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A Review of Chemical 12-D

Isn’t it a telling sign that a seven-minute short film can capture the overall essence of what makes zombie movies great more than any number of recent, bigger budget studio productions? Written and directed by Mac Eldridge, ‘Chemical 12-D’ is an obvious labour of love, managing to squeeze more tension into its short running time than George Romero has managed to put into his last two movies.

Michael Frank (Bill Stoneking), seemingly a lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, has noticed a mutation in the zombies that roam the streets and picks up the wondering corpse of a young boy (Wesley Klepac). Taking him back to his lab, Michael begins to experiment with a solution known only as Chemical 12-D, in the hopes that he may find the answer to halting the spread of the virus.

To reveal any more would mean spoilers, but the overall vibe of the movie is very close to Romero’s ‘Day of the Dead’. If you ignore ‘Land of the Dead’ (like some people do!), then ‘Chemical 12-D’ could be a scene straight out of a possible follow-up to ‘Day...’, such is its grittiness and sense of despair. Bill Stoneking gives a very intense performance as Michael even though he doesn’t actually say a great deal. His deep expressions and subtle looks give a greater sense of hopelessness than any script. The production is surprisingly polished, giving the movie the feel of a studio film, and the effects – particularly the sound – are suitably gruesome.


To summarise, this isn’t the goriest or scariest zombie movie you’ll ever see, but it could well be one of the most lovingly crafted and effective. Instead of concentrating on blood and guts and forgetting the substance (like most zombie movies do), Eldridge has made a short movie that’s big on impact, and hasn’t it been a while since a zombie movie has done that?

To view the trailer for ‘Chemical 12-D, click or paste the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za6IV_2ri3A

MY TOP 5 ZOMBIE MOVIES

I love a list, and in response to Sarah from Gorepress I shall present my top 5 zombie films (all subject to change, though!):

5. The Return of the Living Dead (1985) – Funny and gory in equal measure, ‘ROTLD’ took Romero’s established formula, and made a classic horror/comedy out of it. The first zombie movie to mention ‘Braaaaains!’, and considering when it came out and the budget, the effects are pretty good, too. Add to that Linnea Quigley in the buff, 80’s mainstay Miguel A. Nunez Jnr (if he’s in it, I’ll watch it!) and great comedy performances from Clu Gulager and James Karen, and you can’t fail. 80’s classic.

4. Braindead (1992) – There was a time when ‘Braindead’ was the goriest horror movie ever to get through the BBFC uncut, and maybe still is! Luckily the censors saw the joke in ‘Lord of the Rings’ director Peter Jackson’s gloriously OTT zombie caper and kept all the best moments in – zombie baby being thrown around the park, zombie priest and nurse getting it on, death by lawnmower, sticking on peeling skin with glue, squeezing blood and puss filled boils, and possibly the best delivered line ever – ‘I kick arse for the Lord!’. Plot is irrelevant, all-time classic, go see it now!

3. Night of the Creeps (1986) – One of the most amusing and most quotable zombie movies of all, ‘NOTC’ stars veteran actor Tom Atkins as grizzly cop Ray Cameron and ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation’ brat Jason Lively as geeky Chris Romero (Cameron? Romero? Do you see what they did there?), who team up to wipe out a plague of inter-galactic slugs that lay eggs on your brain and turn you into a zombie. Classy B-movie nonsense that still stands up to this day, ‘NOTC’ was nearly the perfect horror/comedy crossover, except one movie stood in its way...

2. Re-Animator (1985) – Loosely based on the Lovecraft book, ‘Re-Animator’ is pretty much the perfect horror/comedy movie ever, mainly down to the deadpan performances from its lead characters. Jeffrey Combs stars as the ever-so-stern Herbert West, a brilliant medical student who is trying to perfect a serum that re-animates corpses. With the help of his assistant Dan Cain, he sets about trying out his theories on the recently deceased cadavers in the University morgue, much to the derision of top medical teacher Dr. Hill (David Gale), who wants the serum for himself. Hilarious and vulgar in equal measure, ‘Re-Animator’ spawned two inferior, but still worth a look, sequels but this original is still the daddy of them all.


1. Day of the Dead (1985) – Yes, after hours of breaking it down and altering my list, it comes down to this – George Romero’s 1985 sequel to his 1978 classic ‘Dawn of the Dead’. ‘But if ‘Dawn...’ is such a classic, why isn’t that number one?’ you may cry, and indeed ‘Dawn...’ is quite possibly the ultimate zombie movie as it has every element thrown in – gore, shocks, drama, romance, comedy, tense atmosphere – but sometimes having it all there in one movie is a bit too much. As it is, time has been a lot kinder to ‘Day...’ which still holds up – nah, forget that, it’s actually better now than it was then. A small band of survivors are holed up in a military bunker, with the soldiers intent on wiping out the zombies, and the scientists trying to find out what makes them tick. In reality, the zombies are secondary to the human characters and their in-fighting, particularly whenever the vile Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) is on-screen. Containing perhaps the best death-by-zombie moment ever – and nobody deserved it more – as well as many other marvellous effects courtesy of make-up maestro Tom Savini, ‘Day...’ has atmosphere, black humour, shocks and gore, albeit more streamlined and subtle than its predecessor, and that’s why it is my favourite.

