"Pieces" and the Lost Drive-in

Released: 1983 (in USA)

Director: Juan Piquer Simón

Writers: Dick Randall & John Shadow (a/k/a Joe D’Amato)

Starring: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Paul L. Smith, Ian Sera

“Could that have been done with a chainsaw?  Like that one over there...”

I love drive-in theaters.   I love the cool night air, I love the starry skies, I love knocking back some beers with a bunch of friends.  It’s like camping…with movies!

If you choose your show wisely, you might even hear a spooky tale or two.

Of all the nights that I’ve spent watching movies under the stars, one still stands out.  The night that I saw Pieces.  Well, more accurately, it’s the night that I DIDN’T see Pieces.

I’d better start at the beginning…

Drive-ins and I go way back…all the way to the old neighborhood, in fact.   Turns out, we were both born in New Jersey.  Yep, the first “ozoner” opened in Camden, New Jersey in 1933.  Of course, no one ever told me that while I was growing up there and, frankly, I wouldn’t have believed them if they had.

Jersey is about as unlikely a birthplace for the drive-in theater as you could imagine.   Oh, we had them, but they were always closed!

Closed due to rain.  Closed due to snow.  Closed due to the fact that it was so freakin’ cold that no one in their right mind would sit out in their car for five minutes, let alone the length of a double-bill.  Half of the year, it seemed, signs at Jersey drive-ins were switched around from O-P-E-N to N-O-P-E.

In the twenty years that I lived in Jersey, I think I went to a drive-in twice.  One of those times, it rained.

Even worse, Jersey drive-ins were often located in the most unwelcoming areas imaginable.  Either way out in the sticks or stuck next to factories in heavily industrialized areas.

There’s nothing like breathing in diesel fumes or swamp gas while watching the latest teen sex comedy.

The drive-in closest to my hometown was wedged between the junction of three -- count ‘em, THREE! -- freeways: the Garden State Parkway, U.S. Route 9 and State Route 35.  The Amboys Drive-in.

Odd as it was, the location was kind of ideal.  The highways on either side framed the space, so that the theater was both highly visible, yet set apart, at the same time.  You could see the screen from all three freeways, but there was no way to get to it.  At least that’s how it appeared from two of the freeways, the entrance revealing itself only to those driving along the least-traveled road.

Better still, the lot was high atop an embankment overlooking the Raritan River.  The Raritan, itself, was ugly, used to ferry goods to and from the factories further upstream, but from the perch of the drive-in, you wouldn't see the river below.

Parked in your car, you'd see only the massive screen and the corona of stars in the night sky.  Okay, okay…and the arcing twin bridges of the interstates off to one side, but even that looked magical at night.

I passed this drive-in every time my family returned from visiting my cousins.   As a child, it seemed like paradise.  They even had a playground in front of the screen.

Oh, how I wanted to stop!  But, we never did, and the Amboys was torn down before I ever got my driver’s license. 

That theater is my Rosebud.

In my late teens, I moved to California for college and my love affair with the drive-in heated up along with the weather.  L.A. still had a fair number of open-air theaters when I arrived and I hit them all!

Centinela Drive-In, Studio Drive-in, Van Nuys Drive-in, Victory Drive-in... Each better than the last.

For a while, a friend worked as a projectionist at the Pickwick Drive-in in Burbank.  So…free movies!  This was back in the waning days of the exploitation independents, and I saw as many Cannon, New World, and Trans World Entertainment films as I could.

What a glorious time to be alive and in Southern California!

At the peak of my obsession, one of the last great drive-in flicks oozed out of Spain and onto screens across America: Pieces. 

It arrived along with a killer ad campaign.  The posters had, not one, but TWO awesome taglines.  Along the top, it screamed: "You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre!"  As if that wasn't enough ballyhoo, it confirmed along the bottom: "It's exactly what you think it is!" 

Grand, meet slam.  Exploitation perfection!  If there was any justice in this world, the copywriter who thought up that campaign would be a legend.

When the posters first appeared, I was rooming with my friend, Scott, whom I’ve known since high school.  Although we both loved movies, Scott liked, you know…good movies.  Despite this, I’ve managed to drag him to many a F’dup Flick over the years, my enthusiasm able to overwhelm his better judgment, on occasion.

Yet, Scott was having none of Pieces.

