Get 'em All (1960)

directed by Eizo Sugawa

Japan

87 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not very familiar with Eizo Sugawa's other films, apart from by name, but it seems like this one is not one of his more well-known works. Despite that, I still had been wanting to see it for a dog's age, and I was very excited to have stumbled upon a crowdfunded fansub. I was not going to review this, but I liked it so much that I feel like I have enough to talk about for a whole review. It should be noted, also, that the screenplay for this was written by the great Shuji Terayama.

Although it shares many conventions with other Japanese noir (and noir-adjacent) films of the Showa era, Get 'em All stands out in a couple of ways. It is hard to call it strictly a crime film, because the "crime" that is hinted at repeatedly and never quite fully brought into light happened at some shadowy time in the past. It's more apt to call it a revenge film, but what I think it really is is a character study and a commentary on the self-absorbed nature of society. It's nuts to look up the lead actor, Hiroshi Mizuhara, and see that he was only ever in a handful of films over a relatively short period of time, and nothing that had any kind of breakout, international success. He plays his character, Kyosuke, with a quality that I mentioned recently in my review of Nope: We get to see him before a tragedy occurs, and despite the fact that the bulk of the movie takes place after the tragedy, it's the entirely different personality he had beforehand that strikes us. You see him go from seemingly not knowing or caring much about the world beyond his family and immediate surroundings to being wholly disaffected, passively (sometimes actively) homicidal, looking like a shell of a person.

The gist of the plot is that Kyosuke's brother was part of a group of seven men who at some point in the past robbed a bank and got away with a huge amount of cash, which they stash in an empty grave but, upon trying to retrieve it, find gone. Out of all of them, Kyosuke's brother gets pinned with the blame and is killed in a way that's staged to look like a car accident. Unintentionally, Kyosuke stumbles upon his brother's gun, which fired a single bullet during the robbery - a bullet that, if traced, could bring every single person who was in on the robbery down. From then on, all of the remaining robbers are focused on two things: Who has the gun, and who has the cash.

Nobody in this movie seems to feel empathy or be connected with reality in any way that goes further than their own momentary entertainment. No character embodies this better than Kyosuke's sister-in-law, who, immediately after her husband's death, openly and shamelessly takes up with Kyosuke instead ("I can't mambo with a dead person"). Nothing fazes her, life is just dancing and playing and having fun, nothing is ever serious. In a way, this is how every character goes through the world, except instead of being motivated by having fun, for most of them, life - although framed, in this narrative, as one huge game - is a game to be won through being the worst, the most ruthless, essentially the last man standing, with cash in hand. As juxtaposition we see groups of children playing in the streets in ways that are almost uncivilized: A boy kicks around a dead pigeon, a group of kids noisily play cowboys with (...mostly) fake guns. The pigeon motif is actually really interesting because the pigeons are used, I think, as a symbol of the characters' lack of empathy towards other creatures. At a pivotal moment in the film, Kyosuke stops the same boy from stealing someone else's pet pigeon, and after he runs off with it, you think he's just going to let it go - but he doesn't, he shoots it. Kyosuke using the gun on the pigeon opens the door for him to be able to use the gun on other humans. His goal becomes tracking down his brother's associates and killing them all, not caring which of them was the specific one driving the car - all of them are complicit in his eyes, except, strikingly, his brother.

What I liked most about this is that despite a somewhat short running time it still manages to give most of its characters enough background that they feel like disparate people living disparate lives, not just a group of homogeneous shady crims. Tatsuya Nakadai's character is almost (almost) uninvolved in the crimes but still serves as a vital framework for the whole film. He's a former boxer who retired after a leg injury some time in the past and kind of watches the proceedings as an outsider, but proves that he knows what's going on better than anyone when he confronts Kyosuke at the end, telling him that none of this meant anything, none of it was real, "We all had a nice dream. You had fun playing with your pistol." That's what Get 'em All is, in a nutshell. People putting on an act as something bigger, but ultimately none of it lasts, nothing means anything. There's a really strong strain of pessimistic nihilism that runs through this.

This reminded me a lot of Tai Kato's masterpiece I, the Executioner, although the key difference is that the whole motivation behind the main character of Executioner's revenge is specifically that the victim he's avenging was not close to him. But I think that they're similar in that they present a cruel and morally decayed world, where widows move on from their husbands' death in the blink of an eye, where children play with dead things and pretend to kill each other. Personally, when I think "Toho crime movie", what comes to mind first is the Ankokugai films, and this is totally unlike those, although it's contemporary with them. There's also a really cute cat, who fortunately survives everything. Reviewers seem unanimous in their love for Demp the cat.

