Daybreakers - Peter & Michael Spierig (2010)

The highlight of the week, especially if you’re a horror aficionado, is the Spierig brothers’ “Daybreakers,” starring Willem Dafoe, the criminally underused Sam Neill and Ethan Hawke as our hero: a vampire who just wants to do the right thing.

I’ll break the suspense now and just tell you this was a wonderful movie. So many thrillers rely on atmosphere and effects without taking character development and story into account that “Daybreakers” shows up as a truly delightful surprise.

Ten years into the future, the earth has been taken over by vampires. Under normal circumstances, taking over the world would be a victory, but there’s one problem here.

With the human population down to less than 5 percent, the vamps are running out of food.
At the beginning of the movie, we see a panhandler with a cardboard sign that says he’s poor and “needs blood.” Of course, the rich society vampires pass him by without a second look. And then the vampire cops collar him because I guess panhandling is something the undead just won’t tolerate.




Ethan Hawke, donning a scraggly beard and Amish-style hat, looks like one of the Children of the Corn all grown up. He’s a hematologist, working on a blood substitute, providing the vampire world with food when humanity becomes extinct. As it is, human blood is rare enough to necessitate human “farming,” where people are hung up and hooked into IVs and kept alive so their blood can be harvested.

Once the premise is set, the pacing of the “Daybreakers” is perfect. Character revelations and story developments are doled out at just the right intervals. We learn why some people chose to “turn” when vampirism broke out and why others chose to remain human.

Add to that the extensive political and social criticism of “Daybreakers,” and you end up with a multi-layered, frightening, funny and even emotionally rich allegory of good vs. evil in the form of class warfare. “Daybreakers” directly links fascism to classism and it makes its case eloquently, especially considering the fact that it’s a horror film.

The blood shortage causes riots in the street that recalls the kind of desperation we’ve seen on the news in communities around the world following different natural disasters.

When a vampire goes too long without blood, it turns bestial and loses its rational mind. So, as the lower-class slowly turns into wild, uncontrollable animals, they are exterminated. The film is very poignant in its depiction of these mass executions, reminding us that our characters inhabit a world where the rich kill the poor for the crime of being poor.



Meanwhile, amongst the human resistance, there are experiments going on looking for a cure to the vampire plague. They are constantly on the run, hunted by the military for their precious human, life-sustaining blood.

The mercenaries serve as an example of soldiers doing corporate work to feed the upper-class’ hunger for wealth without questioning their orders.



By the end of the film, the personal showdowns, the massive battles and the attempted “final solutions” put forward by both vampires and human culminate into a wild action frenzy that will entertain the hell out of you and make you think at the same time.

But if you’re one who doesn’t like their politics and entertainment mixed, never fear. “Daybreakers” is wildly entertaining as a horror/action film.

So if you want to turn off your brain and just enjoy the excitement, carnage and the humor you won’t be disappointed.

Legion – Scott Stewart (2010)

This movie has an enormous caveat and I’ll just give it to you up front. If you are not a horror movie fan, you will hate this movie.

Most horror/action movie fans will probably not like this movie.

However, if you’re a devoted horror buff who would rather watch a horror movie – any horror movie – than anything else, “Legion” is not a horrible waste of your time. If you love the genre, there are enough fun moments to justify the 90 minutes of life you’ll spend on it.

Take every zombie you’ve ever seen that pits a small, spunky group of survivors holed up in a big house, church, diner, etc. then replace zombie infection with demon possession. Then steal a plot twist from 1995’s “The Prophecy,” and write the worst dialogue known to man. Now, you have “Legion.”

“Legion” opens with an entertaining little sequence where a fallen angel meets, a couple of racist, then possessed, then dead cops. That’s followed by an ominous warning from some unidentified entity. It would have been nice if it was frightening, but we’ll have to settle for amusing.

Predictably, we are taken to a town that, if you’ve ever seen a horror movie in your life, we know is doomed. The name of the town is “Paradise Falls” and that is about as subtle as the film gets.

One pleasant surprise was that at one point, the truck stop’s jukebox plays, “I Just Don’t Understand” by Ann Margaret. I thought I was the only fan of that song.

As the first act starts, we meet our usual cast of characters that we know will be stuck together in the truck stop for the duration of the film.

There’s the spunky, pregnant soon-to-be single mother and the schmuck who follows her around like a puppy, nobly devoted to her even though she’s carrying another man’s child and won’t give him the time of day.