Luckily, he did like the idea of seeing a film under the stars.  So, one balmy, autumn night, we went off to catch a double bill at the Vermont Drive-in.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what we saw that night.  Maybe the films were great.  Maybe I’ve seen them many times since.  Maybe they went on to win Oscars.  Honestly, I have no idea…

What I do remember is Pieces.

The Vermont Drive-in had three screens, the first multiplex drive-in I’d ever visited.  If you looked around the parking lot from your car, you could see (but not hear) the movies playing on the other screens.

Sometime during the bottom half of our double-bill, I noticed that Pieces was starting up on the next screen over.  Ever the savvy consumer (read: broke), I kept an eye on it to see if it was worth checking out on some other night. 

My initial thoughts were that it looked cheap and poorly made.  And then I caught something so outlandish that I literally turned in my car seat and started watching Pieces, instead of the movie in front of me.

If you’ve ever seen the flick, you’ll remember this scene fondly:

A young girl runs through darkened school hallways, spooked by the storm outside and her own imagination.  She breathes a sigh of relief as she reaches a well-lit elevator lobby.  A man in a dark hat & overcoat approaches.  An obvious creep.  She smiles at him, completely forgetting that she was scared out of her mind only a moment ago.

The elevator arrives.  The girl enters.  The man debates if he should join her.  Finally, he HIDES A CHAINSAW behind his back and steps inside!

The pair descend in silence.  The audience grips the edge of their seats in terror…or, more likely, laughs so hard that a little bit of pee comes out.

Finally, the man stops the elevator.  The girl frowns: “What are you doing?”  The killer reveals his chainsaw, fires it up in that tiny space, and cuts her into, well... See title.

What the fuck?!  Did that really happen???  I MUST see this movie!

By the next weekend, Pieces had all but disappeared from our local screens.  Another missed opportunity...  Years passed.  The drive-ins were torn down.  Townhomes went up, parking structures, a Vons…

Yet, Pieces lingered in my mind, like the long-lost Amboys Drive-in…

Some 20 years later, while shopping the DVD shelves of a Sam Goody (don't judge!), the title leapt out at me.  Oh, yes, it will be mine! 

The DVD was from Diamond Entertainment, one of those cheap disc, public domain outfits, and, if I remember correctly, the low quality transfer, obviously pulled from a laserdisc, still had a “turn to side 3” card in the middle of the presentation.  

It didn’t matter.  After all those years, I could finally say with certainty… It IS exactly what you think it is!

In many ways, drive-in theaters and movies like Pieces are similar. Their flaws are both obvious and many, while their charms are peculiar and hard to explain. You either get them or you don’t.

By almost any sane measure, Pieces is a bust. There’s a story, but its Freudian logic is absurdly literal.

A young boy hacks up his mother when she interrupts his private time with a nudie jigsaw puzzle.  40 years later, the police have a new mystery on their hands: a chainsaw-wielding maniac is dicing up college co-eds and making off with a different body part from each murder. 

Who is the killer and what is he doing with the pieces?  Hmmm.

To be fair, this all leads to one very good jump scare at the end (as well as a second ludicrous one).  The film’s whodunit aspect is pretty service-able, as the filmmakers go to great lengths to set up a gallery of could-be killers.  And, as you may imagine, the gore is plentiful.

Despite these good points, the filmmakers have little feel for even the most basic of genre tropes, like, oh…suspense.  As a result, this should have been one of those films where you sit around, waiting for the next kill (see: Friday the 13th, Parts 1-9).

Luckily, the filmmakers didn’t know the first thing about making a cookie-cutter slasher film.  Evidently, they also didn’t know the first thing about college…or police investigations…or how people actually talk.

Pieces is truly “psychotronic.”  Of course I hadn’t yet heard the term back then.  It would be years before I discovered writer Michael Weldon’s books and magazines.  At the time, I only knew that I had stumbled upon a film that was so blissfully ignorant about story construction, not to mention human behavior, that it seemed almost hallucinatory.

Call this sub-genre what you want -- WTF?, Holy Shit Cinema, So Bad, They’re Good --  it is my favorite type of F’dup Flick.  These films are literally INSANE! 