Dogora (1964)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

83 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This is a very overlooked kaiju movie, having fallen into relative obscurity and thus being known mostly by people who are already into that kind of thing. It did receive an English dub, with the revised titles of its international releases referring to Dogora variously as a space invader, space monster, space octopus, or some kind of monster "from the swamp". You can thank Italy for that one - I guess space is a swamp now. My personal favorite is West Germany, who dubbed this "Phantoms Against Gangsters". It shifts the focus of the film off of Dogora and onto the human side of things, but that's not entirely unfair, considering that this is a two-pronged oddity of a film.

I have to say right out of the gate that this is one of my favorite kaiju movies because it's so dissimilar from others. It's half a diamond heist film, half a monster movie, and that makes it unlike anything else. The world it's set in is so mundane and everybody is so deeply concerned with themselves and their little human schemes, and when clearly supernatural events start happening, they're noted, but eventually just kind of abandoned so that people can go back to doing crimes. This is a bit like Ishirō Honda's later film All Monsters Attack, where the backdrop is a dismal, industrialized urban wasteland, a place where adults go through their dreary lives ignoring any and all unusual circumstances around them, but in the middle of this concrete jungle there still exist strange and weird happenings - only, in All Monsters Attack, the strange/weird happenings are all in the mind of a little boy. In Dogora, it's reality. What I'm trying to say is that this is a theme Honda revisits several times throughout his filmmaking career: A city where the people are so caught up in their own lives that they either don't notice or don't give sufficient weight to fantastical things around them.

If there's anything wrong with this film, it's that it's a little bit talky. That ties into what I just mentioned about how all the human characters have blinders on and are involved in their own schemes all the time, so it's kind of part and parcel of the storyline, but it does make it drag a bit in its short running time. There are two main factions at play as far as the human side of things go: The jewel smugglers, a group of six or seven (?) who launch various plots to steal various burlap sacks full of diamonds, and a few guys from the local police who try to stop them. Hopping between sides is Robert Dunham as someone who's ambiguous about how much he knows and who he really works for. The main cast is way too big for everybody to have a specifically defined role, but somehow it works - had the diamond thieves been two or three people, there would have been some vital quality lost. Even though you don't get background on every single one of them, just from the way they acted around each other and the roles they took during heists, you get the impression of them all having different places within the gang. It feels like there's more backstory than is ever revealed onscreen. Meanwhile, the police are your standard police - Dunham is the wild card, but I didn't find him that interesting even so.

But while the thieves are thieving and the police are thinking up ways to catch them, things are happening all over the world that defy logic. People and objects are levitating into the air, large structures are being chopped in half by some invisible force, and huge amounts of coal are sucked into the sky. There is a sense that society is destabilizing by bits and pieces. The scale of these events varies; sometimes it's small, human-sized: In genuinely one of the funniest non-sequiturs I've seen in a kaiju film, the perennial drunk salaryman floats horizontally down a sidewalk before being accosted by cops. Other times it's colossal: Cars being whipped into the air and buildings dissolved, television satellites colliding with unknown objects and being swallowed. Dogora the organism has a slew of powers that seem hard to pin down and very dangerous, and that, coupled with its bizarre, amorphous form, make it a favorite kaiju of mine.

I love Dogora as a creature. Only a very scant handful of other creatures in kaiju media have ever been like it, certainly not before this and very rarely after it. For someone who is so in love with suitmation and the physical process of having a person playing the monster, it's a little ironic that one of my favorite kaiju is basically a plastic bag with strings attached to it. But I would still argue that the creation of Dogora was a peak that the genre has yet to reach again. You may point out the practical effects as not being up to the standards of today's film industry, and you'd be right, but the level of technology doesn't matter when the broader end product is better than anything we could be making right now. The shots of Dogora undulating in the sky like some uncanny sea creature transplanted into the heavens is not exactly going to be mistaken for documentary footage, but the image of it - just the sheer aesthetic, the way it looks - is more striking than anything else could be. Dogora is not a Godzilla with its feet firmly on the ground, stomping its way through a city. Dogora isn't something your house could be trampled by. Dogora is a phantom, a visitation, an utterly alien and incomprehensible force hovering just far enough away that we can't touch it. It has no eyes to look into, no facial features, and its limbs seem useless, not used for grabbing like an octopus or squid. That the military eventually does logic their way into figuring out how to destroy it almost feels like a cop-out. Dogora is such a bizarre and unclassifiable creature that shooting missiles at it and seeding it with poison feels like going after Godzilla with a flyswatter, but somehow it works anyway.

