Army of the Dead (2021)

May 24, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Zack Snyder’s big-scale, loud, macho zombies-in-Vegas popcorn flick has hit Netflix, so here are my thoughts concerning this zombie/heist/father-daughter-reunion movie…

(SPOILERS ahead)

There was stuff I liked about ARMY OF THE DEAD and stuff that I didn’t, so let’s begin with what I liked:

PROS

The ‘world’ of the movie is great: the wrecked vistas of a zombie-infested Las Vegas provide lots of opportunities for eye-candy views of damaged buildings and toppled casino signs.

smashed-up Las Vegas — The smashed-up Vegas location is cool

Matthias Schweighöfer provides a humorous counterpoint to the tough, posturing mercs as the out-of-his-depth German safecracker Dieter.

Dieter in action — Dieter was my favourite character

The semi-rotted Siegfried & Roy zombie white tiger is a novel visual touch.

The nuking scene at the end was okay because, well, a nuke going off in a movie is almost always a cool moment!

CONS

Dave Bautista is brilliant in the right role, such as Drax in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, but here he doesn’t seem to have the acting chops to handle the scenes where his daughter hits him with the ‘you-weren’t-there-for-me’ accusations.

Talking of which, I found all the ’emotional’ father-daughter scenes somewhat forced.

The hero chats with his daughter — “You weren’t there for me, dad…” etc, etc

Omari Hardwick’s character is shown using a cool circular saw as a weapon to kill zombies during the opening credits. This saw is highlighted several times as one of the tools being taken on the heist… and yet Hardwick NEVER gets to use it on the zombies later in the story. Let-down!

Circular saw vs zombie — The saw should’ve been used like this during the heist!

The Alpha Zombies. Okay, for me, zombies should NOT leap around the place like a modern dance troupe! I definitely don’t think a lead zombie should wear a cape & metal mask, roar like a dinosaur, show feelings, ride a zombie horse and be able to reproduce with lady zombies! These Alpha Zombies stop being undead zombies and pretty much act more like something akin to the possessed humans in GHOSTS OF MARS (2001).

Zombie guy on a zombie horse — An undead dude on an undead horse

Why does Snyder keep shooting stuff out of focus in this film? He does this loads of times! At first I thought he was trying to indicate that one of the characters was losing their eyesight.

When it is revealed that the ACTUAL reason for the incursion into the walled-off zone was to acquire blood from an Alpha Zombie (which could be used for some kind of weaponised zombie military program), I just couldn’t help thinking there MUST have been a less convoluted way of getting access to an Alpha Zombie.

The 'queen' zombie is decapitated — Off with her head

I know this might come across as a bit petty, but I thought the actress playing the Alpha Zombie queen REALLY overacted – all of the time!

The queen Alpha Zombie — The ever-posturing Alpha Zombie queen

So, I guess there were more elements I didn’t like than stuff that I did. It’s a shame, but there are too many things that bugged me, including all the stupid decisions characters make in the movie, presumably so Snyder can move it in the direction he wanted.

The scenes showing the military fighting hordes of zombies in Vegas during the credits were so good I felt that a heist story was kind of a letdown in comparison. It would’ve been great to have seen those battles, which are just hinted at in the credits, where we see a poor paratrooper floating down into a sea of undead, the main Las Vegas drag getting napalmed, etc.

Big-scale battle action during the credits

A paratrooper drops into mass of zombies (also in the credits)

If you like larger-than-life, computer game-like movies with muscled dudes firing off automatic weapons, this could well be the movie for you.

Hey, wrecked Vegas looked cool, whatever you think of the rest of the movie…

Island of Terror (1966)

May 23, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

A silicate approaches — It wants to suck out your bones!

Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) and Dr David West (Edward Judd), along with his new girlfriend Toni Merrill (Carole Gray), travel to an island off the coast of Ireland to look into the case of a dead local man… who has been discovered with no bones in his body.

