Day 7: Zombi 3

Roger: Hey, this Blueheart's music is great, huh?
Bo: Yeah, it's making me horny.

Comedy is a subject that is very important to me, something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering for many years now… what is it that makes us laugh, why is something funny and something else tragic? Why do those two intermingle so often? It all boils down to absurdity for me. We laugh because some things defy our expectations as to how the world is structured and, when confronted with those things, we respond by being terrified or laughing (depending, I imagine, on how threatening these things are). I laughed harder watching Zombi 3 than I’ve laughed in response to any movie for quite some time. I’m aware that a few days ago I made clear my feelings about watching bad movies for the purposes of laughing at and feeling superior to them. I am comfortable with the fact that, while I was laughing at Zombi 3 and while the laughter was borne of the movie’s incompetence, what I was really laughing at was its illogic and its absurdity.

I love zombie movies as a general rule and so I am no stranger to the work of Lucio Fulci. The maker of Zombi 2 (here in the States, it’s just called Zombie… the reason for this is that Dawn of the Dead was originally called Zombi in Italy and abroad…Fulci’s Zombi 2 is an in-name-only sequel if I remember correctly.) and The Beyond, he specializes in making films that are like a crossbreed of Dario Argento’s and George Romero’s, though his movies are nowhere near as good as either of those two’s films. Fulci’s zombies are the slowest of the “slow” zombies, moving with the speed of snails and, somehow, becoming ten times as creepy for it. When Fulci brings in a gore scene, it can go on for minutes as the unconvincing effects spill out in a torrent of red before our eyes. It’s rather endearing sometimes, like in The Beyond, there’s a scene in which spiders eat a man’s face for what seems like an hour. Some of the spiders are clearly made of rubber and being bounced up and down on fishing line. The spiders also squeak while they eat the poor man. And their entrance into the movie is quite, um, random. The randomness and the extremity of the gore can lend Fulci’s movies a dreamlike quality not unlike Argento’s.

For the first hour of Zombi 3, I was a bit upset because this movie did not feel like a Fulci movie, though he was the credited director. No dreamlike pacing, the gore was weaker, and the zombies were not Fulci zombies. These zombies were moving super-fast! One of them was involved in a choreographed fight scene in which he menaced a woman with a machete. A lot of zombies leapt down from above the camera just when one of the characters was nearly safe. A couple of them talked. Later, I learned that this was only a half-Fulci movie, that he’d left after shooting 70 minutes, and only 40 minutes were used in the final product. And this shows quite a bit in the movie.

Before I go on to talk about Zombi 3, I’d like to describe to you the following scenes.

• A woman in an abandoned gas station, looking for water for her soon-to-be zombie boyfriend. She walks around in the darkness for a bit doing the standard, “hello, is anyone there” routine. A zombie, chained up, lunges at her. She screams. It grabs her and she wiggles away, out of its reach. The zombie then lunges forward again, pulling against its chains. A large quantity of debris, seemingly out of nowhere, then falls on the zombie’s head, causing the zombie to fall down.


• A soldier guy in the jungle is attacked by a zombie. He wrestles with it for some time until they come to a dock by a river. The soldier throws the zombie off of the dock into what appears to be two or three inches of water. The movie then cuts to a shot of the soldier looking relieved, like the fight is over.


• A group of people (including the soldier from the previous description) have just found respite from constant zombie attacks. They are lying outside in some grass. We hear the noise of a chicken. The movie cuts to a shot of a man in glasses who starts making chicken noises at the chicken and chasing it around, unable to catch it. This is intercut with shots of the others in his group smiling and shaking their head as he struggles to catch the chicken. That guy!


• At the end of the movie: a soldier is running away from some zombies toward a helicopter where his friends are flying off to safety. The helicopter has ascended a little and he is forced to leap onto the landing strut of the helicopter. As he struggles to climb into the helicopter, a group of zombies emerge from a pile of hay below the man and they get him.