Frequently, these movies are the works of neophyte filmmakers whose reach far exceeds their grasp.  Other times, perfectly capable filmmakers find themselves so poorly suited to the material that their attempts to make something unique make it unintelligible.  Iain Softley’s delightfully kooky Hackers, for example.

In fact, Hackers is a great flick to test your tolerance for the WTF? genre.  No matter how absurd the characters and situations become, the film skates by on the charm of its soon-to-breakout cast.

Hackers is a film that you can share with friends and roommates without fear of being labeled morally depraved.  Pieces, not so much.

Still, for those who wade through its sleaze and gore, Pieces has many singular delights:

The lead detective (Christopher George) so inexplicably convinced that the college student found at the scene of the first campus murder is innocent that he asks the kid to assist in the investigation.

The famous female tennis-pro-turned-cop (Lynda Day George, because, well...Christopher George) who goes undercover on campus by posing as…a famous female tennis-pro.

The unsteady co-ed on a skateboard, who somehow reinstates our killer’s bloodlust when she crashes into a plate glass mirror being carried across a sidewalk, Mack Sennet-style, by two unlucky movers.

And then there’s the college, itself.  Like many universities across America, the most popular course at this school is Aerobics, the faculty includes a “kung fu professor,” and one of the classrooms comes complete with a waterbed.

A WATERBED!

Basically, every five minutes, somebody says or does something that makes no fucking sense!  Adding to the insanity are some truly strange acting choices.  

Paul Smith plays his red herring groundskeeper with the same eyebrow arching gusto with which he attacked the role of Bluto in Popeye. 

Not to be outdone, Lynda Day George gives the single worst line-reading in the history of cinema.  I kid you not.  The Worst.  Don’t believe me?  Behold!

To be fair, Mrs. Day George isn’t solely to blame for that regrettable (yet awesome!) lapse.  Actors rely on the director to guide their performance.  Mr. Simón directed her right off a cliff.

On the other hand, would any of us remember Pieces if it weren't so?  I’ve seen Lynda Day George in as many films as Jill Ireland (because, well…Charles Bronson), yet this is the only film from which I can quote a line of her dialog.

Say it with me: “Bastard!  BASTARD!!...”

Now imagine all of us together, sitting in a car, enjoying the cool night breeze, as we pass around some beers.

“BASTAAAAAAAAAAARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Face it: God didn’t make big tracts of land so that we could shop at Vons.  Not even in New Jersey.  He made them so that we could sit in cars, drink beer and have our minds blown by movies like Pieces.

A few years after I picked up that crappy PD copy of Pieces, I tossed it out in favor of Grindhouse Releasing’s definitive 2-disc DVD version.  Recently, Grindhouse announced plans to release the film on Blu-ray in 2016.

It’s not the Amboys Drive-in, but it will do.

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from Grindhouse Releasing's loaded DVD release, which can be purchased here.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release.

"The Exterminator" Comes Home on Cable TV

Released: 1980

Director: James Glickenhaus

Writer: James Glickenhaus

Starring: Robert Ginty, Christopher George, Samantha Eggar, Steve James

“Go get your toy."

My first exposure to a true grindhouse film was The Exterminator.  It was mean, grim, and shocking.  And I saw it in my pajamas.

It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the only way to watch an uncut movie in your own home was through something called cable TV.

And we didn’t have it.

It’s not like my family decided to cut the cord; cable wasn’t available in my hometown.   Literally.   I lived only 15 miles outside of Manhattan and yet the cable – the one from whence cable TV gets its name – had not been strung as far as Cranford, NJ.

My god, how old am I?

True, the first videocassette players were just hitting the market in the ‘70s, but they were outrageously expensive.   Like, car down payment pricey.

There was also a service in the NYC area called Wometco Home Theater, which, kinda brilliantly, sent a scrambled signal over the public airwaves, by sub-licensing a UHF channel at night.   Wometco showed a single movie per day, in an early and a late showing, and the descrambler box cost more per month than we now pay for Netflix.  And that’s in 40 years ago dollars.

So, to put a finer point on it, there was no way FOR ME to watch a movie unedited at home.

Sometimes, when I was really bored, I’d watch the scrambled Wometco signal on channel 68 and try to guess what movie they were showing that night.  And hope to see boobies…

This is what happens when you have only three networks to choose from.

As I entered my senior year in high school, something miraculous happened.  Cable finally reached our suburb. 

