cinema history class: nightmare city (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: Nightmare City (1980)
Directed by Umberto Lenzi

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A bunch of stuff happens -- Presumably a lot of it has to do with zombies or somesuch. The trailer makes it look really good!

Reaction and Other Folderol:
I missed this one, as I was with my family celebrating Asher's 18th birthday. So I really don't have anything useful to say about this. But I'm posting this for the sake of completeness. I assume that Joe would have given it a 10 if he had been there.

Oh, and Keith will be pissed off at me for even posting this.

happy tunesday! heaven was saving you for me

Happy Tunesday!

I'd like to get back in the habit of posting something musical every Tuesday. And what better way to start with "Heaven Was Saving You for Me"? Of course, no promises that I'll keep it up? What's next? The return of Zmedsday?

This is a song I wrote for Sharon and Josh for the first dance at their wedding. I'd been sitting on the title for over thirty years, not sure what to do with it. I really liked it, but every time I tried to use it as a song title, I couldn't get something that I liked. It seemed like a good first dance song title for a wedding. But it also sounded like it could be a great bit of Meat Loaf bombast.

Then Sharon and Josh got engaged. Then they started seriously talking about dates. Then they had a date and venue booked. Then I thought -- "Hey! I have a song idea!" What made it really super is that the title suggested an angle for the song -- something that is perfectly appropriate for Sharon and Josh. She's a Jewish kid from suburban Queens. He's an immigrant who spent his formative years in rural Guyana. So when I wrote the song I leaned into the fact that they managed to meet and work together despite their differences. The challenge was in making it personal and yet general enough. Like, I wanted to reference her research without something as literal as "I was studying what happens as human hands decompose." I think I succeeded. As for the actual performance? A big shoutout to JT Curtis and Emily Seibert. Heck, a shoutout to Eytan Mirsky for putting me in touch with JT. JT produced the track and did the arrangement (in consultation with me) played all the instruments and sang the male vocals. Emily Seibert did the female vocals. I also note that Emily was JT's recommendation. I have to tell you, JT was very professional and easy to work with. He was reliable, and turned in a great finished product. I never actually met Emily, but I was thrilled with her vocal performance. If you find yourself having a song in need of recording, I can't recommend them highly enough. JT's Bandcamp site is here. It's just too bad he's not hawking downloads of my song. And Emily's website is here.

cinema history class: doctor butcher m.d. (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Doctor Butcher M.D. (1980)
Directed by Marino Girolami

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:

A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.

This is a movie that's mostly boredom punctuated by moments of creatively graphic gore. And when it comes to the gore, it can be a pretty good movie.

Unfortunately, there's all that other stuff in between.

The acting is bad. Really bad. And the movie doesn't do a particularly good job of connecting its New York City prologue to everything that follows. It's almost as if they started making one movie, got bored with it, and decided to make another one instead. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I felt watching it.

And then there's the music. I assume the idea was to create an atmosphere of tension and unease. Well, it certainly made me uneasy, but mostly because I wanted someone to turn the damn thing off. Rather than enhancing the action, the score was frequently distracting and annoying.

But let's talk about what the movie gets right: the gore.

The makeup effects are excellent, particularly the zombies, whose decaying flesh is wonderfully disgusting. And the filmmakers certainly aren't shy about showing us the good stuff. An outboard motor to the face? Check. Cannibals enthusiastically munching on freshly harvested internal organs? Check. Yum!

And as the movie approaches its conclusion, things actually get better. The gruesome effects become more frequent, more imaginative, and more effective.

Two scenes in particular stand out. One involves a zombie wearing the hair of a murdered reporter, an image that's genuinely horrifying. The other involves an eye, and let's just say that anyone who's squeamish about eye injuries might want to look away. Or perhaps keep watching, because this is exactly the sort of thing the movie does well.

Which makes the whole experience rather frustrating. Clearly, the people responsible for the makeup and special effects knew what they were doing. If only the people responsible for the acting, pacing, music, and storytelling had been equally competent.

Ultimately, Doctor Butcher, M.D. is a movie that rewards patience with some spectacularly disgusting moments. The problem is how much patience it demands.

It's a pretty good gore movie trapped inside a pretty bad movie.

Joe gave it a 7. I'm not sure whether that says more about the movie or Joe.

they let me in the club! but...

A little bit ago I posted about my quest to get on IMDb. The reason for that post was that my acting career was making progress. Glacial progress, but progress nonetheless.

Well, it finally happened. I'm on IMDb.

Sort of.

Last night, Lindley Farley held a screening of Lost 9, the movie in which I have a small role -- the first speaking role of my career. Blair, Asher and I were on our way to the screening when Lindley sent texted  that the movie was now listed on IMDb. And, along with it, me!

At last! After all these years! After hours in snowy Connecticut listening to Lance Henriksen deliver a speech (over and over again) about God and fear! After hours one evening in a bar on the Upper East Side (or was it the Upper West Side?) trying and mostly failing to be visible!  After gawking in the subway as one man attacks another for an umbrella! After all my struggles to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, I had finally broken through!

Naturally, I immediately looked it up.