With the help of local doctor Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne), they find out that a group of researchers, seeking a cure for cancer in a secluded laboratory on the island, have accidentally created creatures that absorb all the bones from their victims.

The researchers fall victim to their own experiment

As the island becomes infested by these ‘silicates’, the protagonists must try to discover a way to stop these starfish-blob-like creatures, which have hardened, knobbly skin carapaces and a single, central tentacle that they use to inject bone-dissolving enzymes into their victims.

A silicate — These critters are a favourite of mine

Axes, shotguns, petrol bombs and dynamite have no effect on these slow, slithering critters, but Stanley and West come up with a solution that involves poisoning the silicates with Strontium-90. As the islanders gather together in a building, with the monsters crawling all over it, the heroes wait to see if their plan will actually work…

A silcate — Another shot of a silicate because, well, why not?

I like this flick quite a bit!

The silicates make a very distinctive sound (I’m a sucker for creatures that make peculiar noises, such as the ants in THEM!), which imbues the scenes with a certain creepiness and adds tension too, because once you hear the sound you know a silicate is nearby!
Barry Gray, who did the scores for Gerry Anderson productions like STINGRAY, UFO, THUNDERBIRDS, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN and SPACE: 1999, provided the electronic sound effects.

A solicsate tentacle reaches out... — Don’t let the tentacle touch you!

The silicates are very slow moving, which I actually like, because – as with un-speedy Romero zombies – I think more anxiety is created when the heroes should be able to keep out of reach of the creatures but you just KNOW the critters are still going to sneak up on them somehow.

The local policeman becomes the next victim

The silicates have an unusual way of multiplying, which involves each creature splitting into two every six hours or so. This adds a ticking clock element to the plot, as the protagonists need to deal with this threat before the silicates exponentially grow in number until there’s a million of them. A couple of the creatures are shown subdividing, which calls for the production of milky goo and what looks like tinned spaghetti!

This scene probably put some people off spaghetti for good!

Cushing, Judd and the rest of the cast, including Niall MacGinnis, treat their roles seriously, in a plot that is like a Hammer Films-style horror yarn mixed with a 1950s-era scientists-versus-an-experiment-gone-wrong story.

During the finale, with the besieged islanders seemingly doomed to be overwhelmed by the silicates, there’s a moment where Judd and Cushing decide that it’s best for Carole Gray’s character to be given a lethal injection, rather than risk death-by-silicate. Judd doesn’t inject her at the last moment, because the creatures start to die from radiation poisoning, but it was pretty presumptuous of him to decide to kill her without her consent!

An islander falls victim to the silicate — Gotcha!

Director Terence Fisher made another blob-monsters-on-an-island movie for Planet Film Productions, called NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT (known as ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED in the US). But ISLAND OF TERROR is the better film, with such fun moments as a silicate dropping onto an islander from a tree and some brief shots of rubbery, boneless victims, plus there’s a little bit of gore, as Edward Judd is forced to chop off Peter Cushing’s hand before a silicate can digest his bones.

Peter Cushing is grabbed by tentacle — Cushing gets nabbed by a tentacle…

Peter Cushing has his hand cut off! — …so his hand has to be chopped off!

To finish, here are a bunch of posters, some of which misleadingly suggest the movie will feature female nudity!

The Bone Snatcher (2003)

May 21, 2021 Ken Miller 2 Comments

The creature seen through a rifle scope — What is this thing?!

A search team looking for missing geologists in an African desert encounter a swarm of black particles/creatures that eat the flesh off victims and then wrap around the bones to become ambulatory monsters.

Ignore this poster: the creature is not a swarm of ants

The team discovers flesh-stripped corpses

The team starts getting picked off by these things and they eventually have a showdown in an abandoned mine, where it is discovered that the black swarm is controlled by a balloon-sized, egg/cocoon-like hive-mind kind of thing.

The black mass of 'particles' — The black mass of ‘particles’

Consumed by black stuff in his sleeping bag!

