Review: 'Night of the Living Dead: The Official Story of the Film'

When a scrappy commercial production agency decided to branch out into feature films, the Latent Image team had no idea they would change the face of horror forever. As violent and despairing as Night of the Living Dead would be, the story behind the movie is kind of adorable. Its creation was a true all-hands-on-deck operation, as actors doubled as makeup artists, foley artists, and sound mixers. Pennsylvania locals pitched in to play zombies more than willing to stuff Silly Putty and actual intestines into their mouths. While the job of film-director tends to attract only the most massive of egos, George Romero had to be talked into directing the picture after trying to fob it off on Karl Hardman, who co-produced the film and played surly dad Harry Cooper, among several other behind-the-scenes roles. And everyone dressed up and rode in limos to attend the boozy premier in Pittsburgh, which lavished the film with the local attention it wouldn't really receive nationally until it became a Midnight Movie sensation.

Review: 'The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue' Blu-ray

After a woman (Christina Galbó) runs over a motorcycle at a petrol station outside Manchester, the antique-dealing biker (Ray Lovelock) bullies her into giving him a ride to his friend's house in the country. She's a touch anxious because she's on her way to deliver her smack-addicted sister (Jeannine Mestre) away from a creepy husband (José Lifante), who takes exploitative photos of his wife while she's high, and to rehab. Quite a feast of human drama right there, but there's more, because high-tech exterminators are performing some rather environmentally unfriendly pest control on farmland in the country. Turns out the radiation they're using doesn't just turn bug against bug until they cannibalize each other into non-existence. Let's just say the exterminators' methods make the human dead and buried quite a bit less dead and a whole lot less buried.

Farewell, George Romero

Without him, zombies would still be toiling on sugar plantations instead of swarming urban areas. George A. Romero reinvented the zombie in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead even though the "Z" world is never even whispered in its taut 96 minutes. Romero followed up on his pioneering big-screen-E.C. comic with such sequels as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, solidifying his legacy as King of the Zombies, but his achievements hardly end with droves of flesh-eating undead. Romero also made vampires human and sympathetic with Martin, horror comics move and breathe with Creepshow, and killer monkeys campy fun with Monkey Shines. He was also the producer of the classic small-screen anthology series Tales from the Darkside and a charming, politically-sharp presence in such documentaries as Midnight Movies. Having died of lung cancer at the age of 77, George Romero's charming personality will be missed but his nerve-wracking film work--much like his favorite monsters-- won't stay dead.

Review: 'The Return of the Zombies'

Zombies have become so standardized that fans debate the validity of such minor variations as fast-moving zombies endlessly and tiresomely. But before George Romero shaped the modern conception of zombies once and for all in 1968, the only zombie rules were that there aren’t any zombie rules. Most often zombies were mesmerized slaves toiling away on some Haitian sugar plantation. They might also be vengeful “things from the grave,” as witnessed in pretty much every issue of E.C.’s horror comics, or swarms of Romero-anticipating rotting corpses. As revealed in Craig Yoe and IDW’s new anthology of rare zombie comics from the fifties, the zombie ranks might also include a guy who gradually turns into the undead as if he is infected with some strange, fatal disease or the tools of some yokel who can raise the dead with his trumpet.  

As is usually the case with Yoe’s anthologies of stories from such second-tier horror comics as Horrific, Web of Evil, and Strange Suspense Stories, wackiness is what makes these oddities worthy preserving. The Crypt Keeper’s tales tended to follow a sort of storytelling rulebook no matter how grotesque or illogical they were. The most delightful tales in Yoe’s new volume The Return of the Zombies, such as “Hating Corpse” and  “Death by Inches”, follow the logic of someone who woke up at 4 AM with a head full of groggy nightmares. More conventional tales still manage to sidestep convention, such as “The Dead Remember”, which courts serious bad taste with its zombies as vengeful holocaust victims.

