War of The Dead
Overall Recommendation
Recommendation?
There’s nothing very good about this except the first battle scene.
Plot Autopsy
Plot Autopsy
- Group of soldiers get ambushed and there’s a fucking amazing fire-fight scene that totally rocks.
- Later that evening, the same group of soldiers get routed by zombies. And there’s something about a Hellraiser puzzle box.
- Soldiers meet a Russian, who they treat like a German, who takes them to a house. And there’s something about a Hellraiser puzzle box.
- Wave after wave of zombie attack our people. Attrition. Multiple somethings about a Hellraiser puzzle box.
- Our people run somewhere else. Wave after wave of zombies attack them. Attrition. Something about a Hellraiser puzzle box.
- Fist-fights galore, kicking, punching, jumping, fires, mayhem, a distinct lack of nudity, and a distinct lack of any explanation of what the fuck was up with the Hellraiser puzzle box thing. Unless, they explained it and I just wasn’t paying attention. Here. Look at my middle fingers.
Zombie Description
Zombie Description
These are super-soldier zombies created by some sort of liquid goo, or also from being bit. But there’s nothing really zombie about them. I mean, you need headshots to kill them, and they can infect others, but they like fist-fighting and they don’t want to eat brains and they’re just really meth’d out tweakers on PCP here to kick your ass more than they are corpses that have an insatiable need to chew through your skull. No, these are much more likely to be leaping out of a tree in slow motion while wearing a trench-coat.
Where the money went
Where the money went
I think the safest and most positive thing to say is that the vast majority of the money went into that awesome battle scene that started the movie, and then they kept the rest of the movie up to standard as it played out. Everything except the script was grade A here. They just really didn’t have shit to work with. And closing it with some pathetic CGI? That didn’t help your cause much, either.
Best Weapon
Best Weapon
There’s some cool shit, but not all that much. The shovel-fu was pretty cool, smashing someone into a wall so hard the corner of the wall crumbles is pretty cool too. Uh… Aside from that, I enjoyed seeing all the period firearms? Movie really didn’t bring shit to the table.
Can I get a hand?
Can I get a hand?
Yeah, there was exactly one hand moment here. For the briefest of seconds, we saw a corpse’s hand poking through the dirt. I came damn near to squealing like a pig, I mean, fanboy there, but then… Anything traditional zombie went out the fucking window. Instead of leaning on cannon, they went off in some leaping from trees JCVD Kickboxer type shit, with a huge emphasis on some fucking strange puzzle box bullshit that they never explain. So no, you can’t get a hand. You can’t get shit. Except that 1st really cool battle scene.
That was new!
That was new!
I have never had a movie so often return to a running concept- the Hellraiser puzzle box, in this instance, and tie so many different things into it, such as the woman’s necklace, or the Christ imagery, and then just wipe it away as nothing of significance or consequence as the movie ends. It’s like we were told to look at the left hand while the right one did it’s magic, but then when it came time for the illusion, the lunch bell rang and the dude collapsed his hat, put the rabbit back in it’s little rabbit-home, and carefully unraveled and then re-wrapped his handkerchief line. What the fuck was the point of all that shit if you’re not going to make anything in the movie hinge on it? It’d be like every 7 minutes, you shoot 15 seconds of footage of what someone’s left shoe is doing, and then never bring it up when the movie ends. Now that I’ve gone on that rant, I’ll admit that I really wasn’t paying much attention during the last 10-15 minutes of crunchy crashy chaos, so if they did try to shoe-horn in an explanation that tied everything up, I missed it and I don’t regret a fucking thing.
Review Notes
Review Notes
Lithuanian film studios, huh? Gotta admit, I think that’s a new one for me!
Ok, well… there’s half that pile of dried aborts now. Yum!
A big door, German soldiers, Allied POWs, a really loud dog.
Screaming. Tunnels.
Lots of heavy breathing. And screaming from an echo chamber.
Allied soldier makes a move, grabs a gun…
The door opens, some shooting
We meet The Smoking Man.
Who has our hero hauled off onto a metal table.
Everything is filmed in creep-o-vision
And yes, we have classical music! Screams and classical music!
And Injections!
OR maybe it’s blood draining?
Oh, we got the spazzies now!
Opens his eyes, definitely a zombie!
And then we get to read a lot about anti-death experiments the 3rd Reich performed on POWs. And then something about Finnish soldiers having to destroy the bunker. Boilerplate for any video-game level starter.
“This much is true.”
A very bombed out forest.
Que Title.
Oh! A hand! Sticking out of the dirt!
Uh… a group of soldiers… with a cameraman?
Are those German uniforms?
A… creepy supposed-to-be cemetery with occult shit carved on stuff?
Old man in a cabin making gears.
A dog.
That guy stole one of those gear things! What a dick!
Oh! Dog bit that guy! I like the dog.
