|
Synopsis:
Mexico, 1892. Vargas Diaz (Danny Trejo) encourages the townspeople of
Santa Bonita to gather in the local mine for a double celebration:
Dia De Los Muertos, and the discovery of an underground temple
dedicated to the Goddess of Death, whose treasure he promises to share
with them. Shortly afterwards, there is a massive explosion at the mine
that buries the celebrators alive.... Mexico, 1952. An American family
on holiday pulls into a small town needing gas for their car and
somewhere to spend the night. However, the desk at the hotel is
unattended. Sarah White (Ellie Cornell) finds two women in the next
room: the younger weeps as she cleans the floor; the elder paints small
figurines. Neither pays any attention to Sarah. When Sarah reports this
to her husband, Tom (Jeffrey Combs), he decides that they will check
themselves in. Meanwhile, the young Ricky (Noah Luke) approaches the
older of the two women, Oelita (Julie Vera), who whispers in his ear….
Upstairs, Tom and Sarah take one room, while the teenage Lilly is
disgusted at having to share with her brother. First hiding her diary,
Lilly takes a bath. Becoming aware that someone has been in the room
with her, Lilly storms out to confront Ricky, shrieking when she sees
instead a skull-faced figure with a bloody head wound. Downstairs,
hearing the screams, Oelita smiles. Unable to make her parents hear her,
Lilly flees, eventually stumbling into the street, where she finds
herself surrounded by figures in capes and masks. Lilly has barely time
to rip one mask away and see the rotted flesh beneath before she is
overwhelmed. From a window, Oelita and Ricky look on, unmoved…. Mexico,
2005. Students Alicia (Marisa Ramirez) and Joss (Travis Wester) travel
south, heading for her parents’ new ranch. As they enter a small town,
Joss is momentarily distracted, and almost drives into what seems to be
a funeral procession – except that the coffin, dropped in the panic,
spills a bound, bloody-mouthed woman whose naked body is covered with
painted symbols. As Joss realises that his crashed car will not start
again, Alicia tries to comfort the terrified woman, discovering to her
horror that her tongue has been cut out. Joss runs for Sheriff Blanco
(David Keith), who listens placidly to his hysterical account but
follows him outside. The sheriff promises to look after the injured
woman, and leads her away; neither Joss nor Alicia notices his
compulsive grip on her arm. Joss asks about hiring a car, but the
sheriff only laughs derisively, advising them to check into the hotel
for the night. There, Alicia has an odd encounter with an old woman, who
sits silently, painting figurines, while Joss is told by the young
innkeeper, Martia (Laura Harring), that there are no rooms available.
Upon seeing Alicia, however, Martia changes her mind, offering a room
key and announcing that dinner will be at seven. She also insists upon
the two accepting a bottle of wine in celebration of the holiday. Alicia
explains to Joss that it is Dia De Los Muertos, the Day Of The
Dead, when tradition holds that the dead will walk once more upon the
earth….
Comments:
All Souls Day is a prime example of what I consider about the
hardest kind of film of all to review: a low-budget effort whose
manifest good intentions and occasional good idea struggle to make
themselves heard over the combined din of unavoidable production
restraints, and some entirely avoidable artistic blunders. As two wise
people once pointed out, it’s very easy to criticise – fun, too! – so
the temptation with a film like this is to turn a blind eye to its
gallant attempt to do something a little different, and just to focus
upon its various failures. The question becomes one of how much time and
effort a reviewer is obliged to put into panning through the dreck in
order to extract the tiny gold nuggets within – and the answer, very
often (let’s be honest), comes down less to any sense of professional
obligation, and more to what state of mind the film chances to find the
reviewer in. Well, as it turns out, Messers Altman and Kasten have
lucked out in that department: All Souls Day has been fortunate
enough to catch me in an unwontedly benign mood#. Such being
the case, I am prepared to offer some tempered praise of the film, the
first from Cinefantastique’s new production arm, CFQ Films, which for
all its shortcomings does makes a commendable effort to separate itself
from the recent glut of zombie films, and to add a few new wrinkles to
the ever-evolving mythos of the undead.