A victim gets his arm eaten by the swarm

Director Jason Wulfsohn’s film isn’t perfect, with rather forced tension amongst the characters, resulting in an overabundance of bickering. However, there is stuff to like too. The cinematography, aided by the desert location, is decent and the acting’s okay, with Warrick Grier standing out for me as Karl: the gung ho, trigger-happy member of the team.

Warrick Grier plays Karl — Warrick Grier plays gun-toting Karl

The film remains watchable mainly because of the creatures, which look pretty good: a mix of flowing black particles and pieces of skeletons or body parts (such as a victim’s face, or a fleshless skull, etc). If a creature gets shot it simply reverts back to a mass of particles and seeps back into the desert, leaving the gnawed bones behind that it had been using as its own temporary skeleton. These creatures really should have had more screen time. Shame.

One of the creatures just before it is shot

A memorable moment occurs when one of these bone snatcher creatures approaches the main characters in the night, wearing the face of one of their friends. It then proceeds to disgorge a squirming mass of black particles from the mouth of its flesh-mask!

It's wearing their team mate's face! — A bone snatcher critter wears their team mate’s face!

Barfing up some more black particles. Nice

I feel the origin of these particle-things would have worked better if it had been some kind of African supernatural force, which was hinted at when the characters encounter a bunch of strange, bug-eyed totems in the desert. The final revelation that the black swarm is controlled by a small, orange blob-sack hive-mind (that can just be stabbed) comes across as rather underwhelming.

So this is the big, bad controller of the creatures?!

Still, the creatures are cool.

Snow in the Desert (2021)

May 20, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Alien bounty hunter — A bounty hunter moves in…

In the Love, Death + Robots season 2 episode SNOW IN THE DESERT, an albino wanderer known as Snow lives on a hot, barren planet and must deal with various bounty hunters who want to kill him so that they can attain a certain part of his anatomy…

His name is Snow and he lives in the desert

Snow, it transpires, has lived hundreds of years: this is due to the fact that he can endlessly regenerate his cells and body parts, thanks to special hormones released in his testicles. This pretty much makes him immortal – and it also means there are people who want to get rich by acquiring his balls to access a never-ending supply of Snow’s unique genetic material. This is why there are always bounty hunters on his case, but now a young woman called Hirald, who works for an advanced AI within Earth’s government, enters Snow’s life…

Hirald has a secret — What is Hirald’s secret?

Based on a short story by Neal Asher and, like a lot of his work, set in a future history known as the ‘Polity’ universe, this Netflix animated short features super-realistic mo-cap characters and impressive vistas, created by 3-D animation studio Unit Image.

Bounty hunters — These bounty hunters have a cool ‘skinned alive’ look!

The action is very brutal and there’s some cool world-building, with the inclusion of various alien races, including a rock-skinned bounty hunter, and some local vulture-like creatures. There’s a nice touch concerning these flying creatures, when we see them cover themselves completely with their leathery wings to endure the desert planet’s hot midday sun.

These reptile-vulture creatures know that the sun is about to rise... — These reptile-vulture creatures know that the sun is about to rise…

The creatures hide from the sun — …so they wrap themselves up in their leathery bat-wings!

On the whole, the short comes across as a taster for what to expect in the Polity universe, but there are some twists and turns in the brief story, as we discover Snow’s abilities and are finally shown Hirald’s true self – and, of course, you get 18 minutes of sci-fi eye candy.

Here are some (spoiler-ific) shots from the story’s finale…

Mexican Lobby Card Madness!

May 19, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Just look at this Mexican lobby card!

What movie could this possibly be for?! The lobby card features what seems to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

And it also includes these weird faces…

…and yet another weird, fanged face and a guy wearing modern scuba gear…

…plus a seal fighting a shark…

…and a B&W inset picture from what seems to be a Japanese film…

Well, it turns out that the film the lobby card is meant to be depicting is the period fantasy CITY UNDER THE SEA (1965)!

