — Jude is a minor character that steals the show. He’s a scrawny kid with coke bottle glasses and a squeaky voice that, apparently, runs a crummy convenience store on an old swamp road. He becomes Cable’s only ally, beyond the Swamp Thing itself, and helps hide and transport her around the swamp in his boat. Batts’ weird deadpan performance isn’t stellar in terms of believability, but his off-center line delivery and natural charisma make him instantly likable. Even after a space of twenty years I found myself quoting his lines, and I can still see why, as a kid, I always looked forward to the point in Swamp Thing when Jude showed up for the first time.

If (When) It’s Remade: There was a sequel made in 1989 that ratcheted up the camp and goofiness, but I didn’t rewatch it for this review. There was even a television series that I don’t think I ever so much as caught a glimpse of. A remake, done in the vein of a modern superhero film, could certainly either be very effective or abysmal. I would certainly love to see a Swamp Thing that was more than a man in a rubber suit, and I’m sure a lot of creativity could be deployed to bring us a monster that seemed like a real man-plant hybrid. Talk of a remake has bounced around for a long time, and it looks like a 3D version (sigh) may be in the offing for the immediate future. Fingers and fronds crossed that it doesn’t suck.

Final Thoughts: Wow, what a difference between the PG of yesteryear and that of today. I’ve been seeing that in a lot of movies, particularly pre-1984 movies (when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came along and inspired the need for a PG-13 rating in the states), and the levels of violence and, in particular and especially, nudity in these earlier films would probably not fly today.

More Reviews of Swamp Thing

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.

April Fool’s was indeed full of fooling this year, but a phony post over at Comics Alliance managed to make me pretty damn envious of the inhabitants of the parallel world in which it was real. It’s Alan Moore’s next League of Extraordinary Gentleman series, and this time around its America’s heroes of the 80′s that take center stage. That’s right, MacGyver and Jack Burton, B.A. Baracus, Doc Emmet Brown, and Lisa from Weird Science — all teamed up against an undead Tony Montana and the Lost Boys! A nostalgic mash-up of the highest order.

‘Top Shelf Announces League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1988′

Seems a perfect compliment to my Movies of a Misspent Youth series, as well. If only something like this really could make it into the Fast Forward section of my reviews, the world would be a stranger, but better, place.

• Title: Logan’s Run
• Year: 1976
• Rating: PG
• Director: Michael Anderson
• Writer(s): David Zelag Goodman (novel: William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson)
• Cast: Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov

In a far-future computer-controlled city in which life ends at thirty, Logan’s job is to kill those who would escape the system. But as he learns more about a mysterious sanctuary beyond the city walls, he too seeks escape and goes on the run.

Rewind . . .

. . . I suspect there is an entire generation of people — most especially men, most especially of the geeky persuasion — who couldn’t help but think of Logan’s Run when their own thirtieth birthday rolled around. The famous premise of the film is, of course, that this far future hedonistic paradise where life is pleasant and all things can be had in abundance comes with one strict and immutable law — when you turn thirty, you check out. That’s when your lifeclock, the little color-coded crystal embedded in the palm of all the city’s citizens, starts flashing red, and you know it is time to report to Carousel and your own death. Of course, those who follow the rules and don’t make waves have some hope for renewal in the form of rebirth — the rest are destroyed.

In a time long before my own thirtieth birthday, watching Logan’s Run as a wee lad on one of those cable channels with lots of commercials and station identification breaks, thirty years probably didn’t strike me as too unreasonable, as it seemed some infinitely far away and unknowable time. Sure, I disagreed with it in principle, but really thirty was as much as an abstraction to me as fifty, both ages may as well have been the same. I have to wonder what the effect on all of us kids — and here I maintain it to be essentially impossible to have grown up in the 80s and not seen a rerurn of Logan’s Run chopped judiciously to make room for more commercials — if the original idea from William F. Nolan’s and George Clayton Johnson’s novel had been used, in which death comes at age twenty-one.

But I knew nothing of the book then (and still have not read it), though I could see that Logan’s Run was full of all the good, sensawunda stuff I liked in a movie. Future dystopias, high tech pistols, robots, a post-apocalyptic world, (and, as childhood morphed into teenagerdom, a scantily-clad Jenny Agutter started to command at least as much attention as the gee-whiz elements) — in short it had all the vitamins and minerals needed for a growing geek boy. It’s impossible to say how many times I watched the mangled TV version, but I do remember actually renting the movie once and seeing it uncut at some point and being able to immerse myself in the story in a way that I could not before.