Not everything collected in The Return of the Zombies is particularly memorable, but IDW has still assembled a typically attractive package with its center spread of grotty, zombified comics covers and its textural pages and authentically inked artwork. The bite taken from the bottom corner of the front cover is a bit of groovy yet unnecessary extra evidence that IDW is one publisher that takes its goofy second-tier horror comics very seriously. You have to love them for that.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 127

The Date: February 4

The Movie: Creepshow (1982)

What Is It?: Like all portmanteaus, George Romero and Stephen King’s homage to E.C. Comics is hit-and-miss, but the opportunities to see Romero employ true comic book style, King act like a doofus, and EG Marshall get filled with roaches make Creepshow worthwhile.

Why Today?: On this day in 1940, George Romero is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 109

The Date: January 17

The Movie: Dawn of the Dead (1979)

What Is It?: 11 years after Night of the Living Dead, George Romero returns to make the dead walk again, and the shopping mall setting makes room for some truly brilliant satire about our consumerist culture.

Why Today?: On this day in 1983, the world’s tallest department store, Hudson’s flagship store in Detroit, closes for business. I’m not sure if it was closed due to zombies.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 75

The Date: December 14

The Movie: Monkey Shines (1988)

What Is It?: After getting hit by a truck, a wheelchair-bound ex-runner employs a super-brained monkey to do his bidding, which includes a bit of light housework and heavy murdering. Subtle black comedy or unintentionally camp sincere horror? Either way, George Romero’s flick is Kong-sized fun.

Why Today?: Today is Monkey Day. In a perfect world, every day would be.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 34

The Date: November 3

The Movie: Day of the Dead (1985)

What Is It?: The villain in the last installment of George Romero’s original “living dead” trilogy is the military; the most likable character is a sweet zombie named Bub. Tom Savini’s gory makeup jobs go above, beyond, and above the beyond.

Why Today?: On this day in 1946, Tom Savini is born.

Review: 'Zombies: A Cultural History'

I wonder how many people who join in on hip zombie walks or watch “The Walking Dead” obsessively or waste hours blasting zombies in the face while playing “Resident Evil” really know or care about the origins of their favorite creature? Do they know that origin is not traced to atomic radiation or rage virus outbreaks? Serious horror fans do not need to be schooled about the back story of the modern zombie, about how the thing once known as zombi was not a radiation-tainted brain muncher that tended to go with the crowd, but rather a voodoo-enchanted victim of slave labor. Even such serious horror fans will learn a thing or two about these overused, overworked monsters in Roger Luckhurst’s Zombies: A Cultural History, even though some of these revelations shouldn’t be too surprising.

As used in Caribbean culture, zombi seemed an elusive term, sort of a catchall phrase for all things monstrous or weird—an unusually tall dog or a three-legged horse that has no trouble walking, for example. Only when the term passed into the lexicons of anthropologists with a yen for the strange did the zombie begin to come into focus as a colonialist’s overheated metaphor for all that is “bizarre,” “superstitious,” and “savage” about non-white cultures. Luckhurst spends a great deal of his book discussing the racist implications of the zombie that have largely been lost since it became an easy metaphor for anything run out of control in the twenty-first century. Luckhurst points out that the original racist implications are still apparent in such contemporary works as World War Z, but his book is interesting because it is so largely concentrated on the creature’s pre-George Romero breed. Luckhurst  not only discusses the zombie’s historical background—and he shows how it is always lurking around history’s worst atrocities from slavery to the holocaust to the dawn of WMDs— but its depiction in film (unlike other zombie books I’ve read, this one spends as much time dissecting White Zombie as Night of the Living Dead), pulp literature, comics, cocktails, and so on. In doing so, the author has made today’s most overly familiar monster seem fresh again.