From the moment that 75-ohm coaxial video cable was screwed into the back of our Sylvania console television, I watched whatever movie was on, whenever I had the chance. 

Due to the vagaries of cable programming, this often meant seeing the same movie again and again.  Not because it was spectacularly entertaining, but because it was... Always.  Fucking.  On.   (…All The Marbles, I’m looking at you!)

However, there are two movies that I watched over and over again on purpose: Cutter's Way and The Exterminator.

Cutter's Way is an amazingly well acted and heartbreaking drama.  The Exterminator is a stone cold slice of sleaze.

The fact that The Exterminator existed, and was picked up by HBO to play in living rooms across the country, blew my little mind.  I became kind of obsessed with it.

Despite my fondness for it, The Exterminator is a difficult film to defend.

Its themes are recycled from other, better films.  Many of the characters, including our titular protagonist, are unsympathetic.  And much of the film is ugly in both look and content.

In fact, the film’s main strength is that it just GOES FOR IT.  It owns what it is and doesn’t give a fuck how that plays to your notions of a good time at the movies.

It is the quintessential F'dup Flick.

Okay, you remember when I said I couldn’t defend this flick?  (Seriously?!  It was only a few paragraphs ago.  Sigh.)  Anyway, here’s where I defend this flick.

Maybe “justify” is a better word.  “Rationalize”?   How about “explain”?  Anyway, hear me out…

First, the good…

Despite an underwritten role, Robert Ginty’s performance as John Eastman is very compelling. He plays the character as a broken man from the first frames of the film, tossed around by mortar shells and events beyond his control.  In calmer moments, he seems always on the verge of an insight to which he can’t quite give voice.

His interactions with friends and loved ones reek of play-acting for the sake of others – “You okay?” “Yeah.  Sure.” – and much of his dialog is banally direct: “Let’s take a walk, Maria…Michael was mugged.”  “Sit down, Maria…Michael is dead.”

Paul Kersey, in Death Wish, is a hero.  Eastman is an anti-hero and Ginty does a great job making us question if we even like him, let alone want to be like him.

Visually, director James Glickenhaus struts his low budget action skills early, with the (obviously not shot in) Vietnam opener, filled with moody darkness, hypnotic slow-mo, and endlessly curling fireballs.

Despite the occasional visual flourish, Glickenhaus never loses sight of the dark tone he wants for this film.

An early example occurs during the war sequence.  After an intense firefight, fellow soldiers Eastman and Michael Jefferson are captured and tortured.   Eventually, they are able to turn the tables on their Viet Cong captors, but not before Eastman cracks and gives useful intel to the VC leader.

Only a few minutes in and already the audience is faced with an understandable yet challenging development.  Can Eastman really be a hero when he has just compromised US Army operations?

Glickenhaus quickly pushes our unease with our protagonist even further.

Michael is able to get a gun away from his captors and kills all of the enemy soldiers, except for the VC leader, who is only wounded.  Then, he cuts Eastman free to finish the job.

There’s no question how this scene will end; Eastman must kill the VC leader…for many reasons: he is the enemy, he knows too much, and because…well, he is an asshole.

But rather than play the sequence for all its “git some, git some” glory, Glickenhaus locks the camera down and simply observes the two men in one, long take.  As Eastman slowly preps his gun in the background, the bleeding VC leader desperately crawls away in the foreground.

The shot goes on and on.  The longer it does, the more pathetic the VC leader’s doomed escape attempt becomes.  You want this nasty business to be over with quickly but instead we watch this man flail and suffer…and be human.

Finally, the men look at each other and Eastman shoots the VC leader.  No anger, no righteousness, no punny catchphrase.  Nothing.

Drained of any emotional charge or catharsis, the moment leaves one feeling vaguely unsettled.   Hooray?

Later in the film, Eastman perfectly describes this pervasive sense of unease.  

The war over, Eastman and Michael find themselves home in NYC, where they run afoul of some punks.  Predictably, the gang cripple Michael, and Eastman must hunt them down and kill them.

After he’s had his vengeance, Eastman describes how it felt to his paralyzed friend: “It was like we were back in 'nam.  It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong, I just did it.”

