Ebola Syndrome

Ebola Syndrome (1996)

Dir. Herman Yau

Written by Ting Chau (aka Candy Cheng)

Starring Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Yeung-Ming Wan

The doctor's face says it all.

WARNING: If you’re a relative or friend of mine just checking out his blog for the sake of polite curiosity, for God’s sake, don’t read this. Don’t look this up. You don’t want to look at me sometime in the future and know I watched this. Moreover, if you suffer from any sensitivities of any kind whatsoever, including entirely justifiable sensitivities to legitimately horrible things, for God’s sake, DO NOT CONTINUE. If you have triggers, or strongly held moral views, or even lingering vestiges of genuine human decency, DO NOT CONTINUE. I’ll have some nice reviews about polite 60’s horror movies up soon, I promise. THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE. I’m telling you this for your own good and for our continued friendship. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

..................last chance.

.......OK, you can't say I didn't warn you.

Well, gulp, I knew this day would come. Time to lose some friends. The last time I posted about a movie this tasteless, it was the mondo fauxumentary about slavery, ADDIO ZIO TOM. At the time, I was averaging about 300 consistent readers for every one of my reviews. Since then, I’ve been averaging around 20. And that one was at least an unwitting disaster made earnestly by well-intentioned people who just had no clue. This one could only have been made by genuinely deranged lunatics with the express intention of creating something lurid and repellant beyond all conceivable bounds of good taste. You can’t even defend it by saying “well, it was a different time,” because it was fucking 1996.

I’ll say one nice thing about it. At least it’s upfront about what it is. It’s not one of these shady sleazy movies which tries to disguise itself in bland platitudes to entice nice old ladies from the Midwest into picking it up at the Safeway checkout counter, blissfully unaware that they’re about to get an unexpected window into a world they never wanted to know anything about. This isn’t something you can just come across. If you go out of your way to buy a Hong Kong category III import called THE EBOLA SYNDROME, you’re basically signing that waiver, buddy. You can’t complain that you didn’t know what you were getting into.

Of course, that just makes it worse that I’ve reviewing it here. But you know my promise to you, I review every movie I watch in October, no exceptions. So, baring my soul, here we go.

I’m not as familiar with the deep, strange rabbit hole of Hong Kong exploitation cinema as I am with, say, the Hammer Studios films, or anything starring Steven Seagal (And judging from this one, my life is much better off for it). But I do know that EBOLA SYNDROME is one of the infamous “Category III” Hong Kong films, a rating that seems to sort of straddle both R and NC-17 films on the Hollywood scale. Some pretty normal-seeming stuff like Johnnie To’s ELECTION movies are Category III, but so are about a thousand softcore pornos that came out in the 80’s and 90’s. All well and good, but that Category III label is also a cover for a handful of truly infamous deviant works of grand guignol. MEN BEHIND THE SUN, DR. LAMB, THE UNTOLD STORY. EBOLA SYNDROME. These names are spoken in hushed tones even by people who think THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 is a hilarious romp. These are not works of art for the casually interested, these are strictly for the pros. And, of course, the genuinely deranged.

Given that, I have to say that EBOLA SYNDROME is not the gorefest I was expecting given its reputation. It’s certainly morally repugnant --an assessment which I think the filmmakers would gleefully confirm-- but visually it’s not too much more disgusting than your typical Wayans brothers comedy. Unless you don’t like to watch rape. In which case you shouldn’t even be reading this review, let alone watching this movie. Let me state this clearly just so there’s no confusion: EBOLA SYNDROME definitely finds serial rape to be a pretty fun time at the movies in a wacky EVIL DEAD over-the-top sort of way.* If that’s gonna be a dealbreaker for you… well, you’re right. But as a journalist I have a duty to report on what I’ve seen, so let’s dive right in.