The writer’s tendency to lean on academic clichés makes the tale-telling a little less fresh (everything is liminal), but the narrative is always readable and accessible. Luckhurst is highly critical of most of the works he discusses, but he usually makes his case well. I only took issue with his main criticism of Dawn of the Dead, which the author believes is “smug” for implying that its audience is exceptional for being in on the joke and not falling into the mindless consumerism of the film’s monsters. I think the film has a more constructive purpose in exposing the destructiveness of such consumerism, that Romero is attempting to give his audience something to aspire to by inspiring them to reject the behavior they see on screen, behavior they’ve probably indulged in many times before. Zombies: A Cultural History can serve a similarly constructive function by getting zombie fans to start thinking more critically about the creatures they’ve watched kill and be killed so many times before. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 4

The Date: October 4

The Movie: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

What Is It?: The beginning of a new age in zombie movies, and the finest serious film in the swarming-dead genre. The newsreel aesthetic lends this cheapy a powerful sense of realism, as does Duane Jones's performance and the finale, which hits as hard as a punch in the teeth.

Why Today?: On this day in 1957, actress Kyra Schon, who plays the sweet little girl who eats her mom, is born.

Diary of the Dead 2014

Every year I log my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October in a fiendish feature I call Diary of the Dead. This year I altered the scheme slightly for a single, season-ending post.

I wrote it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

Oct. 1

Rodan (1956- dir. Ishirō Honda) **

One of the most iconic giant Japanese monsters first appeared in a pretty boring movie. Miners discover a baby pterodactyl that looks and moves like a kite. It terrorizes Japan without a smidgen of the moodiness of its forefather, Gojira. Amazing that Ishirō Honda followed that masterpiece with such a lazy picture. Rodan would only become fun when paired with Gojira, as we shall soon see.

We Are What We Are (2013- dir. Jim Mickie) ***

I haven’t seen the Mexican film upon which this cannibal family flick was based, so I can’t make any unfavorable comparisons. Taken on its own merits, the American We Are What We Are is refreshingly atmospheric. It’s also deliberately paced, which I usually like, but this one’s a little too deliberate, bordering on tedious. It’s also a bit empty aside from its fairly subtle critique of the patriarchy. On the plus side, it has Michael Parks, which is worth at least half a star.

Oct. 3

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964- Ishirō Honda) ***½

This is more like it. Since Honda didn’t seem interested in/capable of recapturing the grimness of Gojira he took his kaiju franchise to its logical camp conclusion. Rodan is back and less turgid in mood if not motion. So is Gojira and giant bug Mothra. The old rampaging monsters experience a change of heart when faced with three-headed dragon Ghidorah. They actually have a conversation about whether or not they should assist humanity by offing the new menace! Plus there are those wacky fairy twins, who appear on a crazy TV talk show. Perhaps not great fun, but certainly good fun.

Oct. 4

20 Things You May Not Have Known About 'Dawn of the Dead'

A decade after dropping the first, full-blown zombie apocalypse on our heads with Night of the Living Dead, George Romero got around to showing us what happened next. This time the thrills were more graphic, thanks to makeup legend Tom Savini and a full-color presentation, and the satire was sharper. But you already knew that. In celebration of the 35^th anniversary of its U.S. release, here are 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Dawn of the Dead!

1. A tour of the Monroeville Mall by his friend Mark Mason, who managed the establishment, was most inspirational to George Romero. When Mason mentioned that his mall would be a good place to hole up during a disaster, Romero started formulating the plot of his second Living Dead picture. He also ended up filming Dawn of the Dead in the Monroeville Mall. Other movies with scenes shot there include Flashdance and Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

2. The mall scenes in Dawn of the Dead had to be shot between 2 and 5 AM. 2 AM is when the mall’s final establishment, a tavern, closed for the night. 5 AM is when cardiac patients were admitted to exercise.

3. The Monroeville Mall would once again serve as a horrific setting in Stephen King’s Christine in 1983. A year before that novel was published, Romero and King collaborated on the portmanteau Creepshow with Romero directing and King writing and acting. The two horror icons would also meld minds on Romero’s big screen adaptation of King’s The Dark Half, though the original plan for Romero to direct King’s It for the small-screen as a seven-hour miniseries fell apart because of scheduling problems (Tommy Lee Wallace directed the half-as-long version in 1990 instead). From a Buick 6 was another Romero/King union that withered on the vine, though Romero adaptations of The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon and Gerald’s Game might still happen. Romero has already completed scripts for both possible films.