Like it or not, that is the tone for the entire film.  It is beyond right and wrong.  It is amoral.  Fatalistic.  Nihilistic…

So, obviously there is some level of thought and, dare I say, artistry at work here.  But if we are honest, the reason why the film lingers in the memory isn’t because of its craft.  It is because of a long and repugnant subplot set in Times Square.

By the midway point of the story, Eastman has killed every bad guy we’ve met, as well as a guard dog, in increasingly brutal ways.  Now what?  There are still 45 minutes to go.

And here’s where the film makes a radical left turn.  Instead of the previous line-up of comfortably clichéd gangbangers and Mafioso types, Eastman’s next prey are frighteningly realistic sexual sadists.   Not just bad guys, but men so evil that you didn’t even know there were names for the things they do.

In a 20-minute tutorial on hell, Glickenhaus teaches us the names. 

The really bad stuff happens at “chicken places.”  The men who run them are called “chicken hawks.” And the “chicken” are young boys who have been sold into sexual slavery.

Glickenhaus even reserves a special, satirical name for one of the loathsome perverts who frequents the chicken place: “The State Senator from New Jersey”.  (Being from NJ, I smirk at that line every time.)

The whole enterprise runs like a misery machine, destroying people while stacking Benjamins, and Eastman’s reaction to it is equally mechanical. 

In a long and wordless sequence, before the inevitable siege and rescue, we watch as Eastman calmly makes his own hollow-tip bullets: place the bullet in a vise, drill a hole into the lead, place a drop of poisonous mercury into the hole, balance a couple of rods of solder over the tip, and heat with a blow torch. 

In other words, a tutorial bookend.  For every action, an equal and opposite reaction.

Here, I must give a special shout out to Christopher Brenner the actor who plays the “chicken boy” (so named in the end credits) rescued by Eastman.   Although onscreen for only a minute, Brenner’s non-verbal performance is so vulnerable, so beyond terrified, that you start to wonder if the filmmakers actually did kidnap and force him to appear in the film.

If IMDb is correct, Brenner never made another movie after this.  Chris, if you are still out there, I want you to know that you either gave a stunning performance…or I am so very sorry.

As you can see, this whole sequence is a steaming hot plate of WTF?   So, why watch a movie like this at all, let alone multiple times?

Here’s what you need to understand.  When I was growing up, northern New Jersey lived in the shadow of Manhattan.  On a clear day, I could see the World Trade Center towers from my street.  Our TV stations came out of New York, our newspapers came out of New York, our culture came out of New York.

Yet, we almost never went INTO New York.

New York was great, but New York was dangerous.  Every news report said so, every TV movie said so.  Even if you dared venture into New York, for a baseball game or the Ice Capades, you never, ever went to Times Square.  Except, maybe, on New Year’s Eve...

NO!  Not even on New Year’s Eve!

Everything that was wrong with New York – with the world – could be found in Times Square. 

Whatever that meant…

And then I saw The Exterminator.  And I understood.

In a way, films like this are like the works of the Marquis de Sade.  They go so far beyond titillation, into revulsion, that your reaction to it becomes the message.  

“Look at what people do to each other.  It is fucked up, no?  Ah well… Goodnight, now.  Sleep tight.”

But as you lie there in your jammies, in the comfort of your suburban home, trying to make sense of what you just saw, the questions start coming:

Is that stuff about chicken places for real?
How does one deal with evil like that?
Is a vigilante a good guy or just as messed up as the bad guys?
Who made this fucked up film?

I find questions like this fascinating.  Perhaps you prefer Friends.

By their very nature, grindhouse films are confrontational.  You watch them to have your notions of reality and morality challenged.   And by challenged, I mean dragged out into the street and thrashed to within an inch of their lives.

It used to be that you actually had to go to Times Square to see a depiction of 42nd Street as harrowing as this.   Who knew that once cable TV came to my home, it would bring Times Square along with it?

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from the DVD in the Synapse Films Unrated Director's Cut Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, which can be purchased here.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release.

 
 

“Dawn of the Dead” and The Hidden Meaning

Released: 1979

Director: George A. Romero

Writer: George A. Romero

Starring:  David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross

“This was an important place in their lives.”

I first saw Dawn of the Dead upon its theatrical release.  It was 1979 and I was 15 years old.  I’d see it another dozen times, in theaters, over the next few years.  Not only is it one of my most cherished F'dup Flix, it is one of my favorite films in any genre.

