A GREAT YEAR FOR GOREHOUNDS SO FAR... T
here hasn’t been a year in recent memory where I’ve been as surprised at the col- umn-worthy material I’ve found on the ran- dom discs that have oozed into my
possession. Sometimes they’re even just laying there on our editor-in-chief’s desk, such as the screener for Kevin Tenney’s Brain Dead! I’ve never seen Tenney’s most notable film,
Night of the Demons (1988). I understand the cult cachet it has, but it’s never been my idea of a Hal- loween party. After watching Brain Dead, though, I’m perplexed as to why Tenney’s biggest hit was remade by someone else in 2009 instead of just giving him a decent budget to do it, because Brain Dead is about the most mindlessly enter- taining and unselfconsciously ’80s film I’ve seen since, well, the ’80s. Granted, this is no more original than Slither
(2006), “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” segment of Creepshow (1982) or The Blob sequel (1972) or remake (1988), but I was sold by the first fifteen seconds of the restricted trailer. It fea- tures a cheesy CGI meteorite slamming into the forehead of a redneck fisherman, who instantly turns into a zombie that pokes its thumbs into the eye sockets of its former buddy and rips his head in half so that his brain falls out! Cut to two babes stripping off their tops so they can go skinny-dipping. Fif- teen seconds! That’s pretty much what this
film is about: tits and practical gore effects (by Gabe Bartalos, best known for his work on Frank Henenlotter’s films). A vi- olent, dimwitted convict and the hapless sarcastic bastard he’s handcuffed to, a pair of attrac- tive women, and a stereotypical TV preacher and his buxom acolyte hole up in an old hunting camp to fight off alien slug-infested zombies. Except that there are only two of them because the budget didn’t allow for more. Nev- ertheless, it thrills and chills. But those who prefer their low-budget zombie
splatter with a side of nihilism might want to track down Danish filmmaker Casper Haugegaard’s
RM60
Opstandelsen (2010), available on a subtitled R2 PAL DVD from Another World Entertainment. Opstandelsen (meaning “Resurrection”) opens
with a brilliant tracking shot that rises from below the earth of a cemetery to reveal a glori- ous old cathedral. Inside, a solemn funeral for a man named Simon is underway. Fader Lucias (Hans Maaløe) delivers an ominous sermon – “Those who follow Him will live on even after death…” Meanwhile, Simon’s brother,
Peter (Mads Althoff), is busy in the back of the church snorting rails off a Bible open to verse 666. His frustrated aunt sends her two children off to coax him out for the ceremony, but it seems that the Fader’s speech resurrected the dead! While zombies eat the congregation, Peter and his cousins (Marie
Frohmé Vanglund and Bjørn-Andersen) flee into the basement of the church in hopes of escaping the undead horde. With a taut runtime of 50 minutes, Haugegaard
dives quickly into the mayhem. The mourners Peter stumbles into are gnarly – limbs are ripped off and throats torn out – but it’s too brief. Ex- tending that sequence at the expense of some
Brain Dead
of the shaky-cam shenanigans in the bowels of the church would have been wise, but there’s enough impaling, gut-munching and sledge- hammer skull-crushing to keep you gagging all the way through. The extras more than make up for the rela-
tively short feature. There’s a non-subtitled ten- minute making-of featurette and a stills gallery. There’s also an art-gore short by Haugegaard, the 28-minute Kældermen- neske (2008), in which a man kills a friend during an argument and then drunkenly dismembers him; a quartet of music videos, which includes a spectacularly revolting clip for Cephalic Car- nage’s “Ohrwurm,” full of graphic nudity, spilled entrails and worms crawling out of an erect penis; and another for
horrorcore artist Crackmordaz, in which a psy- chotic surgeon grafts the head of a grown man onto the body of a baby that bites its mother’s nipple off. A Zombie Trailershow and a Fulci- heavy quintet of promos for classic ’80s Italian zombie films round out the goods.
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