4. While the political implications of Night of the Living Dead were essentially an unintended factor caused by the casting of a black actor, Duane Jones, in the lead, Romero was fully conscious of the anti-consumerism message of Dawn of the Dead and continued to infuse all subsequent Living Dead movies with political themes.

Diary of the Dead 2012: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews every Monday in October (as was the case last year, I’ll only be discussing movies I haven’t reviewed elsewhere on this site). I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

          

October 15

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976- dir. Nicholas Gessner) **½

An anti-Semitic landlord is trying to force Jodie Foster and her mysteriously absent dad out of their house. The mystery is pretty easy to figure out in the first few minutes of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, so there’s no suspense. Not much horror either. Foster and Martin Sheen as the landlord’s pedophile son are very good, but this flimsy, talky tale adapted from Laird Koenig’s play should have stayed on the stage.

Captive Wild Woman (1942- dir. Edward Dmytryk) *½

Mad doctor John Carradine makes a were-gorilla in this fifth-rate Universal horror. With a half-baked premise yanked from The Island of Dr. Moreau, Captive Wild Woman is mainly a dubious excuse to watch were-cinema’s most racist transformation sequence and footage of circus animals mauling each other that had already appeared in The Big Cage a decade earlier. Plus costumer Vera West should have lost her job for making Evelyn Ankers wear that stupid hat.

October 16

The Giant Claw (1957- dir. Fred F. Sears) **½

A test pilot spots a UFO and planes start falling out of the sky. A classic “War of the Worlds” scenario, you guess? Nope. This isn’t the sort of UFO that’s full of anal probe-armed little green men. It’s the kind that looks like a giant turkey. The Giant Claw does a decent job of establishing an air of mystery, so when we finally see the big bird that is our monster, it feels like the punch line to a joke we didn’t realize was being told. This is one shitty, shitty monster, but once it reveals itself, all you want to do is bask in its magnificent crappiness. So it’s frustrating whenever we return to the human protagonists, even when they’re swapping hilariously awful lines about “atomic spitballs.” The Giant Claw should have been wall-to-wall bird! Still, the time we spend with the “flying nightmare” is to be cherished.

October 17

Beyond Re-Animator (2003- dir. Brian Yuzna) ****

Herbert West has spent thirteen years in the clink since his unholy escapades in Bride of Re-Animator. The brother of one of his monster’s victims is West’s latest protégé, and— guess what?— their experiments go horribly, horribly wrong. Soon everyone in the prison has been monsterized, and that includes the rats. Beyond Re-Animator is a groovy final chapter with great effects (the jawless creature and a sort of living gelatinized man are fabulously grotty creations) and there are plenty of the wacky gags we demand from Re-Animator movies.

I Bury the Living (1958- dir. Arthur Band) ***

Ever since Richard Boone took over the family cemetery business, the plots have been filling up with uncanny speed. Boone fears he’s been causing the deaths by sticking pins in a voodoo map, but the cause is a lot more earthly and predictable. Despite a disappointing ending, I Bury the Living earns points because its bizarre premise is very original, though it might have been better suited to an episode of “The Twilight Zone” than a feature film (particularly if it had played out differently). Director Albert Band’s disorienting camerawork is very cool, but the great makeup artist Jack P. Pierce is wasted here.

October 18

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010- dir. Tod Williams) ***

Paranormal Activity is one of the scariest recent horror movies because of its ambiguity and originality. Yes, the found footage gimmick had been pretty well exploited in the ten years following The Blair Witch Project, but Oren Peli’s film was the first with the bright idea of moving the horror into the home. The first sequel in what is now a franchise is less effective for several reasons. It loses realism by casting familiar character actress Sprague Grayden in a lead role, and it loses ambiguity by getting further into the Featherston family’s demonic history. The big twist? Great Grandma Featherston may have made a deal with the devil so her great grandson-in-law could become—steel yourself—the Burger King. Oh boy. Still, as far as exploitative retreads go, Paranormal Activity 2 is entertaining enough and even manages a couple of good jolts. It also boggles the formula a little by setting the first one in daylight, though we have to wait an hour for it. Cheap jump scares are no substitute for the original’s insidious dread.

