This is not a slam on Miike’s work, but if you are familiar with his other films, such as Gozu, Ichi the Killer and Audition, then you already know what I am talking about. Miike has made his name with some really squirmy horror movies that give just a glimpse of what an avant garde version of Eli Roth with a stronger stomach for gore and absolutely no sense of Western taboos is capable of. Audition remains one of my favorite horror films ever; and yet I won’t watch it again. He is a pretty prolific director, though, with a few dozen credits to his name so far (not bad for only 50 years old), but not all of them make it stateside. His latest work, 13 Assassins, is one of those exceptions, scoring big at the Toronto film festival last year. It is still on the independent film circuit and is garnering no small number of rave reviews along the way.

13 Assassins is very different from what most Western audiences might be expecting from Miike, as it is a historical epic set near the end of Japan’s feudal era. Lord Naritsugu, the Shogun’s younger brother and soon-to-be number two guy in all of Japan, is a sadistic monster who rapes and kills at will. He says it is to remind the peasantry of how they must fear their masters, but it becomes clear that Naritsugu is simply a psychopath whose station allows him the kind of bloodletting that most serial killers can only dream of. Outraged by Naritsugu’s behavior but unable to take direct action, one lord commits ritual suicide to protest having been wronged by one of Naritsugu’s many crimes. After this, something must be done, and one of the Shogun’s senior bodyguards, the renowned swordsman Shinzaemon, is secretly hired to assassinate Naritsugu.

The rest of the movie plays out predictably, especially to those who have seen Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Shinzaemon recruits or hires another 11 samurai with the plan of ambushing Naritsugu’s procession as he travels across the country to the capital, Edo. Some of the 11 get enough character development, or at least fight distinctively enough, that we can pick them out of a crowd and feel some connection to them. Some are simply redshirts who are part of the gang, and who we can count on to die early, if heroic, deaths. Along the way, Shinzaemon and his crew pick up a 13th member of their party, a hunter named Koyata, whose sheer strangeness and barely civilized appearance make him a show-stealer.

The plan for Shinzaemon’s group is simple enough: arrange for Nartisugu to travel through a small town, which will have been fortified into a maze of traps, obstacles and dead ends. Even though Naritsugu will have a large entourage with him, most of his soldiers are not battle-hardened, whereas every one of Shinzaemon’s group is a proven killer. That, and the terrain, should even the odds for our heroes. When they learn, too late, that Naritsugu has several times more men than expected, the heroes spring their trap anyway. They know none of them are going to survive the attack. Surviving is not the point, and the movie is quick to make that distinction for the audience. For these warriors with no more wars to fight, this suicide mission is a most unexpected blessing. It is their last, best chance to get what any samurai really wants: a glorious and honorable death on the battlefield.

Or do they? Where 13 Assassins deviates from pure chambara action and mayhem is in its quieter moments when the doomed samurai are offered to reflect on their stations in life, and all note how wasted their lives really are. These are people who, to be true to their identity, must live lives that are utterly dispoable. The worth of a samura is at least as much measured by his expendability as by his actual ability. These samurai know it, which is why, when they are not preparing for their attack upon Naritsugu, are lamenting what fools they really are.

That said, such moments are reserved as asides; never do we see any of our heroes having second thoughts or looking for an easy way out. Even the young ones among them who have yet to distinguish themselves in battle have made that mental leap from being a person with a live worth living and being a tool of somebody else’s destruction. It is a mindset most could not adopt even if they wanted to. And throughout the film, we get the feeling that the tragedy of the feudal era’s last days was of those remaining few who had no worthy lords for which to sacrifice their own lives. When we first find Shinzaemon, he is quietly fishing, and thinking about his dead wife. We see what looks like a tranquil scene, but for Shinzaemon, it is a slow-moving hell from which there is no escape until Naritsugu’s crimes demand one.