There it was. Lost 9. And there I was, listed among the cast as "Internal Affairs Detective #2."

Okay, it's not exactly a starring role. Hell, I didn't even rate a character name. I'm not even "Lady Who Has Her Car Stolen by Ape." I'm just Internal Affairs Detective #2. But it's a speaking part, dammit! I have actual lines! And now I have an IMDb credit to prove it! Strictly speaking, in the credits in the movie I am listed as "Investigator Reevs" which sounds better.

I was delighted.

Of course, I wanted to make sure everything was correct. My first name was spelled with a C. Good. You'd be surprised how many people get that wrong. My last name had the H in it. Excellent. That's another thing people sometimes miss.

Everything looked good.

And then I noticed something.

The E.

My name was listed as Marc Whinsten.

Whinsten.

Not Whinston.

Whinsten.

FUCK!

After all these years of trying to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, they finally did it. They finally admitted that I was in a movie. They finally gave me a credit.

And they gave it to somebody named Marc Whinsten.

I suppose I should be grateful that they got nine out of ten letters right. That's 90%. A solid A-minus in some grading systems. But somehow, when it comes to my own name, I expect a little better.

Anyway, we went to the screening. I got to see myself on the big screen, which was fun. A couple of my colleagues from work even came to see the movie, which I appreciated. It was a very enjoyable evening. Also, I tried "mushy peas" for the first time, since they came with the fish and chips. But that's a whole other story.

And, to be clear, I'm not actually upset about the misspelling. I think it's pretty funny. After everything I wrote in my previous post about trying to get onto IMDb, there's something almost poetic about finally succeeding, only to discover that they got my name wrong.

I did get a chance to mention it to Lindley, who assured me that he could get it corrected. Hopefully, he will. And if he doesn't, well, I've had bigger frustrations in life.

Oh, and there's one other thing. I also received an Associate Producer credit on the movie. That's pretty cool, too. Unfortunately, my name is misspelled there as well. And IMDb doesn't list that credit at all.

So, to recap: I'm an actor with an IMDb credit under somebody else's name, and an Associate Producer whose producer credit isn't on IMDb.

Still, I'm making progress.

Maybe someday IMDb will acknowledge that Marc Whinston exists.

In the meantime, congratulations to Marc Whinsten on his motion picture debut. I hear he was pretty good.

cinema history class: hell of the living dead (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)
Directed by Bruno Mattei

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
When an accident at a chemical research facility in Papua New Guinea releases a mysterious toxic gas, the dead begin returning to life as flesh-eating zombies. A television news crew investigating the outbreak joins forces with a team of commandos sent to the region. Together, they travel through the jungle, encountering increasingly gruesome scenes of carnage as the infection spreads. As they struggle to survive, they discover that the disaster may be connected to a sinister international effort to address overpopulation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
There's a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT.

The plot is bizarre, the storytelling is messy, and some of the proceedings are downright silly. There are moments when the movie is ugly, and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is supposed to be ugly. And the whole thing feels like it was cobbled together from pieces of other movies.

The influences are pretty obvious. There's more than a little Cannibal Holocaust in here, along with a generous helping of Apocalypse Now. And, of course, the obligatory George Romero zombie influences. It's almost as though the filmmakers watched a bunch of movies they liked and decided to make all of them at once.

And then there's the stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. I understand the desire to establish an exotic jungle setting without actually having to film everything in an exotic jungle. But did we really need all those shots of birds? What was the point? Were the birds somehow involved in the zombie outbreak? Were they conducting surveillance? Did somebody get a terrific deal on a reel of bird footage and decide they were damn well going to use every frame?

Another problem is the storytelling. It reminded me of something that bothers me about a lot of modern action movies. Within any given scene, it's usually perfectly clear what's happening. You know who the characters are, what they're trying to accomplish, and what's standing in their way. But how one scene connects to the next, or how all the scenes fit together into a coherent story, is another matter entirely. The individual pieces make sense. The movie doesn't always.

And the ending? Let's just say I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised by how things turn out.

So why did I give this movie a relatively high rating?

Because somewhere in the second half, I noticed something strange.

I was watching another scene in which a group of living people was desperately trying to escape a bunch of zombies. I was still bothered by the movie's incoherence, its silliness, and its general messiness. But I was also completely absorbed in what was happening. I wanted to know how these people were going to get out of this particular predicament. I was on edge. I was genuinely interested in what happened next.

Somehow, despite everything the movie was doing wrong, it had grabbed me.

And that's not nothing.

I should also give credit to the makeup effects, which are excellent. The zombies look appropriately revolting, and there's some genuinely impressive gruesomeness on display.

Ultimately, Hell of the Living Dead is a badly assembled, frequently ridiculous, sometimes irritating movie. But it's also a movie that managed to hold my attention and generate real suspense, even while I was mentally cataloging its many shortcomings.

I can't call it a good movie. But I can't dismiss it as a bad one, either.

Sometimes a movie doesn't have to make much sense to work. Sometimes it just has to make you want to see what happens next.

And, against considerable odds, this one did.

And the strangest thing of all? Joe...Joe, of all people, gave it a 5!