Curse II: The Bite (Federico Prosperi, 1989)

One of my favorite little grifts in the world of b-movie/exploitation/horror film distribution is the sequel that has nothing to do with the original film. A common practice in the days of regional drive-in and grindhouse distribution when a particular film could be packaged and repackaged under dozens of different titles, the almost-ruse continued into the VHS-era '80s and '90s. My favorite example of this is the 1972 Spanish horror film Tombs of the Blind Dead, in which the zombie-ghosts of some long-dead Knights Templar waste some Eurotrash hotties who get off a train in the wrong damn place. The movie was repackaged in some drive-in markets as a Planet of the Apes sequel, with a new prologue explaining that the knights were actually the ghosts of the apes from the first Apes movie. If I remember correctly, a threatened lawsuit quickly dropped that print from circulation.

That was a guerilla move (wordplay, get it?), but many of these non-sequel sequels are, legally, too legit to quit. The Italian production company behind the 1987 American horror film The Curse and that film's Egyptian producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis, had a new horror movie ready to go called The Bite. The Curse flopped in theaters but was doing very well in the home video market, so Assonitis and the production company decided to slap the Curse name on The Bite, despite the first film concerning an extra-terrestrial meteor/pile-of-goo hybrid landing in a Tennessee farmer's field and infecting the rural area's food and water supply, turning people who ingested enough of that supply into bloodthirsty zombies, and the second film concerning mutant snakes in the New Mexico desert. Both films are about the havoc that ensues when something gets in your body that shouldn't be there, but the similarities pretty much end there.

The sole directing credit of Federico Prosperi (under his Americanized pseudonym Fred Goodwin), who also co-wrote and co-produced, Curse II begins with a young couple, Lisa (The Stepfather's Jill Schoelen) and Clark (J. Eddie Peck, the only actor to play recurring characters on Dallas and Dynasty in the same season), on a road trip to California. They are just about to cross New Mexico, and they ask the redneck attendant at a gas station to give them the best route to Albuquerque. Clark disagrees with the attendant's circuitous four-hour route and wants to take the quicker and more direct shot that cuts the drive time in half, but the attendant strongly warns against it and says there's a 100-mile stretch with no human being in sight. Clark takes the short cut, which is bad news for him but great news for us, the horror movie viewers.

The couple's silver jeep gets a flat tire in that desolate stretch of desert highway, which gives Lisa plenty of time to describe her goofy dream/story about interacting with dinosaurs and gaze lovingly at Clark while he attaches the spare. She also almost gets bit by a snake but Clark shoots it before it reaches her. The character of Lisa is pretty silly in this first stretch of film, which annoyed my wife a bit more than it annoyed me. I find Jill Schoelen charming and cute, and I like her distinctive voice, which has a raspy grit combined with a honey sweetness, so her annoying character was easy for me to forgive, but she fortunately gets to drop her character's goofy quirks and lack of independence once the gnarly shit starts happening.

Spare attached, Lisa and Clark get back on the road. Lisa pulls out the acoustic guitar to play some light folk-pop, and the vibes are mellow until they hit a stretch of highway filled with snakes. Oh shiiiiiit! Clark runs over hundreds of the damn things, covering the sides of the jeep with blood. They stop at a desolate little gas station, where the shotgun-wielding, paranoid attendant (Al Fann) reluctantly patches their tire and gives them more gas for a massively inflated fee. He also warns Clark that the desert animals have all gone crazy from nuclear testing, especially the snakes, who killed his beloved dog. While Clark is using the bathroom, he hears the supposedly dead dog. Before he can take a gander, the attendant puts his gun in Clark's face and tells him to hit the bricks. We then see this snake-bitten dog, which has somehow transformed into a giant dog-snake hybrid. Oh shiiiiit!

Deciding they've had enough road-tripping in Snakeville for one day, the couple stop at a small-town motel run by George (legendary character actor Sydney Lassick, who is not in this movie enough). As they're unloading the jeep, a stowaway snake bites Clark. A little girl sees the snake slither away and points it out to everyone, and a motel guest named Harry (M*A*S*H*'s Jamie Farr), who we think is a doctor, gives Clark the antivenom. When Clark thanks the good doc, Harry replies, "A doctor? I'm not a doctor. I'm a traveling salesman from Brooklyn working the Dust Bowl, so it's my business to know from snakes," which makes no sense but everyone rolls with it instead of taking Clark to a real doctor.

After yet another snake encounter in their motel room, which Lisa dispatches with her acoustic guitar, Lisa and Clark get the fuck outta there without notifying motel staff that there's a huge fucking dead bloody snake in the bed. When Harry sees the dead snake, he flips that he gave Clark the wrong antidote. That antidote was for the everyday run-of-the-mill snake slithering away from the jeep. This snake is one of those freaky mutant desert snakes. What if that was the snake that bit Clark?