13 Assassins is 141 minutes long, the last 40 of which are spent in one long battle scene as Shinzaemon and company take on some 200 of Naritsugu’s bodyguards  in a spectacle of carnage that feels like if you mashed up the Crazy 88 scene from Kill Bill: Volume 1 and the bridge scene from Saving Private Ryan. Technically, this battle scene is outstanding, and it’s worth watching more than once. In fact, in terms of pure action, this movie offers up some of my favorite martial arts cinema I have ever seen. But in all of the mayhem, you almost – but not quite – lose track of the pathos of these samurai in the first place, both Shinzaemon’s crew as well as the notable samurai who loathe Naritsugu but feel obligated to defend him, anyway. In the hands of a less skilled director, that’s all 13 Assassins would have been: a 100-minute preamble to justify running one of the most balls-out swordfights in modern cinema. But this is a Miike film, and as a result, what we get here is something different. Something more. One by one, the players all fall, as the characters of any worthy samurai tale must, and somehow, Miike manages to impart enough humanity on all of them that by the time it is all over, we feel exhausted. Not by the length of the warfighting, or of the viscera that accompanies it, but at the sheer waste of it all. All those lives, for nothing. And that was the point all along.

DYLMAG Rating: 9

Our story opens with a scene of four improbably attractive 20-somethings driving down an empty desert highway in a car they’ve obviously stolen and loaded up with salvage. Very quickly, the scene turns from casual jokes and sexual tension to one of intense dread as the protagonists encounter both the thing that can kill them, and the thing worth living for: another person.

Our world has been decimated by a vague pathogen of some kind that is highly communicable, very fast-moving, and completely fatal. There is no cure, aside from avoiding exposure, and that is the heart and soul of Carriers: the only way to survive a world that has been destroyed by disease is to stay away from infected people at all costs. But when infection itself is so easy to come by, survival itself becomes its own form of punishment. What does it matter to stay alive, if you must do so utterly alone and paranoid?

With that premise in mind, Carriers becomes a grim kind of road movie, with our heroes trying to get across the desert so that they might arrive at a vacation spot they remember as kids. The point being that the world might have ended, but if they can just make it to Turtle Beach, then maybe the world as they remember it might still be around, even if only a little. But the way is long and meeting other people is a certainty, and therein lies the danger. Nothing is as it ought to be in this world, and what should be a father and daughter, or a doctor at a clinic, or a team of scientists all turn out to be something quite different. And, in their own ways, deeply unsettling.

This little girl doesn't know it, but she's about to make a life-altering decision.

Carriers is an unusual movie in that it knows its source material intimately and follows its most logical conclusions, opting to portray what’s likely to happen in the scenario it portrays, rather than manufacture unlikely scenarios that fit neatly into typical Hollywood storytelling. In many ways, this is one of the most low-key horror movies you will ever watch. There aren’t many jump scares to be had (I cannot recall one, come to think of it), what little gore there is is presented in a natural and even predictable fashion. And the kinds of conflicts you expect to arrive in an end-of-the-world movie – predatory survivors in particular – come out in a refreshingly understated way. The world has ended, and with it all of the laws and comforts we take for granted. But it hasn’t turned the world into a guns-and-thunder war zone, either. What results is something more subtle, something much more quiet, and something infinitely horrifying. The shock here is not in creeps that jump out of the shadows, or maniacs with knives, but in the choices that must be made in order to survive. The characters who make it in this setting do so only because they can harden their hearts in ways that simply are not conceivable in a world that has not met the apocalypse. You just have to be willing to give this story some patience and let it sink in after the credits roll to get the full effect.

The doctor is in. This is not a good thing.

This might explain why Carriers is such an overlooked movie. I had not heard of it at all and discovered it only while looking for something to watch on Netflix streaming. The cover art showed what looked to be the cast of Dawson’s Creek trying to look tough, and were it not for the high rating the movie had, I would have passed it by, too. I hadn’t noticed initially that this stars Chris Pine and was made well before he appeared as James Kirk in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. He plays a bit of an impetuous jerk in this movie, too, though with more depth than what we find in Kirk. Here, he comes off as a character who, in regular times, might have just turned out to be another knuckleheaded frat boy. But he has been hardened by witnessing the destruction of the world, and he fiercely defends not only his right to survival, but that of his family members, also. A common theme of post-apocalypse stories is rebirth; who you are after the Fall. For some, it is a matter of redemption. For others, it is a descent into savagery. Pine shows us how one person can undergo both, and it is a character study we don’t often get in movies like this.

Sooner or later, everybody looks like this. Or will they?

