Anton Sirius fills us in on DAYBREAKERS & SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD!

My review of it isn’t done yet, but I want to say this: A Serious Man is the best Coen Brothers comedy since either Big Lebowski or O Brother Where Art Thou? (depending on your personal preference. Whichever one you thought was funnier, it’s their funniest film since that one.) Let me explain how much I love A Serious Man this way: I got into an industry screening of it Friday morning. As soon as I left the theater I went out and scrounged up a ticket for the official world premiere public screening Saturday night, because I just had to see it with a real audience. That’s right. I’ve already seen the new Coens film TWICE inside of 48 hours, and you haven’t seen it yet at all. Nyah nyah. ****************************************** Daybreakers (2009, directed by the Michael and Peter Spierig) When Toronto lost the Uptown Theatre a few years ago, the final movie to unspool on its screen was a silly little Aussie zombie/sci-fi romp called Undead directed by twins. It was low budget and decently inventive with home-brew effects, the kind of film fest film that's enjoyable but doesn't leave too much of an impression. Hence, my expectations were not exactly through the roof for their follow-up, Daybreakers. I came into the theater figuring I was in for a silly vampire/sci-fi romp with a bigger budget. Instead, what I got was the emergence of two seriously talented filmmakers. The year is 2019. A vampiric plague has swept the Earth, and the vampires have won. While civilization has continued on largely unscathed, there's a major problem with the new world order. As humankind's numbers dwindle, so too does the vampire's blood supply. With shortages reaching crisis levels Edward, the chief hemotologist for a pharmaceutical giant, rushes to find a synthetic blood substitute... until he crosses paths with a ragtag group of free humans, who offer him the possibility of finding a cure, something the powers that be will never allow. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Daybreakers is the extraordinary world the Spierigs have created. Instead of the post-apocalyptic wasteland you might expect, they've instead constructed a future moving in a straight line from the present. Their vampires still go to work (although their 9 to 5 starts twelve hours later), still drive cars (albeit with dayproofing options like heavily blacked-out windows and automated UV level warnings), still order their morning lattes (now with 20% real blood!) And capitalism still rules the day, with blood prices rising higher on the market than even oil or gold. They've also done an great job of incorporating just about every vampire stereotype you can think of into their milieu. Edward (Ethan Hawke) is your brooding romantic, mourning his lost humanity and refusing to drink real human blood. His boss (Sam Neill) is your typical Machiavellian political schemer. And those poor vamps who suffer from blood malnutrition, or start feeding on vampire blood, turn into Nosferatu-like mutated freaks (derogatorily referred to as 'southsiders' in the film, presumably because they congregate in the dark below the subways and Subwalks). Add to that mix some awesome creature effects from WETA, a fantastically over-the-top performance from Willem Dafoe as one of the humans (which is not to say Neill isn't sinking his fangs into the scenery too) and some nice little nods to Die Hard and Star Wars in the final act and you've got yourself one hell of an original, entertaining flick. The Spierigs made a major step forward from Undead with this one. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where they go next. *******************************************************8 Survival of the Dead (2009, directed by George Romero) I should have known it was too good to last. Over the last few years, Romero's career seemed to be on a bit of an upswing. Land of the Dead wasn't great but it at least had some interesting ideas in it, while Diary of the Dead was an effective 'reboot' of the series. 40 years on, it appeared as though Romero still had some new things to say about the walking dead. After watching Survival of the Dead last night, I have to say that no longer appears to be the case. The film is just a flat out mess. The basic premise isn't terrible. It picks up right from the middle of Diary, focusing this time on the AWOL National Guard unit the kids ran into. The idea of a group of trained military personnel gone rogue, trying to survive the chaos, certainly has some appeal as a more action-oriented take on Romero's zombieverse, sort of an Aliens to Diary's Alien. That's not what we get though. Instead we get just four soldiers who stumble into the middle of a generations-old Irish family feud on a small island off the coast of Delaware. One clan patriarch wants to shoot all the zombies on the island in the head. The other wants to keep them around and find a way to train them to eat animals and not humans, because... well, the best they can do for an explanation as to why he wants to keep them around is some half-assed crap about following God's plan. Seriously. That's the plot. It gets worse from there. The script is atrocious. Stupid shit happens for no reason other than an aborted attempt at comic relief with zero logic or follow-up. For instance, there's a scene with a guy on the roof of a shack fishing for zombies. He casts a line, hooks one, pulls it up to the surface then shoots it in the head and rips the hook out. He then casts back again, but accidentally hooks a zombie climbing up the building behind him, and they tumble down the roof into the water. The people in the building apparently notice absolutely nothing - not the zombie climbing the building, and not the gunshot five seconds earlier - until the two bodies fly past the window. The whole film is like that. Characters do stupid shit for no reason, comment on the fact that they are doing stupid shit for no reason ("Wow, I forgot my gun at the cabin when I wandered out into the woods looking for water. That was stupid.") and then do nothing about it (like, say, walk back twenty feet to the cabin and get a fucking gun.) Even the plot does stupid shit for no reason. One of the clan elders has a daughter he squabbles with, but when he returns to the island with the soldiers she's become a zombie. No worries though, she's got a twin that we didn't think it was important to mention until we realized we still needed her character to talk! Surprise! It's almost like this thing didn't have a script at all, and it was some sort of attempt at an improv zombie comedy. Only without casting any comedians. If the zombie kills were decent, the rest might have been forgivable. Goddess knows effects have salvaged films like this before. But they're not, they're just as dumb as the rest of the movie. One zombie gets killed by jamming a fire extinguisher into its mouth, because I guess the expanding foam crushed its brain or something. All we get to see is a cartoony shot of its eyes bugging out. Another gets killed by being shot in the chest with a flare gun, which magically makes its head (and only its head) catch fire. There's simply nothing in here even on the level of the brain defibrillation from Diary. I can't even really say I was disappointed by Survival of the Dead. Angered and offended is probably closer to the mark. Anton