This Christmas my very excellent wife gave me (among other things) a copy of More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead, which is billed as "the definitive Return of the Living Dead documentary. Last night I finally had some time to sit down and watch it. It's pretty much two hours of talking heads, and given this wasn't a cursed production like Apocalypse Now the documentary really won't be interesting to anyone who is not already a ROTLD fan. But if you are a fan, there's some interesting material here. For me, Return of the Living Dead was a seminal event in my teenage years. It came out in the summer of 1995 just before I started my senior year in high school. I was a big fan of horror films in general and zombie films in particular (my favorite at the time was Lucio Fulci's 'Zombie', mostly because I had not yet seen Romero's Dawn of the Dead). I vividly remember the drive down to Seattle to see ROTLD in the theater, blaring the Ramones' cover of "Needles and Pins" on the stereo and itching to see what Dan O'Bannon had in store for me. I was not disappointed, and to this day one of my favorite moments in cinematic history is the zombie picking up the radio in the ambulance and telling the dispatcher to "..send more paramedics!"...

Generally speaking, my primary experience with French cinema has been the “magical reality” movies of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and his very excellent Delicatessen is very much on my list of movies to review for this blog). Between that, and movies like Mr. Bean’s Vacation (which may be a British film but it is set almost entirely in France) and The Triplets of Belleville (easily one of my favorite animated films of the last decade), when I think of French films I almost exclusively think of happy, funny, whimsical and lighthearted comedy. Now, it’s not that I expected to actually see that kind of style in a zombie movie -- I knew when I started watching The Horde a few days ago that I was watching...

Back when I started this blog, I wrote to my friend Michael Montoure (whose work you can read over at Bloodletters.com) to ask for his help with a logo. The design brief I gave him was "every bad knockoff of The Road Warrior that was ever filmed in the desert on a non-existent budget", and I think we can all agree that he delivered beautifully on that précis. I was reminded of that this week as I watched a movie that fits that description perfectly: Patrick Swayse’s magnum opus Steel Dawn.

Yes, he is the desert warrior…

Back in 2007, before he was cast in the lead for the Star Trek reboot, Chris Pine was in a little independent post-apocalyptic virus film called Carriers. It sat in a can for two years until one presumes the distributers of the movie realized that they could maybe make a little extra cash off of Captain Kirk and got Carriers into a limited theatrical release. I stumbled across it on Netflix a while back, and although I entered into it with low expectations I was actually pretty impressed.

The story follows four young adults in the aftermath of a global pandemic.  Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby, his brother Danny, and his brother’s friend Kate are trying to reach Turtle Beach where they think they can wait in safety for the virus to die out. They have survived so far primarily because Brian has a very rigid set of rules they must follow in order to stay uninfected. These aren’t lighthearted Zombieland-type rules, but rather very strict and...

So, a little while back when I was reading Lucifer’s Hammer I considered doing a month-long series of blog posts on various post-apocalyptic stories surrounding a world-killing meteorite. I didn’t really want to write a post on Armageddon, though, both because it is obvious and because it would mean I would have to actually watch it again and I am just not that dedicated. (Sorry Michael Bay, no matter how pretty Liv Tyler is to look at I just can’t sit through another one of your overblown steaming piles of cinematic crap). I wanted to dig a letter deeper, and on a whim I tried searching Netflix for Meteor – a true classic of 70’s excess with Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. Sadly, Netflix did not have it available. Also sadly, I instead stumbled across Meteor Apocalypse....

In my last post I wrote about what is considered one of the landmark Japanese animated films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It is the movie that cemented Hayao Miyazaki as a true genius, and coincidentally was also the movie that first got me into anime. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. The movie that I saw, the one that sparked my interest, was actually the bastardized English translation called Warriors of the Wind. Obviously, enough of the original move shone through such that I became a fan, but I was soon to discover just how much got lost in the translation.

Warriors of the Wind was produced by New World Pictures, dubbed into English and released briefly theatrically and then later shown on HBO and released on video tape. The movie was heavily edited for time, entire plot threads were removed, and worse than that the entire point of the movie was excised. Where Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was a grand ecological statement, Warriors of the Wind has virtually nothing to say on the point. Characters were randomly renamed (from Nausicaa to Princess Zondra, from Asbel to Prince Milo, etc.). In the main subplot about the Ohmu, they are changed from sentient sympathetic creatures into nothing but aggressive monsters. It is a tragedy from start to finish.

