TBR: Dear Lord, thank you for zombies

This week in free movies: Giving thanks for zombies

Zombies are everywhere. Like the undead’s ambling ubiquity in movies, zombie ephemera has surrounded us. As the backdrop for George Romero films, Pittsburgh is the global capital for the Z phenomenon, manifested in the annual Monroeville Mall Zombie Fest and Walk of the Dead.

During break, I gluttonously consumed Z movies like an undead family indulging in brain gravy at a post-apocalyptic Thanksgiving. I even spent one night walking in a zombie’s tattered shoes, as I shuffled to a megamall with hordes of mindless holiday shoppers looking for a Black Friday midnight special.

And I emerged after only having been mildly bitten in the frenzy. So, here I present to you two zombie movies on Instant NetFlix that stand above the flesh-hungry pack:

"Quarantine"
This 2008 movie stars Jennifer Carpenter as Angela Vidal, who most people hopefully know from her role in “Dexter” and not her role in “White Chicks.” Instead of a plucky Miami cop, here she plays a plucky Los Angeles news anchor.

“Quarantine” begins with Vidal filming a segment wherein she shadows a local fire company. The direction follows the same formula as other recent horror movies (“Cloverfield,” “Paranormal Activity”), as the entire film is shot from the perspective of one character’s camera, in this case Vidal’s TV cameraman. It’s a definite novelty, but this film does not use it as a shaky, blurry excuse to avoid showing the monsters.

Vidal’s first interview offers immediate foreshadowing. The department’s fire chief says, “This might surprise most people, but 85 percent of the calls we go out on are medical. It can be anything from chest pains to more serious things.” Yeah, “more serious things” is a portentous euphemism for “onyx-eyed, throat-shredding wretches.” These zombies are rabid, vicious human hyenas who make Count Dracula look like Mister Rogers.

What follows is an all-out flesh banquet, complete with a kids’ menu.

Once inside the house, Vidal and a handful of others get trapped. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine the building, and not even cops or firemen can exit. It’s locked up, tarped off and surrounded by the U.S. military.

So they wait.

For 89 minutes, some rabies mutation – whose origins only get more muddled as the movie goes on – infects each person, turning them into pale wraiths clawing, biting and even hammering their way to a meal. Vidal is getting killer footage, but if this is going to be her Pulitzer, it’s going to mean as much as Heath Ledger’s Oscar.

There is no safe haven. There’s no where to run, because they can’t get out. Unlike other zombie films, the protagonists in “Quarantine” aren’t surrounded by the undead, they’re surrounded by the living. They’re not encircled by a brain-dead army of zombies, they are encircled by a conscious, fully aware military supposedly sworn to protect them.

Yet, in either case, it’s an army of ghouls. The soldiers and leaders Vidal and friends need are right outside, armed with M-16s and sniper rifles, but those “saviors” are just as dangerous as the zombies.

At it’s black, sludge-pumping heart, “Quarantine” is a critique of government, as are most Z films. However, instead of targeting the government’s inability to deal with a viral outbreak – like “28 Weeks Later” and “Land of the Dead” – “Quarantine” shows the government’s cold, merciless efficiency. No zombie is getting out, because they’re not letting anyone out. This is what happens when the government does everything right.

You watch and don’t understand why the CDC traps these innocent people like expendable pawns. But if you were on the outside, if you were watching from a neighboring window, you’d be cheering because you could go to bed assured you wouldn’t wake up craving a breakfast of Brainy Pebbles. (they get soggy so fast anyway).

The president would be re-elected in a landslide. There might even be a new national holiday for the day he prevented World War Z (sidenote: For what will really happen when an outbreak occurs, read one of the decade’s best books, “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War,” by Max Brooks, soon to be a movie itself).

Here be a spoiler: The government’s plan works, because eventually everyone in the house dies. I’m not trying to be Davey Downer, the tagline to movie tells you as much: “On March 11, 2008, the government sealed off an apartment complex in Los Angeles. The residents were never seen again. No details. No witnesses. No evidence. Until now.”

Going in, you already know nobody escapes. The question is how it happened. But the tagline puts the finality of the ending into question. If someone got the video, they opened the house. If they opened the house and retrieved the video, what else snuck out with it?

"Tokyo Zombie"
An Onion article said that Pittsburgh is woefully unprepared for a zombie attack. Thankfully, the second film, “Tokyo Zombie” provides a surefire way to survive: Jiu Jitsu. According to the movie, this ancient art of grappling is like vodka and censorship, because it is especially effective if you study it in Russia. “It’s got cool and artistic moves. It’s the best, for a martial art, anyway,” says Mitsuo, played by Sho Aikawa.