Some critics have written off this movie as The Road Warrior without the car chases, and The Road without the love story. That’s a bit unfair, I think, for this explores an entirely different territory, the art of survival in a world so recently dead that the body is still warm. The reality of the apocalypse hasn’t quite sunken in to our characters yet, even though the immediate threat of death lurks around every corner. The things that motivate these characters seem to be suspended in the vain hope that maybe, somehow, things might return to normal. The horror of this movie isn’t that things have gone wrong. It is the mounting evidence that never again will they ever be right.

DYLMAG Rating: 7

Chew on This is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema.

If you haven’t yet seen Battle Royale, you’re not alone. Despite this film’s cult status, its challenging subject matter made it the kind of movie that wasn’t even available on Region 1 DVDs, let along welcome for possible redevelopment by a Hollywood studio. For a while, you could only see this either off some Japanese bootleg or by watching it over the Internet. Now, thankfully, the movie is much more widely available, and there is even a remake in the works. Rarely do we see such a reversal of fortunes for a movie based on the tenor of its content alone, but once you watch Battle Royale, you will understand why. This is a great movie that is in turns disturbing, thrilling, horrifying, tragic and cynical. It is not a conventional horror movie by Western standards. There is no masked killer or monster or gimmicky reason for oversexed teens to perish in the post-coital afterglow. For many viewers, Battle Royale probably comes off as an action flick, or a political thriller, but to me, this is as horrifying as horror gets. As for the reasons why, I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s provide a little context for what makes Battle Royale such a special film.

I have long been a fan of foreign cinema, not because I particularly enjoy weird artsy experimentation or because I get off on reading subtitles, but because foreign cinema is almost always crafted with a whole lot fewer resources than the average Hollywood film. Even straight to video American films tend to have really high production values compared to most movie-making in other countries. And while shoestring budgets and amateurish skills have led to some truly awful movies (Turkish Star Wars and a good portion of Bollywood action flicks immediately spring to mind), this resource scarcity often pushes talented and passionate film makers to make more with less, and this gives rise to a certain inventiveness and a willingness to take chances on content a more conservative industry might pass on.

Even more importantly, however, foreign movies offer exposure to artistic sensibilities that aren’t necessarily in line with what Western audiences (and U.S. audiences in particular) have come to expect. If there is one thing most American audiences can use more of, it’s exposure to how the rest of the world does things. And movies are no different. Along these lines, foreign cinema sometimes come with political views that are alien by Western standards, and this alone is worth sampling, and the stories they give rise to are even more so. So it is with Battle Royale.

After seeing one student knifed and another detonated, the kids begin to learn the art of silence.

The story of Battle Royale takes place in an authoritarian Japan of the near future. Nippon has become a cruel form of gerontocracy; the country isn’t just being run by old people, it’s being run by really cruel old people who are fearful of the revolutionary potential of the current generation of schoolchildren. To break them of this desire to overturn things, the government runs an annual competition whereby an entire grade of what would be 8th grade students in an American school are essentially abducted, taken to a remote locale and forced to battle each other to the death until only one student remains. The lone survivor comes back home to a media frenzy and one imagines some kind of reward, but you’re just not sure. The only image you’re seen of a previous winner shows a young girl so driven into psychosis by her victory that it doesn’t matter if she got a billion yen waiting for her when she gets home. Her life, such as it was before the competition, is over. And that’s just how the government likes it.

One year later: 8th grader Shuya, whose mother recently abandoned the family, and whose father recently committed suicide, is trying to enjoy the only thing he’s got left: the company of his friends as school. But despite this, Shuya is deeply disillusioned with life, as are his classmates, one of whom has become such a bad apple that he shanked a teacher named Kitano in the leg during school hours. Not long into the class trip, sleep gas is pumped into the bus and the kids all wake up on a remote island, the latest inductees into the infamous Battle Royale program. They are all marched at gunpoint into a crumbling bunker where they are met by none other than Kitano himself, who has recovered his wound and is not only too eager to take part in the government’s sadistic youth reduction protocol.

Somewhere, there is a school board that is thinking this guy has the right idea.

The rules of the game are simple enough: each kid is fitted with an explosive collar that will go off if tampered with, if Kitano remote detonates it, or if the wearer walks into a danger zone on the island, where merely crossing into forbidden territory radio-detonates the collar. The collars act as little GPS gadgets that let the soldiers running the program back at the bunker keep track of each student’s location. The collars also let the soldiers know when a student dies. If 24 hours pass without a single student dying, then all of the collars will detonate. Fight or die.

