The last few weeks have been a bit eventful, to be sure. Since my return from Australia, I’ve gotten engaged, finished writing and editing my PhD thesis, and started developing iPhone applications. But my real accomplishment is this: I’ve managed to catch up to what are, to my knowledge, the only two Underwater Nazi Zombie movies ever made.

From the USA, weighing in at a lean 85 minutes, is 1977s Shock Waves. Directed by Ken “Meatballs Part II” Wiederhorn, this is the story of a shipwrecked yachting party, beached on a isolated island after colliding with a mysterious freighter. (So mysterious, in fact, that I don’t think its appearance is ever actually explained.) On the island they find an aging SS commander hiding out in an old hotel with a squad of Underwater Nazi Zombies. PG-13 chaos and carnage ensue.

And over here, from France, weighing in at 71 minutes, or 83 minutes, or 88 minutes, or 90 minutes–depending on your country’s censorship board’s tolerance for nude French women and seeing mannequins get lit on fire–is Zombie Lake. Made by prolific schlockmeister Jean Rollin in 1981 for literally tens of francs, this makes Shock Waves‘ low-budget aesthetic look lush. Zombie Lake quickly jettisons mood, tension, excitement, production values, acting and cinematography to focus on what really matter: lots and lots of naked ladies. But don’t worry! There are Underwater Nazi Zombies, too. As the badly-dubbed mayor of a bucolic French village says: “we better face the facts that the Zombies have declared war.”

It’s a battle for the ages! A clash of titans! Who will win and who will lose!? Let’s break it down.

Titles and Alternate Titles

Like any good grindhouse shows, these flicks have both been released under alternate titles as distributors change and hopes rise of tricking the unsuspecting into multiple trips to the drive-in or video store. Shock Waves has also been released under the titles Death Corps (which will also be the name of my grindcore band) and Almost Human (wait, what? that sound like a comedy about a wacky teenaged robot). Zombie Lake has, besides the unimaginative Zombies Lake and Zombie‘s Lake, been released as pretty sweet The Lake of the Living Dead, as well, of course, as the original French title Le Lac des Morts Vivants, which sounds more Rohmer than Romero (ha!).

Guest Stars

Shock Waves has appearances by not only John Carradine (who I’m starting to think was just cast in every low-budget horror movie from 1965 to 1982), but also Peter Cushing, the same year he also played Grand Moff Tarkin in a little movie called Star Wars. Zombie Lake has Europe’s answer to John Carradine, Howard Vernon, as the mayor, and a cameo by the director as “Stiltz”.

The Zombies: Origin

The zombies of Shock Waves are the remnants of the Toten Corps, a Nazi experiment to turn ordinary every-day thugs and murderers into unkillable zombie soldiers, and then apparently let them go to waste by making them pilot submarines. Stupids Nazis. No wonder they lost the war.

The Zombie Lake lake zombies, on the other hand, are retreating German soldiers who were ambushed by the resistance. To avoid reprisals from other retreating troops (?), the resistance dumps the bodies in a lake that was used for satanic masses (!). Now you know the recipe for zombie.

Oh, there’s also a subplot where one of the village girls was impregnated years ago by one of the now underwater and zombified nazis when he was merely a German soldier, and now papa zombie wants nothing more than to be reunited with his daughter (who is disturbingly undisturbed by the whole thing), but the less said of that the better.

The Zombies: Presentation

The Shock Waves zombies are genuinely cool. Nice make-up, cool rotting-SS-uniform costumes, and seeing them slowly rise out of the black ocean is genuinely creepy, even if it loses some impact around the tenth time it happens.

The Zombie Lake zombies are just dudes in green Halloween facepaint. Sometimes they remember to make the neck and hands green, too. Sometimes they don’t. But they do remember to feather and blow dry their hair.

The Victims

In Shock Waves, the zombies kill the mostly-annoying crew and passengers of a Florida yacht. Yaaawwwn.

Zombie Lake, on the other hand, is mostly memorable for the scene where the girl’s volleyball team pulls up next to a nazi-zombie-infested lake, half-heartedly bat around a volleyball in soft focus, and then start skinny-dipping only to promptly be eaten by underwater nazi zombies. Which never would have happened if an earlier buxom female skinny dipper hadn’t removed the “no swimming” sign before also becoming zombie chow. (Anyone who thinks Europeans are more sophisticated than Americans clearly has not seen enough Euro-trash horror flicks.) It’s actually kind of awesome, and immediately moved this from the worst underwater nazi zombie movie to the best. For about a minute.

Another zombie victim is a girl who is soaking au naturel in a barrel in her back yard. Either Jean Rollin really likes hot skinny-dipping French chicks, or really hates them — they do, after all, all get killed horribly. And by “killed horribly” I mean “have fake-looking fakey fake blood smeared on their necks.”

