Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

It's time we all moved on from the age-old question, "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" For the record, I reject the question's enforced binary. If you celebrate Christmas, any movie you watch on Christmas could be a Christmas movie. More specifically, Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve and the soundtrack is jam-packed with Christmas songs, but it was released in theaters in the summer of '88, it takes place in sunshiny, snow-free (and curiously empty of much Christmas decoration) Los Angeles, and the vast majority of the plot mechanics have nothing to do with Christmas. My answer: Die Hard is the Schrodinger's cat of action movies. It's a Christmas movie, and it isn't a Christmas movie. I'm not copping out with my answer. I'm subverting the dominant paradigm of what Christmas is and what it isn't, son. It's always Christmas. It's never Christmas. Grow up.

I propose a new question. Is Die Hard a slasher movie, and, by extension, are most action movies slasher movie subgenres? Think about how many action movies (like slasher movies) involve an aggrieved fella skulking around in elevator shafts, bushes, closets, etc., picking off his enemies one-by-one. Action movies are reverse slasher movies, where the baddies are the ones meeting their gruesome ends courtesy of an everyman hero. The action hero is also the testosterone-flipped equivalent of the slasher movie's final girl, a regular person pushed into heroics through circumstances beyond that person's control. Okay, maybe it's a stretch, but think about it. The slasher movie and the action movie are at least cousins.

"But why are you writing about Die Hard on a horror movie blog?" I hear some of you asking. Hey, simmer down and reread the first two paragraphs, buddy. If you're new to the site, allow me to digress and go over the history of why I've been doing this for so long. Nearly 20 damn years ago, I found a very cheap used copy of a book written by the Fangoria magazine staff called Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen. Growing up, I was a horror-obsessed kid who could not get enough of the stuff. I was a big movie fan in general, but horror got the most of my attention by a huge margin. By the time I got to college, I'd massively expanded my cinematic interests, and horror was just something I'd dip into occasionally. I became just as obsessed with classic Hollywood, indies, world cinema, comedies, westerns, cult and underground films, drive-in exploitation movies, experimental film, art films, '70s New Hollywood, and on and on. You can get that side of me in my other movie blog, Almost Not Crazy, at moviebot.blogspot.com.

Picking up the Fangoria book in my late twenties gave me the urge to reconnect with my childhood and early teenage horror fandom, and I thought it would be fun to watch all 101 movies and write about them on a separate blog. This was back in the day when people wrote and read blogs, before tech oligarchs turbofucked every aspect of our lives and before social media turned the beautifully varied Internet into the barely functioning, AI-poisoned, three-app social media hellhole it is today. To my surprise, my rough-drafty, fun little horror project drew a decent readership, and when the Fangoria project ended, I decided to keep the site going. A reader suggested a similar list from Rue Morgue magazine, and I finished that one, too. When that project ended, I bought three books, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror, which is chronological (alphabetical by year), and The Official Splatter Film Guide Vols. I and II, which are alphabetical. I alternate movies from each book. My readership is much smaller now, but I can't be stopped. I should be stopped, but that's another story.

Long stories slightly shorter, this is how we get to Die Hard. While the Overlook Film Encyclopedia sticks to horror (though its parameters for horror are pretty expansive), the Splatter Film Guide covers any movie it considers a splatter movie. Horror gets the majority of entries, but the roughly 20 percent of nonhorror splatter films in the two volumes include action movies, westerns, gross-out comedies, crime thrillers, and underground cult movies. I have no problem with this.

Speaking of horror, Die Hard was director John McTiernan's third feature, following two films that could definitely fit within the parameters of horror. His debut, Nomads, was an anthropologist versus supernatural nomadic demons horror-thriller with some major flaws (including Pierce Brosnan's French accent) but great atmosphere and ambition. The movie was a box office flop and received mixed but mostly negative reviews (I reviewed it back in 2009 and thought it was pretty damn interesting despite its weaknesses), but Arnold Schwarzenegger loved it and asked McTiernan to direct Predator, the hit sci-fi/action/horror movie with the most gubernatorial cast ever assembled (future California governor Schwarzenegger, future Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and future candidate for Kentucky governor Sonny Landham; the predator's nephew later became the governor of the jungle biome of Yautja Prime). Predator's massive success led to McTiernan getting an even bigger budget and larger canvas for his third time in charge.

I won't waste anyone's time with a plot description of Die Hard. We've all either seen it or absorbed it through pop culture osmosis. It's probably (alongside Lethal Weapon) the quintessential Hollywood action movie of the late '80s-mid '90s era, expanding and one-upping what came before it while setting up a template and audience expectations for what would follow. Bruce Willis, in the role that turned him from TV star to movie star, is a charming, sarcastic presence who is much more relatable as an everyman than the superhuman muscleheads, martial arts virtuosos, and mentally disturbed Bronson-style vengeance-seekers dominating the then-contemporary action landscape. The much-missed Alan Rickman makes a great villain with a great villain name (Hans Gruber), but, again, his sarcastic humor and greed-based motivation make him a much more human presence than many of his contemporaries. His crew of accomplices and underlings are pretty damn entertaining, too, despite the movie not letting you get to know many of them in any detail. You can play a fun game with yourself and whoever you're watching Die Hard with by deciding who the baddies look like. I spotted Eurotrash Jeffrey Dahmer, Evil Huey Lewis, and at least one of each member of "Final Countdown" hair-metal hitmakers Europe. "Oh man, Bruce just shot Evil Joey Tempest!"