EBOLA SYNDROME centers around this guy Kai San (Anthony Wong, HARD BOILED, INTERNAL AFFAIRS, and more relevant to us here, Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor for THE UNTOLD STORY) who is just... I don’t think there’s a word for what he is. He’s just the worst. Just the absolute worst. When we meet him, he’s murdering a family after he’s caught having sex with his boss’s wife. At first he seems more like a groveling, whiny maggot than a sadistic monster; when the husband catches him he snivels and weeps about how unfair everyone is to him. But the moment he sees an opportunity, he savagely and gruesomely murders both husband and wife, hunts down their young daughter, and douses her was gasoline -- she’s spared only when he’s interrupted lighting the match and has to flee. When you see the daughter turn up later in the movie as an adult, you’d assume she’d be the main character who will eventually get some revenge against this fucking prick. Oh, how little you understand Hong Kong.

Instead, the movie follows Kai to South Africa, where he ends up contracting ebola in the process of raping (and murdering, naturally) a dying Zulu woman from an infected tribal area. Then, he heads back to town and graphically rapes and murders his new bosses at a Johannesburg Chinese Restaurant. All the while, he never fucking stops bitching and moaning about how unfair the world is to him. You might be tempted to see his constant whining in the face of his vile behavior as a grotesque parody of psychopathic narcissism. Oh, how little you understand Hong Kong. Whatever you do, don’t look at the IMDB reviews where half these fuckin maniacs seem to side with him. Jesus Christ, internet. What the fuck. I’m not mad at this fictional character being flagrantly horrible, but I am mad at you guys for even entertaining any notion that he could be seen as anything else.

Anyway, Kai is an unambiguously and unrepentantly despicable rapist and murderer, but the funny thing is he doesn’t know he’s an ebola carrier. He is, the movie tells us, a rare genetic variant who can contract ebola but be asymptomatic, and consequently he spreads the disease unknowingly. He does lots of unpleasant things, mind you, like grind his victims into hamburgers and jerk off in the meat, infecting everyone who eats them. But he doesn’t realize he’s an Ebola Mary til the very end of the movie. So weirdly, the one thing which is sort of the movie’s hook isn’t really his fault, despite all the other reasons we have the hate him. In fact, by the climax, the movie seems to improbably sympathize with him. I know Hong Kong gangster films are famous for their sympathetic portrayal of both cop and criminal alike, but I hope we can agree that this particular guy probably goes far enough that we can agree to hate him. Right, internet?

Still, I can’t deny that even here, in what ought to be a career nadir for most actors, Anthony Wong is kind of terrific. He plays Kai as a kind of over-the-top cartoon, a Looney Tunes character of pure Id, except instead of hunting rabbits or roadrunners or whatever it is that Porky Pig does, his thing is that he rapes and murders and whines and gives people ebola. Like that time Alexander Hamilton chopped down George Washington’s cherry tree and then raped it and gave it ebola, I cannot tell a lie, Wong is a dangerously compelling actor, instilling his performance with a frenzied energy and a truly wicked sense of comedy. He’s so entertaining I can almost see how those freakos on IMDB ended up on his side, which makes the whole experience that much more nauseating.

And nauseating it is. You’ve seen plenty of grim, gritty torture porn serial killer flicks, and they’re so dour and self-serious that it’s hard to get too worked up over them. But the same thing as a colorful, frenetic, over-the-top comedy? The cognitive dissonance between tone and content makes it feel more nightmarish, and it genuinely got under my skin a little (it sort of reminds me of the scenes from NATURAL BORN KILLERS with Rodney Dangerfield as teenage Juliette Lewis’ sexually abusive father, set to zany cartoon music and doused in an arch, sit-com style). I’m man enough to admit that I really felt kind of dirty after watching it, in a way I really didn’t after equally disgusting things like CHAOS. If the purpose of art is to provoke a reaction, this one definitely did have that effect, and to a large extent I think Wong has to be credited for that. You can only see so much violent depravity before you reach the saturation point and it just doesn’t really mean anything anymore, and EBOLA SYNDROME hits that point within the first 40 minutes. That it doesn’t just become an entirely boring, repetitive slog after that is entirely the result of Wong and director Herman Yau’s frenzied comic energy.