The Dezombification

Not be all spoilery or anything, but the finale of Zombie Lake involves using a little girl and a bucket of blood for bait, a villager’s old flamethrower (what?) and the following choice bit of dubbed dialogue:

The Mayor: “We created these monstrous zombies. No weapon could kill them. Can’t be stopped. The Lake is their refuge and nothing ever can make them return to dust. Nothing but Apocalypse could reduce them to ashes, and give them eternal peace.”

Reporter: “The sacred fiery hell of Apocalypse? The fire I’m thinking of has nothing sacred. You see, it’s not at all mystical, but just as effective as Apocalypse. It might just save you.”

Oh, and paternal love plays a role. And flaming zombie-dummies being thrown out of windows.

In Shock Waves, the tide begins to turn when the humans discover the zombies are vulnerable to having their sunglasses removed (double what??). But will it be enough to save them?

Now, let’s tally up the scores, and… oh, hell, it’s a tie! Didn’t see that coming…

Truth is, neither of these is very good. Shock Waves is definitely the better made film and has a couple of effective sequences, but that just brings it up to mediocre. Zombie Lake, on the other hand, has that wonderful combination of incompetence, contempt for the audience and general insanity that makes for a good badfilm. Not a great badfilm — it’s no Robot Monster or Manos: the Hands of Fate — but I’d probably watch it again before Shock Waves just for a few good laughs.

Fortunately, J does start to get it together in the second half, and the story settles into a more satisfying plot. I still did — all the way to the end — find myself frustrated with the movie’s refusal to give me a payoff for the big plot points it set up. I’m sure it was deliberate, but that doesn’t mean I have to go along with it. However, I will say this: I saw the movie a few days ago and it’s really stuck with me since. I’m looking forward to watching it again at some point, with my expectations properly calibrated. I didn’t love it this time, but I reserve the right to love it in the future.

I love the books, published as a series of six manga-sized graphic novels. The books kind of gave me a feeling like I felt like I knew these characters and was in on their jokes and would have wanted to hang out with them (in my younger days, or, hell, now). It’s not that these characters are paragons of awesome — it’s that they’re familiar. They have recognizable inner lives. Even when they’re clueless or narcissistic or petty, you know people like that, and look past it. (Incidentally, this is also how I felt about Pilgrim director Edgar Wright’s equally brilliant Spaced.) But at the end of the movie — SPOILER, but not really — when Scott & Ramona decide to stay together, I was just thinking “sooo… why are these two still together, again? Scott likes her hair, and Ramona likes… ???” It made sense in the books, but movie-Scott never really grew up. (He probably should have stayed with the teenaged Knives Chau.)

I think a big part of the problem is the decision to keep all the fight scenes. In the books, they’re spread out over something like 1300 pages, and break up the story. In the film, they pile right on top of each other in the second half, with a few brief character moments in between. It’s exhausting where it should be exhilarating, and it leaves out the heart. I found myself wishing there had been, say, four evil exes. The would have pissed off the fans, but you know what? Screw the fans. Catering to comic book fanboy literalism did in The Watchmen and ignoring it made Ghost World all kinds of awesome. Cutting out the middle fights would have given the non-fighting bits of the movie some much-needed room to breathe. (Also, this doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but more and more I appreciate Quentin Tarantino’s decision to put all the action scenes in Kill Bill in the first half and all the character scenes in the second half.)

I also really appreciated that in both the Scott Pilgrim books and Spaced (and Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, too) the whole process felt really personal, and also totally DIY, like the people making it know exactly what they want to do, but are figuring how to do it as they go along. The movie doesn’t feel that way. It’s a little too slick for a story about a bunch of Canadian slacker indie kids. It’s awesome to see Edgar Wright exercise his incredible pop-culture imagination on a big Hollywood production, but I think he needs to find his own rules and limits without being tied down by adapting an existing work.