We also get charming (yes, I keep using the word charming, but, this is a charming fuckin' movie) performances from Reginald VelJohnson as a policeman who gets caught up in the chaos, De'voreaux White as the go-getting young limo driver Argyle (Wanna feel old? White is 60 now. Fuckin' Argyle is fuckin' 60??? Fuuuuuuuuuck!), and Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush as goofball FBI agents (both named Johnson) who think they're unbelievable badasses, and quintessentially smarmy performances from Paul Gleason as an arrogant police lieutenant (in a variation on his arrogant vice principal character in The Breakfast Club), William Atherton as an unethical TV news reporter, and Hart Bochner as a coked-up corporate sleaze. Sure, these are all familiar movie types, but there's genuine pleasure in seeing the old standbys done well.

For all its pop-culture and cable TV ubiquity, Die Hard still feels fresh and vital. It's smart where it needs to be smart and stupid where it needs to be stupid. The action sequences remain thrilling and white-knuckle suspenseful, most of the jokes still land, and McTiernan has such a great feel for both the big and small moments, complex action set-pieces, and atmosphere. And through it all, John McClane is there in the shadows, sneaking around in elevator shafts, stairwells, empty floors under construction, rooftops, and darkened corridors, uttering Krueger-esque quips like "yippee ki-yay, motherfucker," waiting to dole out blood-soaked revenge on his next victim. Sorry, just bringing it back to the slasher thing.

McTiernan has done a lot of good work in a filmography full of enormous hits and big flops, though strange personal events killed his Hollywood career in the mid-2000s. He followed Die Hard with another big action hit, The Hunt for Red October, and the less successful romance/adventure Medicine Man, but he flopped hard with the hugely ambitious meta-commentary on blockbusters Last Action Hero, a movie I find fascinating and underrated despite, and sometimes because of, its flaws. He rebounded with two more big hits, third Die Hard movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance and a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, but hit a rough patch with three movies that didn't do so well, Viking action/fantasy The 13th Warrior (which has since gained a decent cult following), a remake of Rollerball, and the military mystery-thriller Basic, which reunited John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson and is purported to have an absurd number of twist endings, though I haven't seen it.

That trio of flops didn't help McTiernan in Hollywood when he got into some serious legal trouble for allegedly hiring a private investigator to tap the phones of one of the Rollerball producers he had been fighting with about the film's creative direction (hilarious, fuck producers) and also allegedly tapping his ex-wife's phone during their divorce proceedings (yikes on that one). The full story is convoluted as hell, but that's the simplified version. He was sentenced to a year in prison in 2014 for perjury and making false statements to the FBI. He served roughly half the sentence in a white-collar prison and the other half on house arrest at his ranch in Wyoming. He later declared bankruptcy. Blackballed in Hollywood, his filmography since Basic consists of a few short films advertising video games and an unreleased documentary about his legal trouble that attributes it to a conspiracy leading all the way up to Karl Rove (it sometimes leaks to YouTube), but he told a crowd at a retrospective of his work last year that he has four films he's ready to shoot if and when he can get financing, including a science fiction movie, a western, and a love story. Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker, to all, and to all a good night.

Zombie Holocaust aka Doctor Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980)

Zombie Holocaust, titled Doctor Butcher M.D. upon initial theatrical and home video release in the United States (Dr. Butcher was my primary care physician until he stopped accepting my employer's insurance), was filmed simultaneously with another Italian horror flick, Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Both films share sets and some actors and crew, and both begin in New York City before moving to a remote island (a fictional Caribbean island in Zombie and Indonesia's Maluku Islands in Zombie Holocaust, though Lazio, Italy, mostly stands in for both; Fulci also filmed in the Dominican Republic and Mexico). Fulci's film is the only one of the two that features a zombie fighting a shark, but Girolami gives us zombies and cannibals and a mad scientist. Take that, Fulci.

The movie opens in a New York hospital morgue. Some weirdo in a trench coat sneaks in at night and saws off the hand of a corpse. In what will be an unexplained Zombie Holocaust trend, bodies don't appear to have any bones. A budget thing? "We only have money for guts and blood. You want bones? Go to Hollywood." The next day, when a doctor who is listed as Dr. Drydock on IMDb, Dr. Dreylock on Wikipedia, and Dr. Drake in the dubbed English dialogue of the version I watched (Walter Patriarca) and his morgue assistant/aspiring anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (the stunning Alexandra Delli Colli) prepare to cut into the cadaver's stomach for a class of medical students, the absent hand is immediately noticed, despite Dr. Three-Names downplaying it. A couple of smartasses crack wise about the missing hand, infuriating the doctor, who kicks the students out and cancels class for the day.