Each kid is given a pack with basic supplies and a random weapon. The randomness is meant to counteract any natural advantages some students might have over others, but when you see that one kids gets an Uzi and another gets a paper fan, you begin to realize that even if Battle Royale had been created as a form of political control, it has descended even further into just a sadistic exercise in screwing with relatively innocent kids.

The battleground is a small islands strewn with ruined buildings that look like abandoned post-war redevelopment efforts. Every six hours, a bunch of sectors are written off as danger zones, gradually giving the students less and less ground to hide in. Eventually, there will be no room left and even students with no will to fight will find themselves locked in mortal combat.

"My interests include listening to Ke$ha, organizing my Hello Kitty dolls and cutting Xs on top of my .357 ammo."

Right off the bat, we see that the students themselves have no interest in killing each other. They may be shiftless smartasses, but they are not murderers, and suddenly being thrust into that role is what, for me, propels this story right out of the realm of action and into that of horror. There is nothing fundamentally different to what’s going on in Battle Royale than what happens in, say, Saw. Or, for that matter, any other horror tale that rests on innocent people being forced to carry out deeds that are fundamentally repellent to them. Forcing people to do things contrary to their nature is one kind of cruelty. Forcing them to do things contrary to human nature is well beyond that. And for me, this is where Battle Royale hits home. It is the kind of horror that makes my skin crawl the most.

This was director Kinji Kukasaku’s point. At the tender age of 15, he was forced to work in a munitions factory during WWII, and he personally endured U.S. efforts to bomb him, his workplace and his entire country into oblivion. Somehow, he survived, but the experience left him deeply resentful of the adult leadership that seemed willing to sacrifice the nation’s youth on a battle it could not possibly win. He used this story to pour all of the venom in his heart into this one thing, and even though in interviews he waved the story off as a mere fable, the rage that fueled him as he made the film (itself adapted from Koushun Takami’s superior novel) is evident.

At this rate, the school yearbook will be about four pages long.

The action of the story, once it gets going, is frenetic, almost to a fault. You’ve got something like 40 students to kill off in less than an hour and a half, and the action in the film is more condensed than it is in the novel, which unfortunately relegates many of the characters to mere redshirt status. That they are all dressed in bland school uniforms that makes them difficult to tell apart only furthers this. Characters who are developed in the novel are given cursory appearances here, usually only long enough to kill them off. And as the students shoot, stab, strangle, taze, bludgeon and poison each other into oblivion, we are at last left with the only four who really matter: Shuya, our hero, Noriko, the girl he’s got a crush on, Kawada, a tough exchange student who survived a previous stint in Battle Royale, and Kiriyama a psychotic bastard who volunteered for BR so he could begin sharpening his already overdeveloped killer instinct. Shuya, Noriko and Kawada work together in defiance of the game’s need for there to be only one survivor. And, their teamwork succeeds where other students’ efforts to collectivize their efforts fail. All the while, Kiriyama roams the island like a black-clad force of nature, seemingly unkillable, unhindered by any sense of morality or restraint. Perhaps my favorite scene in the story is when two girls decide to stop fighting and shout out their decision to the whole island over a bullhorn. Kiriyama cuts them down with a burst of machinegun fire and then turns on the bullhorn so every student still playing the game can hear their classmates beg for mercy before he finishes them off. Kiriyama isn’t just a mutant for whom the game is uniquely suited. He is the kind of person the game will ultimately breed. On an infinite timeline, a society running Battle Royale will end up with nothing more than Kiriyamas. As the father of two, that scares the hell out of me.

"When I get off this island, I'm going to spend the summer at some camp in New Jersey."

In this, we see a grim circularity in this vision of Japan. The government uses its Battle Royale program to keep the youth so paranoid and terrified that they can’t possibly mount an organized resistance, but the disillusionment that results turns the kids into lawless sociopaths who end up making the government’s job that much easier. You can imagine that the government, by the time, our story begins, hardly needs any reason to justify Battle Royale: the country’s youth are so anarchistic and wild that perhaps a crash course in internecine warfare is just what these little punks need. It speaks to Japan as it really is: a culture steeped in its own history yet hurtling headlong into modernity, forever at odds with itself as a people both holding onto its history for dear life and jettisoning it in favor of the latest trend. Given the rapid graying of the country, one can sense through Battle Royale the ongoing tension borne from Japan’s very real challenge of figuring out how to care for its own elderly. If you think that the U.S. Social Security program has problems, it’s got nothing on Japan.