One thing that All
Souls Day does get right at the outset is its appropriation of the
mystifyingly under-utilised festival of Dia De Los Muertos. While
the twin rituals of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are a set part of
the Roman Catholic calendar, in Mexico these days of remembrance take on
a whole different aspect, being not only a time spent in prayer for the
dead, but one for festivity and the celebration of life. Houses are
decorated, special meals prepared, and places set at the table for the
souls of the departed, who are expected to join their families for this
annual gathering. While various movies (mostly Mexican, naturally) have
employed the famous mummies of Guanajuarto either as characters or just
for atmosphere, surprisingly few film-makers seem to have recognised the
inherent possibilities of a festival that involves not just the rising
of the dead, but their welcome by the living. All Souls Day,
conversely, exploits this feature of its back story with an unexpected
and satisfying final twist. The film also distances itself from most of
its brethren with an unusual story structure, unfolding as a three-act
play (or, it could be said, given that Mark Altman could find no better
way of explaining the events we have been watching than an extended
narrated flashback, as a four-act one), each act dealing with a
particular phase in the unhappy history of Santa Bonita. The zombies
here are not the “reinvent Romero” kind that have dominated the recent
cinema of the undead, but the old-fashioned supernatural kind, rising
from their graves on All Souls’ Day to wreak revenge. (Speaking of
Romero--- Throughout All Souls Day you can almost hear Mark
Altman and Jeremy Kasten grinding their teeth with frustration at the
circumstances that kept them from a perfectly proper usage of the phrase
“Day Of The Dead”. Like their own undead, the film-makers finally take
revenge on their tormentor by re-working one of Day’s most famous
set-pieces in the climax of their film.) The film does reproduce the
most standard of all zombie film clichés, the siege, but manages to put
a twist on that, too, by turning the reanimation of the dead into a kind
of mystery that the living must solve if they are to have any chance of
surviving their ordeal.
A fair portion of
All Souls Day’s budget clearly went into the design of its zombies,
who are a combination of the long and the newly dead, and who sport an
understandable mixture of clothing, some of them wearing traditional
Mexican garb, some more casual and modern dress. A close look at the
shambling horde during the siege sequence shows that a considerable
effort went into making these particular undead look realistically
decayed and deformed, even though at times their rubbery origins are a
bit too apparent. All Souls Day has been criticised in some
quarters because its zombies disobey “the rules” when they are re-killed
– that is, they go down under any major injury, however and wherever it
is inflicted – but given that the film exerts itself to convey the idea
that these are not your daddy’s zombies, this criticism is
unwarranted. The gore scenes are on the whole well-executed, and there
are some nicely disturbing visuals. (I do wish, though, that horror
film-makers would give the something-in-the-mirror shtick a rest.)
However, it is sometimes difficult to know whether these inserts are
supposed to be dreams, or hallucinations, or visions of the past; or
indeed, to what extent the characters are seeing what we are
seeing, as when Sarah White comes across a young woman who sobs as she
scrubs an enormous bloodstain from the floor, and doesn’t even bat an
eyelid. All Souls Day does a much better job at suggesting that
the hotel, even the town itself, is trapped in a kind of limbo, where
the past and the present co-exist. Particularly effective is the scene
in which Alicia goes hunting for some alcohol with which to sterilise
Joss’s wound, and is taken into the past by the mysterious Martia, where
she witnesses the aftermath of Vargas Diaz’ disposal of his henchmen,
and helps herself to a bottle of mescal.
One thing I do feel
compelled to praise about All Souls Day is the look of the film.
There is a dreary similarity about too many of today’s horror films.
