my Movie

Movie Details

Title:   Zombie
Director:   Lucio Fulci
Year:   1979
Genre:   Zombie
Times Seen:   1
Last Seen:   05.04.06

Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- The Beyond
- Gates of Hell

Notes History
Date Viewed Venue Note
05.04.06Terror Thursday So when I first saw this movie I thought it was pretty slow with a few great gore scenes. I felt like I didn't like it as much as I should have. Ooh, an opportunity for a paragraph of mini-blog!

There was a local video store right on my way home from middle school and high school. My parents lived way the hell out of town so there was really nothing much out there except trees, cows, and antique shops. So pretty much every day I would stop at this video store and rent one or two movies to watch that night after getting my homework done or whatever... SOmetimes I would spend like an hour in this tiny little shop trying to decide what I wanted to see that night. For the most part my parents were cool with what I was renting... occasionally there would be some discussion, like if I wanted to rent Evil Dead 2 or Faces of Death I'd get a raised eyebrow or two... but mostly they'd cave in and let me watch what I wanted to watch. So I pretty much scoured every wall in that tiny little video store (except the porno corner) through my formative years... and I think I still have a lot of video covers burned in my brain from spending so much time in there looking around. But the two movies I never had the gall to even try and rent because I didn't want to have the conversation that they would cause with my parents were Zombie and I Spit on your Grave. The latter because of the title (and the picture of the bloody nearly-naked woman holding a knife on the cover) and the former because of the zombie's too-real looking face on the cover. I would look at that and think "man, no way... that's too gross to even look at for them. I better not even try."

So, later on when I actually saw both of them, I liked I Spit on your Grave a lot more than Zombie and thought that there was something wrong with that.

So - man this entry is bloggish, sorry - tonight I went to see this Film Geek movie at South Lamar but a huge freakin storm knocked out the power and made us all afraid for baseball-sized hail for a few minutes until the Alamo employees let us go outside and we saw that it was just raining. Funny enough, everything south of the river was dark but as soon as I crossed the bridge it was fine; Downtown was cool as always. So I went ahead and caught this at midnight, figuring I could re-evaluate my opinion of it now that I've seen several other Fulci movies and have a more acquired sense of his vibe. Plus I'd never seen it theatrically and how are you gonna pass up an opportunity to see zombie vs. shark on the big screen (although that's not my favorite scene).

Unfortunately, it seemed that the thunderstorm kept all of the courteous people at home and only the rude and/or drunk made it out to the show. It was like the whole audience was watchingTommy Boy or something and I was stuck in some alternative universe with a movie that is actually not that funny. I don't understand it, man... this is the first time I've really understood how QT says "don't laugh AT the movie, laugh with it. you are not cooler than this movie" because usually when there's a bad seed in the Alamo he's just talking... but tonight I actually felt bad for the movie, like it was the kid in school with the hand-me-down clothes that other kids laugh at even though it's not his fault. Like every line had someone cackling to make himself look cool, at least I'm guessing that's why they were laughing. Maybe there was a nitrous oxide leak in the back of the theater or something, I can't be sure, but it got really annoying. I feel bad complaining about laughter because i feel like a nazi wishing people would stop having fun but geez... Oh man the voice that i'm hearing doesn't exactly match the mouth on the screen HILARIOUS! And it's like Marcus said when he learned Lars had his hands full at South Lamar: "The talkers will take over now, especially with this movie." He was right, too... How do you even complain when the majority of the theater is joining along... they managed to even find something funny with my favorite scene in the movie (where they decide to rest in a conquistadore cemetary and the all the zombies come up out of the ground set to that laconic main theme). There is nothing funny about that scene, why are you laughing!?

Oh well, it happens sometimes. This isn't meant as a formal complaint to the Alamo or anything... so many people were doing it that I didn't see how it could be fixed, even with lars there. Just a bad crowd, it happens... It's a shame though because I really dug the movie more this time around and would've actually gotten into it were it not for the insistent laughter. Clapping and cheering after a good gore scene is great, but laughing for no reason or just because a gag doesn't look 100% real bugs me. It's weird that it's taken me so long to experience that I guess...

oh well. Next week is Motel Hell and I'm really looking forward to that... let's hope the wheather's better so there'll be more people shhh-ing than heckling.