(I should also note that Dogora is not actually a plastic bag, that was a little exaggeration on my part. What it's really made out of is soft vinyl, a material that was relatively new at the time, not yet put into use to manufacture all the Ultraman figures on your shelf that cost more than a month of your rent.)

My goal here is really just to make more people aware of this oft-forgotten film with one of my most favorite kaiju in it. Dogora got a few token cameos in video games and some mentions in manga and novel adaptations of the Godzilla franchise, but never appeared physically in another film. I think you can only do something like this once and then it loses some of its mystique. But this one instance of everything coming together to make a perfectly unsettling, visually striking creature who happens to interrupt a jewel-stealing plot exists as a gem in Toho's colossal back catalogue.

The Sadness (2021)

directed by Robert Jabbaz

Taiwan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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(I wrote this review shortly after this movie came out in May of last year, and I was very enthused about it at the time, but now, revisiting it, I feel the need to rework it slightly. Especially knowing that the director has stated he was not interested in the political dimensions of the film and only wanted to show gore - that goes against, and somewhat spoils, my image of the film. I'm beginning to think most of what I got out of this movie was in spite of the director's intent rather than because of it. I also have read criticism of this as being an empty, try-hard portrayal of violence for violence's sake, and I think there's a point to that. But I do also remember how much I liked the movie the first time I watched it, and so I'm keeping a lot of my enthusiasm intact, although taking it with a grain of salt now.)

I was extremely excited for this one based off of the strength of the fan response; it seems like all I hear is talk of it being the most brutal film somebody or other has seen. But I was also trying to tamp down my expectations, because essentially the same thing happened surrounding The Medium when it came out, and that was a disappointment and a half. However, in this case, The Sadness lives up to the hype. It achieves its brutality specifically because it does things differently from other films typically hailed as ultra-gory masterpieces, and I'll talk about why that is in a moment. It is possibly the engine behind the success of this whole film.

I've reviewed a few horror movies with elements of contagion or viruses, released in the past year or two, that I've taken pains to not shoehorn as being "Pandemic Films" - it's impossible to say at this point how movies concerning covid are going to age, considering that we're still in the pandemic, but usually I don't want circumstances that were taking place at the time of a film's release to be inseparable from my overall impression of it, because someone could be watching said movie in 50 years and have no clue what it felt like for me to watch it in 2020. But The Sadness is a pandemic movie. It's inextricable from the current situation we're in. I say "we", but vitally, this movie is from Taiwan; East Asian countries have had a drastically different and unique experience of the pandemic from what I in the West have. The market on covid films here is oversaturated with stuff that has titles like "Flurona Mask Shark Zombies" and usually these films build off of denial of covid and making fun of perceived hysteria rather than the deep fear and uncertainty that The Sadness has as its backbone.

Although I think there's more blood in this than I've seen in any movie in recent memory, the gore is not non-stop. It's restrained to sudden bursts of almost transcendent violence that the characters have to try desperately to avoid; these little islands of annihilation that they bike and run and fire-extinguisher-to-the-skull their way out of. It felt like there was just about a 50/50 balance between these truly impressive feats of human depravity and moments of genuine calm and even real tenderness, and that was why, when things got bloody and violent, it felt just awful. It's crucial that The Sadness gives us times like the first fifteenish minutes, wherein we see how the two main characters care for each other and live a quiet, peaceful life together, or scenes where the female lead goes to fairly exceptional lengths to help rescue a total stranger from a train. These scenes of normalcy show us that there is another state of being than the unhinged violence caused by the film's covid stand-in. And it really does reflect something of what it felt like to just be entering the pandemic: I still could remember what it was like to eat in a restaurant, I could remember being physically close to people, but then I would check the news and see things like Italy getting absolutely decimated in the early days of the pandemic and the contrast between the memory of safety and the new reality in front of me made me feel doomed. The Sadness manages to somehow be both visceral and ominous at the same time. That isn't easy to pull off.