You could definitely argue that this film is morally reprehensible, and that would be reason enough to avoid it. Alas, I cannot agree with that simple reductive rule, because of course sometimes shocking, repellant, even morally reprehensible art is actually quite great. But fortunately, this is not one of those times. EBOLA SYNDROME has little aspiration to be great art; its loftiest aspiration is probably to get a giggle out of you over how obscenely over-the-line it is. So, given that goal, is it wrong to say that my biggest complaint is actually the crippling lack of narrative here? I know, I know, it's not the point, but still, narrative gives shape and context to the genre goods, and this one doesn't really have any kind of shape at all. It spends the beginning introducing us to this sleazy piece of shit, he murders some people, then he goes to another country, gets ebola and murders some other, unrelated people, and then unknowingly spreads it to various South Africans, then he gets on a plane for Hong Kong and, uh, does the exact same thing again, only in Hong Kong, except less.

No protagonist ever materializes; the movie spends most of its runtime following Kai’s antics, but he has no conflict, and doesn’t even know he has ebola, so there’s not much story there. The young daughter of his first murder victims sporadically turns up, but I notice she never actually does anything (and in fact, later on has to bite him to escape and presumably contracts ebola for her troubles, although we don’t know for sure because she is never mentioned again. That’s some cold blooded shit, Hong Kong!) The treatment of this character is kind of emblematic of how ambivalent the whole enterprise is about conflict; it seems like a revenge storyline should write itself, but the movie barely even bothers to use her as exposition, let alone a protagonist or antagonist. Extremely bad subtitles may have lost some of the nuance, so I can’t criticize the writing (unless the transaction was exactly accurate and it was just written by an illiterate) but come on, is it too much to ask for us some kind of character arc? This guy starts out an asshole, unknowingly gives people ebola, murders and rapes a few people unrelated to the ebola, and then unknowingly gives more people ebola, and in the last 20 minutes he gets in a fight with his wife over a totally unrelated issue (custody of his daughter, who was never mentioned before) and gets shot by police. Wha? That’s not a “story,” it’s barely even a connected series of incidents. Wong’s got some real sleazeball charisma and drags the whole enterprise along behind him, but jeez, he’s unpleasant, and --crucially-- kind of uninteresting. The pace is energetic, but the lack of story defuses any real momentum before it can start.

The narrative is directionless and completely free of any kind of motivating conflict, so by default is ends up episodic, a series of vaguely related vignettes. These lurch uncomfortably between broad slapstick, insanely black comedy, and insanely dark drama, without a lot of consistency (a characteristic fairly typical of Southeast Asian cinema, but particularly jarring here). The movie delivers what it promises in terms of prurient concepts, but aside from a handful of bloody moments it barely even pretends to be a horror movie, even of the splattercore grossout variety. In fact, for a movie whose only reason to exist seems to be to parade out a bunch over-the-line setpieces, it really isn’t all that imaginative or especially dense with craziness. The second half, where he goes back to Hong Kong, is honestly pretty tame. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s some pretty graphic rapes and murders in there, but considering the runtime of nearly 100 minutes and the fact that there’s no story to speak of, it’s actually kind of uneventful. It relies on sadism more than twisted ingenuity for its kicks, which makes it a lot less fun than it need to be to maintain a heady sense of transgression all the way through. This needed to go full-on EVIL DEAD if it was gonna totally connect, and instead it’s mostly just a vapid semi-comic HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. Still in plenty poor taste, but a little dry for a work with literally nothing else to offer.

Case in point:  for a movie whose whole hook is that ebola is bad, we virtually never see any of the actual horrific effects of the disease! People seizure and sometimes projectile-vomit onto others (which, in point of fact, are not Ebola “syndromes”), but we never really see what happens after that. No bleeding, no boils, no weeping blood, nothing. If we’re seriously going to go down the road of making a queasy comedy about ebola, it’s a pretty unforgivable oversight to neglect milking some sicko mileage out of the actual syndromes of the title. What, were they trying to save on the makeup budget? I have no idea. But it definitely was not done in the name of taste. I can forgive a movie devoting itself entirely to the cheap thrills of irresponsible,  transgressive button-pushing, but I can’t forgive it for being so unimaginative about it.