Hey, guess what? It was. Clark and Lisa continue the trek through New Mexico on the way to California, while the mutant snake venom and the incorrect antivenom interact in Clark's system, eventually turning his hand into a friggin' snake head. What the fuuuuck? Meanwhile, Harry takes off in search of the couple so he can give Clark the correct antivenom and save his own ass from liability and prison, assisted by his CB trucker friends Big Flo (Marianne Muellerleile), Death Wish (Jose Garcia), and Beef (Tiny Wells).

We're only about thirty minutes into the movie at this point, and even more insanity follows involving tough guys at a country music bar, a doctor who gives some insanely detailed exposition after a cursory look at Clark's hand, a corrupt redneck sheriff played by Bo Svenson, fundamentalist Christian Scandinavians, a mud pit, more crazy snake hands, giant snakes, miniature snakes, snakes coming at you every which way, and a legitimately funny dick joke.

I love when movies take an insane premise and commit to it, and this movie is aided and abetted in that insanity by the special effects prowess of Screaming Mad George, one of the visionary weirdo geniuses of splatter, mutation, slime, and flesh. He doesn't get to go quite as wild as he did on his masterpiece Society, but he gets to do some pretty strange stuff within the confines of the small budget. Screaming Mad's other notable credits include Poltergeist II, Big Trouble in Little China, Predator, Don't Panic, Spaceballs, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and 4, Bride of Re-Animator, Freaked, Necronomicon, Jack Frost, and an *NSYNC video. 

Curse II is a wildly enjoyable, nutty, stupid, ridiculous, and surprisingly well-made film. It's a lot more fun than the much bleaker Curse and just as weird. A snake head for a hand? It makes no sense, and I love that. It's a bit odd that Prosperi never directed a movie before or since Curse II, since it has such an effective visual style. Whatever ridiculous inconsistencies and incoherencies in the screenplay, the movie itself always looks pretty good. If you're a fellow connoisseur of the nutty b-movie, I think you'll enjoy this. Where else are you gonna see Jamie Farr, a trucker named Beef, and a guy with a snake head for a hand in the same flick? You don't even need to catch up with The Curse part one.

Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)

Three movies I first encountered as a kid have stayed with me as perennial favorites, my love for them never diminishing or fading, even after dozens of rewatches from childhood to middle age, even after my tastes developed and expanded (or in some cases regressed). These movies helped shape my personality and worldview, and scenes from all three often flash into my brain even when I'm concentrating on other things, causing me to bliss out for a few seconds and think, "Man, I love that movie." All three have retained their power and pleasure, and each return visit contains the thrill of that first watch. Two of those movies are Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (I'll never get over Paul Reubens' death). The third one and the bleakest in the bunch (with a sliver of optimism) is, of course, Dawn of the Dead. (I would have included The Wizard of Oz in this group, but my experience with that movie feels like more of a universal or at least national experience, and Oz doesn't feel as inextricably linked to my identity as the other three.)

My childhood love of horror was frequently stymied by my mother's extreme strictness when it came to splatter movies and R-rated movies in general (she was pretty relaxed about most other things). Though my parents and I had watched Night of the Living Dead together when I was 11 (and my mother had memories of defying her own mother's disapproval to see the movie at the drive-in on its initial release), my mom shut down my initial Dawn of the Dead viewing later that same year. I knew from Fangoria and various other horror publications that the decade-later sequel to Night was a much bloodier and gorier experience, so I waited until my parents went to bed to pop in the VHS. I was a night owl with morning person parents, so I figured they'd be asleep by the time the bloody stuff ensued. My mother's ill-timed visit to the bathroom during the film's second scene in the apartment building ended my fun. Seeing the carnage on display (in probably the film's most violent scene), she decided my still-developing pre-teen brain shouldn't witness such scenes and made me stop watching. A small part of me has never forgiven her. (I don't have kids of my own, but if I did, they'd probably be in therapy from watching Texas Chain Saw Massacre at age four. I think we should all be exposed to the horrors of life, and the movie masterpieces about those horrors, from the beginning. I'm not watching Frozen for the 80th time. My imaginary kids are watching the good shit, whether they like it or not.)

I got some delayed cinematic justice the following summer. I was 12 and friendly with a new kid whose parents owned my small hometown's only video store. He could borrow whatever he wanted from the store for free and shared my love of horror, so I spent the summer checking all kinds of banned-by-mom video nasties off the bucket list at his place. Dawn of the Dead was top of that list. From the moment the movie began, I felt a warm, buzzy joy that never let up until the closing credits, just like when I watched Fast Times and Pee-Wee.