This conflict between young and old comes off as a central conflict in Battle Royale, but to me, it extrapolates into something larger; the kind of institutionalized cruelty that happens whenever any government decides to put its own needs before those it is supposed to serve. The very notion of government serving its constituents rather than the other way around is indeed a fragile one, especially for those of us born into a post-WWII planet. Prior to WWII, there were a grand total of seven working democracies on the planet. After WWII, democracy was the default form of government for the human race. It only took about ten years to make that switch. It’s not so crazy to think that one day, things might switch back somehow. I say this not as a jab at any particular U.S. administration, but at the frailty of government itself, and of the spectre of human tyranny, which lurks behind the facade of every well-intentioned effort to rule. Even the most noble of governments can become a form of hideous villainy. When our own children are made to die for the sport of those who see more value in them dead than alive, then we’ll know that we’ve gone past our own expiration date as a society. The Japan of Battle Royale cannot last. The Shuyas, Norikos and Kawadas have their own ways of resisting and bringing things down. But they should never even need to. And yet, how many places can we find children pressed into warfare, brutalized to make a statement to other adults, and made to toil for the fortunes of their adult masters. The places are everywhere. We just choose not to look for them. And that may be the greatest horror of all.

If only Marksmanship, Survival and Torture Methodology were available for college credit.

DYLMAG Rating: 9

There are folks out there bound to disagree with me on this, but I just love this movie. It’s chilling and grim, but there is something compelling about it, especially in its later stages that I keep coming back to. If the sight of watching junior high students off each other makes you uncomfortable, then plan to be uncomfortable. But don’t skip this one.

There’s something going on over in Spain, because while the American movie industry has seemingly lost its ability to produce a decent creepy movie, Spanish filmmakers, led by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) have produced a number of great horror movies, such as The Devil’s Backbone, [REC], and The Orphanage. (Pan’s Labyrinth qualifies as horror depending on who you talk to. I’d consider it dark fantasy, but it’s a fine line. Regardless, so see that one, too.) Shiver is no exception.

Directed by the same fellow who brought us the genuinely unsettling The Devil’s Backbone, Shiver is the kind of movie that in many ways is not all that original. It’s not super-shocking, and it’s not pressing the envelop anywhere. What it is, however, is very well executed. It’s smart. And it knows its audience. And as a result, this is a really effective film, and I found myself enjoying it way more than I ever thought I would. It is the kind of film best watched cold, like any good horror film, so that the fright of the story is as unanticipated to the viewer as it is to the characters. So if you like going into movies unprepared, just know I’m giving this one a 7. Starting with the next paragraph, here be spoilers.

Our story begins with Santi, a lonely teenager with an extraordinary allergy to sunlight. As it turns out, his canine teeth are growing at an unusual rate also, something the family doctor writes off as a side effect. In a lesser film, the story might get sidetracked on this and overplay the curious nature of Santi’s ailment. Is he really a vampire? Or does he just sort of look like one? Obviously, Santi’s life has been turned upside down by his condition, to the point where he and his mother must move someplace where there is not a lot of sun. Lapland is one option, but a Spaniard among reindeer is about as much against the natural order of things as any of Michael Bay’s recent remakes of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror and The Hitcher. So, Santi and his mom move to the north of Spain, where villages reside in deep woodland valleys. This provides the story with two staples that most horror has to strain to provide: plentiful darkness and non-existent mobile phone use.

Santi has been treated like a monster all his life, and only when he arrives at his new home, where it becomes clear that anybody who ventures into the surrounding woods is unlikely to ever come out again alive, does he see that there are real monsters afoot. Shiver spares no time getting into this, but it handles Santi’s move north, his inevitable inability to fit in, and the fact that local carnage is blamed on him with thankful economy. These are all cliches of the genre, but Shiver pays us the compliment of knowing that we know this, and that such turns of plot are necessary for this particular story. So it goes through them deftly and without trying to make them more than what they are.

Is Santi a vampire? The locals seem to think so. Those silly locals.

