Diary of the Dead: Film Distorts Reality, and There are Zombies

The Diary of the Dead (2007) is the last hurrah of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead franchise that created the modern zombie,, that ambling, growling animated corpse that attacks the living, leading to apocalyptic chaos and the end of human civilization.  Here we zero in on the first few days of the zombie outbreak through the found-footage of some student filmmakers.

Debra (Michelle Morgan),oneof the survivors, edited the film, added music,and narrates, making asides about how fim distorts and creates reality.  It's obviously George Romero himself ruminating at the end of his career, giving the valedictory address at the end of a cultural phenomenon (although he went on to write four more Dead movies and direct three).  Horror greats Wes Craven, Guillermo de Toro, Stephen King, Tom Savini, Quentin Tarentino, and Simon Pegg stop by to pay their respects with cameos or voiceovers.

There's only one problem: the movie is ludicrous.

The Universtiy of Pittsburgh film students are makinng a horror movie about mummies, under the supervision of their elegant artiste "I was in the thea-tah" Professor (Scott Wentworth).  Professor Artiste would never grant college credit for a vulgar genre film.

They hear some news reports about people assumed to be dead rising up to attack the living.  Professor scoffs; he's old enough to remember the panic from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast -- 70 years ago!  Impossible! But Ridley (Philip Riccio, top photo) immediately rushes back to his parents' house in Philadelphia, while Jason (Joshua Close) rushes to the dorm to see if his girlfriend is ok. It was just a weird news story!

The dorm is deserted.  All of the students, except for Girlfriend, rushed out as soon as they heard the weird news story.  How would they even hear the story in the middle of the night?  This is before smart phones, so they would all,without exception, have to be watching tv, then panic based on one news story.

Instead of going their separate ways, the film students pile into the van to drive to their parents' houses in small towns across the state, including the Professor, who lives in town and could just go home. Jason keeps filming.   We get some brief back stories: tough guy Tony (Shawn Roberts, left) is upset because he had to do the "girly" makeup for the mummy movie; Gordo (Chris Violette, below) is heterosexual; Eliot (Joe Dinicol, bottom)  is a nerd.

Mary (Tatiana Maslany), who is driving, runs over three people who may or may not have been zombies, and feels so guilty that she tries to kill herself.  They rush her to the hospital,which is deserted except for a few random zombies.  The news reports came in just a few hours ago!

In the ensuing fight, Mary and Gordo die. Pity -- Gordo was one of the cute ones.

It's been about six hours since the news reports started coming in, but society has already collapsed.  They ruminate on the futility of filmmaking and briefly take refuge with a deaf Amish guy.  They haven't seen anyone for hours, but the minute they arrive at Amish Guy's farm, it is overrun by zombies.  Does that make sense?

Next they meet a mysterious stranger with a gun, who takes them to a warehouse in a zombie-free big city, where his crew has been stockpiling supplies. The crew is all African-American. Is the audience supposed to be scared, thinking that black means evil, then surprised when they turn out to be helpful? Weird racist plot twist! 

The mysterious stranger doesn't have a name listed on IMDB, but the next guy they meet does: Sergeant Nicotine (Alan Van Sprang. left), who takes all of the supplies they got from the helpful African-Americans.

Debra (Michelle Moynihan) gets a text saying that her parents and little brother (named Billy, naturally) are still alive.  So they go to their house in Scranton. By the time they get there, however, the family has turned into zombies.

So they go on to to seek refuge with Ridley (remember him?), who has a mansion in Philadelphia.  Isolated, easy to defend, a year's supply of food, six bathrooms.  Perfect place to settle in. The only problem is, Ridley watched his parents and the servants turn into zombies, so he's a little crazy.  Also, he's been bitten.  Also, the mansion is being overrun.

In the ensuing battle, almost everyone dies. I think only Debra, Tracey, and the Professor are left, hiding in the mansion's panic room with a hoard of zombies outside.

No food or water in that panic room.  So how did Debra escape to make the film?

Beefcake:  A couple of shirtless zombies, if you don't mind a little gore with your muscles.

Gay Characters:  No one identified  The Professor has effete, Gore Vidal-esque mannerisms, so I'm guessing he is.  Maybe Elliot also.

Heterosexism: There are two heterosexual couples among the film students, but they don't have much time for erotic expression.

Plot Holes:  We keep our dead isolated from the living, in hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes.  No way there would be enough to cause societal collapse in about 24 hours.

Racism: Other than the "surprise!  not evil!" black guys? The first people to zombify are a family of Arab immigrants.  We see the footage of growlng, snarling Arab zombies over and over.

My Grade: C

The Norsemen: Do You Want a Simpering, Backstabbing, Cowardly Sissy-Man as Your Chieftain?

