Even when I saw it new, I was bothered by the inclusion of not one, but two of the most annoying type of sidekick characters: the fancy city girl who can't stop screaming, and the sassy little kid. But I thought I remembered it being pretty good when the kid wasn't saying anything and the girl wasn't screaming. Nuh. It's actually pretty terrible most of the time, except for the opening "Anything Goes" musical number. The humorous scenes play out like a sitcom, and the main villain is so over the top he fails to seem scary. He's more like a villain from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The action setpieces just seem fake, as if we're taking a ride on the Disneyland Indiana Jones-themed attraction, rather than watching a movie.

I distinctly remember that the big horror sacrifice scene in some kind of underground... uh... volcano? worked for me when I was a teenager, but it didn't work for me now. I thought it was stupid, ill-conceived, unconvincing, and actually, you know, kinda racist.

However, it does feature Evil Shirtless Indy, which may be what carried the whole film for me when I was a teenager, I dunno.

Evil Shirtless Indy is evil because he has been dosed with the "blood of Kali Ma" which causes something called the "black sleep of Kali" which looks an awful lot like classic voodoo zombieism. For some reason it bugged me that they had mixed up their cultural traditions like that, and had what were supposedly Thuggees turning people into zombies and not strangling them. Although I do like the way ESI just sits up and starts laughing insanely when the potion starts to work.

Why he's shirtless, I'm less clear about. Maybe because it's, you know, <i>hot</i> in that big volcanic cavern.

(Do they even have that kind of volcano in India? Seriously, do they have that kind of volcano <i>anywhere?</i> Where there's a big underground cavern and a bubbling lava pit you can throw people into? I mean, I know they have one in Mordor, but that's a <i>made-up land</i>.)

Anyway, I realized that I was witness to -- victim of, if you will -- the very phenomenon that causes the young and inexperienced to slobber over movies that actual reviewers aren't too impressed by (and then get all high and mighty with the reviewers over their difference of opinion). Something that didn't bug me when I was younger, knew less, and had seen fewer movies, bugs me now. Something that didn't seem stupid twenty-plus years ago, seems stupid now.

While I was drawing this, I had a nasty cold (Or is it just a cold? Do I have any suspicious bites?) and was curled up in the living room half-watching Night of the Living Dead. One thing that struck me about Night, this time around, was the way it fits into the general zeitgeist of late 60s low-budget experimental films -- Easy Rider, for example.

The dialog (much of it improvised, according to Wikipedia) has a shambling, but thoughtful, realism, like a Robert Altman film. Most of the drama is somewhat stagy: stressed-out people in a house, arguing over what they ought to do, or quietly going insane. This contrasts with sudden bursts of violent action, trucks blowing up, zombies eating people. The film's view of its own horrors is deadpan, matter-of fact. There are long, lingering shots of the living dead eating the corpses of their victims, and they have a flat seriousness of intent, like people gnawing ribs at a barbecue.

And of course, there's the sudden and shockingly bleak ending.

Even today it's unusual in a film with a mostly white cast for the black guy to be a main protagonist, the hero, and the last to die. Racial tensions are entirely unspoken in the film, but they give it additional depth and bite.

Bite! Hah, that was a pun.

Night brings to mind another aspect of horror movies that I find interesting: what makes a movie gruesome? Is it the shots, that is, what you actually see on screen? Or is it the story, what you know happens? I think Night, like the shower scene in Psycho, provides a strong case for story. Night lacks the special effects to show the dead munching on realistic human body parts. Instead, what you get is a story that clearly establishes what the ghouls are doing, and then you can show them gnawing on a cow leg bone or something, and it's completely horrible.

It is worth noting here that the version I watched was the other one on the "30th Anniversary Edition" DVD that I got cheap. I initially started watching the "30th Anniversary Edition" -- as it's the one that starts up automatically when you put the DVD in -- but was confused by a scene I didn't remember of some guys loading a coffin into a truck. This scene was boring, poorly acted, with stupid dialog, and did I mention boring? I started to wonder if I didn't remember the scene because I've always come into the movie late or something.