I was also so in love with the practical effects in this. They have a shiny, more-real-than-real quality to them, and again, they're not overused - the infected don't mutate to a point where they don't resemble humans or where they look like the walking dead, instead they acquire a genuinely disturbing uncanny valley quality with big, soulless black eyes and a permanent rictus grin. There is so much blood and so much violence, but it's not constant, and that's why it's great. The film as a whole presents enough depth (and even a slight bit of satire) that it diverges entirely from the "what if covid, but it made people zombies" genre that is rapidly accruing films. The depth comes from the fact that it's heavily implied that the infected are kind of "locked in" to their bodies, that they might be fully aware of the abominable acts they're committing but unable to stop themselves, which is potentially the most horrifying thing I've heard about in any pandemic movie thus far.

I'm also really interested in that cartoon that was playing on TV accompanied by what sounded like a public service announcement from someone in the late stages of infection. If anything about this movie disappointed me at all, it's that that was never fully explored. Because it implied that either someone out there retained enough agency and cognitive ability to animate, edit, compose music for, and broadcast a cartoon depicting the horrible depravity they wanted to inflict on society due to the virus' effect on them, or it implied that someone out there had knowledge enough of what was coming that they had that cartoon ready to go before the pandemic even began. The origin of the virus isn't really important to the plot of the film, but what the cartoon implies about it is something I was left wondering about.

To me, there's a perfect level of violence that this movie hits and goes no further. Some of it feels deeply personal and that's why it's so unsettling. The female character is stalked for a good portion of the film by a guy who wouldn't leave her alone on a train, and it just felt so real, so relatable to have this guy following you who you can't get rid of and you don't know what he's going to do to you. That coupling of the real - both on a personal level and in the broader sense of this being about a pandemic and made during an actual pandemic - with the speculative is why this is such a good horror movie. I'm very glad to finally see a new release that didn't let me down, and it blows my mind that this is a debut film for Robert Jabbaz.

Nope (2022)

directed by Jordan Peele

USA/Japan/Canada

130 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to get around to watching this - its theatrical run was while covid was even more of a significant risk than it is now - and I had to contend with rampant spoilers in the meantime. I spent a lot of time scrolling really fast past gifsets. I thought I had seen some things about it that constituted major spoilers, but as it turned out I had done something that I don't know if everybody else does or just me: I'd seen very tiny details from a film and constructed a whole story around them in my head almost unconsciously, leading me to believe I knew the plot, when in reality the actual film was totally different. This is one of those movies where reading about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so I'm going to discuss spoilers freely and recommend that you skip all this and just watch the thing. I also must say: I used to live around this part of California and it kind of is just like that. I would not at all be surprised if there were aliens living out there.

We kind of "cold open" into Daniel Kaluuya's character, OJ, witnessing his father's death in front of him in circumstances that are almost impossible to explain. A nickel, apparently shot at high velocity, embeds itself in his brain, killing him. We also see a house key embedded in the side of one of his horses, the implication being that some extremely high-speed hail of small objects fell over the ranch the night OJ's father died. This is a bizarre occurrence and a perfect way to start off the film, because it doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot or the creature that will come into play later, but still primes us for something utterly strange and new.

I think Kaluuya does an incredible job playing his character for the simple fact that there's a palpable sense of him being a different person before his father's death and after it. And when I say "before", I mean in the literal two or three lines of dialogue he has at the beginning of the film. It's nothing short of impressive how he manages to convey such a change in personality that even though I only saw his "before" self for a very scant amount of time, I was still conscious throughout the rest of the film that the version of him I was watching seemed different. His performance is subtly physical and he conveys the sense of somebody who is uncomfortable in the public eye, somebody more suited to his horse ranch, to the solitude of being with his own family, with his horses. Keke Palmer as his sister, Emerald, is almost the exact opposite, but her performance is just as good, she's so cool and easygoing that it feels like there's no wall between the viewer and Emerald as a person.

This is a movie about cycles of consumption. It's about seeing and being seen. Nothing embodies this better than Steven Yeun's character, Jupiter. A former child actor, he sets up an apparently successful Old West-style theme park experience in the California desert with his wife and children. But in the past, in his role on a fictional late-'90s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", he was witness to an incredibly disturbing trauma that should sound at least somewhat familiar because it is taken from a real-life event that I think probably lives rent-free in the brain of everyone who's read about it. Gordy was a chimpanzee, and as Jupiter tells it, one day one of the chimp actors portraying him "reached his limit". Jupiter does not go into the gore in his own recollections, but we see in flashbacks - and we know from real life - that this was nothing less than total carnage, leaving a woman permanently disfigured, and possibly more people dead in the fictional account of the event. We see Jupiter hiding under a table, watching everything, probably eleven years old at most. And we see how this shaped his life to come.

