Although I wasn’t on the podcast this week, I’d like to use this space to follow up on that creepy, misogynistic Dodge Charger ad.  You know, this one:

A lot of people had a lot of interesting things to say about this, but I was most taken by a point that Lee made about how this spot tries to sell something we generally consider lame.  I don’t mean the car—I mean the behavior.  The compound protagonist is a man going through mid life crisis, who tries to recapture his lost youth/freedom/testicles by driving a muscle car.  The motto at the end was “Man’s… last… stand!” but it might as well have been “Compensate… for… something!“ This is not, generally speaking, behavior that your audience is going to want to emulate.  Even the guy who is interested in buying a muscle car to compensate for something probably doesn’t want to think too hard about his motivations.

Are we to understand, then, that the add is targeting mid-life crisis sufferers who are so far gone that they just don’t care anymore?  Or is it targeting aging hipsters who think that the crisis-of-masculinity is going to be the next trucker hat, making this the first ironic muscle car?

So last week, I was on a luxury cruise. And sitting in a hot tub, watching the Pacific Ocean roll by, mulling over what flavor of margarita I should order next, I felt a tremendous sense of peace.

For the first time in years, I was safe from the living dead.

This is like Hometown Buffet for the living dead.

You see, I live in Manhattan. New York has many things going for it–world-class museums, vibrant nightlife, and a subway system that you are legally allowed to pee in (I’m pretty sure). But one major disadvantage to living here is that I will most likely be devoured by flesh-eating zombies.

Think about it. All pandemics hit the major urban areas first and hardest. That was true even in the days of the Decameron, in which the frame story involves young Florentines fleeing the Bubonic Plague to a villa in the countryside. But when the zombies hit Manhattan, the odds of me getting a Metro-North ticket out of here are pretty slim. I’m probably going to end up dashing across a bridge, carrying my son and my XBox on my back, trying desperately to escape the tristate area before it becomes the DIEstate area. But I might not even get that far – in the pseudo-zombie film I Am Legend, the government quarantines Manhattan and blows up the bridges.

I could, of course, just stay put. If I lock my front door, I’m pretty sure the zombies aren’t getting in. (I live in East Harlem, where we take front doors seriously.) I’ve got plenty of canned food, and I could get plenty of clean water out of the tap before that goes kaput. I figure I could make it a month or two, no sweat. But staying put is really gambling that the government will be able to turn the tide and fight back the zombie menace, or release some sort of airborne cure, or organize some sort of massive rescue effort. And although I’m a proud Democrat, and I believe in the government’s ability to accomplish many things, I don’t have much hope that FEMA can take on a zombie horde before I run out of Easy Mac.

Actually, the zombies may never have a chance to get be. I wouldn’t be surprised if the military panicked and fire-bombed the entire city. I’ve seen Outbreak.

So living in New York, I’ve gradually come to accept my doom. The cruise ship was another story.

For those of you who are not aware, back in the 1980s, a man named Samuel Raimi made a series of films called The Evil Dead Trilogy.  These films, particularly the second and third of the trilogy, are beloved as cult classics from the horror-comedy genre.  Evil Dead 2, for example, has a scene where its protagonist (Bruce Campbell) gets in a slapstick duel to the death with his hand.  The third movie, Army of Darkness, involves Bruce Campbell’s character traveling back in time to train a medieval army to fight his evil clone and a legion of living skeletons.  These movies were made, shall we say, with a tongue firmly in cheek.

Ah, but what of The Evil Dead (a.k.a. Evil Dead 1), the first film of the series?  Although it is not nearly as amusing as its sequels, and though its violence is possibly more brutal than even Oscar-winner Peter Jackson’s classic Dead Alive, I would nevertheless characterize it as a horror-comedy, as well.

Here’s the difference, though.  Where Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness show a blend of horror and comedy, Evil Dead 1 seems to be two separate movies: one a horror movie and one a comedy.

The interesting part to me is the point at which the film switches from type A (B-movie horror) to type B (gross-out zombie comedy): the famous tree rape scene.  And thus, my question for today–which, incidentally is a question that many have asked before and that many will likely ask again–is:

WHY THE HELL WAS THERE A TREE RAPE SCENE IN THIS MOVIE?!