The story, of course, follows Logan 5 and Jessica 6 on an episodic journey through their domed city and beyond, into the post-apocalyptic world of the far future United States, all in search of the fabled sanctuary. Despite the rather heavy elements of soulless authoritarianism, ruthless population enforcement, and a world in ruins, Logan’s Run somehow maintains a light, but not frivolous, touch. The eclectic music and arresting visuals further enhance the overall style of the film, and give it a borderline campy quality that is both fun and immersive. Logan’s world of the city is convincingly its own reality — effective even today, when some of the interiors seem more like the dressed up hotels or shopping malls they probably were — and anyone willing to meet the film halfway will have no trouble suspending disbelief and going along for the ride. Logan’s Run is a great example of 70s SF that knew how to balance big-wow visuals and continuous action with thought-provoking and socially relevant story elements.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . to a time when I’m past my renewal date and, needless to say, I have a pretty different perspective on Logan’s Run. If anything, the premise is even more horrifying, not merely because I now realize just how short thirty years is, but also because I see one of the points of the film that was not quite evident to me as a kid. And that is that Logan’s society is a completely adolescent one, one totally unmoored from either a past or a future, and one that exits as a complete dependency of the state. It’s bread and circuses, circa 2250, and an all-youth culture in which thirty isn’t just over-the-hill, but six-feet-under. The pretty world of Logan’s domed city is like a cross between A Brave New World and The City and the Stars, techno-authoritarianism overlaying aimless hedonism. It’s terrifying when you reflect on it, especially now, and it calls to mind elements of a more and more plausible future.

But that doesn’t make it a realistic film, it’s more of a fable, at least to contemporary eyes. The somewhat clunky, final quarter of so of the movie in which Logan and Jessica eventually make their way to the overgrown ruins of Washington DC seems both heavy handed and a little aimless, as if seeing the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial, and an antiquated looking interior of the Capitol Building deserted and broken were enough to convey a message all by themselves. It seems like a page borrowed from Planet of the Apes, and feels a bit too particular and out of place with the rest of the film. Still, it’s a necessary sequence, even if it does spend too much time winking at the audience.

If I had one major disappointment upon rewatching the film, it would be in the characterization of Logan himself. Here, York’s performance is not to blaim — in fact it’s his performance that points in a direction unfortunately not taken in the film. Early on we see the sadistic glee with with Logan pursues runners trying to escape the execution of Carousel and Last Day, and we see to his almost childlike arrogance and selfishness as one of the City’s chosen ones. For a good part of his run, Logan is in fact a double agent trying to find the organization that assists the runners in escaping the city — he even brings the hammer down on one such group hiding out underground. But there are never really any hard consequences to any of this, no reckoning, and Logan hardly even shows remorse or self-awareness as he moves from undercover runner to the real thing. The humanizing influence of his romance with Jessica, and the implications of the lies and manipulation the remnants of the human race have lived under change his motivations, but don’t seem to scratch the surface of his character. He never even confesses the truth of his earlier deception to the woman he has fallen in love with.

So, if the spectacle outweighs the script in Logan’s Run, I think we can be satisfied that it is the big story that is really being told here, and not the personal journey of any one player. Logan’s Run is more about concepts than people — even if they are very human concepts — and those big ideas are satisfyingly more than just window dressing for a fun action movie, if only barely. Watch it for the nostalgia and impressive designs, and watch it too as part of that fine tradition of future earth societies depicted to the very limits of the extrapolative imagination and effects technology of a certain time and place. Logan’s Run is as much about the 70s as about the future, and is enjoyable both as a story of another era, and as part of the history of imaginative cinema.

• Nostalgia Rating: Huge
• Rewatch Potential: Moderate
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: None, really; but why did it take me two plus decades to realize that Francis 7, Duncan Idaho, and Lo Armistead were all the same guy?
• Verdict: A must-watch seventies sci-fi classic that shows its age and has its flaws, but is nevertheless compelling on multiple levels.

What I Learned: That paradise has a price, and that retro-scifi can be a whole ‘nother class of cool.

