Friday Frights Double Feature!

Meters swum in July Swim for Distance Month: 21.8
Playing in the background: A really sad episode of Deadliest Catch. Two people have died already.

Cook: Man, that is one freaky dude.
Freaky Dude: I heard that.
Cook: With great hearing.
--from Dead and Deader

Last night I tuned in Chiller, the occasionally scary cable channel, and caught a movie called Dead and Deader. This sucker just screams "direct to video", but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The premise, if you will: A soldier comes back from some southeast Asian country (I think it was Cambodia but they said Laos a couple of times so maybe they didn't know either) carrying a mysterious bug (and a literal bug in this case, a scorpion) that seems to cause zombification in everybody but him. These are your classic zombies, the brainless not-all-that-fast-moving type that, uh, want to feed on human flesh. Naturally there's an evil scientist and the clueless military personnel that aren't protecting the innocent public. There's also a wiseacre cook that gets dragged along for the adventure, a lascivious fat chick whose personality actually improves once she's a zombie, and a pretty girl (there's always a pretty girl in movies like this.) And of course there's the Big Mystery of why our hero, despite being obviously dead, hasn't turned into a zombie. And I ain't gonna spoil that one for you, folks. The script is fantastic, with a lot of rapid-fire one-liners and one screamingly funny discussion about who's the best James Bond. And, yeah, can't take it seriously as a horror film at all, but it still merits a GREAT (three stars).

"At some point you have to decide how it benefits you to continue to be such a fucking prick."
--Dr. Prashar, Ghost Town

Tonight we saw Ghost Town on DVD. Ricky Gervais, the funny guy from Shaun of the Dead and The Office (UK version), is a misanthropic dentist (is there any other kind?) who suddenly becomes able to See Dead People. And they annoy him. Much hilarity ensues. Again, the genius of this movie is the script, which is just brilliant. If the flick has a problem, it's that it doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. A romantic comedy? A mild horror movie? A moral tale? Well, it's kind of all of those things. Mostly it's a comedy with ghosts. Ah, so what. It was fun. Ghost Town gets an AWESOME (four stars).

A Friday Frights night of comedies? Something must be wrong with me. Hey, Orphan comes out next week. We can be scared then. Cheers!