Yesterday Temp Trailer from Rob Grant on Vimeo.
Up until a few years ago, the zombie movie was looked down upon by the masses as Horror Cinema’s thick-witted, bloody-jowled stepchild.
But no more. The sub-genre’s now a beloved fixture of modern pop culture. Between George Romero’s pioneering efforts on its behalf, and modern contributions like Shaun of the Dead and the turbocharged sorta-undead epic 28 Days Later, the zombie film has definitely shown legs. Not all of them have been ripped from bodies, either.
Hordes of the living dead (OK, enthusiastic horror nerds) converged on the Museum of History and Industry Saturday night for the 2009 Revenant Film Festival, a celebration of zombie cinema put on by the new plasma-pumping periodical on the block, Revenant magazine. And happily, those fans were greeted with independently-made features and shorts that provided plenty of gut-munching bang for the buck.
The most pleasant surprise of the night? The remarkably high quality of all of the film submissions. Shot-on-video horror’s definitely come a long way, bolstered immeasurably by the affordability and polish possible with high-def shooting, and by an emphasis on strong storylines unheard of during the crude VHS-vérité days of the eighties.
The Northwest contingent was ably represented by the homegrown Zombies of Mass Destruction, one of the most polished and well-engineered indie horror flicks you’ll stumble across. ZMD screened to great enthusiasm this last spring at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it’s entertaining enough to stand on its own completely outside of its local connection (it was shot in Port Gamble, WA, and features a lot of local talent in front of and behind the camera).
The movie’s central shtick hinges on a bit of good old fashioned government distrust, as terrorists infect a sleepy Washington town with a zombie-generating virus and the town’s populace either succumbs or fights to keep itself alive. Edmonds-born director/co-writer Kevin Hamedani goes a little side-of-the-barn broad with his satire here (gays are people, too; US-bred religious fanaticism, ignorance and jingoism is just as toxic as the Islamic extremist variety; etc., etc.), but he also coaxes some big laughs from the stereotypes at hand, and he delivers some incredible shocks in equal measure with the yocks.
The whole enterprise looks great–easily as polished as any indie horror flick I’ve seen in the last five years–and Hamedani’s uniformly great cast hits the bullseye (leading lady Janette Armand in particular possesses star quality in spades). [I was forced to leave before the screening of the final film, an intriguing animated redux of Night of the Living Dead: proceed here for a trailer.]
The shorts delivered, too. The Hell Patrol mixed War Flick with Gutmuncher to winning effect. Shot in a great, sun-burnished style and directed by local boy Turner van Ryn, it suffered a little from its too-short length–it felt more like a highlights reel for a full-length movie than a self-contained short film–but sported some effective action sequences and a great hard-nosed combat attitude. The somber British entry, Plague, meantime, spun a resonant and melancholy tale of a displaced Russian surviving in an undead-clotted England.
But the highlight came early in the form of Yesterday, the first feature screened at the fest. It’s a Canadian zombie opus directed and co-written by one Rob Grant, and I’m hard-pressed to recall a recent so-called amateur feature as well-written as this one.
Yesterday starts out routinely, with the requisite unexplained zombie plague picking through the populace. Then little by little, the script builds a solid mosaic of disparate relatable characters, taking the audience through the ringer with some truly merciless and unexpected twists. By the end, when Darwinian inevitability works its ugly magic on a group of six survivors, the audience was hooked. The characterizations (delivered by an effective cast of unknowns who look like regular Joes in the best possible way) elevate Yesterday to must-see status, and this $25,000 (that’s CANADIAN dollars, folks) wonder deserves some serious attention.
In addition to the movies themselves, the Fest brought out Seattle Times writer Mark Rahner and author Mark Henry for some engaging repartee about their contributions to the Undead mythos (the acclaimed comics series Rotten and the novel Road Trip of the Living Dead, respectively), trivia contests courtesy of the Mail Order Zombie podcast, and more than a few real zombies–in the flesh, as it were. Here’s hoping the Revenant Film Festival proves as implacable and inevitable as the proverbial shambling army of the Undead.