Dawn of the Dead felt like I'd asked some all-powerful being to create something just for me, and that freaky being had delivered the damn goods. It was gritty, it was intense, it was fun, it was pessimistic but not defeatist, it was funny, it was splattery, it was smart, it was dumb (zombies getting hit with pies!!), it was unpredictable while still delivering what you wanted and expected, it showed me what a movie made by a real filmmaker with a real personality and point of view looked like (I didn't realize at the time how important it was that Romero was the editor and the director), and it poured wildly unsafe levels of flammable material on the torch I carried for movies. I can't be objective about Dawn of the Dead. I think it's one of the all-time greats and one of Romero's masterpieces in a career with hardly any duds.

I love how the film begins, with the head and shoulders of Gaylen Ross resting against the red '70s shag. She's taking a little rest, but there's something unsettling and uneasy about the image. After the title scrolls up, we're almost immediately thrust into the chaos and tumult of a TV news studio in disarray. Something disastrous has happened and there's much argument and confusion about how it should be covered. It was a baffling opening scene for me as a kid. I'd never seen a movie begin mid-action before without any explanation or character-building or geographical establishing shots, but I was engrossed anyway. It's such a strong, disarming way to start the film, and Romero shoots it powerfully and confidently. He also appears in the scene with his then-wife and frequent collaborator Christine Forrest in one of his two cameos (the other being one of the biker dudes near the film's end).

The second scene at the apartment building (the one that made my mom 86 the proceedings with a 23 skidoo) was even more confusing but strangely compelling. Who were these guys? Cops? The military? Some kind of special secret forces organization? Why were they shooting people and zombies? Why were some of the apartment residents shooting at them? I was a sixth-grade rube from the sticks. This didn't jibe with the black-and-white world I'd been sold, but I rolled with it. On that first full viewing a year later, I was a teeny bit more sophisticated and had more context, but I was just as compelled. By the time our four leads made it to the mall, I was convinced I was watching my new favorite movie. And I was right.

Speaking of the mall, I get so irritated when people make snarky comments about how the scenes of the zombies wandering the mall are an obvious anti-consumerist visual metaphor, as if that somehow makes the movie not as good as its reputation. A) That's not all it is. B) Saying it out loud and seeing it in action are two different things. C) The mall is one of the four best movie locations, alongside trains, movie theaters, and bodies of water. Why not have zombies in the mall? D) Who gives a fuck?

To look at the movie and see nothing in the subtext of those scenes but that the average American human is a mindless consumer is missing the empathy that exists in Romero alongside the anger and the disappointment, not to mention the humor. There's a real loneliness in those images that's more powerful than the political critique. As the '70s creeped toward the '80s, the importance of community in mainstream American life continued to devalue compared to the wants and needs of the individual (a change that was supercharged and accelerated by the Reagan administration a few years later). What better visual intersection of loneliness, community, selfishness, individuality, aspiration, and desperation than the paradoxical space of a mall?

Just as importantly, it provides a fantastically varied visual space for the crazed slapstick of zombies stumbling around, on, or through escalators, stairwells, fountains, blood pressure machines, and sporting goods stores, getting knocked around and thrown off railings by our human characters, and, in one particularly wild scene, getting hit in the face with a series of pies by a bunch of mercenary bikers?This is cinema, baby.

Despite opening mid-action and continuing tensely and relentlessly from there, Romero finds time for quiet moments full of character detail and some hauntingly beautiful shots of the landscape. This is a poetic movie, in spite of (and sometimes because of) all the hacking, slashing, shooting, and smooshing. Like most of Romero's movies, it's also a keenly observant one about life in this country, and the ending is simultaneously hopeful, uncertain, pragmatic, and ambiguous.

Long before modern directors wouldn't stop congratulating themselves for hiring diverse casts in their aesthetically same-old, same-old Hollywood slop (I'm a catty little bitch today), Romero put together casts of characters that look like how the United States really looks demographically. There are a lot of interesting shifting power dynamics going on with our four leads (Ross, Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger) as the movie progresses in addition to their camaraderie and teamwork, and Dawn of the Dead has a lot of subtly intriguing scenes about the divisions of race, gender, masculinity and femininity, disability, illness, and class without any characters making corny speeches to get any of this across. It continually flavors the movie instead of getting in the way of the movie. Aside from a handful of mildly overwritten one-liners, Romero's characters speak the way people speak, a strength that carries across most of his work.

I could keep going on and on about this movie (I didn't even mention the Hare Krishna zombie or Tom Savini's double duty as makeup and effects guy and actor), but I'll reel it in. Most of you have seen this one (probably multiple times), and you share my love for it. The naysayers? To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, if you don't like Dawn of the Dead, you can kiss my ass.