I think that guy was the doctor? Maybe?
The guy is fucking with the gearbox thing he stole, and it’s getting all Hellraiser on us, and then the fucking cat glitches!! Not even 10 minutes into the movie a guy walks up and says “It’s too quiet here.” Man, I was doing the BEST Matrix bullet-dodging stuff in slow motion the other day when the mushrooms were really rolling hard. I can’t remember where I was. It might have been paddleboarding. Oh. I remember telling some guy that my friend was my “Spatial Awareness Coach”. Yeah. That’s another story. Different day. Same river, tho!
Decent sized force they have. Cameraman is kinda…
Ok, looks like the Americans and Finns aren’t getting along great. That guy really reminds me of my friend L__. Same inability to smile.
“Is there something I don’t know? Something about this mission I’m missing?”
“Relax Captain. It will all be over by morning.” Not exactly fucking reassuring, eh?
Uh-oh. Munchies just hit. Lost past 20 minutes stuffing my face.
I love bananas. I love frozen blueberries.
Attack before dawn, you say?
Everyone’s just shooting away now! Losing a good part of our cast.
And its all being filmed in surreal black and white.
They’re charging? Zero sense. Way too many balls.
This is a great battle scene. Excellent. Classical music, even.
Very good effects. Great filming.
Now it’s night and there’s screaming and growling coming from the German side.
Russian soldier walking towards them?
They shoot him…
Going to check on him… ZOMBIE!
Trying to fight back with the Hellraiser box…
Bullet to the brain works!
Uh… suddenly we’re totally under zombie attack. Like, they’re jumping out of the trees as if this was an old kung-fu movie. Super dark. Hard to see, but everyone is yelling and shooting and fighting a lot.
Now we’re in the trench and there’s peer pressure to kill a surrendering foe? That’s not ok. This Finnish guy is a jerk.
These are fast, nimble zombies. They like to hurdle things.
“What the hell does he know? He’s not even *Finnish*.” Haaaa!!
Zombies leaping in the windows… like, every window imaginable.
Hella intense, almost incomprehensible battle. Absolute chaos.
Camera man is cowering.
Very strange to be watching a WW2 movie where the Russians aren’t considered Allied. Then again, Russia in Finland gave birth to the Molotov, so… There is that!
And just like a video-game, all the zombie corpses are gone with a film edit shift.
Zombies all over the roof!
I think the jerk-ass Finnish guy got bit.
Zombies seem more inclined to have a fist fight than they are biting anyone.
Very dramatic and short car reveal.
And… the Finnish Jerk pulls a face-plant.
Suddenly we’re in hand to hand combat with more zombie Nazis?
And the film dude… will he rise to the occasion? Will he help?
No. He can’t. Or can he?
Zombies attack the car!
The Russian guy knows Shovel-Fu. Really kicks ass.
“Car work better with gasoline.”
Lotta “men having moments”
And now the Captain is a zombie!
Who bites the guy and then, well, faceplants again. Into the closet as it were this time.
Gas everywhere!
Another wave of zombies is attacking!
Explosion! Car tail-lights!
“My grandmother walk faster than this car!”
Oh, shit… there was some sort of… liquid… thing on the guy’s coat! And it was moving around! So he threw his coat out the window!
But then the car died. And the zombie Finnish-Jerk Captain is there somehow.
Super-Leap! Onto the car’s roof!
Finally, someone in a movie has to reload!
There was something about the Hellraiser box, and then… the zombie Finnish jerk captain is still alive.
But the car’s dying.
Now they’re driving through a cemetery lit by burning debris all over the place.
“I know this place. It’s ok!”
Looks like the starting level of a Resident Evil video game.
Walk into a strange house in the middle of the night, sniff a sausage off a plate on the table, and declare it’s time for everyone to have some food. That’s my MO too.
Ok, like… a philosophical conversation about the existence of god and if we’re going to abandon the Russian guy and make a run back for our lines. And a lot of pensive thinking faces. Got it.
And… we’re going to throw in a dead wife, so we have a reason for one character to be grieving and looking for death, and the other guy really likes his pet dog. Excellent character development!
More futzing with the Hellraiser puzzle-box.
So, there’s entire rooms of this house that they didn’t clear before sniffing the sausages and getting into theological debates?
Oh! A crying woman!
The Russian’s woman!
Oh, shit! Looks like she bit!
These Finnish guys really don’t value human life.
Oh, nice addition. Rape and murdered children. Had to know this was a serious movie.
Turns out it was the Finns all along!
Russian gonna take them to the bunker.
Bunch of babble about… crap.
These guys can find a reason to fight about anything.
Wait! Another wave of zombies attacked! About damn time!
And now we have torch waving fist fights, a rolling car fist fight, interspersed shots of Christ in crucifixion with fires burning all over the place… it’s like they used the urban set from Full Metal Jacket, put up a huge crucifixion, and then filmed a western saloon brawl from a crane.