Anyway, as the credits started up and I saw a name other than George Romero for "director" I started to fear that I had been ripped off and went back to the main menu where I found a version called "Night of the Living Dead '98" which is the one I watched. This version at least fit with my memories of the movie, and the director credit is George Romero.

I wanted to make note of the slow-vs-fast zombies concept: Night zombies are actually capable of moving pretty fast when they have a target, but when they don't have a target, they just mill around aimlessly. They don't flat-out run, but they shuffle rapidly.

Personally, I think that fast -- as in, faster than living humans -- zombies are a big mistake. Even though I have enjoyed movies with super-fast zombielike monsters (28 Days Later, the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake) I enjoyed them for aspects that are totally unrelated to the speed of the monster -- in both movies, the scenes that worked the best would have worked out almost exactly the same with slower zombies.

Further, I think the super-fast undead concept is part of what ruined the recent I am Legend. Not only does it come across as lazy filmmaking -- here, we're going to induce tension with Lots! Hey! Of! Look out! Quick! Over here! Cuts! -- but it also tends to introduce unnecessary inconsistencies in monster behavior. You have monsters that move so fast you can't even see them when the plot requires, but then when the plot requires something else, they don't.

Also -- and I realize this might be a personal thing -- I tend to think shots of humanoid monsters running really fast look stupid. I thought that in Terminator 2, I thought it in the Dawn remake. I think it might be because there's something characteristic about the way humans run that makes a running human look like a human and not a monster anymore, but I don't know. I just know that when I see a shot of a supposedly scary monster running full-on after someone, I have the urge to start laughing.

The big reason fast zombies bug me, though, is that it's the wrong trope, like vampire movies where the vampires aren't in the least seductive. Sometimes they're good horror movies anyway (Nosferatu comes to mind) but they're not good vampire movies. If you're making a post-Romero style zombie movie -- and he did invent the zombpocalypse genre -- you're making a movie about a certain kind of threat. A threat that is inexorable, mindless, huge, growing. It's not like being chased by a tiger, it's more like being overrun by killer ants. And the most horrific parts of zombie movies tend to be the way newly reanimated zombies lose their human identity and affections, which is something that you have to linger on a bit for the full emotional effect to come through.

One final thing about zombie movies: nobody, including George Romero himself, is quite sure how the term zombie came to be applied to the post-Romero walking dead. The filmmakers did not call them "zombies" during production or promotion, and the word is not used in dialog or titles in his Dead series. Pre-Romero zombie movies, such as the classics White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, invoke Carribbean voodoo tradition about what it means to be a zombie. I suspect that it was probably a reviewer -- somebody writing about the film called or compared Romero's dead to zombies -- and the name stuck, possibly because people like saying the word "zombie." I know I do.

I think this in part because narrative -- a novel, for example -- requires no play. And play -- darts, for example -- requires no narrative. However, a game with no play would be a failed game. And a novel with no narrative would be a failed novel. So to me it simply doesn't make sense to regard them as the same thing, since they can be separated so completely.

However, just because they can be completely separated, does not mean that they inevitably are. Many games, especially video games, have a lot of narrative applied. We can regard these as hybrid art forms, narrative games (Myst, for example), or a gamed narratives (Choose Your Own Adventure Books, for example). I suspect highly narrative games -- and not Tetris or Guitar Hero -- are what game fans have in mind when they claim that video games should be considered right alongside movies as a narrative art form. However, they are incorrect.

I believe they are incorrect because I would put even slightly gamed narratives on the "game" part of the spectrum, as more game than narrative. That's a personal judgment call -- not everyone may agree. Okay. But they are incorrect for a second reason.

Games simply fail to be very good when considered as narrative.