On second thought, let me whittle down my question to one that’s a little more specific.  What I want to know is, how are we meant to read the tree rape scene?  Is it meant to be the end point of Evil Dead’s B-horror movie, or is it the beginning point of the gross-out zombie comedy?  Or is it neither?  All this and more after the jump.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Ryan Sheely to overthink listener feedback. Topics include our troops in Iraq, scary movies, your ICBM address, proving and proving our knowledge, Will Smith, pulling punches in Faust stories, the further meaning of vampires, and how much TV can be good.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 69 (MP3)

Matthew Wrather is joined by Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel (briefly), Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to overthink the third dimension in movies.

Update: After recording was done, I heard the static on my line. Very sorry for the less-than-stellar sound quality. I’ll do better next time. —mw

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 68 (MP3)

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Jordan Stokes to overthink Eye-talian Americans, tokenism and the minority experience, Zombieland, spoilers and violence w/r/t same, Reference Movies, and the meaning of the undead.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 67 (MP3)

On last week’s podcast, there was a passing reference to the “Ghost Ship Moment.” This is an idea I came up with back in 2003, while slogging through Ghost Ship on DVD. For those of you who aren’t diehard Julianna Margulies fans, this is a movie about a marine salvage team that finds a long-lost Italian ocean liner floating in the Bering Sea. They climb aboard and start poking around artfully rusted-out staterooms, and increasingly eerie things start happening. But somehow, the crew members refuse to accept that the boat is haunted, even after a bunch of them have died mysteriously.

[In this new series, Overthinking It writer John Perich dissects the "high-concept train wrecks" of the early 80s. These big vision monstrosities, known for their weird music and kitschy style, left their stamp on the first half of the decade. John takes a look at these cult classics, from birth to termination, and their impact on pop culture]

What Is It
The Keep (1983), Michael Mann’s last big project before “Miami Vice.” A fantasy/horror film.

The Big Idea
Nazis dispatched to guard a crucial Romanian pass occupy an ancient keep in the Carpathians. They unwittingly release an ancient demon trapped within, who picks them off one at a time. Adapted from the well regarded F. Paul Wilson novel of the same name.

In the Thriller music video, Michael and his date have the misfortune of passing by a graveyard right as the dead start to rise. To make matters worse for MJ’s girlfriend, he becomes zombified as well. In most zombie movies, this is the part where she gets her brains eaten. But this is not a standard Zombie Apocalypse. This is a Thrillerocalypse.

Sadly, YouTube isn’t letting me embed the actual dance. But here’s some Filipino prisoners giving it their best shot.

My question is: why do the Thriller zombies dance? The obvious answer is: it’s a music video, and people dance in music videos. However, I think there might be a plot-driven reason too.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”  So opens H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”  To quibble with Lovecraft about horror is surely a sucker’s game, but I think he’s only half right here.  Lovecraft’s own stories all have a central “unknown,” but the best and scariest of them are always the ones where the big reveal comes not as a shock but as a confirmation, not a “WTF?” but an “I knew it!”  So I’ll emend his definition:  The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of that unknown which we realize, in the moment of unveiling, that we knew all along.  Of course, it’s a tricky line to walk, which is why truly successful horror is such a rarity.  Telegraph it too much, and the audience will laugh at you.  Too little, and you end up with the Double Shyamalan, a twist ending that’s so out-of-left-field that the audience simply rejects it.  To get it right, you have to get your audience to realize the secret subconsciously while remaining consciously oblivious.  Now, I’m not going out on much of a limb by saying that the subconscious plays a role in horror.  Most scholarly analyses of horror claim that the supernatural unknown illustrates a Freudian concept known as “the return of the repressed.”  What the rational mind refuses to deal with – sexual desire being the big one, although in Lovecraft’s case it was racism – will bubble back up again as a bug-eyed monster.

Curious what all this has to do with Ghostbusters?  Me too!  Let’s click through to the next page together, friends.