*Lest you think too harshly of us men, note that this was written by a woman, screenwriter Ting Chau who also penned stuff like THE RAPIST BECKONS (sounds pretty classy, what with “Beckons” right there in the title!) and, even worse, Hong Kong Hollywood knockoffs like “ADVENTUROUS TREASURE ISLAND” and “CHINESE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS.” She also did another horror movie with Herman Yau called THE GHOST INSIDE (2005), apparently the most expensive Hong Kong horror film up to that time.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: None apparent, but come on, what's the tagline going to offer that the title doesn't?
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Loose adaptation of The Book of Moron Musical
• SEQUEL: None
• REMAKE: None, and I think it may just be safe to say this is one we don't have to worry about getting remade.
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: Hong Kong
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Anthony Wong has had major roles in some classic Hong Kong pictures
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None
• BOOBIES: Yep
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Lots
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Total graphic dismemberment.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: None
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Absolutely
• EVIL CULT: No.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: None!
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: None
• VOYEURISM: Uhhh... I feel like the has to be a scene where this guy creepily pervs on someone, it just seems sort of inevitable in a movie like this, but damned if I can give you any specifics.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Fairly high, thank Jesus.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If intentionally giving people ebola is only the fourth or fifth worst thing you do, you just may have what it takes to be a main character in a Hong Kong comedy.
• TITLE ACCURACY: There is ebola, although weirdly the "syndromes" seem a little off.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Since it's not even really making an effort to be "good," it's a little hard to assign an objective rating. I mean, seems like the freakos online who sought this thing out were satisfied with what they got. It definitely is unrelentingly repellent, which seems to be the only real objective here. Even so, I wish it were a little more well-structured and more creatively depraved. Gun to my head, I'd give it a C-.

…..

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Dir. Spike Lee

Written by Spike Lee & Bill Gunn

Starring Stephen Tyrone Williams, Zaraah Abrahams, Elvis Nolasco, Felicia Pearsons

So, it turns out Spike Lee’s contribution to our current cultural movement of pushing the media ever further into an all-vampire-all-the-time format is pretty weird. I mean, it’s even weirder than the phrase “Spike Lee is making a vampire love story” would suggest, and frankly I’m not sure that sentence even makes sense. If I just read that phrase and I hadn’t seen the finished product for myself, I would assume there was a translation error or something before I would believe it was a real thing. But nonetheless, I can assure you, it is real. I have seen it. And it’s a weird one.

When last we checked in on the ongoing and baffling trend of indie auteur darlings making inexplicable vampire films for no discernable reason, it was Jim Jarmusch’s ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE which was flummoxing us. That one was almost wholly an exercise in dreamy atmosphere -- probably a little too dreamy, in fact; at times it’s nearly comatose. So I was counting on Lee to address the balance by making a different kind of vampire film. Lee comes with his own set of problems, but the one thing he’s never been accused of is understating anything. So even once you’ve managed to accept the idea that he’s making a vampire film, there’s at least one more shocking surprise in store for you: DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is, if anything, even more slow, quiet, and dreamy than ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. What the fuck is happening to the world!?

Now I gotta be honest with you. I have a superpower. It’s not super strength or telekinesis or something useful like that. I’m more like one of those poor sad mutants you see in the background who have an extra eye that can see microwaves, or they lay eggs, or they’re just real ugly. The kind that never get invited to join the X-Men, and when they ask there’s a real awkward moment where Wolverine or somebody has to unconvincingly tell them they’re all full up at the moment but if you’ll just leave your resume dot dot dot. In my case, my superpower is that I’m incapable of not enjoying a Spike Lee movie. I’ve seen, I believe, every one of his theatrically released films except HE GOT GAME and SHE HATE ME, and liked all of them and loved most, even the ones that most people hated. From wildly unwieldy recent fare like MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA to wildly uneven masterworks like RED HOOK SUMMER to wildly provocative button-pushers like BAMBOOZLED to wildly ingratiating crowd-pleasers like MALCOLM X to even the wildly unnecessary OLDBOY REMAKE… they’re all fierce, wild things of beauty, filled to the brim (and often spilling over the brim) with ideas, love, anger, politics, and raw, ragged humanity.

But DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS isn’t like that. Where Lee is usually passionate and provocative to a fault, here he takes the exact opposite approach: JESUS is languid and vague and cold. It’s a very strange approach that doesn’t really suit his talents very well and results in the first and only Spike Lee movie that I probably dislike more than I like, though of course there are pockets of greatness here as well.