Game narratives can be complex and intriguing in their own way, but these narratives have a completely different criteria for success than narratives that stand alone as narrative. Emotional engagement in a game is supplied primarily by the act of playing it. Emotional engagement in a story is supplied primarily by -- you know, the story. This is fundamental. It's why movies based on video games are almost inevitably dreadful. The story that seems to be there when you're engaged in playing the game doesn't actually exist. It's a clever illusion. Like the story that seemed to be there during your dream last night, it falls apart on the retelling.

Disagree if you like, but keep in mind that I consider any argument that begins "how can you say that when you haven't actually played game X?" to prove my point. Without the act of play, a game narrative does not exist. And in my mind, that makes it not a narrative at all.

Both movies are not actually horror "spoofs" in the style of the Scary Movie franchise or Mel Brooks films. They are simply horror movies that are also funny. Or, alternately, comedies where people also get eaten by the living dead.

(A spoof is a parody, which is a specific sub-set of comedy that derives its humor specifically by mocking or subverting expectations established in another work, or in a genre as a whole.)

Both movies obviously take their inspiration from George Romero's influential series of zombie movies -- according to the Wikipedia article Return arose from a dispute between John Russo and George Romero about how to handle sequels to Night of the Living Dead, so both men simply went their separate ways. Huh. I didn't know that. Russo wrote a book as a sequel, and Return was originally going to be based on that book, but wasn't.

Shaun is just made by people who love zombie movies, as all right-thinking people do.

Return introduced an important aspect of pop-culture zombiedom: it is the source of zombies that want brains.... brains.... It is also part of the evolution toward the "fast zombies" seen in 28 Days Later and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. Return zombies are neither fast nor slow -- they are normal human speed.

The real distinction of Return zombies, though, is that they are smart. Articulate. Mostly all they say is "brains" but, when the need arises, they can also say things like "send more cops." There are a few scenes where they cooperate, or use complex tools or schemes in order to get after a person.

Another Return distinction is that the pieces of the dead body are animated independent of the brain and spinal cord. This means that you cannot disable them by removing the head or even by chopping them into little bits. The bits will still come after you.

Shaun zombies are extremely slow and very stupid, which is often played for laughs, as when Shaun and his buddy Ed think the zombie girl on their lawn is just monumentally drunk. Shaun zombies are too stupid to fight or plan, and they are easily disabled by brain injuries.

These differences actually make the emotional engagement with the protagonists very different: in Return, once the zombie rules are established, it seems pretty obvious that nobody in the film is going to make it out alive. In fact, the film ends pointing toward the complete zombie apocalypse of the later Romero films.

But in Shaun, the zombie threat seems very much as if it can be managed. There is a possibility of success that increases the suspense. The audience, by being allowed to suspect that the characters might survive, starts to become worried about whether they will.

Overall, Shaun is much more character-driven than Return. Return's characters are mostly stupid teenagers (a funny and cringeworthy cross-section of mid-80s pop culture types), a couple of hapless medical-supply-center employees, a slightly evil weasel of a boss, and a possible Nazi war criminal. The choices that lead to them being where they are when the zombies attack aren't particularly important, unless you want to interpret the movie as an anti-capitalism metaphor.

(One of the hapless employees is the boyfriend of one of the teenagers -- he has just started a new job and the other teenagers mock this "responsible" choice. Rightfully so, given that it results in everyone getting eaten by zombies.)

In Shaun, the interpersonal conflicts at work before the zombies attack are absolutely crucial to every decision made by the protagonists. They affect where people go to try to fight off the zombies, how they try to fight them, and also which SO STUPID OH MY GOD YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! decisions they make. The zombie attack becomes a way of revealing character.

Also, Shaun plays one trick with character that I love, love, love. It is very common for horror and suspense movies (any movie where lots of people die) to have at least one or two unlikable characters who get killed off early. Sometimes this bothers me a lot, especially when I feel that the death of an unlikable character is played for laughs (the lawyer or the fat guy in Jurassic Park) but nobody else's death is. It's not only ethically troubling, it also strikes me as lazy, unchallenging filmmaking. Pandering, even. Why make a movie where people die horribly if you're not going to challenge the audience to be at least a little disturbed by this fact?