This is the hallmark not just of this but of all recent Spanish horror cinema. These movies don’t speak down to their audience. The stories are smart, the characters are smart (and thank God, they act intelligently) and they expect the same from the audience. It’s not that Shiver is a hard movie to follow. It just does us the favor of not turning stupid at any point. And this is really important, because the core reveal of this tale – what exactly is killing people in the woods? – is the sort of thing that were this movie to take itself too seriously, or were it to condescend to the audience, it would not work at all. I can see this film with American stars and in English playing at the local mall, and when the monster is revealed, the audience collectively laughing its ass off. And they would be right to do so. Which is why it always pays to see the foreign original of a recent American remake. But I digress.

Old people in small towns know more than they let on. Fact.

There are three classic themes this film taps, and it does it well, creating a sort of horror movie mash-up that works well despite the risk that so many story threads might entangle each other. The first is the Little Town with a Big Secret. We see this a lot; the isolated community that usually is either superficially friendly but secretly vicious in nature, or one that is wary of outsiders and harboring a pretty good reason for it. The town in this movie is of the second variety, but it is one of the most believable ones I’ve seen. It is…well, a small, rurual town that doesn’t get a lot of visitors. I’ve been to places like this. And they’re not bad people. They’re just used to being left alone and aren’t going to go out of their way to welcome newcomers. That Shiver bothers to try portraying a small, isolated town as it should be deserves some praise. I also have to note that this is one of the most darkly beautiful settings I’ve seen in a horror movie in some time. The cinematographers love this scenery, and it shows. The deep, shady woods and towering mountains of the scene serve to reinforce the claustrophobia and the grim darkness of the story. There is a fear over this town, and the very landscape both foments it and gives the sense that one is trapped. Which brings me to the second theme: The Dangerous Environment.

“Back in my day, we walked to school through monster-infested woods.”

Movies like Jaws, Alien and even the Texas Chainsaw Massacre all rely on the notion of the characters being trapped in a setting where they can run as much as they want, but it will never be far enough to escape what chases them. In Jaws, to confront the shark, you must meet it in the ocean, where the fish has every advantage. In Alien, you’re stuck in deep space with something that really wants to kill you. And in Chainsaw, you’re stuck in the remote backwoods, where the deep isolation makes it impossible to expect help. Horror films keep coming back to this concept because it works. Almost too well, really, and so it gets over used. Shiver is little different; the town is in a deep valley and the woods are everywhere. Even though the town is of a decent size, has a high school and some contact with the outside world, every road cuts through thick forest. Every walkway seems to have been a trail blazed by Little Red Riding Hood. And once the movie establishes, early on, that the evil to be confronted lives among the trees, you realize that there is no safe place to be had. It’s an old troupe, but again, it works here. The reason why is what brings me to the third theme: Urban Legend.

According to Spanish cinema, little children are not to be trusted.

In Shiver, you never get the feeling that there is something definitely supernatural in the woods. The townsfolk seem to know that something bad is out there, but they don’t have any ideas what. Could be wolves. Could be the Chupacabra. Point is, smart people stay in town, where they don’t have to think about it much. When you’re Santi, living in a house that’s pretty deep into monster country, you don’t have that luxury, and so the story takes off. Quickly Santi enlists the help of his weirdo friend he grew up with before moving out to the sticks to investigate what the hell is killing people (and always when Santi is around, which makes him unpopular both with the families of the slain as well as the local police). The cop problem lessens when the daughter of the local investigator takes a liking to Santi, and she joins the group to find out what the hell is going on. The speed and accuracy with which the kids unravel the mystery is refreshing, actually. They turn to the internet, as they ought to, and their research plays out pretty much like how it ought to, if armed with the evidence they begin with. But what also works is Santi himself; the medical condition he has that one could see being mistaken for true vampirism in a more primitive age drives him to seek a rational explanation for what’s going on. And he gets one without the movie leading us down needless blind alleys to try to complicate a mystery that doesn’t really need complicating. It is just smart storytelling. It’s not a really epic tale, or a very deep one. But it knows its points, it hits them and it doesn’t waste our time. And these days, these seem like rare qualities in a film genre such as this one.