A big part of the problem is that this isn’t really a Spike Lee movie at all. Despite the credits identifying the film as “an Official Spike Lee Joint” (a jab at his previous film, the studio-compromised remake OLDBOY, which carries the more impersonal “A Spike Lee Film”), there’s a ghost haunting the entire production, one Lee seems beholden to to the film’s detriment. That ghost is the 1973 avant-garde horror(?)/art film GANJA AND HESS, and its writer/director/co-star Bill Gunn. DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is not billed as a remake, but in fact it’s in many cases a direct scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot copy of its predecessor, to such an extent that Lee gives co-writer credit to Gunn (who died in 1989).

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. GANJA AND HESS is a pretty amazing movie; a talky, philosophical, sexy, mysterious and engrossing acid trip through some bizarre funhouse mirror of Black American anxieties in the early 70’s. And DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS clearly understands and aspires to those superlatives as well; it mimics the movements of GANJA AND HESS obsessively, changing a few details but openly and faithfully aping GANJA AND HESS’s unique blend of dreamy philosophy, mysterious plotting, and sexual frankness.

The story, such as it is, is pretty simple: wealthy anthropologist and African art collector Dr. Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams, primarily a stage actor) is attacked by an unstable assistant (the excellently-named Elvis Nolasco, small parts in CLOCKERS and OLDBOY REMAKE), who stabs him with an ancient African dagger and then kills himself. Greene seems to die, but then mysteriously awakens as an invincible, immortal being who must have human blood in order to live. When the assistant’s estranged ex-wife Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams, British TV shows Waterloo Road and Coronation Street) shows up looking for her husband, she and Greene quickly become lovers and in time she becomes a vampire too. Eventually, however, Greene begins to tire of his new supernatural life.

The story itself isn’t particularly the point, though; Gunn wrote the original with the stated intention of using vampirism as a metaphor for addiction, but the finished product is even stranger and more surreal than that -- it’s a disorienting, mysterious dream. The problem with Lee’s remake here isn’t that the source material isn’t great, or that Lee isn’t great. The problem is that they’re both great for entirely different reasons with staggeringly little in common save their interest in race, which is somehow both a completely central and maddeningly inconsequential point of reference. Race is obviously enormously important to the film and its whole perspective, and yet it’s in subtle, slippery ways which don’t exactly add up to a coherent point. What does GANJA AND HESS have to say about the African-American experience? I don’t know, exactly… and the problem is I don’t think Lee really knows, either. Lee obviously knows the movie is great, but I suspect his slavish devotion to the inexplicable narrative rhythms of the original are the result an attempt to backward-engineer a intricately complicated device which he does not fully understand.

That’s a problem for an artist as strong as Lee is, because it means he’s unusually restrained here. He seems fearful that if he adds too much of himself, he’ll alter the delicate chemical alchemy that make the movie great to begin with -- and he’s right. But he’s also incapable of exactly recreating the original work --let alone the context-- in a way that recaptures its original potency. His attempt to rebuild a piece of art which he doesn’t entirely understand --and maybe doesn’t even have a concrete explanation-- piece by piece ends up feeling alienating and disingenuous. It’s like George Carlin once said about playing the blues: “its not enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played.”

The result is a wildly schizophrenic film which boasts numerous strong sequences but just as many that are absolutely stultifying, a word which I would never have guessed could be fairly associated with a Spike Lee film. Many of Lee’s films have an overload of ideas which don’t necessarily hang together --a problem for a lot of critics, but never for me-- but here Gunn’s original work and Lee’s new additions openly negate each other. Mixing Gunn’s stagey, wandering soliloquies with Lee’s own ear for modern patois results in jarring shifts that sound like they’re coming not just from different movies but different planets. Lee, ever the literalist, also can’t resist trying to explain a bit more about what’s going on here than Gunn ever attempted --in the movie’s worst scene, the protagonist explains he’s a vampire, a word which I don’t believe is ever actually uttered in the original-- but making parts of the plot lightly more concrete just emphasizes how nonsensical the rest of it is. Gunn couches his ambiguity in drug-tinged 70’s hallucinatory cinema; Lee steadfastly keeps things concrete and grounded in at least some kind of realism, which just makes the movie’s inherent strangeness feel like a mistake rather than a central feature. You get the sense that Lee is trying and failing to communicate a story here, whereas his 70’s counterpart never had any intention of doing so to begin with. Attempts at modernization like a brief sequences that references AIDS and a lesbian gender switch near the end find Lee feeling a bit more in his element, but they also seem maddenly isolated from the rest of the movie.