Then there’s the bickering middle-aged couple and their smart-alek teen. Of course, we’re given the troubled young man who’s running from his own personal demons, We have the truck stop owner whose life is a miserable failure because, well, he’s a truck stop owner.

And then there’s a fry-cook.

The siege begins with a crazy old lady who turns out to be possessed. I’m sure you’re familiar with the trailer. “Legion” is probably best known as ‘that movie that has the freaky old woman climbing on the ceiling.’

This sequence is admittedly entertaining. And there are a few more amusing scenes, one of which involves one of our doomed battalion being crucified upside-down and having his blood replaced with acid-pus.
And the action sequences when the truck-stop is under siege are fun enough to watch.

But at the end of the day, “Legion” plays out like a traditional zombie movie with a twist.

Aside from my theory that someone thought seeing an old woman crawling up the ceiling would lure horror fans into a movie theater, I can’t think of a single reason why this film didn’t go straight to DVD.

TheTop10Blog

The list of movies that make you root for the bad guys is now on thetop10blog.com.

Aside from the obvious good taste they have, as indicated by putting out a Resident Film Snob list, the blog is quite fun to just click around on.

Hell, everyone loves lists, right?

Top Ten Movies that Had Me Rooting for the Bad Guys!

10) The Killing – Stanley Kubrick (1956) - Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay is the ultimate badass. He’s tall, tubby and middle-aged, but who cares? He’s the smartest, toughest guy in the room. Seeing the cops get their man in this movie is just heartbreaking.

9) Reservoir Dogs – Quentin Tarantino (1992) – The only things I wanted when I saw this film was for Mr. Orange to pull through and for Mr. Pink & Mr. White to find a way to get out of this mess with their hard-earned bag of diamonds. Mr. Blonde, Joe and Nice Guy Eddie, who really cares about them? I just like to tell myself Mr. Pink, in all the shouting and gunshots we hear at the end, managed to blast his way through the cops and get away. Probably not, but still.

8) 2,000 Maniacs – Herschell Gordon Lewis (1964) – They’re sadistic, they’re evil and they’re southern, but they are just so damn happy to be killing people, you just want to laugh along with their sick glee. And they dispatch our heroes in such inventive ways, too! (The remake is also more than worth checking out.)

7) Serial Mom – John Waters (1994) – Come on, she’s just a protective mother. Somebody hurts her little girl, so she impales him with a fireplace poker and removes his liver. It’s more than fair. Besides, how can you not love a woman who makes prank calls with such a dirty mouth? If only she had gotten her hands on Suzanne Somers in the end.

6) Heavenly Creatures – Peter Jackson (1994) – The first two acts of this movie achieve such a sense of wonder and create such a believable bond between these two girls that even when they turn to murder, we don’t want them split up.

5) Deconstructing Harry – Woody Allen (1997) – This one is an unusual choice. Horror movie villain? No. Bad guy? The worst kind. Everything Harry Block touches turns sour. He’s a horrible person and he admits it freely. But every time someone yells at him or calls him on his awful, selfish behavior, I kind of want them to back off the poor guy. We’re alone in the universe, are you going to blame that on him, too?

4) Scream – Wes Craven (1997) – Officially, I don’t really think of this as a good movie and Skeet is just awful. But tell me the first time you saw this movie, you didn’t want Matthew Lillard’s bug-eyed freakazoid to win the day. I actually left the theater pissed off because the good guys won.

3) Sin City - Robert Rodriguez (2005) – Hell, there aren’t any good guys to root for here. Especially Marv. He’s one of the most brutal thugs in film history, but he has a moral code of his own. If you end up on the wrong side of his fist, you probably have it coming. “I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad.” The man loves inflicting pain, but he knows the difference between right and wrong and that just makes you want to give the giant ugly son-of-a-bitch a cuddle.

2) Arsenic and Old Lace – Frank Capra (1944) – Two compassionate old ladies euthanizing strangers, offering the ultimate cure for their loneliness. I have seen this movie countless times and laugh my ass off every time I watch it. You adore the two balls-out insane old women with Teddy Roosevelt burying ‘yellow fever’ victims.

1) The Devil’s Rejects – Rob Zombie (2005) – From the moment Baby Firefly says, “I love you, mama,” as their house is under siege to the end when she’s firing her gun wildly, determined to take as many cops with her as possible, you just can’t hold anything against this girl. Her giggle is just so infectious. She could kill everyone you love and then turn to you and laugh and just make your heart melt. And that’s not the only thing she does with that mouth.