October 19

Homicidal (1961- dir. William Castle) ***½

William Castle jumps on the Psycho gravy train and pulls the neat trick of combining Norman Bates and Marion Crane into a single character. Castle does his darnedest to maintain the ruse, but it’s tough to not figure out where the story’s heading. Of course, Castle is always more about style than story, and as usual, his style is an ace blend of legit technique, B-cheese, and almost accidental creepiness. Homicidal was the last in Castle’s streak of terrific pictures begun with House on Haunted Hill. After this his inspiration dried up with a lame remake of The Old Dark House.

October 20

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011- dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) ***

In Paranormal Activity 3 we travel back to 1988 when the Featherston sisters were little girls and their grandma was mixing and mingling with the devil. In contrast to the somewhat lethargic second part, the jumps, jolts, bangs, and shadows are nearly non-stop in part three. This picture is something the original most certainly wasn’t: a cheap (as opposed to inexpensively produced), special effects-flaunting fun house ride. It’s a pretty good one: dumber than part two, but a little scarier. The rotating camera is a nice touch, but everyone except the babysitter looks like a 2011 hipster in this ’80s period piece. Could’ve used more hairspray.

The Headless Horseman or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1922- dir. Edward D. Venturini) ***

This early version of Washington’s Irving’s timeless ghost story isn’t bad, with Will Rogers doing decent comic work as Ichabod Crane, and there’s a hilarious sequence in which parishioners keep falling asleep during a preacher’s long-winded sermon. Yet even at a mere 70 minutes, it exemplifies how “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” simply doesn’t lend itself to feature-length adaptation. The original story is too perfect to be expanded and rewritten, as it was in Tim Burton’s infuriating version, and it’s too simple to be treated faithfully without becoming tedious, as Edward Venturini’s film often is. Way too much time is spent with Ichabod’s students. The entirety of “Danse Macabre” played on the soundtrack during the psalmody lesson scene alone! The horseman is no great shakes either. In his unintentionally funny first appearance, he has noticeable difficulty mounting his steed. Some horseman! When his identity is revealed after the climactic chase, the climax is rendered completely anticlimactic.  Disney’s animated short is still the greatest version by several miles.

October 20

Creepshow 2 (1987- dir. Michael Gornick) **

Lazy, witless sequel to George Romero and Stephen King’s 1982 portmanteau, which wasn’t so great to begin with. The opening segment about a vengeful wooden Indian is completely clueless about its own racism. The second episode is about a killer puddle of Castrol. It’s scarier than it sounds, which isn’t saying much since it doesn’t sound scary at all. In the finale, a woman is dogged by a hitchhiker she ran down while driving home from a date with a man whore. The one saving grace is the fun animated wraparound, which pays tribute to the great horror comics of the ’50s.

The Moth Diaries (2011- dir. Mary Harron) **

Mary Harron cashes in on the teen vampire craze with The Moth Diaries. It isn't as pea-brained as Twilight (what is?), but its glum self-seriousness is tiresome and its postmodernism isn't terribly clever. Harron is a good filmmaker, but there is no evidence of her skill in this movie. And though a film about teenagers doesn't just have to be for teenagers, The Moth Diaries is not a movie for adults. Outsider kids might like it.

Review: 'Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film'

Our ideas about and understanding of filmmaking changed drastically when Roger Leenhardt and André Bazin of Revue du Cinéma introduced their “auteur theory” to the cinematic lexicon in the mid-1940s. Leenhardt and Bazin passed the ownership of film, once considered a collaborative effort or a producer’s medium, to directors with singular visions. Such directors, the critics argued, are the true authors of their films because they control scripts that reflect their own social, political, and artistic ideologies. With their distinctive camerawork, lighting, and control of their actors, they single-handedly crafted their films as assuredly as painters manage canvasses and sculptors manipulate stone. Although the auteur theory has its flaws— some proponents overlook the integral contributions of writers, cinematographers, producers, and the rest—it has helped establish a canon of indisputably great directors whose work can very reasonably bear analysis as the product of a single, or at least principal, creator: Francois Truffaut (the theory’s first high-profile champion), Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, etc. Grand artists creating grand works of art. But are conventional concepts of artistic value integral to auteurism?