Oh, there’s horses now? Like, one was just sitting there for the guy to jump on?
Back to driving away slowly through the night. Good detour, guys! What’s next?
She has a mini-Hellraiser puzzle box necklace.
And another wave of zombies shows up! And forces them into the bunker!
Now we’re filming in a concrete box!
They open door number 1… Chaos and corpses and a really big mess.
Nice. Headshots all around!
Another wave is attacking!
Very strange rotating cheese-grater light in this hallway.
Some sort of strange distillery…
A picture of Nazi scientists holding the Hellraiser puzzle box…
Ok, so it’s a sort of key.
That starts the… distillery machine?
Something just lifted up the lid.
Screaming people behind green glass.
And now they find more of the icky-goo
And then the Russian… the key…
Strange lab experiments, half a face, a bottle of… something flammable.
And the woman disappears.
So the Russian has to go off to find her.
Fuck, they still have 30 minutes to fill out?
No wonder they had this guy take off on a side quest.
He finds some… bleeding guy.
And gives away his light.
Totally gets his ass jumped in the process too.
Oh, shit. He threw a guy into a wall so hard the corner broke off.
“When you begin to feel it, you pull pin, you know?” handing an infected man a hand-grenade.
All the lights go out, and you see your woman for a brief second, so…
Yeah, stand there with you eyes closed. Makes sense.
Oh, she’s ill. We’ve gone to classical music again.
Dude shot her in the head and she leaked black oil out of her eyes!
Oh, shit. That’s one hell of a zombie. One of the best I’ve seen!
Wait, there’s still Germans down there? Or Russians? Or, like, other people with guns and different agendas.
Good old random spray and pray firefight.
Locking doors strategically.
Arguing about who is going to get sacrificed.
Yet another wave is coming.
They just keep finding new rooms.
That’s not how security codes work.
Over? Over? Can this please be fucking over?
“So, how is war going on your side?”
Ah, shit. The American is going to fight the asshole Finnish captain zombie.
Nice knife-throw.
We got a fall like Luke down the gravity well, a whole lot of monkeys on the girders, and then…
We climb out of what looks like a UFO and use smoke. Red smoke. And then run away! To classical music, of course.
————End Transmission——————–
Introduction
Introduction
So, here we are again. I believe one of the funniest things I’ve ever said was “Officer Gonzolez, we need to stop meeting like this.” after the same cop pulled me over for a missing headlight multiple times on subsequent evenings. I think he’s probably… No, I suppose were he to read my record he’d have the same biases that any law enforcement officer would have reading that I’ve stood toe to toe and not backed down to the authority duly granted the color blue. It’s folly to hope otherwise.
Think of all the lists you’re on. Your name, your person, is counted by talliers that you may be ignorant of. “1 death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” I have 5 pumpkins.
We bought them to shoot with shotguns, but then the area where we go shooting was gated off due to it being a particularly nasty dry season. So not only did I not get to shoot my new (to me) semi-auto .12g, I didn’t get to pulverize a bunch of pumpkins to the paste that’s acceptable to leave decorating the forest.
Shotgun shells are a must-gather. They’re plastic. Brass and steel, yeah, it’s nice to clean up. Lead? You’re nuts. Good luck finding it all. But don’t be a fucking asshole and drag a television out to the shooting range and then reduce it to fragments of components strung across a 12-foot diameter and then leave that shit there. There is a special part of hell involving white-hot pincers and prehistoric 3-foot-long carnivorous insects reserved for people who bring inappropriate targets to shooting practice.
Yes, I’ve shot Tannerite, but only small bricks of it, and not very often. Also, it was in very controlled environments, and not packed into a microwave. There are ways to have fun without destroying everything, but it seems now that our culture is obsessed with leaving it’s mark on anything it comes into contact with, resulting in generalized decay, like termites through our physical surroundings and social morality.
There’s another hell reserved for wildfire arsonists, but that one involves very tart apples and a rare species of burrowing toad. Our fucking Boy Scouts, no longer content to bounce along in the Catholic Priest’s dainty skip-steps, now getting way out front and saying; “Hey! We allow girls now! And we now preach a razing of all public lands!” toppling stone structures carved by nothing more than wind and time, and existing in a state of forever, reminding us of how extreme the odds were to overcome and actually be standing here… and now, all together, HEAVE! SHOVE THOSE DELICATELY NATUALLY BALANCED ROCKS OVER! FUCK NATURE!
Then magically, just like Watergate and nothing at all like OJ Simpson, we’ve got a press statement that it was done in the interests of public safety? Really? I’m gonna go start quarter ton rocks rolling downhill randomly and claim I’m helping prevent assidents when the police catch up with me. No- it’s human nature to knock shit over, to stomp on ants, to throw the rock at the duck.