Top Marks: The look. An appealing melange of borderline camp and futurist disco; everything from the outfits and hair styles, to the smooth minimalist lines of the sets, screams the 70s. While many of the Oscar-winning effects, impressive at the time, are now dated and quaint (the huge leap that was the ILM revolution of Star Wars was still a year away), it is the design that still appeals. Logan’s Run is a feast for the eyes, both for its imaginative and colorful visuals, and in its preservation of what a past era thought the future might look like. It’s this look that is a big part of what makes Logan’s Run so fun and watchable to this day.

If (When) It’s Remade: With a stinger of a branding premise (life ends at thirty!), it should come as no surprise that Logan’s Run has been circulating as potential remake fodder for years. There was a short-lived TV series (and I think I may have caught a few episodes, it seems familiar), and some other properties, but no reboot. Yet. IMDB has one tentatively slated for 2012 . . . but in Hollywood years that’s a bit like saying ‘wait till you’re thirty’ to an eight year old. No doubt the reboot will have all the CGI, gratuitous video-game style action, and ‘gritty realism’ we’ve all come to know and love in modern scifi movies.

Final Thoughts: Logan’s Run is both a science fiction and a ‘scifi’ movie, if one is to split hairs over the definition of those terms. Compared to Star Wars, the space opera that came along only a year later and would change the way imaginative films were made forever, Logan’s Run seems dated. But not just in the effects department, but in the whole approach to story telling. Star Wars, in seeking to be a modern myth, tapped into deeply unconscious elements of heroic storytelling and did so in a way that elevated plot above all things. Logan’s Run, like a lot of 70s SF, took a different approach — instead of narrative slight-of-hand, it was all about drawing attention to the things it wanted the audience to think about. While Star Wars offers some thematic depth, Logan’s Run has an appealing intellectual element that raises questions about overpopulation, freedom vs responsibility, religion and authority, human nature, and the ideal society. It can be dumb and smart at the same time in a way that, in our age where scifi is just another word for action movie, seems an artifact of a simultaneously more and less innocent filmic tradition.

More Reviews of Logan’s Run

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.

• Title: Dawn of the Dead
• Year: 1978
• Rating: NR
• Director: George A. Romero
• Writer(s): George A. Romero
• Cast: Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Tom Savini

Four survivors of the zombie apocalypse make a comfortable life for themselves in a suburban mall. But in a world with no future, can mere survival be enough?

Rewind . . .

. . . and, growing up, I had a friend who was big into horror films, and had all sorts of things on tape via his older brother. I, on the other hand, was never very much into the horror films that seemed popular at the time, the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths. Sure, they were scary, and I didn’t quite mind being scared. Nor was I particularly squeamish. But those slasher flicks were basically about leading lambs to the slaughter, and I couldn’t identify with the characters or situations in them. They didn’t have the sort of spark that captured my imagination, and seemed more or less to be mere pornographic depictions of murder (how some things never change). Aside from Stephen King and a few other writers I enjoyed, I mistakenly thought all horror was like that, and film horror especially was just an endless serious of masked psychopaths chasing teenage girls through midnight forests.

Then my friend introduced me to George A. Romero’s zombie films.

He did so with a connoisseur’s appreciation for effect, and with scrupulous adherence to chronology. I can’t remember if we watched all three films in the ‘Anubis Cycle,’ Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, over the course of the same evening or not — I kind of doubt it. But what I do remember was the somewhat illicit thrill of watching these flicks on the VCR after my parents had gone to bed for the evening. At the age of ten or eleven (or twelve?) these grainy, unrated b-movies — dubbed copies gotten through conventions or mail order film clubs — had a dangerous feel to them. They were underground, not part of the mainstream, and more extreme even than the Freddy and Jason fare other kids my age might be able to talk their parents into letting them watch. They also felt more real, of almost documentary quality, which only added to the appeal — and to the slight fluttering in my stomach as I fed the tapes into the machine, conscious that I was crossing a line into unknown territory . . .

Night of the Living Dead was good, I thought, if a bit hokey at times and pretty limited in scope. Day of the Dead was good too, as it really laid the apocalypse on thick — and it was the ‘end of the world as we know it’ vibe of these films that really captured my imagination as an already dyed-in-the-wool aficionado of post-apocalyptic stories. But it was Dawn of the Dead, the middle film in what is loosely described as a trilogy, that really got me excited. It took the premise of Night of the Living Dead and made it bigger, but it was a lot more fun and had more appealing characters than Day of the Dead. Indeed the characters make this film, relying as it does on four actors to carry the whole piece (with some help from the zombies, of course).

