JFL

This heavyweight parable about human society and the monstrousness of power was made as a cryptic artistic project under totalitarianism, but it wasn’t released to cinemas until after the revolution, which was to its detriment. What under communism would have ended up being a mythical project by an artist suffering under the yoke of totalitarianism was suddenly transformed into a work that had nothing to offer viewers in the newly established democracy in which anyone could boldly say whatever they wanted. It thus became all the more clear that Masseba was essentially an exemplary case of being artsy-fartsy. From today’s perspective, the film is a curiosity of its time, but from the viewer’s perspective, it would have come off as didactic and naïve if it were a fifteen-minute short; as a feature-length film, it is mainly just unbearably tiresome.

Anna Nicole Smith got her first major “acting” role in the sequel to the execrable DaVinci's War (1993), a self-serving project of Joey Travolta, John’s older brother. If we take an optimistic view, it might seem that understanding the plot of To the Limit requires knowledge of the previous film, but the truth is more prosaic: the film simply doesn’t make any sense. The narrative is scattered among several parties (Travolta, the Italian mafia, Anna Nicole Smith, an unhinged Vietnam veteran, a priest). In addition to that, there are several other constituent characters (Branscombe Richmond is given two lives, as killers in the service of the bad guy) and a heap of complicated storylines. However, the motivations of the vast majority of the characters are not clear at all, nor are their roles in the story. And that’s not to mention the fact that, with the exception of the need to regularly oscillate between the characters as dictated by the screenplay, the narrative does contain a single McGuffin or any other element that would push it forward. Of course, Anna Nicole stands out from the general chaos and parade of senseless acting performance thanks not only to her ridiculously sexual assets, which she shows off right from the beginning to the satisfaction of eager viewers. A much more essential aspect, however, is the dullness and awkwardness that pervade all of her scenes, especially the dialogue scenes.  I would seriously be interested in knowing whose idea it was to cast her in the role of a CIA agent (I would guess that it was one of the final mean-spirited jokes played by the spendthrift billionaire J. Howard Marshall) working undercover, i.e. a character whose essential features should be intelligence and resourcefulness, two aspects that are not in any way associated with the essentially passive and objectivised actress and which she is unable to portray. Nevertheless, the sequences with Anna Nicole Smith elevate this moronic mish-mash to the level of campy fun. But there are too few of them in the film to make it watchable entertainment. Even though the spectacular climax deserves a place in the pantheon of the most imbecilic sequences in the history of trash thanks to its stupidity, clichéd nature and excellent wow effect, it can’t stave off the feeling that it’s just a waste of and a squandered opportunity to make magnificent camp. All of this is made up for by Anna’s next film, her very own Die Hard, her magnum opus: Skyscraper.

Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby continue down the trail blazed by Romero. Following Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, an absurd satire of discredited hippie ideals, this time they use the living dead in a biting reflection of Vietnam syndrome and the issue of reassimilating returning soldiers into a society that doesn’t understand them. As in the case of other thorny issues, ignoble genre productions got out ahead of Hollywood, which turned its attention to veterans’ issues only several years later in more soothing and psychologically tinged melodramas like Heroes (1977) and Coming Home (1978). Though Dead of Night has a trash plot about a fallen soldier who returns home as a living corpse and must delay his physical decay by feeding on the blood of new victims, the film doesn’t slide into superficial exploitation. On the contrary, through its complexly developed, exaggerated premise, it succeeds in showing viewers what veterans went through when they returned home from the psychologically destructive hell of war to a country that had not been touched by war at all.

Umberto Lenzi repeatedly asserted that his film is not about zombies and one can only agree with him in principle when considering the behaviour of the mutant killers in Nightmare City. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to deny that this film piggy-backs on the popularity of zombies at the time, particularly the boom in Italian zombie productions kick-started by Fulci’s Zombie, which itself was made as on the back of the international box-office success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (which was released in Europe under the title Zombi). Nightmare City persistently gives one the impression that its makers saw Fulci’s breakthrough Zombie and decided to give viewers a sort of direct sequel of that film. The main attraction is thus the spread of an apocalyptic contagion to modern metropolises, while a handful of characters strive to survive in the chaos that has arisen and stay with their loved ones. Though the resulting film radiates the filmmakers’ ambition to shoot a spectacular vision of the apocalypse with the scope of Hollywood disaster movies, it’s impossible to overlook the cack-handedness of everyone involved and their roots in exploitation cinema. What good is it to have a magnificent narrative scope when the greatest emphasis is placed on piling up the cheapest and most straightforward attractions, which make the planned epic just another in a long line of misogynistic trash flicks that revel in sequences of close-up nudity and brutal destruction of women’s bodies.

Though this short parody of Romero’s classic basically only has one idea, it is necessary to acknowledge its makers’ feel for comedic timing and imaginative shot composition, thanks to which the varying of a single joke over the course of eight minutes remains not only bearable, but even refreshingly absurd.

They just don't make them like that anymore. The 1980s had their unmistakable charm thanks to the collapse of the floodgates that had held back decadent creativity, which in turn brought a boom to the video market. In the seventies, it was still necessary for films to attract viewers to cinemas, so every effort was exerted to evoke the impression of a certain level – the best example of this is porn productions at the time, which commented on sexuality as a social phenomenon. By contrast, the video market brought forth the need to immediately stand out from the mass of competing titles surrounding your film on all sides at the video rental shop. Dead Heat is characteristic of eighties titles, particularly in the context of zombie movies. By that time, zombies had migrated from the margins of cinema and into the mainstream, as was evident from the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, and thus became a welcome addition to the portfolios of B-movie production companies. This time the living dead are surprisingly combined with a buddy-cop movie in the mould of 48 Hours or Red Heat, where the requisite pair of cool cops are not only on the trail of zombie criminals, but experience for themselves the benefits of relative post-mortem invincibility. The filmmakers consistently tried to evoke the impression of studio B-movie quality in this third-rate production. Both Treat Williams, aka “the poor man’s Kurt Russel”, and the mulletted meathead Joe Piscopo excel in their lead roles with unintentional ridiculousness. Literally every second line is an attempt (usually pitiful) at a dry one-liner and even Vincent Price appears in a cameo in recognition of the film’s inspiration. Even the basic buddy-movie concept breaks down under the onslaught of attractions and one-liners, as the protagonists differ basically only in the fact that one wears a sport coat and the other prefers a leather jacket, but the two of them are essentially identical über-dudes. The film actually retains the queer dimension of buddy action movies only when the two protagonists drive around the city together in a gaudy red Cadillac, whose ownership is not revealed, so it is apparently the property of a shared household. Despite the degree of campy entertainment that the genre foundation offers, attention is mostly focused on the magnificently crazy concept of the walking corpses. Fine masks and special effects make every clash a feast for the eyes of trash lovers, with the phenomenal highlight being the protagonists’ fight in a Chinese restaurant, where animal delicacies come to life. The bits with zombified chickens, a smoked pig and, in the climax, a whole side of beef place Dead Heat high on the list of unforgettable trash flicks. Furthermore, we could (if we so wanted) see the motif of zombifying the protagonists, who return after death to finish their last case, as an imaginative reflection of the formulas used in action movies about tough-guy cops. This time, it truly applies that for these heroes, who remain partners even beyond the grave, a bullet wound is just a scratch and their work becomes more important to them than their own lives when, after coming back to life, they don’t consider the consequences of this phenomenon, instead thinking only about catching the bastards who have all of it on their conscience.