Rainey Dawn
Not sure if he was a vampire or a zombie - he seemed to be a mixture of both. He looked fine when get got home but needed blood like a vampire, later on his flesh started rotting and he was eating like a zombie. I guess he was more of a vampire in the beginning but as the days went on he turned more zombie - or so it seemed to me.Anyway, it's not a bad film - the mother and father are the ones that made this film! The parents emotions and actions are good in this film. I do wonder about that mother though, she apparently was no longer in love with her husband, treated their daughter like "you're a sweet girl but..." - yea the mother seemed to only really love her son -- I can understand falling out of love with the husband but it seems she would have treated her daughter with the same love as her son. LOL -- maybe it was just me though.Overall I did enjoy watching the film.7/10
MisterWhiplash
This is technically a "zombie" movie, but it's one that leans more on allegory than most I can think of. It's about a young soldier, played by Richard Backus, who at the very beginning gets shot and killed in Vietnam. And, appropriately, his family gets notice from the army that he died in combat. The father (John Marley) and his daughter (Anya Ormsby) give their response of immediate grief, but the mother, played by Lynn Carlin, is refusing it, it can't be so, no way no how, they're *lying*, in fact. That very same night, the son, Andy, returns home... but as WHAT, you may ask?How did Andy come back to life? No answer, and there's no effort on the part of Bob Clark, the director (one of his very few entries in this genre), and Alan Ormsby the writer (I assume related to the actress playing the daughter by the way), to explain this even in the brief 'radioactivity/satellites/voodoo' or so on. It's meant, I think, to be a pure metaphor for the time: this was Vietnam, of course, when Americans, as well as many more Vietnamese, were being killed by the thousands, and if people did come back they often were never the same again. Andy coming back to the family as a symbolic zombie first - he talks to his 'so happy to see you!' parents and sister in a plain monotone, with Backus looking like you sucked any of the life out of a Montgomery Clift type of actor - and then as a 'real' one, as the horror comes from Andy having to kill people and take their blood (this latter part reminded me of Martin, the Romero film, but that's another story altogether so let's not go there).I think that there's a good amount of, frankly, cheese to this picture. There's a scene where, to show that Andy is fully disconnected from humanity when some local boys come around and the dog is bothering him and them, he picks up the dog (this is after badly testing his 'strength' against one of the boys) and strangles it to death. And while the intention is for it to be a serious moment, it's purely laughable. What does work is that Marley and Carlin - of all things re-teamed as a married couple following the John Cassavetes masterpiece FACES - play it straight and play it all sincerely, and bring real drama out of it (up to a point, to varying degrees for both of them), and that Backus also fully commits and is genuinely creepy and terrifying when he has to be.In the last stretch, especially the last like 20 minutes, it gets progressively sillier, or just more demented or WTF or whatever, as Andy is literally melting away with maggots taking up his innards. It gets to the point where his character is set up on a double date with his sister and he has to put on sunglasses just so everyone else doesn't see how he's melting away, like a literal *walking dead* figure. The message is not exactly subtle, but aside from the grief of a parent over a child, which is made especially clear with Carlin's mother and she is delivering the real goods, yes, even when it goes more bats*** in the final stretch, it's also kind of, well, misogynistic (Marley, the dad, sort of just pushes aside his wife and daughter whenever he feels like it as an excuse of being angry about his son, to the point where he pushes one character off the screen!)Clark and the writer have something noble to say about how families dealing (or decidedly *not* dealing) with grief over their fallen family members, especially with a war as tumultuous and wrong as Vietnam was, and some of it shows. At the same time it's also an excuse to see Richard Backus act extremely creepy and detached for 90 minutes, and while he's certainly not bad at it, he makes it today seem mostly kind of silly. I'm not sure if the filmmakers intended that, but it does make for a highly entertaining sit, especially with a packed audience.
GL84
After returning home from the war, a young man's sudden change of behavior alarms his parents who slowly realize the monster he's becoming and try to stop his insatiable blood-lust causing him to run wild throughout town.This one was quite a disappointing effort as there's really not a whole lot right here. What this one really does well is the rather innovative use of dealing with the subject matter at hand, detailing the condition afflicted here without really over-exposing it all that much. By going with the symptoms here for PTSD as a lynch-pin for the change in behavior here, this manages a pretty remarkable feat of giving the film a realistic-based back-story motivation for the horrific behavior but also a thoroughly unique and creative one that doesn't seem all that far-fetched here to possibly happen. Unfortunately, the only other working part here is the film's two horror scenes, where he traps and stalks a doctor in his office after realizing the truth, and the finale where a thrilling encounter at a drive-in leads to a frantic car-chase through the streets of town with a flaming car and a nice crash-stunt that makes this one all the more enjoyable as it's really the main part of this that works. Despite the originality of going with the back-story explanation for the film, the biggest problem is that nothing of interest is done with it. The film tries to make it seem like being cold, distant and completely devoid of interest in interacting with family or friends is cause for being the creepiest tactics imaginable, and yet all they do is drag the film out with scene-after-scene of the same behavioral tendencies and nothing is done about it, either his parents or anyone around him. Nothing about these are scary, and when combined with the majority of time spent here detailing the family life where the dad becomes convinced something's wrong and the mother is in absolute denial about everything doesn't help matters by focusing on drama rather than horror because what's shown isn't that scary which makes her behavior seem overblown and needless while his just drags the film along lifelessly. This is furthered by the fact that the supposed mystery about the mysterious soldier being responsible for the early off-screen death here is so clumsily done that it's impossible to come to any other conclusion here other than he did it as the evidence is so clear-cut and delivered in such a clumsy manner that the police look like incompetent fools for not seeing it, making these go on for what seems like forever. The last big problem is that the film really only deals with horror elements in two scenes which are completely unscary that their effectiveness is really questionable, especially the finale with the laughable make-up effects used here. These here are what really hurt this one overall.Rated PG: Violence and Language.
LeonLouisRicci
Cult Director Bob Clark can be Forgiven for Porky's (1982), Although the Deserved Profits from that Low-Budget Embarrassment Could be Considered a Late Arrival for Past Excellence. This is an Allegorical Sleeper About Returning Vietnam Vets at a Time When that Debacle was Far From Analysis and a Subject that was Divisive as Well as Deadening at the Box Office.It is an Eerie Movie that is Frequently Undermined by its Low-Budget but the Director Manages to Draw the Attention to the Unsettling Story of a Mother's Unconditional Love for Her Deceased Son, Even when He is Summoned from the Other Side and Returns as the Walking Dead.The Cast Does What it Can with the Chinsy Sound and Some Awkward Arrangements but the Strength is the Creepy Unfolding of a Family Torn Apart and the Detached and Deranged Behavior from a Lost Soul Portrayed by Richard Backus. He is an Addict and a Monster Created by the Evil Evolvement in a War that Should Not Have Been.This is a Well-Received and Touted Cult Film by Many who have Seen it, Although it is Relatively Unknown Outside of Horror Buffs. It Remains a Movie A Head of its Time and is Quite the Underground Classic and Should be Seen by Film Historians and Pop-Culture Archeologists, or Anyone Looking for a Good Cutting-Edge Scare from a Movie with a Message.