The Norsemen )Vikingane)  is Monte Python light, finding humor in the incongruity of modern sensibility in Viking times:   "You can't go on the raid, we have a couple's night planned."

It's filmed in a replica of a Viking-Age farm in  Avaldsnes, Norway, usng authetic costumes and implements.  The actors  film every scene twice, first in Norwegian and then in English.  Their accents range from mild to nearly incomprehensible.  This makes the modern references evern more humorous ("Find your bliss!")

It's  quite plot-heavy; if you miss an episode, you're sunk.

1. The Vikings of Norheim pay tribute to the evil, powerful Jarl Varg.  When they discover a map to a new territory in the West (England), he schemes to get his hands on it.

2. When Chieftain Olav is murdered, his brother Orm (left) takes over, even though he's unqualified, having never been on a raid before because he's a weakling and a coward.  He's also gay.

Not open, andwhen he's accused, he denies it, but he has homoerotic drawings and dildos in his bedroom, he won't sleep with his wife, and when he is raped by one of Jarl Varg's men (while dressed as a woman for a play), he enjoys it.  He explains that according to Viking law, only the passive partner counts as "homosexual," so he tried to be as energetic as possible.

So a weak, cowardly, sneaky, underhanded, potential fratricide is gay but in denial?  I don't like that at all.  I don't care if Viking times were homophobic.  They could have made Orm a great warrior, not a sniveling pansy stereotype.  At least he doesn't lisp, and he was only shown sewing in the first scene.

2. Rufus (left), a captured Roman slave, regales Orm with stories of the pansexual  orgies he used to attend (but when he fantasizes about them himself, the players are all women).

None of the Vikings have ever heard of acting, so Rufus talks them into building a theater and letting him put on a play.  He wants to make Norheim the cultural capital of  the North.

Later, Rufus, Orm, and one of the women become outlaws.  I don't think they become lovers.

3. Arvid (left), a great warrior, wins a farm  by challenging its owner to combat, but he dislikes Liv, the wife he gets as part of the deal; she is into "feelings," and he'd rather be out pillaging.  He also apparently has affairs with Chieftain Olav's wife Hildur and Orm's wife  Frøya.

I had to check wikipedia. I can't tell the women apart.  Except Froya, who goes on raids, rapes men, and then cuts off their penis as a souvenir (she wears a chain of them arund her neck).

When Orm is disgraced and forced to flee the village, Arvid becomes chieftain.

There are many other named characters who have little snippets of plot:

1. Kark, a slave who earned his freedom but decided to stay on as a slave ("there's no greater joy than doing backbreaking work for no money)

2. Orn (top photo), who insists on sitting next to his best friend Ragnar during raids.

3.  Sturla Bonecrusher (left), hired as Rufus' assistant/bodyguard when he's working on the theater project. When Rufus tells him to "discipline" a recalcitrant worker, he knocks the guy's head off.  Literally.

Not much beefcake, on or off camera.  Rufus gets the only significant shirtless/bulge exposure.

And the blatant, blatant homophobia is a major turn-off.  I keep hoping for Orm to be redeemed, but throughout Season 1 he just keeps getting worse. Then I keep checking to see if Norway happens to be a homophobic country, but apparently not. So WTF?

Fall 1982: Dancer from the Dance: Gay Ghetto by Andrew Holleran

When I started grad school in Bloomington, Indiana in 1982, I had no trouble finding gay books.  There were no gay sections in the campus bookstore or the White Rabbit downtown, but you could just scan the shelves for titles that were dark and sinister, about secrets and lies and despair, like Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask or Tennessee Williams' A Thirsty Evil.

But one day I stumbled upon one that didn't use code: Dancer from the Dance (1978), by Andrew Holleran, with a shirtless guy wrapped in a yuppie sweater on the cover (he looked like Perry King, bottom photo).  The blurb that yelled: "A haunting novel of romance and decadence in the fast lanes of gay society!"

Wow, no secrets, no lies, no despair!  Maybe even a gay man who experiences a moment or two of happiness, and doesn't die at the end.

No such luck.

The gay men in Dancer from the Dance are all young, beautiful, wealthy, and cursed. They trudge from gym to bar to after-hours club to bathhouse, dancing, taking drugs, having sex, seeing the same faces year after year, but knowing nothing about them except their penis size. They have dozens of lovers but no friends.  They are unable to find any meaning in life, or any happiness.

Every summer they are bussed from the Village to Fire Island, from one prison to another, and they peer out the windows at Sayville, with its husbands and wives sitting contented on porches while kids frolick in front yards, and they think "That's happiness!  But we can never experience it, because we're gay, and therefore doomed."

