Late Night Flicks for the (Living) Dead Set

With the Woody Harrelson zom-edy Zombieland disemboweling the box office competition last weekend, the time is ripe to take in some vintage living dead cinema. And the U District's Grand Illusion delivers the dead men (and women) walking, in spades, over the next week.

Director Sam Raimi built his now-blockbuster-sized career on The Evil Dead, a cheap but incredibly effective little 1982 chiller that took a formula set-up (college kids accidentally unleash all manner of undead/demonic ickiness by recklessly reading from an evil spell book) and goosed it with a winning combination of unbridled energy, sledgehammer shocks, and wicked humor. It turbo-charged the horror genre worldwide.

Four years later Raimi followed it up with Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (screening at the Grand Illusion for one week beginning on October 9). Less a sequel than a more expensive remake of the original, EDII ditches the raggedly creepy edge of its forebear in favor of even more gleefully-maniacal laughs. This movie, much more than the first Evil Dead, established cult movie god Bruce Campbell's comedic chops and endeared Raimi (and Campbell) to legions of horror fans.

The Grand Illusion has paired up EDII with the third chapter of Raimi's Dead trilogy, 1992's Army of Darkness: This time out Campbell's indefatigable wiseacre zombie killer Ash is spit out in a mythical fantasy kingdom to take on the undead, battle the evil spirits possessing his own body, and rescue a beautiful princess. Critics kinda crapped on Army during its initial release, but it's a hoot and a holler, upping the silliness to the maximum and riffing amusingly on the wonderful Ray Harryhausen fantasies of the 1950s and '60s. You won't find more inventive doses of serio-comic horror anywhere on the planet.

If, however, you prefer your undead flicks steeped in good old-fashioned gutmunching nihilism, stick around for the Illusion's late-night screenings of Zombie on October 9 and 10. Directed by Italian splatter icon Lucio Fulci, this 1980 shocker set the blood-red standard for the gutmuncher genre--go here for additional Cliffs Notes--and it gave its director lasting notoriety.

In it, Ann (Tisa Farrow, Mia's little sister) travels to an uncharted island in the Antilles with a stalwart English reporter (Ian McCulloch) in search of her father. The bulk of the film unwinds on that island, as the Gutmuncher Commandments are checked off: The dead rise and devour the living; a scientist (in this case, British character actor Richard Johnson) labors to vanquish a zombie plague that he may or may not have helped induce; the heroes discover that walking corpses can only be taken out by a bullet to the head; guts are munched by the barrel; and you can forget about a happy ending, Bucky. 

It's easy to dismiss Zombie as grindhouse sleaze, and indeed, it hurls sensationalism by the shovel at its viewers (name the last movie you saw with a great white shark battling a zombie underwater while a topless lady skindiver narrowly escapes both flesheaters). Look beyond its gleefully scuzzy Coat of B-Movie Colors, though, and some real (dare I say it?) artistry surfaces from the mayhem.

An atmosphere of utter despair clings to the early island scenes like rough sand on wet skin--the director deliberately denies his audience even a tiny ray of the humor George Romero injected into Zombie's superficial inspiration, the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead. As envisioned by cinematographer Sergio Salvati, this sand-blasted ghost town of an island village is light-years removed from George Romero's urban playground of the undead. And Fulci mounts his monstrous money shots with such suspenseful grace he almost doesn't need to slather on the hemoglobin and entrails.

But slather he does. Zombie rolls out some of the Italian maestro's most showstopping setpieces of splatter, including an incident of ocular violence that imprints itself on the brain as much for its excruciating build-up as it does for sheer "Dear God, did they just SHOW THAT?!" impact. If Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films are bubbly horror cocktails, Fulci's Zombie packs the unadorned potency of a straight shot of Everclear.