The doc is disturbed. Several corpses have been mysteriously robbed of body parts in recent weeks, but Dr. Whatever won't call the cops despite Lori's insistence because he doesn't want his hospital's reputation damaged. This leads to a classic bit of conversation between the doc and his assistant. Dr. Maybe-Drake: "We must have a psychopathic deviant in the hospital.… Something like this would make sense in a society of primitive savages, but today in New York City?" Lori: "But Dr. Drake, do you really think we're that much different than the savages?"

Events escalate from corpse-robbing to murder, with a strange symbol left on the bodies that anthropology nut Lori recognizes as a ritual symbol on one of the Maluku Islands. Despite the doctor covering things up, a journalist named Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) hears the rumors and barges into Lori's apartment for a scoop. Lori doesn't like her pushy style or the fact that she interrupted her gratuitous nudity moment (relax, pervs, we get several more nude scenes later) and gives her the brush-off. Back at the hospital, an orderly from (you guessed it) the Maluku Islands, is caught eating a patient's heart. He leaps to his death by smashing through a window. We get a great shot here of his stand-in dummy falling several stories to the sidewalk below and landing with such impact that the dummy's arm breaks off. They leave this scene in the movie, though when the camera returns to the orderly's body, his arm is once again intact. I love it. When the arm of the dummy falls off, you gotta keep it in the movie. It just looks too cool.

Lori finally convinces Dr. Three-Names to call the police. Two men show up who I assumed were NYPD detectives. They ask a lot of questions about the victims and the orderly, and Lori gives them the Maluku Islands scoop and introduces them to an anthropology professor she assists when she's not assisting in the morgue.

When Lori goes back home, she hears someone in her apartment, and her Maluku Islands dagger is missing. Fortunately, one of the two NYPD detectives (or so I thought) happens to be knocking on her door, and he searches the apartment. He doesn't find the intruder, but he sees the empty case where the dagger was. Then he says, "We should call the police." What the fuck? I thought youse guys were the police. What gives? I'll tell ya what gives. The two dudes who show up in trench coats and start investigating the crimes right after the hospital workers call the police are not detectives. They're anthropologists! This is the kind of shit that happens all the time in Zombie Holocaust. And I have no problem with it. I thrive on this kind of nonsense. It gives me life.

The two anthropologists are Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch, not the Echo and the Bunnymen singer) and his assistant George Harper (Peter O'Neal). The two men plan an expedition to the Maluku Islands and invite Lori along for even more assistance. She's reluctant because she lived there as a child and doesn't want to spoil her fond memories. What? Why is she only bringing this up now? And why was she living there? We never find out. She finally relents but is irritated to discover that annoying journalist Susan is also on the trip because she's George's girlfriend and thinks this story will put her on the map.

One of Peter's old buddies, a former New York doctor and medical researcher named Obrero (Donald O'Brien), now lives on one of the Maluku Islands and hosts our quartet. He gives them directions to the island connected to the New York corpse-robbing but warns them to be careful because the natives don't like outsiders. His assistant (so many assistants in this thing) Molotto (professional wrestler-turned-actor Dakar) takes them out on the boat the next day, until Peter realizes Molotto is deliberately steering them to the wrong island. He makes Molotto change course against his will. Big mistake, dawg.

Dr. Obrero was deliberately deceiving his old buddy to keep him away from the island and its secrets (and Dr. Obrero's), but now that Peter's found the island, friendship is just another word. Our gang has to fend off the island's cannibalistic natives, bloodthirsty zombies (who are mostly your basic run-of-the-mill zombies except for the cool didgeridoo-esque sounds they make), and Dr. Obrero himself and his really fucked-up laboratory. Interestingly, the cannibals are filmed like Romero's Night of the Living Dead ghouls (several shots are ripped off wholesale) more than the zombies. We also get some pagan rituals involving body painting and a stone altar with a silhouette indention carved into it. We don't know what any of this means or why it causes certain events at the film's conclusion, but it does give Lori another excuse to get naked.

I enjoyed the absurdist New York chunk of the movie more than the standard-issue mad scientist, zombie, and racist cannibalism biz, but Girolami keeps things moving and is not afraid of piling on the blood and gore, Delli Colli has a mesmerizing movie face, and the dubbed English dialogue is a source of joy for me. There is always something beautifully off-kilter and hilariously strange about the way English-language rhythms, sentence logic, and slang get mildly scrambled in translation in mid-'60s-early '90s dubbed Italian horror, and it's one of the many reasons those films are so pleasurable, even a less-than-stellar example like Zombie Holocaust.