As one of the characters explains: "The world demands that gay life be ultimately sad, for everyone in this country believes. . .that to be happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMILY."  Andrew Holleran not excluded.

The main character, Malone, vanishes at the end of the novel.  Sex/dance partners are always vanishing.   Some escape, like the character who moves to the Deep South and finds infinite joy in helping a friend install a septic tank.  Others die.  The rest keep on dancing.

Very depressing take on the gay world.  Yet I wasn't depressed, because I knew something that Malone and his coterie didn't: the men they saw day after day, year after year were, in fact, a FAMILY, an adhesive brotherhood that could change the world.

See also: The Violet Quill

The Fate of "Gilligan's Island"

What Boomer kid doesn't get all wispy and nostalgic upon hearing "Just sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."

Gilligan's Island (1964-67) was an iconic Boomer tv series, part of the "lost far from home" genre, about seven people who set out from Hawaii on a "three hour tour" and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island.  We didn't care that their escape attempts were ludicrous, or that visitors managed to make it off the island with no trouble.  What counted was the adventure: they fought pirates, headhunters, mad scientists, Russian spies.  They found a Jungle Boy and a buffed surfer.

It was a "boys only" paradise, with no girls or grownups around to spoil the fun.

Ok, the Howells were grownups.  Sort of.

Ok, there were two girls, Ginger and Mary Anne, but no one acted all goofy around them.  They were like big sisters.

Although they paid lip service to the goal of getting off the island, it was obvious that no one really wanted to leave.  Back home they were failures, parodies of themselves.  Ginger was an actress relegated to horrid B-movies, but on the Island, she was a star.  The Professor was a polymath teaching high school science, but on the Island he was a genius.  On the Island they all could shine.

There was no ongoing plot arc, as is common in tv series today, nor was there a conclusion.  The last episode of the series leaves them still stranded on the island.

But iconic Boomer tv series don't stay dead for long.  There were endless reruns, and, 10 years later (1974-77), The New Adventures of Gilligan  appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon. Most episodes involved inter-group squabbles, with an 1970s "the more you know" moral, rather than escape attempts.



The characters look considerably younger than the actors they depict.  Gilligan and Mary Anne could be in their teens, and Skipper and the Howells look barely 30.  And why is Ginger platinum blonde instead of "ginger"?

.

In October 1978, I was a freshman in college,  and like every Boomer kid, I had no choice but to watch the tv movie Rescue from Gilligan's Island .  They finally made it back to civilization!  Except instead of having them shipwrecked for a reasonable amount of time, the premise is that they've been on the island for 14 years, since 1964.  They're obviously older, well into middle age or old age, which makes their stuntwork cringeworthy.

They arrive in Hawaii to a huge crowd of well-wishers and fans (except none of their family or friends).  The moment Gilligan leaves the coast guard ship, a soldier hands him an ice cream cone.

Giving a middle-aged man an ice cream cone rather than a hefty check from the insurance company? Bogus!

 They try to go back to their old lives: the Professor to his research university, the Howells to their snooty friends, Ginger to the movies, Mary Anne to her farm in Kansas.  But it's the midst of the sex-and-sleaze disco era, everything has changed, and they're miserable. Fortunately, they end up being shipwrecked on the same island again.  There's no place like home?

Every Boomer kid watched them being rescued again in The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979).  This time they return to convert the island into a resort, where they proceed to solve guests' soap opera problems.  Apparently this was the pilot to a proposed tv series, with different problems every week, sort of like Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

First up: a workaholic husband whose wife wants him to relax (played by Happy Days' Tom Bosley and The Bob Newhart Show's Marcia Wallace), and an unaccompanied minor (popular child star Ronnie Scribner) turns out to be a runaway.

Since this is a tropical island, there is some beefcake among the extras lounging at poolside.

Not many Boomer kids, now young adults, cared enough to tune in to The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981).  The island is still a resort, with the Harlem Globetrotters as guests, but the plot involves the villainous Martin Landau trying to get control of the valuable mineral "supremium."

Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell III, was in poor health, so he appeared only in a cameo; his character was channelled by David Ruprecht (left) as his never-mentioned-before "son,"  Thurston Howell IV.

The last gasp of Gilligan's Island, except for in-character guest spots and retrospectives, came in 1982-83, with the Saturday morning Gilligan's Planet. The Professor can't built a boat, but he builds an interstellar spacecraft.  They end up spacecraft-wrecked on an uncharted planet.

Really?

I was in grad school at Indiana University at the time, too old for cartoons.  But even if I was 10 years old, the premise seems unbearably far-fetched.

Besides, I had already seen Lost in Space.

See also: Gilligan's Island