A Review of Night of the Creeps

If you try and analyze the elements of all the great horror movies, there are certain things that continually crop up. Obviously gore and terror are key, but you could also add to that a streak of dark humour, quotable dialogue, straight-but-slightly-knowing performances, characters that you care about, lots of genre references and in-jokes, better than average special effects and a pretty good story; ‘Night of the Creeps’ has all of those.

The story begins in 1959 when an alien aboard a spaceship (stay with it!) ejects a capsule that his pursuers are trying to get back. The capsule heads towards Earth, and lands in the woods near a couple of courting students who go to investigate. The guy goes to find the meteor while his unlucky lady friend waits in the car, which is parked right on the main road in the path of an axe-wielding serial killer. In the woods, however, the meteor containing the capsule splits open and a slug-like creature leaps out and goes straight into the mouth of the male student.


Fast forward to 1986 and Chris Romero (Jason Lively) and J.C. Hooper (Steve Marshall) are a couple of college geeks looking to gain the attention of Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow), so they decide to join a fraternity. Brad (Allan Kayser), the leader of the fraternity and Cynthia’s boyfriend, tells the hapless duo that they must perform an initiation. In this case, they have to steal a dead body from the college morgue and dump it on the steps of a rival frat house. Chris and J.C. sneak into the morgue and find a cryogenically frozen body that they try to steal. After being interrupted by a lab worker they flee, leaving the body defrosting on the lab floor. Unfortunately, the body is the frozen corpse of the 1959 student and it still contains the slug from the meteor – well, it does until it leaps out of the corpses mouth and into the mouth of the lab technician. It seems that the slugs enter the body through the mouth and lay eggs in the brain, turning its host into a zombie before the head explodes, giving birth to more slugs. Enter Detective Ray Cameron (Tom Atkins), who is called to the lab due to there being two dead bodies, although when he arrives there is only the body of the lab tech. Seems the student corpse is on its way back to the ladies frat house, where he picked up his date in 1959, only this time he meets Cynthia. After his head splits open and a load of slugs spill out, Cameron is called to the scene, where it turns out he has been before. Apparently, Cameron’s girlfriend was the young student killed by the axe-murderer in1959 and, after discovering her body, went hunting for the killer and killed him with his shotgun, burying the body in the exact spot where the House Mother’s cottage now stands. The slugs that spilled out of the corpse have also found their way to the cottage, and Detective Cameron and his old adversary are about to have another meeting. Meanwhile, Chris is making headway with Cynthia, who has gone to visit him and J.C. to try and explain what she saw at her window. After dumping Brad, she asks Chris to the prom but unfortunately Brad takes it badly and hangs around the girl’s frat house, bumping into the House Mother’s dog that has an unwelcome visitor – and it isn’t fleas!

With slugs everywhere and a college full of students to play with, it’s up to Chris and Detective Cameron to put a stop to it all, before the slugs reach the college basement where one of the student’s science experiment is stored – jars full of human brains!

Not your average zombie fare, ‘NOTC’ is B-movie madness at its finest. Tom Atkins is in his element here, playing the grizzled alcoholic cop with a great supply of quotable one-liners (including the unforgettable ‘Thrill Me’), and Jason Lively and Steve Marshall bounce off each other like an established double act. Obviously paying homage to the classic monster movies of the fifties, along with the obvious influence of ‘Night of the Living Dead’, this movie could quite easily have been made today, such is its lasting appeal. Indeed, if you’re a fan of recent monster/zombie movies like ‘Slither’, ‘Infestation’ or even ‘My Name is Bruce’ then this is definitely essential viewing, and could quite possibly be seen as a forerunner to those movies (‘Slither’ in particular). The references are also fun, mainly because it’s done with affection and not in an ‘ironic’ way – there’s the obvious Romero/Hooper/Cameron/Cronenberg names, but also Raimi and Landis are name checked as well.

If you’ve never seen this movie (and due to it not being available for years, you probably haven’t) , then the dvd is certainly worth getting hold of. There’s plenty of ‘making of’ featurettes, deleted scenes, trivia track, commentaries and a Tom Atkins interview, and it all looks fantastic. Overall, a real genre classic that has hardly aged a bit so get it now!