I don't think I've ever felt like I could understand the psychology of a character more, not by having it explained to me but simply by their actions, than I did with Jupiter. A word repeated throughout this film is spectacle. Jupiter constructs his entire life around being the spectacle, taking what he witnessed and internalizing it. Early on in the film, he tells Emerald about how the Gordy's Home incident was made into a Saturday Night Live sketch, and he tells her with reverence - not a hint of bitterness, not a hint of trauma, it is genuinely the highest honor to him that his ordeal has been turned into comedy fodder. Because it keeps him in the spotlight. As long as what happened to him is consumable, he doesn't have to look directly at it. He can instead frame it as the spectacle. He becomes the spectacle as a defense mechanism, because if he makes himself into something to be consumed, he is immortal as long as there are people to consume him. But it can't last forever. You can beg and plead to be seen, to be looked at, but as we'll see repeatedly throughout Nope, you can never, ever be the one doing the looking. Jupiter tells the SNL story while sitting in front of a commemorative T-shirt from Cape Canaveral, which of course includes the Challenger on its list of shuttles.

Race is not absent from this movie's concept of who is being seen and who is seeing. In fact, I think it's at the center. I know there are probably elements here that I'm not even aware of because I'm viewing this as a white person. Nope builds itself around a sequence of images strung together by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse being ridden by a jockey, often hailed as the first motion picture (the images shown in the film are not his first horse film, but a later, presumably better-looking sequence). The jockey - a Black man - is lost to history, almost definitely intentionally. In Nope, an identity for him is created, a Bahamian named Haywood, and OJ and Emerald's family are his descendants. So this is not only a movie about movies, about seeing, about consuming and being consumed - it is inherently a movie about the Black experience of being consumed. The story is the same from before the beginning of Hollywood through to today: white audiences will eat up simulated Blackness, will go wild for stories about cannibals in the jungle and caricatures of everything they fear about Blackness, but should that Blackness look back, should they be confronted, everything becomes chaos.

This is represented in the Viewer. A creature that consumes everything that beholds it, a giant eye (or what looks like an eye) scanning the landscape for what it perceives as encroachments upon its territory. By its very existence it is looking, but if you look back, it devours you.

The absolute genius of this is that not only is it an allegory for media consumption and race in Western filmmaking, it is also a deeply scary movie. It is horrific in a different way from Us or Get Out, in that its horror is actually, legitimately not of this world. It's also drastically less humorous: Peele's previous two films were similarly allegorical and serious, but there were moments of levity in them to be sure. Nope is practically a vacuum of humor (although that TMZ guy eating shit on the bike was pretty funny). The Viewer is really just ghastly: this unknowable, massive thing that watches you and refuses to be watched in turn, scooping people up whole and then flying around broadcasting their screams as they're being consumed alive. It's ghastly as an entity and it's also ghastly because nothing I just said about it couldn't technically be said about the machinations of the movie industry when you're an actor of color.

This is basically a perfect movie. If I had to find anything at all I disliked about it - and this really is the smallest thing - the interstitial title cards bothered me. They looked stock somehow, like a template that comes with a video editing software or something. Apart from that, it nails everything it tries to do. Seeing the Viewer unfold to its full, nearly incomprehensible form was breathtaking. OJ's final ride, with the best use (I guess one of the only uses) of Exuma ever put to film. Emerald's Akira slide (I cheered). And when he thinks he's not coming back, OJ's "I'm watching you" gesture to Emerald is deeply, deeply meaningful: In a world where everyone begs to be seen, where everyone is concerned with seeing the latest spectacle and becoming the spectacle themselves, in a "look at me" world, with that gesture he's saying "I'm looking only at you". Not "see me", not "I want to be seen". "I see you".

Deadman Inferno (2015)

directed by Hiroshi Shinagawa

Japan

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If you're going to watch a "weird things happen to yakuza" movie, you can't do much better than Takashi Miike's Yakuza Apocalypse (except maybe with Takashi Miike's Gozu). That being said, if you're not looking for a cinematic masterpiece such as those and are content with a mid-tier zombie movie that will deliver the guts and nastiness you expect and not much else, Deadman Inferno is certainly not your worst choice, especially in the final act when it becomes almost an entirely different film in terms of quality and tone. I will be discussing spoilers towards the end of this review, but just in the form of non-main-character deaths.