What Shaun does, is, there are two characters (Shaun's stepfather and his girlfriend's flatmate) who Shaun dislikes intensely, and at first the audience agrees with him. Then, these characters are touchingly humanized right before they die horribly.

Now, that's filmmaking.

One interesting similarity between both films is the way they reflect the time in which they were made. Return was released in 1985 and is 80s-sploitation as much as it is anything else. It clearly reflects anxieties about environmental contamination, militarization, and nuclear war. In Return, the zombie apocalypse is acute, immediate, possibly total. (And based on the failure of a containment system built by the Army Corps of Engineers... how's that for prescience?)

Shaun was released in 2004 and reflects a very 2004 set of anxieties. I'm not sure if it's quite fair to describe a British movie as having a post-9/11 sensibility, but I can't think of a better way to explain it. In Shaun, the zombie apocalypse lasts for a day. During that day many people die and it seems, for a while, that this is really it. The end of the world.

Yet six months later, in a brilliant coda, we see that the apocalypse has simply been absorbed by the all-powerful amoeba of popular culture. A click-through the television channels reveals that the zombie threat has been reduced to the point where chained-up zombies are actually kept around to perform menial tasks and participate in tacky game shows, and also for sentimental reasons.

There is something fundamentally existential about the zombie genre -- after all, these films deal precisely with the question of where our selves reside, are we meat, or spirit? Zombie films come down firmly on the side of meat. Zombie films do not imply transcendence.

In The Return of the Living Dead, you cannot win because, no matter what you do, the threat does not go away.

In Shaun of the Dead, you cannot win because, no matter what happens, nothing changes.

The current tour is an "anniversary" tour, which is cooler than a reunion tour. They played mostly stuff from their earlier, punkier albums, rather than from their later, uh... less punk albums.

I have seen them once before in recent years, and enjoyed it, but the sound was a little off and the show never quite achieved magical. The one on Sunday night did. It was pretty much perfect in every way.

Except, I was an idiot and didn't dress for the concert assuming I was going to end up in the dance pit, but I suppose the fact that I wasn't fully prepared to get sweaty and stepped on, and had to hold down my bag so it didn't flap around too much when I pogoed, was part of the charm.

I only ended up in the pit because people weren't dancing much in the outer reaches. I couldn't stand that they weren't dancing. So I got very insistent and pushed through the crowd until I hit resistance/dancing. Once I was that far, the movement of the crowd pushed me inexorably forward and I ended up about three rows from the stage, toward the center. (With the Exene worshippers. The Billy Zoom worshippers were somewhat to my left, the John Doe worshippers somewhat to my right.)

In 1982, I was sixteen, and too shy for the pit.

In 2008 I was too old for the pit but I was there anyway.

In 1982 it was an all-ages show, but the youngest people I remember were teenagers like me.

In 2008, there were parents who had brought their kids. The youngest kids I saw looked around eight or nine. They were brothers, in the Billy Zoom section, and their mother formed a kind of protective wall around them. She was singing along with all the songs. The kids looked like they were having a good time.

In 1982 I bought a calendar for 1983. The calendar art was done -- I think -- by Exene, who does collage, and it has a very cool mysterious 'zine-y look that probably influenced my graphical sense a lot.

In 2008, I bought a 'zine called "Sing Along With X" that had lyrics -- I recognized some of the art, so it might have been assembled from existing lyrics sheets. The giant silver X on the cover deposited glitter everywhere.

In 1982 I bought an official concert t-shirt. I still have the t-shirt. I almost wore it to the show, but at the last minute changed my mind.

In 2008 I bought an official concert t-shirt. This is because all my clothes were soaked and I wanted something dry to put on.

In 1982 I had espresso for the first time.

In 2008 I had beer, for neither the first, nor the last time.

In 1982 I saw X with two people I barely knew, one of whom didn't enjoy it very much.

In 2008 I saw X with my husband, and four of my oldest and dearest friends.