The performances, too, suffer in comparison to the original. Stephen Tyrone Williams is perfectly serviceable as the opaque, isolated Greene, but the actor seems uncertain and a bit timid in the role. He’s got a genuine charm  --immediately evident on the few occasions he gets to smile-- but the role clearly doesn’t play to his strengths. Original star Duane Jones (known for his only other major film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) had a fierce, imperious take on the role which made him magnetic and compelling despite his elusive character. Williams simply feels reserved and a little bored. Zaraah Abrahams, as Ganja, fares better with a more active and relatable character, but doesn’t come close to Marlene Clark’s effortless portrait of gilded toughness. Clark is just naturally commanding; Abrahams feels a little more needy and demanding, even a little bitchy (her suffocatingly posh British accent doesn’t help matters; not that it’s her fault, but that voice is the quintessential embodiment of vapid English upper-crusty spoiled brats). Nothing about her feels steely or damaged the way Clark originally did, though her performance is sympathetic enough to effectively command our attention, and as the movie rolls onward she seems to find enough confidence in the role it make it her own. Really, though, the person best served here is Rami Malek, as Greene’s amusingly resentful butler. Even with very few lines, he’s allowed to instill his character with a lot more personality than either Williams or Abrahams are, which makes him instinctively more appealing to both Lee and the audience.

Oh by the way, Snoop from The Wire is in here.

Watching Malek, it’s easy to remember what a great filmmaker Lee can be, but it’s also obvious why his strengths are ill-suited to this particular adaptation. Lee thrives on colorful, larger-than-life characters, rich humanism, and provocative social experiments -- all things which are fundamentally the opposite of GANJA AND HESS’s icy, surreal, fractured intellectualism. Plenty of Lee’s personality sneaks in around the margins, but he’s so beholden to the spirit of the original that the real meat of the story seems to be actively working in opposition to his best instincts. And when he applies some of his trademarks --earthy, lurid realism, long dialogue takes, sly humor-- to Gunn’s material, it’s sometimes a flat-out disaster, as the painfully amateurish scene where Hess explains his vampirism demonstrates. Even so, as the movie gradually winds towards its climax (and in doing so, generates some fitful stirrings of intelligible drama) the beautiful photography alone is ample reminder that Lee is a talent to reckon with. He may not always make the best choices (the aggressive, sometimes seemingly deliberately out-of-sync musical selections here, for example*) but he’ll never be uninteresting. An extended long-take seduction sequence --which starts off a bit awkward but gradually builds a real sexual and dread-inducing power-- is a stunner. A lengthy musical sequence near the end --strikingly similar to his previous RED HOOK SUMMER, but also a fairly direct lift from GANJA AND HESS-- is mesmerizing, and finally engrossing and mysterious in exactly the same way its progenitor was. And as the movie reaches its final destination, Lee finally seems to find his footing and lets the movie’s enigmatic symbolism speak for itself, creating some genuinely haunting --if still totally inscrutable-- images.

With all its contradictions, dead-ends, and surreal plotting, this was already going to be a film for a very select audience, and having seen it I can understand why even a lot of that audience was put off by it. Frankly I’m not even sure what the point of making this film was; Lee, like Gunn before him, still seems to suggest that the film is in some way about addiction; it seems like it should be, but the final product suggests nothing of the sort, as neither vampiric character seems especially bothered or really even interested in their so-called addiction and are really too opaque for us to really understand what they’re thinking in the first place. Certainly there are other intriguing elements here --the film’s curious Christian imagery juxtaposed with its explicitly African curse, the isolating effects of Greene’s wealth, the contrast of vampiric death and rebirth-- but nothing resolves into anything resembling a specific point. This, then, is ultimately a film not to be parsed for meaning but to simply experience. If that experience is a somewhat less fulfilling one than the original (perhaps always destined to be the case when remaking movies so strongly of their time in a vastly different era), well, at least it’s still a unique one. I’m glad to live in a world where “Spike Lee’s Vampire Film” is a real thing that exists, but I hope the next movie he makes has a little more of himself in it,** especially after two remakes in a row. Remembering the greatness of the past is important, but let’s not let it take over our future, OK Spike? Ancient African daggers are not the only thing that can turn us into bloodless vampires -- overly respectful tributes to the cinema of the past can do it too.