They feel the same, they sound the same, and they resort to precisely
the same kind of scares. Above all, they look the same; and I
tell you, I am so sick of that frickin’ blue filter,
I....could....just....gaaahhhh!!!!
But here, in the
cinematography of the experienced Christopher Duddy and the production
design of Denise Pizzini (the latter working hard with restricted
means), there has been an obvious and on the whole successful effort to
do something different. Much of All Souls Day is bright and
colourful and interesting to look at; an unexpected quality for a zombie
film.
Ultimately, however,
All Souls Day is a frustrating experience, not just because it does
some things well and some things badly, but because its good and bad
aspects are so inextricably entwined, you can only shake your head in
bewilderment. (Or, in my own case, consider removing that gold-panning
analogy, and substituting something less polite about extracting trace
metals from sewerage.) The overall impression gained about the pairing
of Mark Altman and Jeremy Kasten is that their ideas are perfectly
sound, but that, at least at this point in their careers, they lack the
ability to bring those ideas to fruition. To be fair, some aspects of
their collaboration I like very much indeed, including the fact that
(rarely these days) the screenplay of All Souls Day refrains from
clubbing the viewer over the head with its plot points, yet provides
sufficient information for those paying attention. For example, it is
perfectly clear, although it is never spelled out, what the relationship
is between three of the main characters, and why Alicia is the person
destined by fate to try and give Santa Bonita’s living dead their peace.
It is also refreshing, in these self-reflexive times, to find a horror
movie that is capable of acknowledging the fact that its characters are
familiar with other horror movies, without taking on that
infuriating air of smugness that taints so many similar efforts. Thus,
when Joss comes out of an encounter with the newly undead Esmeralda with
a chunk missing from his thigh, his friends react with panicked dismay:
they know very well what such a bite wound ought to mean.
(And there’s one more
“reference” moment that provoked an appreciative guffaw from Yours
Truly, namely when Erica the blonde cheerleader reacts to a mention of
The Shining with blank incomprehension. “Her idea of an old movie
is pre-American Pie,” comments her boyfriend.)
On the other hand,
there are those plot contrivances and carelessnesses that just scream of
a screenplay insufficiently polished. Santa Bonita is supposed to be so
isolated and lonely that the inhabitants can carry out a ceremony
leading to a human sacrifice in the middle of the street in the middle
of the day; yet just check out how much traffic is heading in the other
direction as Joss and Alicia are driving towards this “ghost town”.
Joss’s call for help (the last from a dying phone, natch) goes to his
friends back in California, not to Alicia’s parents, who are presumably
somewhere in the vicinity and have a more expert knowledge of the area.
And why? “My parents are going to be so pissed!” announces Alicia. Why
they should be is anybody’s guess, but Joss immediately takes his
girlfriend’s emphatic insistence upon her parents’ pissed-ness as
sufficient reason not to call them. (I think if I were expecting my
daughter and her boyfriend and they didn’t show up, I’d be a lot more
pissed if they didn’t phone than if they did.) But all
this pales besides the screenplay’s utter refusal to admit that the one
thing above all others that its four trapped people would do when
confronted by the risen undead, would be to demand answers from the
other two people trapped with them! – both of whom are so self-evidently
up to their eyebrows in whatever is going on in the town, the screenplay
has to write them out of most of the middle section of the film, in
order to avoid reminding us just how artificial the kids’ failure to
confront them is.
While a great deal of
care obviously went into evoking the three different time periods, the
structure of All Souls Day brings problems of its own, chiefly –
although this is perhaps more noticeable in retrospect than at the time
– that the film’s extended second act turns out not to have very much to
do with anything. (Even with the one thing that does carry over –
a character seen here reappears later on – a few moments’ reflection
shows that they’ve got the passage of time completely wrong.) Despite
their prominence in the film’s promotion, the appearances of Jeffrey
Combs and Ellie Cornell, fun though they are in their own right, are
nothing more than glorified cameos. Mircea Monroe, who gets considerably
more screen time as their daughter, hardly convinces as a fifties miss.
