So Very Dark

As Heather has told me, many times, Zombies make everything better-

…and that is why she recommended the movie ‘Fido’ to me.

too many cute movie posters — I can’t choose.

So, the premise is that, a generation or two back, some alien spore landed on earth and began reanimating the dead. It was horrible and bloody and many people had to fight off their own relatives and recently deceased loved ones. Lots of people died. Then ZomCon came along created ‘The Collar’…a zombie obedience advice that turned a dangerous menace into useful manual labor. There. I don’t need to tell you anything else. You already want to watch it, right?

Okay, I’ll give you a smidge more; the movie is set in a Pleasentville-esque 1950s suburbia, all the way down to greeting your man home from work with a fresh martini, and the main character is a lonely boy who’s zombie becomes like a sweet second father to him.

HOW CAN YOU RESIST?!?!

Anyway, it’s very cute, and Carrie Ann Moss plays the neglected mother, and if you have any love in your heart for zombies, you should go see this right away.

On a more sour note….we also attempted to watch 30 Days of Night last night.

Now, a while back, a Barnes and Nobel employee pushed the Graphic Novel on me, and with my weakness for a pretty GN, I didn’t think twice about buying it. …nor did I regret my purchase. The graphic novel is beautiful and creepy and overall very well done…the slightly off kilter art makes a month without sun in a tiny town far from everything just a bit more eerie. I highly recommend it:

The movie, however…within the first five minutes I was rolling my eyes — two of the central characters in the comic are a husband and wife law-enforcement team, who stop to watch the sun set before bidding it goodbye for 30 days. That wasn’t good enough for the movie, however. Not enough conflict. So, in the movie, rather than having the brief human scene of a husband and wife pausing for a few minutes of together time before battening down the hatches in their little town, the sheriff and some random deputy take distracted note of the sun’s drop below the horizon in the midst of other police business. As for the wife, you meet her a few minutes later, currently legally separated from her sheriff husband (though the whole town seems to want them back together) and just in town for her last stop on some inspection, and as long as she can catch her flight out, everything will be dandy. Which of course she doesn’t. Oh, no…she will be stuck for a month in a small town in close proximity to her enstrangled husband! How dramatic!

The movie continues to go downhill from that point.

The art direction, first of all, did nothing for me. I understand that not every movie can be another Sin City or 300, and even if I, personally, feel that you shouldn’t make the attempt if you aren’t going to do it right, even I can accept that certain movies set the bar very high, and recreating the gorgeous style of a graphic novel can be a challenge that’s difficult to meet. However, this movie chose to land on a ghastly midpoint–art direction and cinematography that were absolutely NOTHING special (straight to DVD horror film comes to mind) but with, none-the-less, an effort to recreate certain imagery (character poses, scenery) from the novel, which, to be honest, looked bloody ridiculous. And was a double insult, since they didn’t even bother to try to recapture the gorgeous, spooky atmosphere of the novel.

Shots from the movie:

Along with failing at, really, any kind of art direction what-so-ever, they butchered the plot. Now, I’ll be honest, we did not watch the movie through to the end. We had already sacrificed enough of our precious time to utter crap, and decided that enough was enough. However, in the novel, there is an integral plot that is evident from fairly early on — regarding, among other things, WHY the vampires come to Barrow Alaska, and the repercussions thereof (oh, and yes, in the comic the vampires speak ENGLISH, not some crazy weird hissy/clicky foreign language. Who came up with THAT?!).

My overall impression of the movie was that the creators were trying to rope in the graphic novel fans who had come to expect great things based upon other films, and get them to innocently hand over their money without actually having put a lot of money into making the film itself.

Utter crap. Don’t watch it.

Buy the Graphic Novel. It’s gorgeous.

Don’t see the movie. Don’t even download it — even if you don’t pay any money to watch it, that’s time out of your life that you can never get back.