It is also the movie that taught me about theme.

If you read my post on Night of the Living Dead, you’ll realize that I saw Dawn before I ever saw the end of Night.  Such was the difficulty in re-watching a film, pre-home video.

Being underage, the path to seeing the unrated sequel was not a straight line either.

I first became aware of Dawn thanks to a newspaper ad.  In my memory, it was a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times, with that big ol’ zombie head rising like the sun.

However, a little research at the library has proven that can’t be true.   Of course, it isn’t an NYT sort of film.  In fact, NYT film critic Janet Maslin walked out after 15 minutes, yet still filed a review!

Back in those days, I was enamored with the NYT.  It became my go-to read, once my older sister started bringing it home on Sundays, along with the New York Daily News (traditionally, we were a Daily News house).  More to the point, the NYT's Arts & Entertainment section was my go-to read.   All those in-depth articles about current films.  All those full-page ads for upcoming releases…

Maybe I saw the full-page ad in the Daily News.  Or perhaps, the small sidebar just appeared larger to me at the time because the tidings it conveyed were so monumental.

As the ad itself heralded: “First there was NIGHT of the LIVING DEAD.  Now George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD.”

Imagine my surprise.  The film that scared the crap out of my mom had a sequel?  And it was going to play at a theater near me?!   Life was good!

 Now, I just had to convince someone to take me.

I’d seen a couple of R-rated films by then and I hadn’t puked or turned into a psychopath.  Obviously, I was one of those “mature audience” types that could handle adult themes and situations.

Immediately, I went to work on my mother and sister, the parent and guardian in my life, to convince them that they should see this film…and take me with them.

However, as I went back to that full-page ad (go with me on this, will ya?), I slowly became aware of something very strange.  Something that could be a fatal roadblock to all of my scheming.

Every other movie ad I’d ever seen had an MPAA rating at the bottom, but this one had only a box of plain text.  

"No explicit sex”…blah, blah, blah…“scenes of violence”…blah, blah, blah…”No one under 17 will be admitted.”

WHAT?! 

That was the same restriction as a XXX film!  And this didn’t have any sex in it!  How could they do this to me?  I’ll murderlize, ‘em, to quote Bugs Bunny.

With typical kid logic, I decided to fight the prohibition with the most powerful weapon in my arsenal.  I would pretend that I didn’t know.

Eventually, I convinced my mother to take a friend and me one Friday night.  My mother liked all sorts of movies – so it was entirely possible that she would like this – and she had no moral issue with horror films.  However, she had not been to a theater since Jaws, four years earlier.  So, this was a mighty big concession on her part.

Luckily, the force of my willed ignorance worked like a charm, once we got to the theater.

Local theater owners seemed confused how to handle an unrated film.  Although they strictly adhered to the guidelines for every other film, they treated this one as if it was Rated R: No one under 17 admitted without a parent.  As a result, my mom was able to buy us tickets, no questions asked.

The hard work done, I ditched mom.

Yep, my friend and I moved way down to the front of the theater and left my mom, in the back, to sit through this gore-fest all by herself.

As the bloodshed and body count ticked upward during the film, I felt a twinge of guilt.  But at the end of the day, she was a good sport, and it became one of her favorite things to throw back in my face whenever she wanted me to do something:  “Remember how I took you to that gross movie and you made me sit...  All.  By.  MY.  SELF?”

Whenever I think about Dawn, the first word that comes to mind is gleeful.  The movie is flat out fun!  It’s scary, exciting, funny, gory, intense.  It has zombies and soldiers and bikers.  It even takes place at a shopping mall, which was my favorite place at the time (maybe now, as well), aside from a movie theater.

Simply put, Romero nails it in this film.  His ambitions were huge and he achieves all that and a box of Sno-Caps.  Yes, the micro-budget shows in everything from the secondary performances to the quickie blue make-up on the background zombies.  But I didn’t – and don’t – care about any of that. 

As a horror film, as an action film, as an allegory, this film over-delivers.

Remember that none of the common wisdom of “zombie = consumer” existed as yet.  This is the film that launched that discussion.  So, my friend and I did not walk out of the theater discussing the finer points of the film-as-metaphor.

And yet, certain parts of the film made me realize that some unstated thing was going on here.