Released as WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP in the US, this British-American movie starred Vincent Price, Tab Hunter and David Tomlinson in a tale about a lost city beneath the sea off the Cornish coast in England.

The movie featured some gillmen (who definitely didn’t resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon!), an undersea volcano and a pet chicken. The story centred on the film’s protagonists discovering a group of men living in underground/undersea ruins: these men did not seem to age, thanks to a weird mix of gases in the caverns and subterranean rooms they dwelt in.

Here’s a UK poster…

Here’s a US poster…

And here’s an Australian poster…

But, let’s face it, nothing can compare to this insanely inaccurate lobby card from Mexico!

Ice (2021)

May 18, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Two brothers, called Sedgewick and Fletcher, have recently moved to an ice-covered planet, where they try to fit in with the other youths already living in a grim, industrial factory base.

Fletcher is the cooler of the two brothers and is ‘modded’, whereas Sedgewick is not genetically modified and is looked down upon by the locals.

Even though Fletcher doesn’t think it is a very good idea, Sedgewick tags along with his brother and takes part in a race across ice flows, beneath which massive marine creatures called Frost Whales swim.

Everyone but Sedgewick is modded and they soon begin their dangerous race, which involves keeping ahead of the Frost Whales that always smash into the thick ice seven times before crashing through it to jump skywards.

Towards the end of the icy run Fletcher gets injured, so Sedgwick grabs him and carries him to safety, just as the Frost Whales begin breaching. Sedgewick is now respected by the locals and the group head back to the base after their adventure.

Massive factory vehicles — I love the look of these massive vehicles

ICE is a 13 minute episode from the second season of the Netflix animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS and is an interesting mix of styles.

The characters have a look reminiscent of stylised Jamie (Gorillaz) Hewlett drawings, whilst the machinery trundling around the industrial base has a more realistic feel: these massive oil rig-like contraptions on massive caterpillar tracks look pretty impressive.

The Frost Whales, however, are even more striking visually, as they leap from the ice and are lit by some kind of phosphorescent lighting.

ICE, made by Passion Animation Studios, possesses an okay story, but you’re far more likely to remember the episode because of those majestic breaching alien whales at the culmination of the tale.

All Through the House (2021)

May 16, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

The monster looms closer — This certainly isn’t Santa!

On a snowy Christmas Eve, a young brother and sister quietly sneak downstairs to hopefully get a fleeting glimpse of Santa as he leaves presents under the christmas tree. But they actually discover that ol’ Saint Nick is a grotesque-looking, raw-fleshed, toothy creature!

The creature lurks behind the christmas tree — What’s lurking behind the christmas tree?

ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE is a 7 minute episode from the second season of Netflix’s animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS and it wonderfully mixes cuteness with creepiness.

The creature knows if you've been good... — The creature knows if you’ve been good…

Directed by Elliot Dear, this animated short from Blink Industries first hints that we’re not going to see your typical Mr Clause when a long, prehensile probe-tongue snakes onto the screen to suck up the milk and snatch away the cookies that’ve been left out for hungry Santa!

The tongue-tentacle appears... — The tongue-tentacle appears

The gift-giving creature is a marvellous creation: it has a toothy maw reminiscent of the eyeless, tooth-faced alien from THE DEADLY SPAWN (1983), mixed with some overlong forelegs that make it look a little like the critter in CLOVERFIELD (2008). Actually, this festive beastie also reminds me quite a bit of the large, pink-skinned thing featured in METAMORPHOSIS: THE ALIEN FACTOR (1990). This santa-beast also possesses human-like arms & hands that it uses in an amusing, expressive way!

The weird creature approaches... — The weird creature approaches the kids

Anyway – regardless of exactly which previous movie monsters reminded me of this episode’s cool, novel-looking creature – ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE proves to be a short, sweet, semi-scary treat that reveals how we actually get our presents: a xenomorph-like monster vomits-up the perfectly-wrapped gifts in a stream of saliva!