The root of all evil in the film is ultimately the sort of thing you’ve already heard about, hence the Urban Legend thing. Thankfully, the use of this is not so overwrought that it loses credibility. A lot of Urban Legends are, in truth, somewhat creepy. Where they stop being so is when supposedly non-retarded people in movies start acting like they never heard of things everybody has heard of, or when they act like there is a whole lot more to these things than a weird set of circumstances and a compelling story to go with it. Once again, when Hollywood turns its Eyebeams of Ruination (TM) upon this film, it will spend way more time than it needs to exhausting and expounding upon the Urban Legend element of this thing. I can feel it.

This is the hot girl. She is here to help. And to fall down a lot.

Ultimately, Shiver’s final reveals aren’t very revealing, which is a weakness, and certain parts of the finale play out pretty much as you’d expect them to, which is a disappointment. Santi’s friends are easily foreseen archetypes – the geek whose unusual interests equip him to fight monsters (sort of) and the pretty girl who is there to help and get into trouble. The central villain of the story was something I kind of hoped would be something else – rather than one weird thing in the woods, I had hoped there was an entire family of them, an evil that had become as much a part of the neighborhood as the local butcher. And in at least one instance, our heroes literally stumble across critical information to the plot. And while it is well handled, the epilogue end up having to tell us the full deal of what’s really going on because the story somehow can’t quite get to it during its natural progression. On this last point, I’m of a mixed mind. On one hand, I appreciate that the film never veered into pointless exposition to explain things before they are resolved. On the other hand, having it explained after the fact always feels like the filmmakers are simply covering their bases. Had things been left unexplained, the story might have been much, much creepier – how deep to this town’s secrets run, anyway?

However, these letdowns all feel relatively minor because when you get right to it, this is a fun movie that is really well shot, doesn’t veer into stupidity and promises that if you don’t mind reading subtitles, there is a whole universe of great cinema out there for any genre fan, really, but especially for horror. Horror lends itself to this because most times, you can make a good horror movie for not a whole lot of money. And right now, the advent of cheap digital photography and post-production has enabled a gazillion foreign filmmakers who don’t have a big budget to work with. Horror, which rarely needs one, becomes a good outlet for all of this untapped creativity, which is why we see so much good horror coming from places like Japan, Thailand, England and now Spain. I’ve heard it said that in Hollywood, making a movie is like riding in a limousine driven by an idiot, whereas in most other countries, making a movie is having a race car pro at the wheel behind a POS hatchback. Personally, I’ll take the hatchback every time.

DYLMAG Rating: 7

Here’s the thing: I love zombie movies. I always have. I always will. As far as horror movies go, this genre is my favorite because it mines a theme that I find deeply disturbing: that one day, without any warning, everybody you know might suddenly want to kill you. I guess I read enough news to know that this isn’t entirely without precedent. Sometimes, humans just go apeshit and turn on each other with the kind of savagery we would like to pretend we are no longer capable of. But we are, and we do, and that scares the hell out of me.

Zombie movies touch on this effectively, and always in a way I find equally creepy and intriguing, which is why the last few years have been so much fun for me, ever since Zack Snyder’s surprisingly good remake of Dawn of the Dead followed up the simply terrific 28 Days Later. What followed was an intense blitz of every iteration of zombie cinema one might imagine, of which Pontypool, a neat little  film from Canada, is a recent entrant.

Of course, whenever Hollywood detects a workable genre of film, it exploits the living shit out of it until everything you ever liked about it has been obliviated in some dickheaded crusade to avoid doing anything remotely original with one’s development budget. And boy, did this ever happen with zombie films. It has gotten to the point where Roger Ebert (who would be the world’s least dangerous zombie now that he’s missing his jaw) has basically written off the entire concept as an exhausted exercise in underdeveloped characterization, more exploding skulls than a 12-pack of The Departed DVDs, and the sort of hollow, exhausted feeling afterwards that you get when you eat a CostCo-sized bag of Cheetos for dinner.

All of this might explain why nobody saw Pontypool when it came out back in 2008. It was small and indie even by the standards of the Canadian film industry, though what it lacked in publicity it more than makes up for in proof of concept, enjoyable acting and deft execution. In fact, it might just be the most clever and original zombie movie I have seen in quite a while. It doesn’t have the self-aware mayhem that makes Zombieland so goddamned fun, or the wit that makes Shaun of the Dead proof positive that comedy really is one of England’s finest exports. But it does have the courage to go for atmosphere rather than viscera, and it takes an overexposed horror concept and manages to pull off a subtle form of dread with it. In a genre that virtually demands you go over the top, Pontypool plays it cool and provides the kind of horror experience you’re not likely to come across very often.