1. The fact that both films are turning out to be very successful financially is, I think, a satisfying rejoinder to the arrogant, elitist view that mainstream audiences are too unsophisticated to want anything challenging in their summer movies. You have here an apartheid-themed movie set entirely in South Africa and a long, talky movie where most of the dialogue is in German and French. Neither will do Transformers 2 box office, but these movies are both going to make a lot of people a lot of money, and entertain people, to boot. And unlike Transformers, people are going to be talking about these movies ten years from now. The lesson is that with the right marketing, you can get away with all that as long as you aren’t boring.
2. Inglourious Basterds is the work of a master at the peak of his abilities, and District 9, the work of an emerging talent, but both have a scrappy sureness and a mix of the cerebral and the visceral that I really enjoy. Though maybe it’s more accurate to say neither Tarantino or Blomkamp have any interest in distinguishing between the head and the gut in their filmmaking.
3. Nazis and South African racists both make excellent villains, and both films give us a kind of alternate, fantasy take on events where historical evil can actually be appropriately punished. I’m not at all a bloodthirsty person, but I’ve been reading a lot of World War II history the past few years, and I could watch the climactic theatre scene of Basterds ten times in a row. The more I read about history the less sympathy I feel for the people who willingly stepped onto the wrong side of it.
4. That said, Landa the Jew Hunter may be the single greatest character to ever appear in a Tarantino movie.
5. SPOILERS. I had been looking forward to both movies for a while, and trying not to learn too many details going in. This worked better for Basterds than District 9. I was actually a bit disappointed that the latter turned into such a typical action movie — maybe if I’d known, I’d have kept my expectations more modest. But Basterds continually went in new and unexpected directions. Tarantino has gone from a talented stylist and dialogue writer to the master of letting scenes unfold at their own pace, and without his crutch of pop-culture references (or the English language), you can see what a great storyteller he has become. I’ve not decided yet where Basterds fits into the Tarantino pantheon, but I look forward to watching it several more times to try to decide. District 9 mostly makes me eager to see what Neill Blomkamp does next.

The “plot” involves a biker Elvis lookalike with a vague European accent, who befriends a kindly Christian lady who takes him to a drug party (!). He gets seduced by her skanky sister, who is also Christian and also into drugs and who turns him onto the devil weed, which he becomes addicted to in about 17 seconds flat. Through a series of events that probably made sense to the director while he was coming down a spectacularly bad trip of his own, Euroelvis ends up eating some experimental turkey meat (!!) which turns him into a man with the head of a turkey!! Well, actually, it turns his head into a vaguely turkeyish lump of papier mache, but we know it’s supposed to be a turkey because he now can speak only in turkey gobbling (!!), and also, he now has an insatiable thirst for the blood of junkies (!!). You know, just like a real turkey. I’d try to describe more of the plot, but I think I’m running out of parenthesized exclamation points.

I know it sounds like this movie a spoof, but I swear, it is totally for-real. How do I know? Because it’s soooo fucking incompetent! Actors flub their lines and look at the camera, entire scenes are too dark or out of focus, and every 20 minutes, the leathery director himself shows up to chain smoke and explain whatever the hell his turkey-loathing brain has decided was going on in the scene we just saw. You can practically smell the bourbon and listerine on his breath.

All this, and I haven’t even touched on the turkeyman/skank love scene (she has a monologue about what their unfortunate children would look like), the ridiculous gore effects complete with looped stock screaming, or the heavy-handed Christian message, where everything works out all right in the end thanks to a whole lot of praying to Jesus. I have no idea how this movie got made, or who it was made for, but damn, am I glad it was. So I guess maybe it was made for me.

As a thesis, that’s pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the movie jumps from idea to idea until it’s tonally all over the place. And while some of those tones are clear and sharp, a lot of them are pretty fucking leaden, with plot points added and abandoned and characters undergoing sudden unexplained personality changes.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a Japanese documentary about Kenzo Okuzaki, who was a soldier in New Guinea in World War II, where he was one of only 30 survivors of his 1000-man unit. The events seem to have left him a little unhinged, and after 40 years in and out of prison, filled with a burning desire to extract the truth, he sets out to interview the other survivors. The doc unfolds as a series of long interviews with each of the survivors, as Kenzo uses a combination of imploring, cajoling, rudeness and direct accusations. When that doesn’t work, he starts (literally) beating it out of them, leading to the bizarre sight of two old men wrestling around while cops in Mickey Mouse gloves ask polite questions. Piece by piece a story comes out, of illegal executions, starvation and cannibalism, and the very strange Kenzo Okuzaki starts to make sense. In fact, the more you learn about what happened, the more it seems odd how well-adjusted the other survivors are. I think watching the whole thing at one time would be gruelling, but watching one or two interviews at a time, it’s fascinating. It’s not just the story of Kenzo Okuzaki, it’s also a proxy for the story of how Japan itself came to deal with its imperial wartime adventures, and neither story is a happy one.

If TENAMO is too much medicine to take all at once, The Fall is too much sugar. It’s the labour of love of the uni-named commercial and video director Tarsem, made largely with his own money, between paid work. It’s a fantasy emerging from a story told by an injured stuntman to an immigrant girl in a hospital in 1915 California. He tells her the simple story of a group of heroes on a quest for revenge, but filtered through her imagination, it becomes something strange and exotic — an aside about native American Indians becomes confused with the culture of a friend from India, for example. The story owes a lot to films like The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen and The Princess Bride, with a bit of El Topo and Prospero’s Books thrown in. But it also contains some jaw-dropping visuals, incredibly, achieved without the use of CGI. Instead, Tarsem uses art direction, landscapes from around the world, and brilliant cinematography to create some of the most stunningly beautiful images I’ve ever seen.