In each of these instances, I laughed and laughed hard. Particularly at the chicken thing, but also at the zombies hidden in hay. I don’t know why they were in the hay, but I believe it’s a new breed of zombie that we can all call the “hay zombie”. The scene descriptions don’t even begin to account for the amount of inanity in the film. There’s a flying zombie head with no visible means of propulsion other than its desire to consume human flesh. There are zombie birds. And, most importantly, I may be wrong, but I believe one character dies at the hands (eh) of the severed flying head, only to come back moments later and then die again at the hands of a zombie-mob. It occurs to me that I haven’t even mentioned the scientist who created the means by which the dead come back to life, whose acting abilities reside in his index finger or the way the main soldier characters in the film start rolling around everywhere.

I’m glad I watched this movie. It’s helped me figure out some of my movie-watching philosophy. I generally like to respect the filmmakers when I watch movies, so if a movie is working in a way that you can tell it’s trying to be scary, exciting, whatever… I will try to engage with it on those terms. When I am given inconsistencies and shoddy craftsmanship, it is fair game for me to enjoy on whatever level I like. Therefore: Zombi 3 is a comedy. Things happen for no reason in this movie and they’re decidedly not scary. It even appears as if it switches from being shot on film to shot on video at random. The movie has no merit as a horror movie. It has no new horror ideas in it, no tension, no scariness. It is structured more as an action movie, with its fast zombies, soldiery shootouts, and pounding score similar to Day of the Dead, but it has no merit as an action movie either. However, it is so shoddily put together that it does have merit (at times) as an absurdist comedy. And since we’ll never get to see The Marx Brothers starring in A Night with the Living Monkeys, this will do just fine.

Day 6: Fucking Zardoz, man.

Zed: Stay behind my aura!

In short: Zardoz is a trainwreck movie. It may even be the perfect example of a trainwreck movie. In order to discuss Zardoz, I think it's necessary to first state what I mean when I call something a "trainwreck movie". It's pretty simple: a movie is going along for a while and in your mind you're thinking to yourself "this is pretty good!" and then, at some point, the movie jumps the tracks and at the end of it, you're shaking your head and saying something in a disappointed tone, like, "fucking Zardoz, man..." There are a few examples I can think of right now... The Hulk, The Keep, and Lifeforce(that one's a BIG TIME trainwreck). All of these are not bad movies, per se, they're just movies that lose the way at some point while maintaining very good intentions. What denotes a trainwreck movie from a bad movie is that it is always internally consistent (just as a train doesn't cease being a train when it leaves the tracks, The Hulk doesn't stop being the movie that preceded it when Nick Nolte and Bruce Banner have a metaphysical special effects fight and, in fact, if the movie ended any other way it would be a betrayal of everything that came before it) and full of intriguing ideas that never seem to make it to the screen in a coherent fashion.

Zardoz is probably the perfect trainwreck movie because, as soon as it starts, you can see that it's going to wreck somewhere along its path. You can feel it the same way you feel like you're in the most competent of hands when Touch of Evil starts with that uncut tracking shot. It's hard not to know that disaster looms when the floating head of a man, dressed up like a genie and claiming to be immortal, tells you that Merlin was his idol and that the story you're about to see is an allegory and a satire. It's even harder to put aside feelings that disaster is going to eventually beat this movie into a bloody pulp as a giant stone head flies over gorgeously photographed landscapes like a hot air balloon with a guidance system and lands near a bunch of people on horseback wearing nothing but red underpants and bandoliers. And when, after said people on horseback bow before it, pledging allegience to the head they call Zardoz, that floating head responds to them by saying "the gun is good, the penis is bad" and spewing gun after gun after gun from its giant mouth, it's difficult to shun the knowledge that you are going to dislike this movie for the very same reasons that you are going to unabashadly love it.