In Pontypool, Grant Mazzy, an arrogant shock-jock exiled from his old gig in the big city, is doing his career penance by running the morning show at the local radio station in Pontypool, Ontario. Housed in the basement of a church, Mazzy in the Morning is run by sound engineer Laurel-Ann Drummond, a spunky hometown girl recently returned from a stint in Afghanistan and produced by Sydney Briar, a weary divorcee who is having second thoughts about her decision to hire Mazzy at all. The story begins with just another morning at the station, with Mazzy being the kind of dickhead that got him huge ratings until it got him fired, and with Laurel-Ann and Sydney trying to keep Mazzy from alienating their entire audience, which one suspects is roughly equivalent to some crappy MySpace band. Then they get a strange phone call that there’s a mob trying to storm a doctor’s office downtown. The people are all repeating gibberish as if they’re speaking in tongues, and it all reminds Mazzy of a disturbing encounter he had with a townsperson on the way into work. Very quickly, the three realize that there is something really horrible going on in the ass end of the Canadian outback, and somehow, they’re the only folks able to tell the world about it. And that, as they say over on FARK, is when things begin to get weird.

Pontypool goes directly against a bunch of the conventions I’ve come to expect from a typical zombie movie. Most of the action is off-stage, delivering the kind of gradually ratcheting tension that Hitchcock was such a master of. And what action there is is mainly dialogue; this is easily the most talky zombie movie ever produced. We don’t see a single gunshot get fired throughout the entire movie. (Remember, this is Canada we’re talking about here.) The vector of infection comes from a most unexpected source, putting every character at the kind of risk that really lets you know that nobody in this thing is safe. The few characters we see act with uncommon intelligence for a horror movie, which deprives us of a lot of predictable and unentertaining carnage. And there is a conspicuous absence of the old “the only thing worse than the zombies are the other survivors’ motif. In this story, the situation devolves too quickly for people to turn on each other; they are all too preoccupied with staying alive. But most importantly, the film fixes the location in a very tight spot, forcing the characters to listen to the end of the world more than take part in it, and it is this where Pontypool gets its best material. It’s all a bit like if Orson Welles decided to do Night of the Living Dead, and I mean that as a good thing.

As Grant, Laurel-Ann And Sydney listen to the world outside of their pitiful little radio station fall apart, their story made me think about the power of communication to bring people together, whether they are on different continents or they are in two entirely different states of mind. The town of Pontypool itself is in the middle of nowhere. The radio station is itself all by itself in a forgotten corner of a forgotten burg. And in their own way, the heroes are all isolated from each other and the people in their lives. They make their living talking to people, but at a time when their talents are needed the most, they find that perhaps staying on the air might be the worst possible thing they can do. The marketing tagline for this film is “Shut up or die,” and by the time the credits roll, you’ll understand why. But you might also be picking up what, for me, was a more subtle message of horror I am not used to getting in modern cinema at all, let alone zombie movies. What if we’re really all alone? I mean, really all alone? And what if, when we finally begin to break down that isolation, we realize, perhaps too late, that keeping quiet might have been the only thing that kept us alive? What if miserable isolation was the best thing that ever happened to us?

They say that really good zombie movies aren’t about zombies at all. The zombie thing is just a stand-in for a bigger issue. And here, it’s all about why and how we talk to each other in an age of sound bites, half-truth and doublespeak. We are under a daily assault by politicians, pundits, marketers and journalists who all wield our language like a madman’s straight razor. And at the end of it all, Pontypool is about how language can confuse us so badly that we begin to doubt not just the words we use to communicate with each other, but the each others we’re trying to communicate with in the first place. If you don’t believe me, just say the first word that comes to mind, and then repeat it over and over and over again until you get to the point where the word doesn’t even sound like the word anymore. And then imagine an auditorium of Glenn Beck fans screaming that word at you and see if you don’t feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise. That may be a bad example, though, since every time I take a look at that fat crybaby’s ratings I start thinking the zombie apocalypse has already begun.

DYLMAG Rating: As far as zombie movies go, this one’s an 8. As far as movies go in general, I guess I’d give this a 7. It’s a 6 if you’re tired of all of the goddamned zombie movies already. And it’s probably a 5 if you never saw the point in them in the first place.