The only problem is, stunning beauty pretty quickly turns tedious. I don’t know if it’s that you need the contrast of beauty and the everyday, or that it’s just the inability of my imagination to absorb something so rich, but I soon started to feel the guilty aesthetic boredom I feel at art galleries. What I did find, though, was that by breaking it up over several days, and stopping when my interest was flagging, The Fall became a really unique and rewarding movie experience. Actually, I wish I could do that with art galleries — I’d probably appreciate art a whole lot more if I could. Philistine I may be, but if that’s the cost of maximizing utility, I’m happy to pay it.

Funny People is a bloated, beautiful mess of a film by your hero and mine, Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up). It’s about a dying Adam Sandler — woah, let me finish, that’s not even the best part! — who takes on struggling young stand-up comic Seth Rogan as a personal assistant, in an impulsive attempt to both avoid and embrace his loneliness and self-loathing. Hilarious, I know, but trust me, this is a very, very funny movie. It’s mostly set in the world of competitive, ambitious young comedians who consider nothing off-limits in their mission to entertain and out-funny each other, and the dialogue is brilliant. Characters make cutting comments, just grazing a buried truth, and then undermining it with a punchline. Sandler is actually really solid — Punch-Drunk Love solid — and I know we were all getting tired of Seth Rogan doing his Seth Rogan thing, but he manages to give a performance more nuanced and heartfelt than anything I’ve seen form him before. Not to mention a (mostly) great supporting cast of comedians, rivals, girlfriends, girlfriend-comedians and comedian-rivals. The only problem is, Apatow seems to love these characters so much, he wanted to make about three movies with them. And then he did. And then he edited them all into this one. And one of those movies, the one which takes over the last 40 minutes, is actually not a very good movie. But I’ll take a lopsided, ambitious mess over safe and predictable any day.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn “Point Break” Bigelow’s film about bomb-disposal experts in Iraq, is basically the complete opposite of Funny People: tightly focused, visual rather than verbal, and humourless. It’s also wired as tight as a spring about to snap. The Iraq of this movie is a place where any discarded plastic bag could contain an IED, and any cell phone could be a detonator. Also, another difference: Judd Apatow is going from great flick to great flick. If you had told me last year that the washed-up action director who would make the first great Iraq War movie would be Kathryn Bigelow, I would never have believed you. But great it is. I was shocked when the credits rolled — I couldn’t believe 131 minutes could go by so fast. It could have been another hour long and I wouldn’t have minded.

Actually, though, there is something the two films have is common — they are both about process. In Funny People we see how comedians work, trying material, bouncing it off each other, refining it. In The Hurt Locker, we see how someone goes about disabling hundreds of bombs in a one-year tour, how the insurgents and occupation forces constantly learn and adapt to each other’s technique and style. Of course, in one movie, bombing has a very different meaning than the other.

So where does it fit into the full ordering of Pixar flicks?

The Incredibles > WALL·E > Ratatouille > Finding Nemo > Toy Story > Up > Monsters Inc > Toy Story 2 > Bug’s Life > Cars.

That’s where.

What it’s missing is the retarded-brilliant worldview of the original series. I never got into any of the later Trek series, but I watched the original series as a kid, and I’ve been rewatching it on DVD over the past year. Gene Roddenberry had a crystal-clear vision of future human society as the ultimate secular-humanist fantasy: a perfect multiracial (and ideologically homogeneous) science-based utopia, free from war and religion and prejudice — a universe where the space-babes are all sexually liberated and everybody is self-actualized up the yin-yang. The best episodes of the original series deal with what happens when our crew of altruists comes into conflict with beings and societies that don’t share their 1960s-liberal values. (The worst involve alien women stealing Spock’s brain.)

Now, I’m no advocate for sticking with the source material: if you’re going to do a remake/reboot/whatever, I’d rather see you pick and choose what to keep and put a new spin on things. But I’m slightly saddened that JJ Abrams felt he had to dumb down a 1960s TV show about a planet-hopping space-stud and his loyal buddies, just because it had a bunch of, you know: ideas. Case in point: the pure plot-device villain. Even the Gorn had a more interesting motivation than Eric Bana did.

All that said, though, Trek is a fun movie, and I really enjoyed seeing new actors doing their own takes on familiar characters. I liked the in-joke of Sulu’s “combat training” being fencing (and the payoff later). I’m glad Uhura finally had something to do other than answer the phone. And how awesome was it to see Simon Pegg as Scottie? If you’re dead set on making Scottie the comic relief, for God’s sake, you’ve gotta cast the Pegg.