The creature holds a gift — This is for you…

At the end of the story the creature growls the children’s names as it coughs-up their presents, tells them that they’re good, then crawls up the chimney. Once the beast has gone the sister is left to ask the question: what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been good?

the creature gets close — Close encounter…

The Tall Grass (2021)

May 16, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

Deathly-white creatures attack! — White-fleshed creatures attack!

A passenger (resembling H.P. Lovecraft) leaves his carriage to have a smoke when the train he is travelling on briefly breaks down in a field of tall grass.

Disregarding the train conductor’s request not to wander from the train, the man walks into the prairie and notices strange lights amongst the grass… so he treads further into the field and he finally encounters a white-skinned humanoid creature with a featureless face.

The passenger should've listened to the conductor and not strayed from the train — The passenger should’ve listened to the conductor and not strayed from the train…

The passenger walks into the tall grass... — …but he does walk into the field…

The passenger walks through the prairie — …and he paces further into the long grass…

The passenger encounters one of the creatures... — …and he encounters one of the creatures!

More of these pale-fleshed beings crawl out of the dirt within the field and they chase the passenger through the grass! We now see that the faces of the creatures are not totally featureless: big, gaping mouths full of masses of sharp teeth can be seen as the beings close-in on the terrified passenger.

The man is dragged to the ground and is overwhelmed by the creatures, but the train conductor intervenes, saving him. When both men manage to get back onto the train, which is finally heading away from the prairie, the conductor says that he believes this area of grass is some kind of portal to another world – and these humanoid creatures are transformed people who became lost there in the past.

The creatures close-in... — The creatures close-in

The conductor comes to the rescue — The train conductor comes to the rescue with a flaming torch…

The creatures don't like fire — …because he knows the creatures don’t like fire

A satisfying 11 minute horror short, this episode from season 2 of the Netflix animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS has a unique animation style that I prefer to the more photorealistic animation seen in other episodes in the series.

Based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story of the same name, this is a straightforward, simple but effective tale, made by Axis Animation, that is full of mood, mystery and monsters.

Invincible (2021)

May 15, 2021 Ken Miller Leave a comment

17 year old Mark Grayson is the son of Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero. With Mark’s own superpowers emerging, his father decides it’s time to start training his son, who is given a costume and assumes the name Invincible.

Invincible confronts Machine Head — Invincible confronts a villain called Machine Head

INVINCIBLE is an animated Netflix series based on Robert Kirkman’s comic of the same name. The world of this show is inhabited by the kind of characters you’d also find in Marvel or DC universes (heroes, secret identities, villains, super teams, robots, alien races, monsters, shadowy organisations, etc), but this series handles things rather differently, with fights that are brutal and often deadly, involving characters who are willing to carry out shockingly terrible things they believe to be the right thing to do.

The demise of many characters is not pretty

Just a warning that there are going to be spoilers ahead, though the conclusion of the first episode probably lets you know where the story is heading.

The aforementioned episode 1 ending shows us Omni-Man, this story’s Superman analogue (a ‘good’ being from another planet), wiping out the superhero team Guardians of the Globe in an extremely savage manner. From now on you know this isn’t going to be a typical superhero cartoon.

This never happened in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends!

The series progresses with Mark (who is quite Peter Parker-like) trying to juggle life as a teenager, navigating a world of first dates, etc, whilst also taking on the commitments of a superhero. Various characters, meanwhile, try to discover what part Omni-Man played in the massacre of the Guardians of the Globe. These people include the Hellboy-like demon detective Damien Darkblood, scar-faced Director Cecil Stedman (who oversees the secret Global Defense Agency) and even Omni-Man’s wife, Debbie.

Damien Darkblood is a demon detective — Damien Darkblood has his suspicions…

Omni-Man’s motivation will ultimately be revealed when he announces to his son later in the show that he is ‘guarding’ the Earth to prepare it for invasion by his own people, to make it part of the Viltrumite Empire.