A Review of The House of the Devil

‘The House of the Devil’ could quite possibly be the movie that really shows those pesky youngsters how to make an effective horror movie. Harking back to an era when these types of movies were dubbed ‘chillers’, this movie takes the slow build-up and tense atmospheres of movies such as ‘The Amityville Horror’, and then climaxes in a crescendo of Hammer-style violence that really reminds of when movies were designed to scare and shock without the excessive use of torture and over-complicated traps.

Jocelin Donahue plays Samantha, a student who is looking to move out of her University digs and get her own place. Hoping to come up with some rent money pretty quick, she takes on a babysitting job for a slightly strange couple called the Ulmans, who live in a very big spooky house. Samantha turns up at the house with her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) for support, when Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) tells Samantha that she won’t be babysitting a child but rather looking after his elderly mother-in-law, whom he claims will be no problem and Samantha won’t know she’s there. Not being too happy about it, Samantha refuses but Mr. Ulman, who refers a lot to the lunar eclipse that is happening that night, is desperate, so he offers her more money. Samantha agrees, much to the annoyance of Megan, who leaves and says she’ll come back after midnight to pick Samantha up. After the Ulmans leave, Samantha spends her time investigating the massive house, listening to her walkman and ordering pizza, although after hearing strange bumps and noises she phones Mr. Ulman on the number he left, but apparently the number doesn’t exist...



Any further plot details will spoil the movie, but if you’re a fan of old-fashioned spills and chills then you won’t be disappointed. The movie is a slow-burner, and the middle section when Samantha is investigating the house does take up a lot of the running time, but it’s this build-up of tension that makes the final act of the movie so effective. With it’s hat tipped towards classic Hammer and a big dose of seventies horror – there are nods towards ‘The Exorcist’, the aforementioned ‘The Amityville Horror’ and even further back to ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ – this movie won’t suit everybody, especially given the violent extremes that movies seem to have to go to today, but director Ti West seems to have enough genre know-how to make it work and really show how terror can be effective when using a ‘less is more’ strategy. In fact, if you didn’t know this was a new movie, then you could be forgiven for thinking it came out in the early eighties – missed a marketing trick there!


Overall, this is a great movie, and one that genre fans will be raving about for a while. The acting is very good, especially ‘Manhunter’ star Noonan as Mr. Ulman, and the script is convincing. Tense, atmospheric, creepy and disturbing, this is certainly a breath of fresh air in the current ‘torture-porn’ climate. If you’re a ‘Saw’ fan looking for your next gore-filled fix, then you may have to look elsewhere.

A Review of Wrng Turn 3: Left For Dead

Bucking the trend of DTV franchises, 2007’s ‘Wrong Turn 2: Dead End’ was an exciting thrill-ride that outstripped its not-sure-if-its-serious-or-a-comedy predecessor. More mutants, more gore, characters that you routed for and Henry Rollins in an inspired bit of casting. You would think, then, that now a style for these movies has been established and it works, then part three would be an even bigger, bolder and better gorefest. As if they’d dare cock it up now...

After the now traditional opening gambit, where an insignificant group of eye candy youngsters get wasted (which is, to be honest, the best scene in the movie), we shift to the local prison where a group of high-risk prisoners are about to get transferred, and try breaking for freedom on the way. Stopping en route at the local sheriff’s office, the group then move on but their bus gets spotted by Three Fingers, the mutant cannibal, who rams them off the road. And so begins a desperate race for survival, as the prisoners battle not only Three Fingers, but also each other in a desperate bid to escape capture.

Doesn’t that sound exciting? On paper maybe, but when it’s on the screen, it becomes apparent that quality control wasn’t high on the agenda. Lacking the obvious passion for the genre that part two had in bucket loads, this entry in the series has the production values of the made-for-TV bilge that normally gets shown in the middle of weekday afternoons. The script is shamefully poor, the lines delivered by actors who obviously don’t know or care about the genre, or indeed the movie, they’re starring in, and the CGI makes ‘Mega Shark VS. Giant Octopus’ look like a contender for the best special effects Oscar. And this is before we even go into the utter absurdity of the situations the ‘characters’ (the term is used very loosely) find themselves in – let’s just say that if you ever find yourself with a seemingly dead mutant cannibal laying at your feet for about the third time in one evening, and you have a shotgun in your hand, it may be best just to err on the side of caution and blow his head off.

It isn’t all bad, though, as there are one or two moments that raise a smile. There’s a rather impressively bosomed young lady who gets one of Three Finger’s arrows right where it hurts, and a rather unfortunate young man who gets cheese-wired into three pieces, but two impressive kills just isn’t enough. With no big-name actors or cult personalities to speak of, a tedious lack of ideas and a list of plot implausibilities that just make the movie more ridiculous as it goes on, it seems the standard set by part two has been put to one side in favour of just churning out crap that seems similar but lacks the substance. Avoid.