They're eating her! Then they're gonna eat me!

I used to work in a video-shop in Bolton, whose company also owned a very cheap movie studio, and so out catalogue was flooded with a crazy amount of terrible, super-low-budget horror films. So during that time I developed a hobby of watching awful, recent monster movies and laughing at them - and I got to see films like Ice Queen (they used a toy car on a model background in the establishing shots) Haunted Boat (which came out just after 'Ghost Ship' and featured a boat... that turned out not to be haunted at all) and of course - What Ever Happenned to Alice (which I still say is the 'worst movie I've ever seen').

Oh! And they also had one my absolute favourite films, the one that became a big running-joke for us employees - Trees 2: The Root of All Evil, which was about killer Christmas trees that over-run a hillside town. Trees 2 has the best damn ending-credits song I've ever heard in my life. If you ever see that movie in a shop - buy it, at any price.

But I've gotten away from my point here, which is Song of the Dead. I saw a second-hand copy of this at Blockbuster (who normally don't bother with this kind of film, except for The Asylum's boring efforts) with a box reading 'Day of the Zombie'.


It looks boring and generic - but what's that at the bottom of the box? 'The ultimate horror opera'? Yes! It's a zombie musical! And one so bad that the title had to be guiltily changed, just so that it would stand a chance of being sold! That seems pretty stupid to me - who would rather watch a nondescript zombie flick than THE ULTIMATE (or rather, first... I think) zombie musical?! Well, I love musicals, bad films and zombies so I grabbed it.

Here's the trailer - which actually gives a very fair and honest account of the movie's content.

And it was such a pleasure to see another one of these movies - that know they're bad and kind of mock themselves but also are really lovable for trying - and I have nothing better to do, so now I'm going to review it.

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The movie is very, very low-budget, and very, very poorly-acted (by everyone except Steve Andsager, who is actually very funny). The singing is also truly awful, except by the guy you see at the beginning of the trailer there, but sadly he only appears twice.

The plot is deliberately very similar to George Romero's classic 'Night of the Living Dead' which these film-makers (like me) clearly adore. It begins with a man and a woman in graveyard, moves to a beseiged cabin in the middle of nowhere and ends on a pile of burning bodies. The Romero references are many, and usually painfully obvious.

Speaking of heavy-handedness, I think the biggest flaw here is the large amount of time and effort given over to political satire. Because of the zombie-musical concept, the movie tries to be lighthearted and throw jokes in there. Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they don't even make sense, sometimes they're actually good (the 'hobbies' song made me laugh out loud). But the zombies are referred to as 'zombie terrorists' and the chemical that caused the problem is the 'Jihad Ressurection Virus'.... yeah.
And we're not talking about a few throwaway lines here: this is the major theme of the plot. Believe me, after an hour or so it gets old. It's a nice enough idea to try to parody recent US foreign policy in your movie, make your heroes occasionally look like monsters, follow in Romero's satirical (but much much much subtler) footsteps... but this scriptwriter and this premise are just not capable of effectively satirising that. "We need to bomb any country that had anything to do with terrorism!" What, because your shack is beseiged by zombies...?

The songs themselves are actually catchy as hell! Unfortunately the singers are absolutely horrible, and the bland rock band who play them all are awfully samey. No big book numbers, sadly. All light rock.

It's a bad movie - there's no denying that. There is a tombstone at the beginning that looks like it's made of card and written in marker pen. One of the zombies is topless, and curiously she's always at the very front of the horde, next to the camera...

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But at the same time this movie really is something special... or at the very least unique.

Every now and again the movie really impressed me with a subtle Romero reference (one character angrily calls another 'flyboy' under his breath) or a clever little spin on a zombie cliche (arms reaching through a wooden wall, waving slowly back and forth during a sad song).

And this is the thing, here. This is why I'd recommend seeing this film. Despite the fact that it's a kind-of-comedy musical, despite the huge limitations it faces, this film really tries hard to add a few things to the zombie lore.
There is a scene near the end when one of the characters who's been bitten gathers the others round him and starts to explain the zombies' motivation. Another character asks a rhetorical question, why do these reanimated corpses want to eat the flesh of the living? Why are they cannibals? And suddenly you think.... wait, that's actually a very good point! Why the hell do they? And the guy says this:

"By feeding on the living, the zombie's mind thinks that... it will live again! Their drive is to live: it's what they remember. But all they have is this unnatural state of death, mixed with awareness. Their minds tell them... that if they feed on the living, then they will live again, and the pain of being dead... will stop. / I can feel it inside me."

And that's a brilliant bit of writing, in this armchair reviewer's opinion. You have to watch two acts of cardboard tombstones to see it - but it's worth it.

Two stars out of five. But that's more than I'd give to most of the zombie films from the last ten years - including Romero's.

The Day A Good Cover Made Me Buy A Bad Book

For most of last year, I was obsessed with buying new books. Not necessarily because I wanted to read them, but because there was usually something I could learn from them. I bought Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb just to see what all the fuss was about. I bought Star Wars: Republic Commando - Hard Contact by Karen Traviss to see why she was one of the most respected names in Star Wars. I even bought Starship Troopers to experience Heinlein for the first time in my life.

But there was one book in particular that I'm still trying to learn from. After several trips to Borders, there was always one book that absolutely stood out from the rest. I never knew why, but I knew that I had to look at it at least one time before I left the store, even if I was leaving with another book. I would just stare at it, wondering why this book had be so captivated.

That book was Across the Face of the World by Russell Kirkpatrick, and, eventually, I did buy it and it sits on my shelf to this day. But not because I liked it. I didn't care for it at all, actually. When I finally got around to actually reading the thing, I didn't really care for the story, the characters, or anything like that. I won't sit here and say it's the worst thing I've ever read, because it's not, but it wasn't something I liked.

But the cover...Jesus Christ, it's probably the best cover I've ever seen. Every time I see it, it instills a sense of wonder in me. I see that bright moon, that lonely landscape, and the riders casually heading off into the horizon...and I'm in awe already. Even as I type this, knowing full well what sub-standard story lies in wait beneath that cover, I still can't help but feel inspired. I just don't know why.

My sister always says that everything has something to teach us. And whenever I started ranting to her about a bad book, she would repeat that, to an author (like my almost-self), even bad books have something to teach me. Well, this book taught me: Yes, sometimes a great cover can sell a book, no matter what it is. R.A. Salvatore talked about this, saying that a good cover is absolutely imperative to a book, contrary to the opinion of his agent that covers don't matter very much. And he is absolutely right.

After I read The Crystal Shard, my idea of what the main characters looked like was forever altered by the cover. That's how Drizzt, Bruenor, and Wulfgar will always look like to me. It's the reason why I decided to buy the old first edition versions instead of the newer, Todd Lockwood-drawn masterpieces. Amazing, though they are, they are not what first made that impression.

This would all happen again with The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, but that actually seems to be a good book so far. And Collision Course by William Shatner is another book that I bought on account of the cover, and it's still one of my favorite books. So, sometimes I get lucky.

But...yeah, it seems that the cover is very important. To me, at least. They have prompted me to buy good books and bad books alike; but, most importantly, bad books. And that's the magic of some book covers. They can cast a spell over us, even if the words beneath it do nothing of the sort.