Dawn of the Dead established the now-familiar premise of survival in the face of a zombie apocalypse — it is the film that cemented the concept and gave us its dominant tropes. Despite being Romero’s second zombie film, it really is the first ‘modern’ zombie movie, the movie that gave us zombie humor, suggested that our fellow humans were more dangerous than any walking corpse, and let us share in the vicarious anarchic thrills of the collapse of western civilization and its abundant material culture. Yes, the idea of a world devoid of rules where you can go and steal what you want and do what you want and be entirely justified in doing so is an intrinsically appealing one. Tinged as it is with the depressing prospect of the end of humankind as a species of living organism, and you have the classic push-pull thematic backdrop to a zombie apocalypse scenario. Dawn of the Dead, with its survivors who have managed to build a new life of comfort and material abundance in that most American of places, the shopping mall, manages to parlay the initial premise of monster horror into a kind of vast and melancholic dread which is, for me now and as a kid, one of the finest of cathartic experiences.

Maybe I was just a weird kid.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . to an era when today’s weird kids have zombie lunchboxes, and parents think nothing of letting their munchkins see horror films more gory and shocking than anything Romero and Savini could cook up with their 1978 low budget effects and make up. And we have video games and books and movies; all sorts of movies big and small. Breakfast cereal, childrens’ pajamas, and scented candles soon to follow, I’m sure — and all this commoditization of zombies is sort of amusing when you consider that one of the themes of the movie that gave birth to the genre was the commercialization of modern life. Sadly, Romero’s two further explorations into zombieland since his three core films, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, both fell victim, in my opinion, to his awareness that people where saying he was a director with a message, and so he set out to deliver one above giving us a good story – rather than the reverse.

But what about Dawn of the Dead? “It’s about consumerism, man, and, like, how consumers are just zombies.” Sure, that’s in there, but is the film really about that? Of course not, and here is where the problem with Romero arose, the notion that he is a satirist or gore-spattered Mark Twain derailed him from what he did best, making great low-budget movies about zombies. Yes, he is sharper than most, and infuses his films with a certain symbolic depth that I suspect is more about the happy accidents that arise when one is in the throes of the creative act, than a great deal of forthright planning. Be wary of he who sets out to make art, because it’s likely the guy who believes passionately about his no budget zombie movie will end up shooting rings around the would-be artist, because his goal is to tell a story, not send a message. Romero’s messages were oh so much smarter when they were the incidentals of his terrific stories, and not the basis of them.

Anyway, in watching Dawn again after a space of many years — and many zombie movies — I was struck by a lot of things. First, how unbelievable most of the zombies were. In our age of hyper-effective make up and effects we are used to zombies that bleed and slough skin and look a mess in general. There are a few decayed looking zombies in Dawn, but for the most part they are people with gray face paint. They tend not to be as convincing as either the black-and-white zombies of Night of the Living Dead, or the more modern looking rotters of Day of the Dead, but this actually works well in conjunction with one of the movie’s main themes, and that’s the developing contempt for the zombie threat. Initially terrifying, the survivors learn that they can out run and out smart whole packs of zombies, and their ingenuity gradually sees them master their new environment of the mall and take it back from the undead. Zombies become a figure of fun, easily disposed of, and just as easily used for the venting of frustration and anger. It’s an uncomfortable but somewhat viscerally relatable exploration of the lines between life and death, and it rightly identifies that the most unsettling thing about a zombie is not that it is dead and hungry, but that its human dignity has been erased.

And I was reminded too of just how much cooler slow zombies are than the speed freaks of modern cinema. Firstly, there’s just the believability aspect, one expects an animated corpse to be a little less good at sprinting than it used to be (granted, many modern fast zombie films use the premise that the zoms are still alive, a concept most associated with 28 Days Later’s rage virus), but they are much more horrifying as well. One unsettling scene in Dawn of the Dead illustrates this nicely. The population of a tenement is being relocated by some civil defense guys during the initial outbreak, and two of our main characters, Peter and Roger, stumble upon an area in the basement where the building’s residents have been leaving their dead. In a fast zombie scenario this would have been a run and gun situation, maybe with some propane tank bombs going off for good measure. But in Dawn, the zombies in the basement are writhing around on the floor, some are eating the limbs and flesh of others, others can barely move, but they take little notice of the humans for the most part. Instead of an action scene we get an execution, and Peter and Roger have to off the zombies with their pistols. It’s a powerful scene, one that modern films don’t make the time for, but one that shows the transition between our normal world and one in which it is necessary to work extreme violence on vast numbers of what were once people in order to survive.