Is it not human nature? Maybe not- it doesn’t remain human nature, at least, we learn not to do those things. I suppose were we to devolve- at least, on the food acquirement scale, then throwing rocks at ducks would be appropriate, assuming you knew how to swim.
It’s human nature to want to throw the rock that drops the huge window, isn’t it? Even if it’s *your* window, doesn’t that make it even more attractive in some ways? When I was a child, I got a bb gun, a Red Ryder, and one day I was shooting it in the yard and I had a ricochet that bounced up and off of one of the barn’s windows, ringing with quite an audible bing of a sound, but breaking nothing.
I was amazed that the bb could hit the window without breaking it. So I aimed my gun at the window and pulled the trigger, shooting out that pane of glass. When you’re a really young kid, are you supposed to know the basics of physics, like, if a projectile bounces off something before coming into contact with a surface, it scrubs off quite a lot of its kinetic energy, and that same projectile launched at the same initial speed directly at the object is going to impart a whole shit-ton more energy- also while centered on a perfectly centered dot of contact?
Or do you just know not to shoot at windows? I mean, I guess I hadn’t learned the first rule of gun safety yet, which is not to point your gun at anything you’re not willing to kill. I don’t think that specifically applies to a Red Ryder bb gun, nor a window as a living creature, although, being glass, it is alive to a degree. There’s that quote about “advanced technology becoming indistinguishable from magic”.
5 Masters. 5 Magics. I think I’ve already picked out the movie I’m gonna watch. This in itself is quite the productive divergence from my usual flailings. I ate a small bunch of aborts earlier and I can feel a little bit of it settling in smoothing out the jagged, tamping down the jaded.
Yesterday, I believe it was, while I was out running errands, I parked the car and stepped out into the parking lot, and I looked around, and at the sky and clouds, and thought to myself; “Man, it really feels good to be alive.” I talked to my therapist today, explained that I’d been running on a steady diet of .5 to 5 grams of mushrooms a day, and his response was that I’d built a system that worked for me.
Using psychedelics was a positive experience for me to approach the trauma that I have, and it bought me the calmness and bandwidth to think things through from different perspectives. And then he advocated for wearing pants. Cut off jean shorts, at the very least.
He also asked me to tell him why I couldn’t move to a South American country- I think he used Ecuador- (Hey, Ecuador, I mean you no insult by my ignorance if you’re not in South America. I have never been good nor interested in geology, or… uh… cartography… shit. I’m not saying this right. When I was in the 3rd grade I was able to identify 5 of the states and none of the capitols, ok? So you’re cool, and if I’m ignorant, I apologize) as an example.
He asked why I couldn’t relocate down there and surf by day and be a psychedelic guide at night. There’s really no reason why. I know my wife wants to give her hospital a couple years of positivity and grinding to try to improve the systems for the workers, but now that she’s both super awesome *and* award winning, she’ll be able to get a job anywhere.
Where to flee to? Alaska or South American Ecuador? Do we need to lean in harder and contribute more, or help for longer, before we wave our towel? (I’d say throw in the towel, but that goes against rule #1, which in this instance, is NOT “Cardio”, but rather “Always know where your towel is.”.)
Oh! Yeah! I never actually mentioned the movie I picked out. War of the Dead. “A platoon of American and Finnish soldiers is driven deep into a Russian forest where its Captain discovers a terrifying secret.” I’ll be honest. This sounds like every other Good Guys are doing Good Guy stuff and then they run into Super-Duper Bad Guys and then it turns out that the Super-Duper Bad Guys are Zombie Nazis, which is not only the 3rd worst kind of Nazi (Ones involving overly tart apples are worse, as are most of the amphibious Nazi persuasion) but by being Undead Nazis, they’re CHEATING.
I mean, in war, you shoot someone, you point your stick, or your finger, or your firearm, and you yell BANG or “I GOT YOU!” or you pull the trigger, and your friend whirls around in defeat, or they yell “NO YOU DIDN’T!” or they tatter and come apart, losing limbs in bursts of pink mist and unstructured meat. Sometimes, there’s a butterfly hanging around.
People remark about how quiet it is, and then someone else answers the call with “Too quiet.” Maybe a photo is taken at exactly the right moment to capture your extreme grimace, your facial contortion your only armor against the moment, defining you in photograph etched far deeper into us in anonymous death than ever contributed in known life.
Yeah, arms feel sorta long right now. Got buddy coming over tomorrow to help work on the van, and then we’re going paddleboarding. It should be a good day. I have another huge pile of aborts set aside, too. Dried ones. Ok. Let’s… like, there’s this bong, and then there’s a movie. “You should never throw a bong, man. Never ever.” Or something like that. I searched my files, I don’t think I’ve done this movie, or even ever seen it. I hope I’m not let down and I’ve been tricked.