In his new book Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film, Kendall R. Phillips argues that Leenhardt and Bazin’s theory should extend to three filmmakers often shoved to the back of cinema’s closet because they primarily work in the dreaded horror genre. Phillips establishes broad thematic threads as evidence of their auteurism: George Romero’s fixation on the body, Wes Craven’s fascination with the split between nocturnal Gothic horror and diurnal reality, and John Carpenter’s obsession with the American frontier.

Phillips’s thesis regarding Carpenter is strongest. He smartly stops just short of designating the director as a maker of Westerns, but provides a sharp view of the way rugged individualists stumbling into dire situations in cagey variations on the American frontier recur in much of his work. But horror is so deeply linked with the body and Gothic traditions that either theme could just as easily be applied to the films of Whale, Raimi, Browning, Cronenberg, Polanski, and many other genre filmmakers as Phillips applies them to Romero and Craven. The writer also avoids his three filmmakers’ aesthetic sensibilities for the most part. A director’s stamp is not merely measured by recurring themes, but also by distinctive artistry. Perhaps Phillips recognized that a number of the films he discusses are artistically negligible and deeper discussions of aesthetics might damage his central argument.

Despite its somewhat incomplete argument—and I’m certainly not suggesting that these filmmakers aren’t auteurs— Dark Directions is a compelling and intelligent look at Romero, Craven, and Carpenter’s politics and the finer themes linking select clutches of their movies (each chapter deals with threads traveling through three or fours specific films). This means the book does make a strong case for the intellectual mechanisms grinding behind horror’s surface murder, gore, and mayhem. As such, it may provoke more intelligent considerations of a genre that often doesn’t get its due. For that alone, Dark Directions would be a very worthwhile book.

Farewell, Bill Hinzman

That name may not ring a bell, but his face sure will. When Bill Hinzman appears swaggering through a graveyard just minutes into Night of the Living Dead, we are aware that a) George Romero has no intention of easing us into the hot water and b) the zombie rule book has just been rewritten. Night of the Living Dead was the very first film to reimagine zombies not as voodoo pawns but as a concentrated team of brain-dead brain eaters, and Bill Hinzman played the very first of that new brand of zombie. On the strength of that dialogue-less yet iconic role, Hinzman was cast in horror movies on a semi-regular basis throughout his career, including Romero's own The Crazies, Santa Claws, and the delightfully-titled direct-to-video The Drunken Dead Guy (in which Hinzman played, appropriately enough, "The Experienced Zombie"). Hinzman also directed a couple of schlockers of his own called FleshEater and The Majorettes. According to Dread Central.com, Bill Hinzman died of cancer at the age of 75 on February 5th. Insert tasteless joke about his return from the grave.

Review: ‘More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead’

George Romero revolutionized the zombie flick with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. While transplanting zombies from Caribbean voodoo rituals to Middle America and transforming them from the brain-dead pawns of some nefarious witch doctor into a relentless mob of cannibals, Romero’s film also helped build the Midnight Movie phenomenon of the ‘70s. With 1978’s Dawn of the Dead he sharpened the political implications of his first film, almost making the zombie movie a respectable form of social satire. By the time he made the righteously anti-military Day of the Dead in 1985, finger waving threatened to devour the essential purpose of all zombie movies: a fun, scary time watching zombies eat people.

Psychobabble's 10 Most Petrifying Portmanteau Episodes

portmanteau (noun \pȯrt-ˈman tō\)
1. a large suitcase for traveling
2. a word formed by blending two or more other words
3. a horror movie anthologizing two or more distinct episodes into one horrifically zany, often inconsistent, sometimes spectacular whole, all bolted together with a wraparound story usually resolving with a ghastly ironic twist.