Dawn of the Dead was made for little over half a million dollars, which is stunningly low by any criteria. It is a b-movie, and indie movie in the truest sense, and one that essentially laid the foundation for one of our new modern myths. It no longer seems shockingly violent, indeed by today’s horror standards it’s practically tame. Nor does it present us with a wall-to-wall action film like many of the zombie apocalypse films to come after it have done. What it does is paint an unremittingly bleak picture of a world without a future that suggests that survival, even abundance, don’t count for anything when they are accounted the only thing. Locked inside a shopping mall stocked with every material desire while death pounds on the door to get in, this survivors’ tale can be seen as a parable for modern life — just so long as one doesn’t overlook that Dawn of the Dead is its own story and no allegory, it just happens to be one that lets us look at how we behave when the world is ending all around us.

• Nostalgia Rating: Undying
• Rewatch Potential: High
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: None
• Verdict: The quintessential zombie apocalypse film.

What I Learned: The importance of head shots, and that “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

Top Marks: The cast. Four unknowns, who later achieved some small cult status by virtue of this movie but have rarely appeared in anything else of any consequence. But they do a hell of a job carrying this film with nary a false note, and give Dawn of the Dead a sense of reality not really felt in most films on the subject. The four play off each other well, and move the mostly character-driven story forward with real heart. Make-up artist Tom Savini’s later appearance as a crazed, saber-wielding biker leader was also a highlight, and heralded a long line of cameos in horror and monster films.

If (When) It’s Remade: It has been remade, or ‘rebooted’ in the modern parlance, back in 2004. Despite opting for fast zombies and creating an entirely new story only loosely based on the premise of the original, the reanimated Dawn of the Dead was quite well-done in all areas, and visually impressive. What it lacked was the original’s black humor and lingering sense of hopelessness, of the madness of trying to live when the entire world is dead.

Final Thoughts: There are some people that complain about the ubiquitousness of the zombie in modern pop culture. But zombies are here to stay, because zombies are the monster of the modern age. The zombie apocalypse combines our yearning for anarchy with our distrust of our fellow humans, our lust for consequence-free violence and our artificial relationship to death as a thing alien and antagonistic to the clean lives we live. Zombies are here to stay because zombies are us.

More Reviews of Dawn of the Dead

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.

After ransacking the web for images for my The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai review, I ended up with quite a lot of unused pics. Rather than deviate from my two-pic format for the  reviews, I thought I’d post some more here in honor of one of the most distinctive looking movies of the 80s.’

The most striking image from the start of the film, Buckaroo Banzai’s jet car (a real vehicle with a jet engine attached — though I’m sure the Oscillation Overthruster was just a prop).

In the extended edition, an introduction sequence featuring young Buckaroo and his parents begins the film, but wasn’t used in the theatrical cut (shame, as I think it explains things better than the opening info dump). Banzai’s mother is played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

John Lithgow heads a team of zany and odd looking character actors, staples of film and TV of this era. Lithgow’s fellow Red Lectroids include Christopher Lloyd as John Bigbooté, Vincent Schiavelli as John O’Connor, and Dan Hedaya as John Gomez.

Lord John Whorfin calls Yoyodyne during his breakout.

Buckaroo Banzai can do it all — no wonder he has his own comic book.

Red Lectroids from Planet 10 by way for the 8th dimension — battery-sipping bad guys.

Buckaroo Banzai in Whorfin’s Shock Tower — “I’ve got nothing but time!”

Hong Kong Cavaliers — Banzai’s team of scientists, thinkers, musicians, and adventurers. Jeff Goldblum as New Jersey, and Clancy Brown as Rawhide.

Publicity still, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, and Peter Weller.

Remember when video phones where a dream of the future? Here Banzai calls the President, sporting the red glasses that where a bone of contention between director W.D. Richter and studio boss David Begelman, who apparently said “Heroes don’t wear red glasses!”

The Black Lectroids’ organic-looking space ship, in orbit around the Earth. Apparently it was a lump of coral.Blurry pic of Banzai and John Parker in Whorfin’s Thermopod.

Our hero bids farewell to Black Lectroid John Parker in his Thermopod.

Musical end credits sequence — the gang’s all here and ready for the sequel (ahem).