Yes, the screwdriver through the ear was awesome.  Also, I loved the gag of the blood pressure machine reading zero, after the zombies tear the biker away from the machine…and his arm.  But there were other shots and scenes that hinted at something deeper.

As I played the film over in my mind, I came to pin all of these lingering questions on a single shot.

It’s not one of the classic gore set pieces.  It’s not a payoff to a joke.  In fact, the shot likely means nothing to anyone else.  But Romero chose to show it in a big, juicy close-up and I could not figure out why.

In the years since, I’ve read interviews with Romero where he states that he’d rather get 100 good shots, instead of a single perfect one, when shooting a scene.  It gives him choices in the editing room.

In my heart, I am certain that this shot – and therefore all of the things that I learned about storytelling because of it – is in this film due to that conviction.  Thank you, George Romero!

The shot is toward the end of the film.  The bikers invade, the good guys defend, the zombies win.  The mall is theirs, once more.  As Francine and Peter argue about whether or not to leave, we see that Stephen has turned.

Yet, with all that going on, Romero cuts away to an interesting sequence. 

The zombies bump about merchandise in the mall.  Inside a department store, one zombie knocks some beauty supplies to the floor.  A second zombie steps on them.  In an insert that fills the frame, the once precious product squeezes out across the photo of the beautiful model on the display, wasted.

Hmmm.

All hell is breaking loose and Romero zeros in for a moment which has no bearing on the life & death struggle of our heroes?

The shot hit me on some subconscious level.  I knew right away that it was trying to tell me something, but I could not verbalize what.

I mentioned the shot to my friends.  No one who saw the film remembered it, and more to the point, no one understood why I cared.   Once again, I went back to the library and dove into all of the reviews that I could find of the film.

Here, I’m going to give credit to Roger Ebert, solely to show how wrong I was about his love of genre films in my post on Night.  Check out his glowing review of Dawn.

Notice the line in the first paragraph: a “satiric view of American consumer society.”  And there it is: us = consumer; zombie = consumer; ergo, us = zombie.

Was Ebert the first critic to call out this idea now considered zombie gospel?  Maybe.  It certainly wasn’t Janet Maslin (though she did make a dismissive reference to this theme in her review).

Was he the one who spelled out the theme FOR ME?  Honestly, I doubt it.  I can’t imagine how I would have gotten access to the Chicago Sun-Times, during an era when only national publications were indexed and catalogued.

Although I can’t remember which critic and which article made the light bulb go off for me (and for that I am deeply sorry), I feel comfortable crediting Ebert with a big assist in getting the conversation started.

Once I was given that simple tool – a satire of consumerism – I was like a zombie set loose in a mall, myself.  I began to bump into all kinds of thematic associations.  Each time I watched it, I stumbled away with something new.

The argument in the TV station about whether it was more important to post an accurate list of rescue stations or keep the graphics up so viewers will keep watching =  The news/entertainment divide.

 

Peter and Stephen burying Roger in the only bit of dirt available inside the mall: a planter = The folly of Vietnam.

Stephen and Francine’s chilly, post-proposal bedroom scene = The battle of the sexes, and the crumbling of the traditional male patriarchy.

The bikers’s rally cry to attack the mall after our heroes ignore them: “We don't like people who don't share. You just fucked up REAL bad!”  = The riots which rocked the inner cities, earlier in the decade.

In point of fact, this film is not only about consumerism.  It is about the sorry state of our great nation at the end of the 1970s.

And exploding heads, and marauding bikers, and infectious zombie bites.

A few years before Dawn, a film entitled Network came out.  It is a film filled with big ideas.  It won Oscars.  It was talked about by everyone.  It was rated R.

I did not beg my mother to take me to see Network.  I waited patiently until it popped up on broadcast television, years later.  It’s a great flick. I really respect it.  Somewhere around here I have the UK Blu-ray…still in the shrink-wrap.

And that might be the most enduring lesson that I’ve learned from Dawn.   Even a lowly genre film can tackle lofty themes.  The audience begging to see it might not be expecting any such thing, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll walk out with more than they expect.

Janet Maslin, not withstanding.

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from the Anchor Bay Ultimate Edition DVD, now out of print, but still highly recommended.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release.  You can buy used copies of this 3 disc set here.