Horror Film Review: Festival of the Living Dead (dir by Jen and Sylvia Soska)

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Opening with a montage of scenes from Night of the Living Dead mixed in with actual footage of civil unrest from the 60s, Festival of the Living Dead imagines a world where a zombie outbreak actually did occur in 1968.

Humanity survived. All of the zombies were apparently put down by human hunters and the plague of the living dead was ended. In order to commemorate the night of the living dead, a Festival of the Living Dead is held every year at the sight of the zombie outbreak. Over the past 55 years, the Festival has become a high-priced event that can only be attended by people who are willing to spend a lot of money for the honor to stay in tents, listen to live music, and set fire to a giant wicker woman. Essentially, the Festival of the Living Dead is Burning Man but instead of basing the festival of new age nonsense, the Festival is based on a zombie outbreak.

Unfortunately, those who attend the Festival have lost sight of what the party is supposed to be about. Now, instead of celebrating the survival of humanity and paying honor to those who lost their lives (sometimes more than once in one night!), the people attending the Festival are just influencers who are hoping to go viral. Early on in the film, Iris (Carmen Bicondova) point out how weird and tacky it is to have a festival celebrating an event where so many people died.

This year, the folks at the Festival of the Living Dead are going to be reminded about what the entire festival is supposed to be about! When one vlogger films himself snorting what he claims to be a crushed meteorite, everyone assumes that he’s just another person looking for online fame. But soon, he’s foaming at the mouth, throwing up, and then savagely attacking the festival staff. Of course, those who have seen the original Night of the Living Dead will remember the much-ridiculed scene in which a news reporter is heard to speculate that the dead are coming back to life due to space dust that was brought back to Earth by NASA. It turns out that reporter knew what he was talking about. It’s not just a case of Hell no longer having room for the dead. It’s the meteorites!

Ash (Ashley Moore) and her friends try to survive the Festival of the Living Dead, which turns out to not be an easy task. Not only are zombies famous for being relentless in their pursuit of the living but the living are famous for reacting to living dead outbreaks in the dumbest ways possible. Ash has one cool friend, that would be Iris. Unfortunately, the rest of her friends are nowhere near as smart. Fortunately, Ash has zombie hunting in her blood. Though the film doesn’t specifically state it, it’s suggested that her grandfather was Ben, the hero of Night of the Living Dead.

Festival of the Living Dead is a loving homage to Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. It’s undeniably derivative but it’s also made with so much love for the genre that it doesn’t matter that you’ll be able to guess who is going to live and who is going to die from the minute they first appear onscreen. Ashley Moore, Carmen Bicondova, and Christian Rose (as the film’s bravest character) all give strong performances and the film’s central joke — which is that everyone at the Festival is either too stoned or too stupid to initially notice the zombie outbreak — is one that works because it’s rooted in fact. Do you seriously think anyone at Burning Man would notice the living dead?

14 Days of Paranoia #2: Deep Throat Part II (dir by Joseph Sarno)

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1974, Deep Throat II (also known as Linda Lovelace, Secret Agent) is the R-rated sequel the legendary X-rated film, Deep Throat. I should, at this point, confess that I have never seen Deep Throat, though I have seen the 2005 documentary about the making of the film and its subsequent cultural impact, Inside Deep Throat. I’ve also read Legs McNeil’s oral history of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve watched Boogie Nights a dozen times.

Anyway, Deep Throat II….

The star of the original film, Linda Lovelace, returns as …. Linda Lovelace! Linda is working as a nurse for a perpetually turned-on sex therapist (Harry Reems) who, when told that he got laid just last night, whines, “Last night was a long time ago!” Among the therapist’s patients is nerdy Dilbert Lamb (Levi Richards), who is obsessed with black lingerie and his aunt, Juliet. Dilbert has built a giant super computer named Oscar. In its electronic voice, Oscar says stuff like, “Why do you want to talk to me, baby?”

The plot is not particularly easy to follow but, as far as I could tell, the head of the CIA (played by adult film vet Jamie Gillis) is concerned that Dilbert has been compromised by either the Russians or by a bunch of do-gooder activists led by a Ralph Nader-style journalist named Kenneth Whacker (David Davidson). (The journalist’s followers call themselves Whacker’s Attackers.) The decision is made to recruit Linda Lovelace to investigate because Lovelace apparently has a mysterious technique that she can use to get men to tell her anything.