That having been said, if you could drop a vampire or two into your upcoming CHIRAQ, I ain’t gonna complain. Or get a wolf man in there or something. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

*Culled from over 800 unsigned artists who submitted music to him specifically for the movie

**Speaking of which, why the hell is he not playing the part of the unhinged assistant, which was played by Gunn himself in the original film??

Gallowwalkers

Gallowwalkers (2013)

Dir Andrew Goth

Written by Andrew Goth, Joanne Reay

Starring Wesley Snipes, Kevin Howarth, Riley Smith, Tanit Pheonix

So, with Wesley Snipes now out of jail and staging his big comeback by jumping on the already outrageously bloated bandwagon of check-cashing that is THE EXPENDABLES,* I thought it was time to take a look back at the last thing he did before the IRS unfairly stole from us a future filled with BLADE sequels. If it seems a little late for that, given that Snipes has been in the big house since 2010, well, at least it’s not my fault: they shot this thing back in 2006, but just put in out in December 2013. Maybe they should have just waited two more years and released it as a special 10-year anniversary edition, but oh well, I guess I really do have to think of everything myself. Instead, somebody over at Lionsgate apparently rediscovered the box with all the raw film they shot in it in some kind of RADIERS-style warehouse, gave it a few hard shakes, dumped it out on the floor, and then released it directly to DVD.

OK, so obviously there’s a few red flags in that description. But while the movie is a bit too incoherent to live up to the enormous potential any horror-western starring Wesley Snipes as a Namibian zombie-hunting cowboy inherently has, I gotta say this is much more unique and interesting than the usual DTV dreck. Though the writing is iffy, it's full of unique and polished visuals, utilizing the wide open spaces in its Namibian locations to evoke Leone, Mad Max, and --with the addition of bizarre stylized sets and villains-- Alejandro Jodorowsky. Seriously, this this is what would happen if EL TOPO was made as a DTV sequel to JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES. Kinda crappy, but too weird and ballsy to completely ignore.

Yes, that is Cthulu's vagina backing Wesley up.

Now, before I go on, I gotta admit that when I say “a bit too incoherent,” I mean that the movie is a complete and total mess, an absolutely incomprehensible jumble of scenes which appear to be playing in random order, sometimes with no discernable relationship to each other. And when I say “the writing is iffy,” I mean that there’s no way this thing was completed with a finished script, and much if not all the dialogue is utterly inscrutable babble or free-associative narration, and that Snipes really only says about 5 words the whole way through anyway.

Obviously, those are bad things. But if you can get past that, everything else here is awesome. I realize that to get past that, you have to be a person willing to ignore the entire structure and plot of a movie, but hey, you’re reading this, you must at the very least be tempted by the idea of seeing Wesley Snipes as detective John Gallowwalker, undead bounty hunting Namibia cowboy. Give in to the darkside, bud, I promise this won’t waste your time like so many DTV schlock knockoffs which promise greatness only to deliver tedious retreads of lame genre cliches. This one is gonna deliver a bunch of craziness like you ain’t never seen.

This guy has a lizard instead of hair, I think that's pretty self-explanatory.

The plot is this, as far as I can gather, and please don’t quote me on this, but I think at one point in the past (revealed by a flashback in the last third of the film, only none of this really makes sense so I didn’t realize it was a flashback at the time) I think Wesley’s wife or somebody was raped (and murdered?) by a bunch of guys, so he killed them, but then also died himself, and then for some reason was resurrected (magic?) but then so were they, and I think that every time he kills someone they come back as the undead and he has to re-kill them again**, only now they’re weird mutant freaks that wear other people’s skin. And there’s this guy Kasana, who decides to get the band back together and come after Wesley, but that was Wesley’s plan all along (?), and also he gets an arrogant young partner to help him. And I think there might be something supernatural about all this but I can’t say for sure. I definitely don’t know what a gallowwalker is, though. I guess either the mutants or Wesley probably. There are some gallows early on, but no one walks away from them so I dunno, your guess is as good as mine.