...

First off, before I get into this week’s post I want to say, I have no intention of turning this into an anime blog. My posts from the last two weeks led me back to Nausicaä, on which I will spend this week and next, but after that I will move onto other apocalyptic genres. Specifically I the coming weeks I have lined up posts on killer meteors, zombies, and all kinds of other non-animated mayhem.

So, why Nausicaä this week and what does it have to do with apocalyptic fiction? Well, re-watching Angel’s Egg led me back to the first Japanese animated film that really captured my imagination, and it is set in a future shaped by an apocalyptic war so it definitely fits the bill.  Released in 1984, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set one thousand years after the “Seven Days of Fire” in which most of humanity and civilization was destroyed. Only a brief bit of backstory is given, but the implication is that some nation or entity either created or summoned a group of Giant Warriors who laid waste to the world.

...

Last week I talked about the anime masterpiece Tenshi no Tamago. This week I have the sad duty to report on the hostility done to that very excellent move by it’s American translation, In the Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep. This is going to be a short one, because this movie doesn’t deserve much consideration.



So what happens when a shlock genre studio like New World Pictures gets the license for a deeply mysterious and beautiful masterpiece like Tenshi no Tamago? Naturally, they delete everything but about 30 minutes of the animation, and then wrap it all in a live action story filmed in and around an abandoned California refinery with a cast of people who have never acted in another movie (before or since) and shoot in on what appears to be a budget of $25 plus a bubble gum wrapper.

The earth is a wasteland. Scavengers wander around in full body haz-mat suits with gas masks, because the air is too polluted to breathe. Meanwhile off...

Sit back, boys and girls, I’m going a bit surreal this week. This is one of my all-time favorite movies – beautiful, hypnotic, surreal, and cryptic all rolled up into a gorgeous anime package. I discovered Mamoru Oshii’s “Angel’s Egg” quite by accident back in early 1986, and therein lies a tale.



In early 1986 I attended Rustycon with my best friend Riff, and spent a fair amount of time in a room that was showing non-stop Japanese animated films. I got to talking to the guy who was running the room, and ultimately a few weeks later he gave me a videotape copy of Tezuka’s “Phoenix 2772”. As an afterthought, because there was space at the end of the tape, he also tossed in “Angel’s Egg” because he thought it was pretty cool.  Twenty five years later and I can’t say that I have ever given Phoenix 2772 another thought, but “Angel’s Egg” has stuck with me.

At that point in time,...

“…ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars…For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows…Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death…No flesh shall be spared…”

- Mark 13:7,8,12,20

In September of 1990 a nasty little British film came out that was equal parts post-apocalyptic, science fiction, and horror. Hardware is a bleak, grimy, operatic and ultimately bloody and painful piece of work, and achieves all of its goals beautifully.

So, I had originally intended to write a Deathlands retrospective this week. I still plan on doing that next week. But I just got home from seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and suddenly that became my topic of the week. I went to the movie expecting a fun Planet of the Apes movie, and instead what I got was a genuinely smart, well-written and well-acted science fiction film. Yes, there were plenty of nods to the original movie, but it really stands completely on its own. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go. You won’t regret it.

The premise of the film is that Will Rodman (played by James Franco) is a research scientist trying to create a cure for Alzheimer's. Not coincidentally, his own father (played perfectly by John Lithgow) suffers from the disease, and is the primary motivator for the research. Through an unfortunate chain of events, Rodman winds up taking home an infant chimpanzee who has genetically inherited the traits from the treatment he was testing. Caesar is raised...

One of my all-time favorite cult films is this 1998 gem that mashes up Mad Max, The Wizard of Oz, Russian-American Rock and Roll, and 1970’s Hong Kong cinema. I give you: Six-String Samurai

The premise of the movie, as given during the opening credits, is that in 1957 the Russians used nuclear force to invade and conquer the United States. In the vast wasteland that resulted, only one place remained as the last bastion of freedom – a city that became known as Lost Vegas, where Elvis was crowned as King. Forty years later Elvis is dead, and now Vegas needs a new King.