The film begins a decade before any zombie business ever gets going, but with no less blood, as two yakuza groups exchange gunfire that ends in basically one entire side's death and the lasting injury of the group's leader. It's interesting that the movie decides to spend its set-up time on this instead of any kind of zombie lore; the zombies in this movie are generic creatures, not much depth to them, no explanation afforded aside from the conjecture of one character (more on that later). The film then skips ahead ten years to when the leader of the murdered group's close friend and non-blood brother is about to be released from jail. He has a daughter whose life he's been gone for much of, and she's a major player in the film herself. Her anxiety over her father's upcoming release date and not wanting to see him again leads her to run away from home with a friend, eventually ending up on Zeni Island, which is where the real action starts.

For a movie that's basically "yakuza vs zombies", the yakuza are the least interesting characters here. I much preferred watching the rest of the cast fight for survival rather than the leader and his brother, who were meant to kind of be the main characters. I think this is because of a crucial stumbling block that this movie keeps hitting: Parts of it are ostensibly meant to be funny, but it doesn't ever feel like it commits enough to the bit, either when it's meant to be funny or when it's meant to be serious. The movie is too middle-of-the-road for the jokes to work - the yakuza are neither treated with 100% drama and profundity, nor are they portrayed as goofy and weird, so the end result is just these stock video-game-character-feeling guys. The non-humorous parts of the film largely feel like it's going through the motions, being perfunctorily sad or tragic, but never doing anything original enough to complement its attempts at humor. This is all, as I mentioned, up until the ending. The last half an hour or so of this could have been made by a whole different director.

(There's also the issue that a lot of the jokes just aren't funny - there's a good helping of rape jokes in the form of one of the rival yakuza who is presented as a slow-witted oaf who can't control himself around women, which is supposed to be funny somehow. And, while they fortunately do remain fully dressed and non-panty-shotted, the leader's daughter and her friend are repeatedly referred to as "hot schoolgirls".)

Once everybody gets onto the island, a cast of characters is assembled that includes a bunch of yakuza, the two girls, a kind of lecherous doctor and his exes (zombies), the world's least responsible cop, his friend who believes he's on candid camera for most of the film, and of course the entire island's population, who have become zombies. The origin of the zombies is, as I said, not delved into that much, but the doctor is genre savvy, and quickly determines that, basing his observations off of the zombie movie canon, these are the runner-type zombies, and their vector of infection is likely an already-existing virus that was mutated by the introduction of a synthetic drug. (He's better at zombie analysis than he seems to be at practicing medicine, also he looks, like, 22.) This is a zombie movie that absolutely acknowledges that it's a zombie movie and has the characters fully aware that they are in a zombie-apocalypse scenario, which I personally prefer over something where people are running around panicking and inventing non-zombie-related names for the creatures, like "The Infected". No frills, no pretensions, this is a zombie flick.

The film moves at a steady pace until the final half-hour. That's when the main cast starts dying. It's like at the same time everybody who isn't already a zombie has a revelation about themselves and their lives where they realize that the zombies are a form of deliverance. Everybody in this is more or less either a bad person trying to go straight or an unremorseful criminal, and for their own personal reasons, past a certain point, people start choosing the zombies rather than living with themselves. And it's... kind of glorious. It's kind of cathartic. I particularly love when the doctor realizes both his exes are there, in zombie form, and just kind of goes "welp" and decides there's nothing he'd rather do than die at the hands of two women he at one point loved. There's some hidden magic going on on the part of the narrative that stops the viewer from going "What are you people doing?! Why aren't you fighting?!" It's not that the zombies are particularly tough to beat, although they are fast. The characters are all adequately equipped and there's a boat involved and everybody could probably have held out a little longer if they'd really wanted to. But they don't want to. They realize that they're so far gone, for reasons either personal or external, that they don't want to go back to being who they used to be. So they choose being a zombie. I'm drawing a comparison here that takes some serious mental footwork, but this honestly calls back to 1963's Matango and its question of whether or not, in a society that is rapidly decaying and becoming untenable, it might be better to voluntarily become something inhuman than cling to a humanity that you will inevitably lose.

So this is mostly worth watching for the ending. It's not all submitting to the bloody claws of fate, a lot of characters do fight back and they fight back magnificently, and some do survive, but it's not the ones you expect to survive. Also, for what it's worth, even though this is not a scary movie at all (it's just a bit gory), I went to bed right after and had one of the most disturbing nightmares of my entire life.