The movie's plot is one of a science fiction utopia/dystopia in which, sometime in the future, humans have divided into two camps. One group is barbaric and is policed by the horseback people, known as Brutals. Their leader, Zed, sneaks into the giant floating head and finds himself among a second group of people, the Immortals. The Immortals are just that, immortal. Everytime they die, their bodies are regenerated by a supercomputer/A.I. thing known as The Tabernacle. They're also telepathic and like to meditate. They're superintelligent and super bored, living in a 1970s science fiction dreamland, a combination of colored plastics and old architecture, glass and stone. Their food and wealth is provided to them by the barbaric outsiders who, to appease their god Zardoz, give offerings of wheat to the giant stone head. They're obviously patterned after hippies or hippy ideals and, as Zed arrives, they're unsure of what to do with this bummer of a brute. Study him or kill him with telepathic powers?

The movie is one of these science fiction movies that is mostly about ideas. I would wager that a majority of the running time is spent explaining the world and it's landscape. It is fascinating for a while, but eventually the explanations of whatever new wrinkle to the world is presented start seeming repetitive at best, dull at worst and, in the second half, just confusing. What little narrative tension that exists in the second half is borrowed from popular mythology, The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, etc. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it's neat in a "oh they snuck that in nicely" kind-of way. But the people never resonate on a human level... The Immortals are mostly too remote and clinical to care about. Zed spends too much of his early screen time not doing anything but following Immortals around as they explain what he (and we) are seeing.

Zed is played by Sean Connery in, unfortunately, the worst performance I've ever seen him give. He is a killer and a rapist who, eventually, learns to be the smartest guy on the planet, but Connery just looks bored or confused most of the time. Perhaps I'm projecting. His acting is more interesting as the character grows smarter, but by that time, I was so busy keeping up with the overly complicated and expanding plot that I hardly noticed. Connery is also saddled with an unfortunate costume, spending the entire running time of the movie in red underwear that makes him look like a cheap Tarzan (though there is one moment when he wears a wedding dress that allows me to cross off "see Sean Connery in a wedding dress" from my list of things I'd like to see before I die).

It's too bad, too, that the movie buckles under the weight of all its concepts because there is so much to like here. I had the most fun watching this movie than any of the others I've watched so far for this blog. The movie is terribly earnest, sometimes to the point of campiness. There is a logic and a cleverness to everything and it's beautifully shot and produced. The first hour is delightful as the movie introduces us to the world it's devised, but, again, once the plot starts to take off and Zed inspires a civil war among the Immortals and is taught the secrets of the universe while inseminating women Immortals with his seed, it just flies right off the rails. It flies so far off the rails, in one scene an Immortal tells Zed that they built a spaceship. Zed says, "did you use it?" The Immortal replies, "yeah, it was a dead end" the way you might say you once ate a pear and didn't quite care for it.

There are three scenes I need to describe here that might give you an even better idea of what kind of movie this is: First scene: an Immortal man enters a room of other Immortals and speaks in "dubbed". His lips don't match the sounds he's making and the sounds are incomplete and garbled. The other Immortals applaud it as if it was a performance of poetry. Second scene: at dinner, the Immortals go into "second level meditation" and make loud moaning noises. One man doesn't want to go into second level meditation and they wiggle their fingers at him as he struggles under their psychic weight. Third scene: Sean Connery in red underwear running around a hall of mirrors with various images projected onto them, shouting over and over again, "TABERNACLE!!!" while looking confused and angry.

Pauline Kael apparently said that if this movie wasn't in English, we all might have thought it was a maserpiece. I'm inclined to agree somewhat. It's a fascinating movie, to be sure. It's thougtful, serious, witty, insightful, and honest... and these are all the reasons it's a bad movie. Whatever it happens to be being thoughtful, serious, witty, insightful, or honest about at any given time in the movie, it is ignoring everything else that is important. Still, something in me thinks that someday, fifty years from now, people could resurrect it as an overlooked classic. It's too good to be this bad. It's Fucking Zardoz, man... and there's nothing else like it.