This English-dubbed, Japanese film (based on Yusaku Hanakuma manga) is a cross between “Shaun of the Dead” and “Kung Fu Hustle.” It’s a comically exaggerated Z movie that makes “Zombieland” seem like “Dawn of the Dead” by comparison. When it’s not portraying all women as shrill crones, jokes about child molestation and repressed homoeroticism pervade this demented, puerile romp.

It’s goofy. It’s offensive. It’s self-aware and the special effects are especially awful (Mitsuo’s bald cap doesn’t even match his skin). But ultimately it’s so campy, it’s hilarious.

Unlike many Z films, “Tokyo Zombie” doesn’t use a virus to account for its villains – viruses commonly explain the zombie plague, because this plays on modern panics over swine flu, avian flu, SARS, Ebola, etc. But “Tokyo Zombie” finally revisits zombie lore roots, with the undead sprouting from the ground. It has something to do with people being buried in a recycling dump, and their corpses getting recycled into the undead. Evil spirits mixed with toxic waste. It doesn’t really matter.

All of the characters are surprisingly at peace with killing and decapitating other people, living or undead. One hen-pecked nerd is burying his mother in the dump when his girlfriend kicks the mother’s head off (sending it flying for miles through the air while still chastising her). The girlfriend had warned, “Keep piling on the dirt, or no more sex.”

Even when a flock of zombies lurches into their warehouse, Mitsuo and Fujio (played by an afro-sporting Tadanobu Asano) remain nonplussed.

Fujio: “What are they?”
Mitsuo: “Zombies, I guess.”
Fujio: “Zombies”
Mitsuo: “Well this sucks. Hey, let’s bail.”

“Tokyo Zombie” focuses on the antagonistic bond between these two best friends. Zombies are merely an inconvenience.

Mitsuo and Fujio set off on a road trip to train in Jiu Jitsu. Fujio wants to go to the United States because he says, “America is rad.” Mitsuo wants to go to Russia, but the whole plan gets sidetracked when Mitsuo gets bitten.

The people in “Quarantine” needed a lesson in seppuku: If you get bitten, do the right thing and kill yourself; there’s no crying it away. But here, Mitsuo does the right thing. He jumps off of a bridge because he doesn’t want to infect his best friend.

Mitsuo already thought the Grim Reaper was approaching. Mitsuo sings a morbidly comic, poorly rendered song about his terminal stomach cancer, “Even though I don’t know when I’ll die / I’m going to try like hell to show you how cool Jiu Jitsu is / Jiu Jitsu is the best martial art in the world / I just wanted you to know that.”

However, Mitsuo is just a hypochrondriac whose only professional diagnosis is gastritis (a simple stomach ache). He screams at the doctor, “If you don’t tell me I have cancer, I’m going to kill you!”

He’s arguably insane, but he and Fujio’s relationship is somehow affecting, regardless of its ridiculous context.

Early in the movie, a pontificating prophet said, “If you’re a zombie, you’re in constant pain, and you’re compelled to eat the flesh of the living to ease this pain.” It’s no accident that Zombie Mitsuo doesn’t really try to eat Fujio. Mitsuo isn’t in pain when Fujio is around.

Like other Z films, “Tokyo Zombie” attempts to weave in a societal critique. In this case it’s a criticism of economic stratification. Rich people build protected condos inside a walled-off Zombie Tokyo. Poor people are their slaves, and the proles are made to fight zombies in a gladiator contest. The hundreds who can’t compete are put to work generating the city’s electricity by squeezing wired-up hand clasps.

It’s impossible to fully convey the absurdity of this movie – by the end, you’ll see the first cinematic appearance of a feces-firing turret gun – so just watch it.

“Tokyo Zombie” could be a story of timeless friendship. It might serve as a subtle moral warning against the concentration of wealth. But it’s more likely just a stupid, fun movie that turns the watcher into a zombie by letting him turn off his mind and forget social taboos.

Sometimes that’s OK. At least you’re eating popcorn and not a cerebral cortex.

For the Z-curious and light of wallet, here are some other zombie films available on Instant NetFlix:
* “American Zombie,” a faux documentary about zombie equality
* “The Evil Dead,” whose cult resurgence like coming back from the grave.
* And, of course, the movie that started it all, “Night of the Living Dead.” It’s a classic, but gruesome and dramatic modern heavyweights like “28 Days Later” have probably desensitized you to Romero’s original depiction of zombies as sluggish mannequins whose heavy eyeshadow and ties make them look more like they just came from Hot Topic than rose from the grave.
*If that still doesn’t fill your gullet, check out the upcoming movie “The Crazies,” in theaters Feb. 26.