Hamlet - Gregory Doran (2009)

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Hamlet” features David Tennant as the insane Prince of Denmark, Patrick Stewart as the villainous Claudius and Brit Mariah Gale as the tragically doomed love, Ophelia.

Tennant is best known as The 10th Doctor from “Doctor Who.” Fans of the series, including this film-snob, consider him to be the finest Doctor in the sci-fi series’ history.

Patrick Stewart is famous as Jean-Luc Picard from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and more recently as Professor Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” film franchise. Mariah Gale is a newcomer, but already has an impressive pedigree on British television including roles in adaptations of “Oliver Twist” and “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

I am officially declaring this to be the definitive adaptation of Shakespeare’s famed tragedy.

Olivier’s Oscar-winning 1948 version is the version many cinematic purists will point to as the standard, but the film feels staged and Olivier is too stoic as the grief-mad and revenge-driven Hamlet to have much of an impact.

Then we have Zeffirelli’s 1990 adaptation starring Mel Gibson as Hamlet. It’s a good film, but Gibson overplays the craziness in the Danish Prince. I wonder if Gibson was just practicing for how he was going to behave a decade or so later when the actor lost his mind entirely.

As for Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 version, the less said, the better.

On to Tuesday’s release of The Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation, first aired on BBC and now to be available on this side of the pond.

This adaptation of “Hamlet” is directed by Gregory Doran who also directed Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001. I would not have expected a modernized version of the play, in which the palace is a modern mansion, security cameras play a pivotal role in the eavesdropping sequences and handguns are substituted for swords to be so faithful to the spirit of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Then again, it should come as no surprise that the RSC understands the story, characters, language and above all the humor of “Hamlet.”

When Claudius makes his incredibly tasteless joke about “dearth in marriage and mirth in funeral,” the RSC understand this is not just one line in a king’s long-winded speech, but an incredibly tasteless, albeit clever, remark. And the actors have such a strong handle on Shakespearean language that it sounds natural, conversational even coming from them. Even lines like, “with such dexterity to incestuous sheets” are delivered in a way that makes their way of speaking feel organic.

The play written and produced by Hamlet to “catch the conscience of the king” is actually a pretty hilarious sequence.

There is such humor in “Hamlet” that most others have missed. This adaptation actually had me laughing out loud several times.

Every supporting performance is wonderful. Mariah Gale is sympathetic and tender, then wonderfully mad as Ophelia, as if she’s trying to match Hamlet’s craziness.

Oliver Ford Davies, you might know him as Governor Sio Bibble of Naboo, exposes Polonius for who he is: a tiresome old man who refuses to stop talking until you just wish you were dead.

And Patrick Stewart makes a formidable Claudius.

But the real treat here, what makes this adaptation worth running out and buying as soon as it hits the shelves is David Tennant’s turn as Hamlet.

His performance is subdued, manic, sulking, frightening, violent and hilarious by turns. He captures each state of Hamlet’s mind perfectly.

There are moments where his madness is nothing short of gleeful, as if Hamlet knows full well that he is losing his mind and he kind of likes it.

An idea that could easily have gone south was to have Hamlet deliver many of his monologues while looking into the camera.

We don’t feel like we’re watching Shakespeare. We are watching a grieving, bitter, angry, self-pitying and vengeful lunatic ranting and taking us into his confidence. It’s incredibly intimate.

This same technique is used a few times with other characters, Polonius in particular, with no success at all.

When anyone except Hamlet talks to the camera, it comes off as distracting and irritating, even though I do understand what Doran was going for.

But happily, those moments are very few and it’s a small complaint compared to watching sequences like Hamlet cradling poor Yorick’s skull, remembering what childhood was like when there was someone whose purpose it was to bring him joy.

Or his “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

Or his reaction to Claudius’ demands that he tell him where he has stashed Polonius’ body.

Or, my favorite moment, when he merrily calls out, “Goodnight, mother!” as he drags Polonius’ corpse by its feet out of her bedroom.

Bottom line is that David Tennant is the finest Hamlet I have ever seen, on screen or on stage.

He’s even a better Hamlet than the one I envision in my head when I read the play for myself.

Remembering the best horror movie quotes

Okay, I've gone national a couple of times now. So I officially rule.

You don't have to bow down before me, but I will be kinder to you if you do.

Remembering the best horror movie quotes

The [Pookie] Master - Parody of "Sound of the Drums" Gas Mask Scene

I'm sorry, but the most terrifying Master ever is also the most adorable.