mrAru and I have been having a blast with netflix…and getting movies we wouldnt normally spend actual money to rent.
Yesterday we had 2 arrive [1776 is backordered, dammit=(] and The Beyond was one of the 2 [and for the terminally curious, Swing Kids was the other one]
sigh OK, not a bad movie, per se…sort of italian/existential.
plot [spoiler] A woman inherits a derelict hotel charmingly situated over one of the 7 gates to hell. Several odd things happen to her, the buzzer for room 36 keeps ringing, where an artist was murdered who was apparently the only person able to keep the gate of hell closed.] Several people die, a painter falls off a scaffold, a plumber gets his face crushed and melted by a demon hand, a handyman dies somehow [i think killed by the same demon hand] the interior decorator falls off a ladder and gets eaten by spiders…typical horror movie fare. Female protagonist and doctor end up chased by zombies in the hospital and end up in the basement/hell. Very disconnected plotlines=[/spoiler]
OK, when confronted with zombies, and you see that the only thing stopping them is shooting them in the head, wouldn’t YOU stop shooting them in the stomach and aim solely for the head? Is it rocket science to even notice the only effective shots are headshots?
I had a similar gripe (ok, one of many) with John Carpenter’s Vampires. James Woods has a big speech about what will and won’t hurt/kill vampires and specifically says that guns are absolutely useless against them. This doesn’t stop his character and everyone who works with him from carrying guns and shooting at lots of vampires, to little effect, throughout the movie. This strategy gets lots of the vampire fighters killed. Another poor and needlessly complicated strategy is to come upon ramshackle houses in the middle of the desert that are home to nests of sleeping vampires and instead of just driving right through the walls with their large, armored vehicles, exposing all the vamps to the crispifying sun, they send in guys to more or less harpoon the vampires and drag them outside using winches. I left that movie feeling that every vamp fighter that died totally deserved it for being that amazingly stupid.
LOL, I agree about Vampires…one good size bulldozer to scrape the top off, push the house to one side and a backhoe to dig out the rubble=) Although, purportedly fire also worked, so what would be wrong with a few barrels of napalm and a match…I would think a basement would make an wonderful impromptu BBQ=) Shish-ke-vamps, anybody?
The Romero movie canon (as well as the recent *Dawn * remake) established that one zombie bite will, in a short time, kill you.
This REALLY made me wonder about the bikers in the original Dawn, who laughingly abuse the zombies, stealing their jewelry, hitting them in the face with custard pies, and so forth. Man, I’d at least wear leather gloves when I did something like that… I mean, talk about dangerous entertainment…
ON a non-Zombie note, I remeber going to see Swing Kids in the theatre thinking it would be a good movie to laugh at but that it was actually pretty good.
[SPOILER]Fun, perhaps… but any movie where the zombies will stop in mid-attack simply because persisting with the attack would ruin the dramatic tension … well… somehow, those zombies just don’t strike me as all that dangerous.
On the other hand, if they can be trained to play video games, they just might be dangerous as all hell…[/SPOILER]
Simon Pegg told an interviewer (semi-seriously) that more filmmakers of all genres should include flesh-eating zombies. He thought that when a Merchant-Ivory costume drama started getting boring, zombies would be a great way to liven things up!
I believe that’s the whole point. The bikers do all this to impress eachother with how macho and reckless they are. It’s like playing chicken or doing placing your hand on a tale and stabbing the space between your fingers repeatedly at increasing speeds.
The jewelry is just a trophy to show what you’ve accomplished. IIRC some bullfights begin with unarmed men trying to steal ribbons from the bull’s head and horns for the same reason. The custard pies are both flair, and a literal way to show that the man laugh’s at danger.