In INVINCIBLE a fight between various powered heroes and villains will always result in injury, and often death, with the villains REALLY wanting to kill their adversaries: there’s no pulling of punches or easy wins.

Gory action — The action gets, let’s just say, pretty gory…

Where most shows and films feature super-powered battles with very little human collateral damage, INVINCIBLE doesn’t shy away from showing what it’d be like if such conflicts erupted in a heavily populated environment. In episode 2, for instance, a race of extra-dimensional aliens called Flaxans enter a city via portals and many bystanders are cut down by lasers or crushed as the invaders launch their attack.

Superheroes in this show can't save everybody — Superheroes in this show can’t save everybody

But definitely the most outrageously pitiless example of this is in the final episode, when Omni-Man shows his son just how little he really thinks of the humans around him by punching Invincible so hard that his son smashes into a Chicago street at such speed loads of civilians are killed. Then Omni-Man follows this up by forcing his son to hover in front of an oncoming tube train, resulting in the bloody deaths of all the passengers, who are smashed apart as the train ploughs into Invincible.

The series’ plotting keeps you guessing about the motivations of different characters (such as Robot), there are great set-pieces and there’s a decent amount of emotional impact too. It’s pretty upsetting for Debbie, for instance, when she watches footage of her superhuman husband telling his son that he regards his wife fondly… like a pet.

As this is the Monster Zone blog, let’s look at some of the monsters, aliens and beings that inhabit the show…

The green-faced alien Flaxans are vicious would-be invaders who age quickly on Earth due to the way time flows in their own dimension.

There’s a cool-looking, tentacle-headed monster that resembles Cthulhu, which the Global Defense Agency send to attack Omni-Man after he’s revealed to be a bad guy.

Titan is a super-powered thug who can coat himself in a golem-like stone outer covering.

Titan: a stone-skinned thug with a secret plan…

Reanimen are cyborgs built from corpses by twisted scientist D.A. Sinclair. They are later mass produced by the Global Defense Agency.

One of Sinclair's savage cyborgs — One of Sinclair’s savage cyborgs

Thokk, the Battle Beast, is an extremely powerful lion-headed being who kicks superhero ass and exits if he feels his adversaries are not worth the effort.

Sequids resemble starfish with external brains and are parasites that Invincible encounters on Mars. These critters, if not kept in check, can rapidly multiply and make whole civilisations their hosts.

The Martians are a race who will do anything to stop the spread of the Sequids, including considering the execution of visiting Earth astronauts.

The muscled, blue-skinned Mauler Twins are not actually twins: one is a brilliant scientist and the other is his clone. The thing is… both of them claim to be the original!

The Mauler Twins are totally ripped and totally blue

INVINCIBLE boasts a great voice cast, including J.K Simmons as Omni-Man, Steven Yuen as Invincible, Sandra Oh as Debbie and Mark Hamill as Art Rosenbaum, a superhero suit tailor.

Check this superhero show out: it’s well-plotted, well-paced, shocking at times and full of interesting characters.

Just in case you need a reminder that this is not a kids show…

Paul Komoda Concept Art

May 14, 2021 Ken Miller 2 Comments

Gan-Q drawing detail — There’s no mistaking Paul’s gorgeous drawing style

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of Paul’s concept work posted online either by himself or featured on various sites. He is a sculptor, fine artist, illustrator, resin kit designer and movie concept artist.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a selection of his concept designs here as I love the look of his illustrations, which very often almost have the feel of classic Leonardo da Vinci drawings.

Enjoy…

Horned wolf concept for Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Unused creature design for Kong: Skull Island (2017) — Unused horned tiger creature design for Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Unused flying creature design for Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Paul’s concepts for the flying creatures in KONG: SKULL ISLAND were pretty otherworldly. It’s a shame these didn’t find their way into the film as they’re very striking.