Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Today I went for a walk to get groceries and travelled past a yard with a bunch of items sitting out for free on the lawn. I spotted a stack of dusted-over DVDs and stopped to read their spines. Nothing looked too compelling, though I did see something called Zombie Apocalypse with Ving Rhames on the cover, so I picked it up and put it in with the groceries. When I got home, I put the groceries in the fridge and fed the disc into the player, as I didn't have anything going on for the afternoon.

Zombie Apocalypse isn't very good, nor does it benefit from being spectacularly awful. The worst part of the production is the ubiquity of CGI. With every zombie decapitation, there comes a spill of computer-generated gore, the blood physics wildly unconvincing. The same can be said for the layered-on smoke and fire, which look spectral and otherworldly atop the movie's locales. Some present-day pundits may decry AI, but a lot of AI slop looks far superior to CGI of this caliber. I guess the only upside to CGI vis-a-vis AI is that someone got paid for their efforts. On account of the constantly looming CGI and the preponderance of suburban and small-town backdrops, the arena for this zombie apocalypse feels rather claustrophobic. 

To the credit of the writers and filmmakers, though, they did manage to do some world-building. Regarding zombies, we learn how to discern between "shamblers" and "onesies" and get some additional details about their behavior in packs. Indeed, the writers are very eager to share the terminology of this world. This happens mostly through conversations, so there's a lot of expository dialogue in this film. I found this a bit intrusive, though the filmmakers do manage to make some intriguing conceptual space within the limited physical and digital space onscreen.

I'll give Zombie Apocalypse points for the sense of odyssey that it creates. The party of protagonists are on a quest to reach a ship that will take them to a safe-zone, and they traverse various suburbs and small-city downtowns to get there. They're perpetually stumbling upon zombie ambushes as they do so. The film is picaresque in this way. 

The characters are generic and not especially likeable, at least at first, but as their odyssey carries on, I couldn't help but feel some minimal investment in them. Ving Rhames is the only inherent standout, and he does everything that's expected of him. In 2011, Rhames was seven years removed from Dawn of the Dead, and he clearly knows the drill. By this point, he also had the piss-poor 2008 Day of the Dead remake under his belt and was solidly typecast in the zombie-action subgenre. He's mostly just going through the motions in Zombie Apocalypse.

Eventually, the group splits up unwittingly, and one of the subsequent branches encounters a new group of humans. There's a cute exchange when the protagonists and the new group realize that their terminologies differ—e.g. the latter calls the monsters "the dead" rather than "zombies". These little meta moments work in Zombie Apocalypse because they're not constantly shoehorned in as per recent blockbuster tripe such as Love and Thunder.  

In time, we see group members die, and it's not unmoving. In terms of emotionality and plot, this made-for-TV movie moves, if nothing else. All told, Zombie Apocalypse wasn't a total waste of my Sunday afternoon. So if you see it lying on someone's lawn for free, I urge you to pick it up and give it a watch. Once you've watched it, don't throw it away. It's worth passing on to someone else with time to kill.  

Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)

Last night I went on Tubi looking for a grindhouse movie, and damned if I didn't find one in Blood Sucking Freaks. This 1976 film fully delivers as exploitation horror, depicting various means of torture including thumbscrews, guillotines, and electrocutions. And, delivering as promised on its title, the film features an especially memorable scene involving a mad physician drilling into a woman's skull and gleefully sucking out the blood and cerebrospinal fluid with a straw. He gets his comeuppance, though, as the good doctor is torn apart after being thrown into a cell full of long-captive nude women who have turned feral. He's an outlier, as the victims in this film are almost entirely women in the nude, and so the misogyny is pervasive and undeniable. 

The violent vignettes are tied together by a very loose plot in which a demented dramatist named "Sardu" attempts to gain exposure for his Grand Guignol-style act. To this end, he eventually kidnaps a famous ballerina affiliated with the Kennedy Center (the one now chaired by President Donald Trump) and brainwashes her with his sadomasochism gospel. As he subjects her to assorted forms of psychological torture, his assistant Ralphus—a little person with an impressively tall afro—dances and claps with a leering grin. If it's not already obvious, Blood Sucking Freaks is a wholly rebarbative experience. That said, the film maintains a goofball tone all throughout, which by turns helps mitigate the mean-spiritedness (a bit) but also amplifies the carnivalesque madness. 

Yet Blood Sucking Freaks also contains some genuine flashes of artistry. The film culminates in the ballerina giving a public performance in which she elegantly kicks a bound critic to death, which makes for a rather sublime and unexpected viewing experience. Where else but in a 1970s grindhouse movie are you going to see a ballerina leaving a theater critic in a bloody mess? 

When I heard that name "Ralphus" given to Sardu's assistant, I must confess that I thought of World Championship Wrestling, where a schlubby bald man of that same name served as the personal security guard of future WWE legend Chris Jericho back in the 1990s. In the obligatory post-movie Googling, I learned that Jericho, now running out the clock on his career in AEW, is a huge fan of Blood Sucking Freaks. In fact, Jericho considers Blood Sucking Freaks one of his favorite movies, and he's even written a song about it. I find this to be a very telling revelation. It's one thing to appreciate a film like Blood Sucking Freaks as a product of a unique cinematic ecosystem at a particular time, but it's quite another to say it's one of your favorite movies. I mean, the movie involves nearly constant sadomasochistic violence against captive nude women, the dad jokes flying as liberally as limbs. I would ask Jericho, Just how much has this film shaped your sensibilities as a person and a performer? Perhaps the answer would explain some of the questionable gimmicks, storylines, and projects Jericho has attempted in the long sunset of his career.

Chris Jericho, singing for his band Fozzy
(Credit: Lisa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

As a further aside, I'll note that when I heard one particular swell in the musical score as the mad physician is introduced, I was reminded of hip hop artist Necro, whose track "Evil Shit" uses a portion of the organ music from Blood Sucking Freaks to great effect. Having revealed my enthusiasm for exploitation movies, professional wrestling, and Necro's raps in the course of this brief article, the reader may now be posing serious questions about my aesthetic sensibilities.

Execrable or not, I have no choice but to appreciate Blood Sucking Freaks, as it is an archetypal grindhouse movie. In fact, were I compelled to identify a single movie as representative of exploitation horror as a whole, I might pick Blood Sucking Freaks. With just one screening, it has forced itself into the mix with movies like I Drink Your Blood and Maniac that could also win the ignominious distinction of quintessential grindhouse horror flick. But with that, let me be clear: I'm not saying Blood Sucking Freaks is one of my favorite movies, or even good. Unlike those other aforementioned grindhouse classics, I'm never going to watch this turd again.

The Short Story Substack

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