Even after typing that, I don’t really have any idea what any of it means, but that’s OK, mostly it’s just a convoluted excuse to shoehorn in a bunch of nutty imagery and bloody violence. Interestingly, I feel like it might be possible to re-edit this and save it from itself. If my interpretation of the plot is even remotely correct, at its heart there’s a pretty simple revenge story here, with Snipes cursed so that the people he revenge-kills come back and hunt him down. If they’d just laid out the characters and their motivations in a semi-chronological way I think we might have been able to get a better idea of what in god’s name was going on here; as it is, it seems like they’re trying to save Wesley’s backstory for a kind of third-act twist, but nothing makes sense without it so by the time it’s revealed you still have no idea what the hell is happening, and it completely disrupts any momentum the film has been able to build by that point.

Oh I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?

But you know what, it almost doesn’t matter. This would arguably be a technically better movie if I knew what the plot was after having watched it, but the best things about it don’t have anything to do with that anyway. Most of what’s great about the movie can’t really be described in words, because man’s language is not powerful enough to accurately articulate why it’s cool that Wesley Snipes is a cowboy who blows away these three guys with Dark Jedi eyes who wear identical Catholic cardinal’s robes and hang around the railroad tracks like a bunch of big shots. Or that there’s this guy Bucketskull who wears an oversized novelty helmet that makes him look like an evil bobblehead of the voodoo master from PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES. Also I’m looking at some images online right now, and there’s a bunch of pictures of this cool looking guy with no skin, I don’t even have any specific memories of him, that’s how much fun this movie is. In a normal movie, you’d definitely remember the no-skin guy; here, he’s lost in the shuffle of carnival masks and lizard-skin pony tails and so forth. Who can argue with this bountiful catalogue of wonder? I mean, look at these images below, does this look like stuff you could ordinarily find in some Wesley Snipes DTV knockoff?

Alas, Snipes himself is pretty inert as the stoic badass, mostly relying on his costume and poses to seem cool, but never offering any genuinely compelling characterization. I’m sure he had other things on his mind (i.e. that when the movie wrapped and he headed home it would be to a much smaller bedroom than he was used to, and there would be another guy already in it) but come on, if you’re gonna make a movie this weird you gotta loosen up a little, fellah. I’m not saying make it jokey, but have some fun, take a chance on a more unique performance. Anyway, Snipes does fine, but I’d have liked to see a little more hustle. Fortunately the remaining cast is full of colorful characters and weird, surreal visuals enough to mostly make up for it, and the sparse, desolate Namibian locations serve as a compelling character unto themselves.

With so many crappy-looking oversaturated but bland DTV action films on the market, it's really nice to see one which clearly aspires to a stylish and memorable iconography. Mexican Cinematographer Henner Hofmann*** takes fantastic advantage of the wide-open desert space and the stark, weathered minimalism of the primitive sets, creating a classic look and highlighting the excellent production design. The action is pretty good too, full of classic Western standoffs but also some pretty well-choreographed knock-down-drag-out fights. Yes, ultimately its fragmented and needlessly convoluted flashback structure kills most of the momentum the simple revenge narrative should have been able to build, and it kind of limps to the finish. But even so, those who are in the market for an offbeat action film with some genuine visual polish will find plenty to like here. And hey, how often do you get to see Wesley Snipes fight an all-albino cast of ghouls with a penchant for Baroque Vaudeville costuming in the deserts of Namibia? Not too often, I'm guessing. Take a chance on this one, and enjoy it for its imagination (if not always its execution).

* Along with, STALLONE. STATHAM, SCHWARZENEGGER. FORD. CREWES. COUTURE. BANDERAS. and… GRAMMER? What, are they gonna get David Hyde-Pierce for the next one?

**That’s what it says on the poster, anyway. Not sure that is borne out by the events of the movie.

***Mostly unknown-to-me Mexican films, but he did shoot the hilariously shitty Bon Jovi-starring VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS, so I guess my JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES comparison at the beginning of this review was apt.

Like celebrity deaths, zombie priest gunslingers always come in threes.