(She does, however, get nekkid, which some of my male colleagues seem to
feel is reason enough for the existence of this lengthy cinematic
detour. Speaking personally, the Gratuitous Boob Shot is generally when
I start fidgeting and glancing at the time counter on my DVD player.)
It is clear that the
film-makers intended All Souls Day to be a character-driven film
– and this is one of its most contradictory aspects. The performances
from the four young actors portraying the film’s protagonists are
unusually good for a low-budget production of this nature, and there is
a pleasing degree of insight in the way they interact. (Joss and Tyler
are friends, but their respective girlfriends can’t stand one another.
Male comfort is maintained by a refusal to acknowledge female
hostility.) The problem is that in three of those four cases – on the
whole, I exempt Marisa Ramirez’s Alicia – the characters that those good
performances create are so annoying, it undercuts the impact when their
numbers are whittled down over the course of the siege. (Oh, come on! –
you don’t consider that a spoiler, surely?) Some of the problems
we see here are by no means unique to All Souls Day. Common to
many films like this is the fact that the characters are simply never as
freaked out by the horrible events they encounter as they should be. In
short order, Alicia and Joss almost run over a funeral procession; crash
their car; discover that the “body” is a live, bound, naked woman whose
tongue has been cut out; and find that their car is a write-off and that
they are consequently stranded for the night. They have an encounter
with a local hotelier whose conduct gives new meaning to the term
behaving suspiciously; and Alicia, at least, begins having visions
of the hotel’s bloody history.
The reaction of our
heroes to all this? To (i) agree that things are “creepy”; and (ii) to
get drunk and have sex.
Of course, I can’t
speak for every woman in every horror film; but personally, whenever I’m
stranded in a lonely town where the locals like to bury people alive and
I’m having repeated visions of dead children and the slaughter of
previous tenants of my hotel room, I don’t generally find that it puts
me in the mood, exactly.
But I must be in a
minority, making such a fuss about such things, because when Joss’s
friends, Tyler and Erica, turn up a few hours later in response to his
carefully uninformative phone call, their response is, essentially, a
disinterested, Oh, whatever.
Giving the devil his
due, at least some of this is intentional on the part of screenwriter
Altman, who is certainly trying to make the point that even the spoiled
and self-interested can, in a crisis, find reserves within themselves
and rise to the occasion; even, should friendship require it, at the
cost of their lives. However, by the time that the ultimate sacrifice is
made, we’re just a little too glad to see it for the good of the film.
Nor is any kindly
feeling generated, either towards the characters or the makers of this
film, by two short scenes of such concentrated stupidity, the temptation
to just turn the damn thing off is almost overpowering. The first
comes when, as per formula, the siege has reached the point when those
barricaded inside start debating whether or not to try and make a run
for it. One of Mark Altman’s better character moments occurs here, with
Erica – she who took one look at Joss’s bite mark and voted to ditch him
– unexpectedly stepping up to the plate and volunteering a sprint to her
car, which she plans to drive as close to the front door as possible. So
far, so brave. The problem, to put it mildly, comes with Erica’s exit
from the hotel. Let me stress, up until this moment this has been a film
played quite straight, with (by and large) believable people behaving in
believable ways. Yet all of a sudden we’re in the world of wire-fu, with
Erica leaping and spinning and back-flipping and high-kicking her way
out of the hotel and through the zombies to her car.
Words can barely convey
how wrong this sequence is. As they say in the classics, if you
were to look up the word WRONG!!!! in the dictionary, you’d probably
find a clip of it. Incredibly, though, things get even dumber. As Erica
draws near to the hotel in the car, Tyler makes a run towards her. One
side of the car is in the clear. The other side is thronged with
zombies. Get which side he goes for?
Yes. Well. I suppose it
is funny, really, in a sick, Darwinian kind of way.