1. “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” from Dead of Night (1945- dir. Alberto Cavalcanti)

Review: Simon Pegg's 'Nerd Do Well'

Simon Pegg is the role model horror, sci-fi, and comedy geeks always craved. Less contemptuous of his fans than Bruce Campbell, Pegg is the ultimate geek hero because he is completely grateful for and humbled by his success with such stellar work as “Spaced”, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz. That humbleness pervades his memoir Nerd Do Well, although I’m not really sure why this is categorized as a memoir rather than an autobiography. I’ve always made the distinction that autobiographies are by famous people and memoirs are by unknown people who’ve been hooked on crack, abused in some way, or most commonly, both. Pegg is famous enough, and aside from a good deal of ganja puffing, there isn’t anything in the way of drug abuse in this book. Aside from his parents’ divorce, several teen heartbreaks, and one genuinely tragic event involving a boyhood friend, he seems to have lived a pretty happy, pretty charmed life.

Pegg often writes that he doesn’t really know why such a jolly story needs to be told. He’d rather be doing other things, like making up a cheeky sci-fi scenario starring his superhuman alter-ego and robot butler buddy that could easily have made a neat novel in itself, or delivering a thoughtful multi-chapter essay about his favorite movie, Star Wars. Pegg’s autobiographical vignettes aren’t always as interesting as his tangents, but his flawless writing and sincere amiability make every page enjoyable reading. Pegg knows a straight life-story narrative is no way to convey the geekiness that made him a cult hero. By showing us what he likes to do and talk about, what cracks him up, and what inspires him, he creates a complete, personal, and specific self-portrait. And like his best work on TV and film, it is breezy, often touching, and frequently hilarious fun. Pegg’s accounts of befriending his own heroes—George Romero, Gillian Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, John Landis, Rob Morrow—are delivered with geeky awe rather than name-dropping smarm. He is just as jazzed about meeting these people as anyone reading his book would be to meet him. Simon (I hope he doesn’t mind my assumption we’re on a first-name basis) never lets us forget he is one of us.

May 26, 2010: 20 Things You May Not Have Known About George Romero

This Friday, George A. Romero unleashes Survival of the Dead, the sixth installment in his beloved “Living Dead” film series. Romero not only spearheaded the zombie craze that continues to rage but also made the greatest films in the genre (save one priceless exception by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg) with his original trilogy of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead. Of course, there’s a lot more to Romero than reanimated corpses that snack on entrails. Here are 20 Things You May Not Know About George Romero…

May 27, 2010: Psychobabble recommends ‘Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear’

George A. Romero madness continues with a look at his 1988 flick, Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear...

Allan (Jason Beghe) has it made in the shade. He’s a super-buff champion runner dating gorgeous Linda (Janine Turner shortly before “Northern Exposure” and long before her side-job as a rightwing crackpot). But he loses his career and his lady friend after getting creamed by a truck and losing the use of his arms and legs. Enter Ella, an almost freakishly adorable capuchin monkey. Ella’s already extraordinary intelligence is further bolstered by brain-infused injections administered by Allan’s buddy, the mad doctor Geoffrey (John Pankow). At first Ella performs household tasks for Allan: answering his phone, preparing his lunch, changing the battery in his electric wheelchair. She even does windows. But as she becomes addicted to Geoffrey’s shots, the monkey-junkie develops an unnatural psychic/romantic bond with Allan. Before long, she’s offing his sundry enemies, which include an antisocial parakeet.



Did George Romero set out to make Monkey Shines a bizarre comedy? He’s a smart guy, so I won’t rule this out, but there’s such a lack of self-consciousness in the acting and execution that I’d wager this was genuinely intended to be “an experiment in fear.” Let’s call the experiment a complete failure, but the film an immensely enjoyable winner. We get to see Ella best Geoffrey in a knife fight, Allan doing an uproarious Clint Eastwood impersonation as he threatens to rip out Ella’s eyes, Allan’s mother giving him several strangely sensual sponge baths, Allan shaking the stuffing out of Ella with his teeth, and an Alien-inspired dream sequence that will drop your jaw. This ain’t Night of the Living Dead, but it sure is a lot funnier than Creepshow. And somehow Ella remains monumentally adorable even when she’s trying to stick a syringe in Allan’s girlfriend’s eyelid. Yow!