When Linda is first approached by the CIA, she thinks that she is being drafted into the Army so that she can fight in Vietnam. “But I have asthma and I need new reading glasses!” she says. Hey, me too! Anyway, Linda is relieved to discover that she will not being going to Vietnam and that her new codename is Agent — wait for it — 0069. (Just in case you were wondering what the level of humor was in this particular film….)

Despite the film’s cast of veteran adult performers and the fact that it’s a sequel to the movie that some people went to jail for transporting across state lines, Deep Throat II is an incredibly tame movie. The film is edited so haphazardly that it feels as if at least half of it was left on the cutting room floor. At first, I assumed that I was watching a heavily edited version of the original film but a few minutes of research online revealed that I was watching the original. (Apparently, director Joe Sarno directed the film so that more explicit scenes could be directed by another filmmaker and inserted into the action but, for whatever reason, those scenes were never filmed. Sarno was usually one of the more aesthetically interesting and thematically daring of the directors working in the adult film industry. You would not necessarily know that from his work on this film.) The actors struggle to keep a straight face while delivering their lines, Harry Reems enthusiastically jumps up and down in almost every scene in which he appears, and Linda Lovelace seems to be trying really hard but she just has a blah screen presence. Unlike Marilyn Chambers in Rabid or Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Linda Lovelace does not come across as having been a particularly good actress.

That said, there is one interesting aspect to Deep Throat II. Kenneth Hacker worries that Oscar could become smarter than the human being who programmed it and that the computer’s creation could be the first step to the creation of a permanent surveillance state, one in which even private thoughts will be used against the citizens of the United States. In the film, everyone laughs him off. 50 years later, it no longer sounds that fanciful.

14 Days of Paranoia:

Fast Money (1996)

Playing Catch-Up: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (dir by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone)

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you heard of Conner4Real?

If you haven’t, you’re probably just old or else you don’t keep up with what’s happening in the world of popular music. His real name is Conner Friel and he used to be a member of the Style Boyz. Of course, the Style Boyz eventually broke up. Kid Brain became a farmer. Kid Contact became a DJ. And Kid Conner — well, he became Conner4Real and he became a bigger star as a solo artist than he ever was as a Style Boy. His debut album, Thriller, Also, broke records.

But the follow-up, Connquest … well, Connquest wasn’t quite as acclaimed. In fact, it was hated by just about everyone. This is despite featuring classic songs like:

Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)

Mona Lisa

and Equal Rights (featuring P!nk).

Fortunately, when Conner4Real was facing his greatest existential crisis, a film crew was present to record his struggle. For those of us who were fascinated by the career of Conner4Real, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a chance to see how Conner dealt with everything from his terminally ill pet turtle to the elaborate marriage proposal ceremony that led to Seal being attacked by wild wolves. We would have gotten to see Conner and his manager defeat a swarm of mutant bees but, unfortunately, that happened right after the only time that Conner’s manager asked the film crew to stop filming.

Oh well, these things happen.

So, as you should have guessed from all that, Popstar is not a serious film. It’s a mockumentary, with the emphasis on mock. It was also one of the funniest films of 2016, a spot-on parody of the silliness and pretensions of fame. Conner is a combination of Justin Bieber and Macklemore at their shallowest, a well-meaning but thoroughly empty-headed singer. In fact, if Conner was played by anyone other than Andy Samberg, he would be so annoying that the film would run the risk of being unwatchable.

But fortunately, Conner is played by Andy Samberg. It’s hard to think of anyone who plays dumb with quite the same panache as Andy Samberg does. There are plenty of lines in Popstar that shouldn’t work but they do, specifically because they’re being delivered by Samberg. He brings just the right amount of sweetly sincere stupidity to the role. Almost despite yourself, you find yourself hoping that things will work out for Conner and the other Style Boyz. Conner may not deserve to be as big a star as he is but it was obviously going to happen to some idiot so why not a sincere one?

Samberg is not the only funny person in Popstar. The movie is full of funny people, from Sarah Silverman to Bill Hader to the always underrated Tim Meadows. It’s also full of celebrity cameos and I have to admit that I usually tend to cringe when I see too many people playing themselves. But in Popstar, it works. One need only rewatch something like Zoolander 2 to see how well Popstar pulls off its celebrity cameos.

Sadly, as funny as Popstar was, it was also one of the biggest bombs of 2016. (The trailer, it must be said, did not do the film justice.) However, I expect that it will soon develop a strong cult following. In a few years, we’ll get a sequel. It probably won’t be as as good.

Oh well. These things happen.