(And let us not
overlook the moment when the naked, tongue-less Esmeralda
conscientiously writes in the dirt, They cut my tongue out so that
no-one can hear my screams; an act of supererogation that almost
challenges the carving of AAAARRRGGGHHH.... in the rock wall of a
cave as the comic pinnacle of non-verbal communication.)
It’s stuff like this
that makes it so hard to deal fairly with a film like All Souls Day,
where just a couple of missteps – albeit missteps taken in seven-league
boots – can so easily evaporate the goodwill built up by the obvious
enthusiasm of the film-makers. After the idiocy of Erica’s rooftop
escapades, it takes a real effort on the part of the viewer to re-engage
with the film. And that’s a shame, because there’s some nice unexpected
material in the film’s final act: Mark Altman gets to indulge his
evident love of westerns (which I share, so I rather like what he does
here; others may feel differently); Laura Harring’s overly mannered
performance softens into one of real poignancy; and Danny Trejo turns
out to be a total bad-ass. (Okay, I guess that wasn’t so unexpected.)
All Souls Day is, in the end, an uneasy kind of film, with too much
talk and too little action for the horror-hounds, but also too lacking
in the quality of its writing to work as a character piece. (It must be
admitted that Mark Altman does have something of a gift for producing a
joltingly bad line of dialogue at just the wrong moment.) Still, if
All Souls Day is finally a film more of good intention than good
execution, it certainly gives reason for us to hope for better things
from its production team in the future, not least in the elegant
simplicity of its solution to the siege of the undead. I may be wrong
about this, of course, but I can’t offhand think of another film that
suggests that if you were one night to find yourself besieged by zombies
and fighting for your life, the very best thing you could do would be to
let the zombies in....
Want a second opinion of All Souls
Day? Visit
Cold Fusion Video Reviews.
(#So why was
I in such a benign mood? Because the night before I watched All Souls
Day, my football team had an unexpected win under extremely bizarre
circumstances. Thus is a film’s reputation won or lost!)
ALL SOULS DAY
– available on DVD through
Anchor Bay Entertainment:
Running time:
89 minutes
Aspect ratio:
1:77, 16 x 9 enhanced
Audio:
Dolby Surround 2.0, Dolby Surround 5.1
Extras:
-
Souvenir booklet
-
Audio commentary with director Jeremy Kasten and
producer/screenwriter Mark Altman
-
Raising The Undead: The Making Of All Souls Day
-
Faces Of Death: The Make-Up Effects of All Souls
Day
-
Jailhouse Rock: The Stunts of All Souls Day
-
Deleted scene
-
Extended scene
-
Trailer
-
Storyboard gallery
-
Screenplay (DVD-ROM)
Comments:
Anchor Bay has gone above and beyond in the quality of the DVD release
of this low-budget horror film. While I’m not a huge fan of DVD extras –
I appreciate them if they’re there, but I rarely if ever buy a DVD
because of them – this is one time when I think that the extras provided
do a real service for the film they are promoting. The commentary by
Jeremy Kasten and Mark Altman is an informative journey into the ups and
downs of low budget film-making. Although, when they start to invoke not
just George Romero but Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, there are
moments when we fear for their sanity, for the most part the two are
refreshingly honest about their film’s shortcomings and their own
mistakes – and, I’m relieved to report, are just as painfully aware as
they should be of how utterly WRONG!!!! the rooftop gymnastics scene is.
“Raising The Undead” is a puff-piece, granted, but the participants seem
so sincere in their enthusiasm for All Souls Day itself and the
experience of making it, that it is impossible to come away from a
viewing of it without feeling a little more appreciation for the film.
“Faces Of Death” is an interesting look at Almost Human’s make-up work
on the film, but certain viewers should beware: the technicians based a
number of their designs upon real death scene photographs, at which we
are given close looks that might be too much for some.
Material for this review was generously provided by
Anchor Bay
Entertainment.
Special thanks to Melanie |
Director: