Mother of Tears

Father and daughter reunion as Asia Argento stars in her father's Mother of Tears (Myriad Pictures)

I fell in love with Dario Argento when I was17 I saw Suspiria. It scared the crap out of me and sent my friend running for the exit. None of his films since then have been able to duplicate the impressive jolt - like riding a rollercoaster and feeling like the tracks have suddenly disappeared and you're free falling - of seeing Suspiria for the first time. But I have found something to enjoy in each of his films. Now using the word "enjoy" to describe a Dario Argento "spaghetti horror" film is likely to offend some people who find his films excessively gory and sadistic. But Argento is a horror master who's made an art out of terrifying audiences. Suspiria, made in 1977, was the first of what would turn out to be a long gestating supernatural trilogy he called the Three Mothers. The second film was Inferno (1980), set in New York, and this year he delivers the finale, Mother of Tears (opening June 27 at Landmark's Ken Cinema), set in Rome. (You can listen to the KPBS Film Club for our discussion of the film.)

Doomsday

Sol interrogates his prisoner in Doomsday (Rogue Pictures)

Doomsday (opening March 14 throughout San Diego) is an action film Molotov cocktail that mixes one part 28 Days Later (virus and infected people); one part Escape from New York (undesirables isolated in a walled community with an outsider sent in); and one part Road Warrior (car stunts and punked out characters). Now with an explosive combo like that, I don't understand why Rogue Pictures was so reluctant to screen the film for the press. Such an action film is essentially critic proof - people who want action will go no matter what -- but if the film can snag some positive reviews, it might be able to broaden its demographic. Plus in the case of Doomsday, the film had Neil Marshall at the helm, the savvy filmmaker behind The Descent and Dog Soldiers. So all in all this was a film I was looking forward to and I felt cheated that the studio refused to screen it in advance.

The Signal

Do you have the crazy? That's the question The Signal asks. (Magnolia Pictures)

Calling TV a wasteland is old news. But suggesting that our televisions -- and also cell phones and radios -- could be the means by which people are transformed into homicidal maniacs, well that's a bit fresher. The Signal (opened on February 22 throughout San Diego) serves up a triptych of horror, with each segment helmed by a different filmmaker.

The Signal opens like a 70s low budget grindhouse picture, something American International could have produced. An obviously deranged killer brutalizes women on the screen. Is this the movie we've paid to see? At first we're not sure but then the image distorts and eventually degrades into mere noise on the screen, and we realize we were watching an image on a TV. We find ourselves in a dark, claustrophobic bedroom where the TV has gone on the fritz. We also discover a pair of young lovers in the room. It makes you wonder, though, was the slasher film meant to fuel their passion or was it just something that came on late at night without them noticing? It doesn't seem the type of thing either Ben (Justin Welborn) or Mya (Anessa Ramsey) would be interested in, so it makes you wonder if it was on for some other reason (more on that later). The apartment belongs to Ben and he's having an affair with Mya. He keeps trying to convince Mya to leave her husband Lewis (A.J. Bowen) but to no avail. She insists that she has to return to Lewis, or there might be bad consequences. She even tries to call Lewis from Ben's apartment to warn him that she'll be home late. But the phones, like the TV, don't work and are just transmitting some kind of static noise.

Teen Critics on Diary of the Dead

I want to introduce you to something new here on the Movie Blog -- Teen Critics. That's right, I will be working with a group of students taking a Film and Lit class at Mount Miguel High School, and having them post reviews on a regular basis. I'm very excited about this opportunity for a number of reasons. First of all, I think these are a great group of students and I enjoy hearing their opinions. Plus, those opinions come from a very different place than my own and that makes for a livlier discussion. Second, I have always felt that the great thing about public broadcasting is the diversity of voices, and hearing from a younger generation about the pop entertainment that they consume so ravenously is a point of view that's worth checking out. And finally, I feel that the best thing we can do for the next generation of filmgoers is to get them thinking critically about what they see. So I hope that writing these reviews will help this group of students learn to view film more critically, and that by example they may encourage others their age to look at film from a more thougtful perspective. That being said, this is not going to be a dry academic exercise. This is all about movies so there's definitely room for fun. For out first Teen Critics outing, I took them to see George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (playing exclusively at AMC Palm Promenade Theaters). So here for the first time -- drum roll please -- are the Teen Critics sounding off on the undead. I am including five reviews here, and short bios of the students participating. In the future, each reviewer will post his or her review separately. And just to prove that I haven't tried to influence their opinions, you will notice that a few of them disagree with my own reaction to Romero's latest zombie outing. I hope you will both enjoy their perspectives and encourage their efforts.

George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead

The dead are coming back to life... again. Diary of the Dead (The Weinstein Company)

Let me be upfront about this – I love zombie movies. I don’t know what it is about the lumbering undead that I find so endearing but they definitely charm me. And George A. Romero is THE master of zombie horror, having essentially created the genre with his 1968 black and white film, Night of the Living Dead. (There were some zombies before Romero but he defined them as we know them today, and anyone who saw him at his panel at last year's Comic-Con should be convinced of his master status in the horror genre.) This year, the 67-year-old Romero delivers his fifth zombie film, Diary of the Dead  (opening February 15 exclusively at the AMC Palm Promenade Theaters), so run, don’t “shamble,” over to catch the undead’s latest uprising.

The great thing about Romero’s zombies films is that you can enjoy them in any of a number of ways. If you just want a zombie gorefest, he delivers a bloody thrill ride of horror fun. But his films can also be appreciated as truly independent filmmaking in which Romero has complete control of everything; his films serve up primers on how to make a film on little or no money outside Hollywood. And finally, if you want something a little meatier, you can always find social commentary mixed in with all the blood and gore. Romero’s latest, Diary of the Dead, satisfies on all three levels.

George A. Romero Interview

George A. Romero reanimates the zombie genre with Diary of the Dead (Weinstein Company)

When George A. Romero made The Night of the Living Dead in 1968, he essentially invented a genre. But potential distributors were not initially impressed. In fact, they asked him to change the film's bleak ending. But he simply said, “F--k you.” That pretty much set the tone for Romero's relationship with the mainstream film industry. Like John Waters, he's a filmmaker who has remained outside the industry (Pittsburgh for Romero and Baltimore for Waters) making the films he wants. This year he delivers the much-anticipated zombie outing, Diary of the Dead (opening exclusively at the Palm Promenade Theaters).

“It's not a continuation, it's not sort of a fifth film in the series,” Romero explains, “It goes back to the first night when the dead are coming back. I sort of felt that I had gone far enough with Land of the Dead, and I was ready to get off of that train… There was a collection of short stories, actually two volumes, called Book of the Dead, and they were all stories about what happened on that first night. I came to realize that I could sort of keep doing stories about different people over those first two or three nights.”

Cloverfield

Cloverfield: Can it live up to its hype? (Paramount)

When Transformers opened last July 3 it was almost overshadowed by the trailer that proceeded it. The trailer boasted no title, just the release date of 01-18-08 and some shaky, handheld camera shots that included the head of the Statue of Liberty rolling down a Manhattan street. Since the film being touted came from J. J. Abrams (creator of Alias and Lost), it created a massive buzz. Abrams wouldn't even reveal the film's title at the Comic-Con later that July. There was a teaser poster unveiled that showed the Statue of Liberty without a head and a wake in the water heading to New York that implied a big creature. All Abrams would fess up to at the pop culture con-fab was the fact that while promoting Mission Impossible III in Japan, he and his son came across a store with shelf after shelf of Godzilla toys. That's when he realized that the U.S. needed a monster movie like that. I love King Kong, he confessed at his Comic-Con panel, he's adorable, but I wanted something that was just insane.

Abrams did get something insane. Insane viral marketing for his film months before it even came out. Wild speculation ran rampant on the Internet, people proposed that it was a new Godzilla movie, an H.P.Lovercraft creature, even Voltron! Rumors spread about the title, the story, everything. Not until late October did Abrams confirm that the title was Cloverfield (opening January 18 throughout San Diego), but his refusal to provide any additional information about the film, and specifically about the monster, just kept the Internet a buzz.

I am Legend

Will Smith in I am Legend (Warner Brothers)

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I am Legend has already inspired two prominent movies, The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971) with Charleton Heston. It's also influenced others including Night of the Living Dead and more recently 28 Days Later. Now music video director Francis Lawrence brings a mega-budgeted version of I am Legend (opening December 14 throughout San Diego) to the screen with Will Smith as the last man on earth... sort of.

I am Legend opens with a news report in which a doctor (Emma Thompson) discusses her recently found cure for cancer. An amazing breakthrough for science, yet you wonder why she doesn't seem happier. Maybe it's because the cure involves mutating a virus. Cut to three years later. New York City is desolate and overgrown with vegetation. Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) appears to be the last man on earth. But he's not exactly alone. There are hordes of infected people (in the book they were essentially vampires) who come out at night to hunt. So Neville spends his days foraging for supplies and his nights holed up in his fortress of an apartment. Neville is also working diligently on finding a cure for what this mutated virus is doing. He also won't give up hope for finding other survivors somewhere in the world.

28 Weeks Later

Robert Carlyle in 28 Weeks Later (Fox Atomic)

When 28 Days Later opened in 2003 it reinvigorated the zombie horror film. There hadn't been any good, serious entries in the genre for years and it burst on the scene as fresh and gory. But 28 Weeks Later (opening May 11 throughout San Diego), the film's sequel, faces more competition as it arrives on the heels of Shaun of the Dead, Goerge Romero's Land of the Dead, the remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror half of Grindhouse.

Technically, 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later are not zombie films. Like Robert Rodriguez' film, they are about infected people rather than undead or reanimated cadavers. That may be a fine point of distinction to most moviegoers but it's important to fans of the zombie genre. The distinction also changes the nature of the horror, moving it from the realm of the supernatural or unexplained to a much more terrifying real world kind of apocalypse.

Shaun of the Dead/Interview with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead (Rogue Pictures)

The new British import film, Shaun of the Dead (opening September 23), sounds like something that was thought up in a pub after one too many pints. But the surprise of this self-described romantic comedy with zombies (that's a zom-rom-com) is that it's a clever homage to George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead. I spoke with Shaun's creators at the San Diego Comic-Con.