Really Awful Movies

You always remember your first.

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the horror movie gateway drug for this author, age 11 or so, on a Halloween night long ago, chopped to bits on Buffalo’s Fox affiliate WUTV yet still retaining its indelible impact. Sure, frights had come before (Dr Who’s creepy score, those saltshaker Daleks, and Christopher Plummer skulking about London’s East End hunting for Jack the Ripper) but this film was intentionally sought out for its scares, by a kid looking to earn his stripes in what’s become a lifelong obsession — horror.

Night was the perfect cinema accompaniment to the perverse joys found earlier within the pages of HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King (if your childhood differed, you really missed out).

The film was the ideal portal to transcendent frights— violent, but not excessively so (but just enough to leave you wanting more), black and white to tame the terrors ever so slightly for someone that young, and a confounding message that resonated, even though one didn’t exactly know why.

Romero’s canonical Dead movies can be ordered and re-ordered every which way, with as many unresolvable (and correct) arguments as to which is best and why. They’re the stuff of bar night arguments, worthy of any GOAT sports parley. They can be endlessly watched and re-watched without losing one iota of impact, and there’s not many films like that, especially in horror.

Creepshow, though flawed, was a rite of passage for many…The Crazies, since eclipsed by far better exemplars, nonetheless instilled a love of bio-hazard films. And for a guy who is best known for giving zombies their due, George Romero’s Martin is one of the Top 3 vampire films ever.

Most directors’ creative output diminishes over time. And his was no exception. But without Romero’s efforts, horror films would’ve likely continued to get the short shrift, critically speaking.

To paraphrase Stephen King re: Night of the Living Dead, George Romero “play[ed] a number of instruments, and he play[ed] them like a virtuoso.”

RIP sir, and thank you for all you’ve done. We owe you so, so much.

Once again, we turn to The Simpsons here, as in one episode Springfield’s resident hippie tells Principal Skinner to SIMPLIFY, MAN! That’s essentially the thrust of Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, a minimalist documentary that maximizes lifestyle hectoring.

Two ex-Wall Street types travel the country positing that people would be happier with a few cherished possessions instead of an overabundance of indistinguishable things.

That’s called being poor. We’ve known about that for a long time. Thanks.

Of course, being choosy and thrifty isn’t second nature to people; our creepily hug-obsessed hosts, Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Millburn, who made in a month what the authors of this site do in a year, so the fact that such a concept would be revelatory to them, says more about the guys than it does about us.

Minimalism: The Movie, is basically Minimalism: The Book Tour dragged out over a 90-minute run-time, with Ryan and Joshua touting the benefits of a lean lifestyle to some of the most well-heeled people imaginable (“NPR listeners, now these are our people.”).

One of the touchstones of this minimalism movement is your typical Road to Damascus moment, wherein people claim they were unhappy, threw away their stuff, and became much happier. You hear the same a posteriori reasoning about yoga, gluten-free diets, meditation, etc, etc. But the happiness-stuff-arrow can go the other way too, and the Really Awful Movies team is reluctant to part with any of its hundreds of Blu-rays/DVDs (naturally, an over-abundance of books isn’t cited as a bad thing by the doc hosts-cum-authors).

Talking heads (a couple of neuro-scientists including Sam Harris and a few sociologists) pontificate loftily about the nature of happiness and how the masses fill the void with consumer goods, absent anyone from the faith community (there’s a slew of evidence to suggest people of faith are happier than the rest of us, which is a pretty big oversight).

Ironically, the minimalism movement has brought us a veritable cottage industry of books: The Joy of Less, Goodbye Things, Stuffocation…it’s odd that you’d need a book to tell you what most people — save for tiny percentage of aggressive Black Friday rubes — already know: live within your means.

And yes, it’s easier said than done. But it’s easier done, when you have amassed a small fortune already, and are hawking a message to a receptive audience with time/$$ to spare.

** (out of 5)