Really Awful Movies

Canuxploitation (rightly) called it “an unheralded landmark of Canadian B-film.” Now it’s time to sound the trumpets for Siege, aka Self Defense.

In an experience soon to be lost to the passage of time, this title was selected in an actual bona fide bricks and mortar video store. And in its URBAN SCUM section. Having movies curated for you by people whose knowledge eclipses yours is invaluable, regardless of your age. It works for albums and older brothers/sisters too.

The urban scum sub-genre is one of our favorites. Both this site’s authors have been mugged in Toronto the Good (separately, or else we would’ve inflicted a beating on our assailants worse than the punishment doled out by Paul Kersey to the interchangeable parade of mulleted goons in Death Wish III). And there’s something about the grimy streets and urban decay that is just plum for action settings.

Siege, while it does show a street sweeping machine going about its business, doesn’t pretty up the urban filth. Here, the setting is unusual — Halifax, Nova Scotia — and a police strike that has paralyzed the downtown, apparently based on an actual circumstance the municipality faced. And this pretty Maritime city has never looked so rundown.

The New Order, a frightening fascist organization as befits its name, is seizing upon the opportunity to rid the city of undesirables, menacing a gay nightclub and massacring its occupants with pillows and silencers. One of the bar’s patrons sneaks out a washroom, taking refuge at a nearby apartment whose occupants include a couple, and their friends, including two visually-impaired students under their care.

The gang set up a stakeout around the perimeter and this veers into extremely tense Assault on Precinct 13 territory, although accounting for a lack of first responders by a neat police job action conceit here, better than Carpenter’s contrivance of a power outage preventing calls to LAPD for backup.

In Siege, police personnel fail to answer 911 calls, and even the most serious of these is passed along a bureaucratic phone chain that leads nowhere.

When one of their own is gunned down in cold blood on their front stoop, the apartment dwellers, including a neighbor whose unit attaches to theirs, arm themselves with a rifle, a bow, and anything at their disposal, seemingly over-matched by their well-trained, well-armed and determined antagonists.

This is some terse, action-packed Canadiana.

***1/2 (out of 5)

Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard lumbered its way onto our list of the worst horror movies of 2015…and what with the choruses of vitriol this thing received, we certainly weren’t belting out our disapproval a cappella.

Were we wrong?

If you’ll excuse the extended, battered, bloodied metaphor, no piece of art can stand on its own, and luckily for Zombie Killers it was a cohesive song (if no toe-tapper) when compared with the one note blown by the likes of “worst” nominees Sharknado 3 and Ebola Zombies.

This one was a borderline inclusion in our list at the time because of its attempt to upturn the apple cart when it came to the typically rotten zombie genre.

So…Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard gets a revisit, whereas the other two will only be watched under extreme prejudice and/or duress. Besides, director Harrison Smith is a real mensch, and we’re excited about Death House, just like nearly every other gorehound on earth.

What was initially off-putting about this film was the front-end loading of voice-over. At the best of time, this device is a grind, so when we first encountered Zombie Killers (henceforth ZK), that’s what stood out — and given how many zombie movies we’d seen during that stretch of reviews and how sorta stale the genre had become, the entire visual spectrum blended into one muddy unmemorable whole. So…that movie…the one with the voice-over…was the one that got the beat-down.

In ZK, a militia who train with paint-ball equipment during zombie killing downtime are resigned to cope with their fate as members of their ranks, holed up in a slapdash “town,” become infected.

They care for the sick, then occasionally “evict” some of their elderly residents, a bit like how members of that cohort are shunted off to long-term care facilities. ZK really plays up the drama about who’s doomed to die. It’s an interesting conceit, glossed over upon first viewing. Sure, other zombie / contagion flicks deal with this too, but not with this kind of grim practicality and pathos.

There are also interesting discussions about the whys of making these “evictions” public, a definite nod to the death penalty and among the more interesting bits of chatter overlooked.

The ad hoc town is at the mercy of the GP, “Doc,” whose equipment and breadth of knowledge cannot even begin to deal with the public health emergency residents of Elwood have to deal with.

The barbarian hordes are at the gates, and ZK meta-references films of its type: “They’re walking like movie zombies,” etc. It’s a conceit we still feel detracts from the drama.

So is Zombie Killers among the worst films of 2015? No. It’s got a few neat ideas, marred by pacing issues and lack of bona fide scares (with a few exceptions). Two and three quarters to be perfectly accurate.

*** (out of 5)