The zombie genre has a long history in the European and American film circles and is still thriving today.
In recent years, the zombie trend has extended to Asia, and the Korean filmmakers next door have repeatedly made a splash in the zombie genre.
In the past few years, "Busan Trip" has been popular all over Asia, and in the past two years, there has been a big hit of the Netflix drama "Lee Corpse Korea".
However, although the zombie genre is mostly low-cost B-grade films, it is actually a very test of film industry technology. After all, this genre requires extremely high makeup technology and special effects production, so it has always been the type that Hollywood is best at.
As a zombie film lover, today I will recommend a zombie film cult god "Horror Planet".
The film, which was translated as "Sonu Zombie Machine Gun" in Hong Kong, was jointly created by two of Hollywood's great ghost directors Quentin Tarandino and Robert Rodriguez, and was praised by many fans as: double the thrill, double the blood, and double the excitement.
In the inventory of many of the best zombie films in film history, the film has been shortlisted for almost all year round since its release, which is the favorite of many zombie film fans.
This issue of this issue of the "Cult Movie Awards", let's talk about this alternative zombie film -
Planet of Terror
Planet Terror
Released in 2007, the film was produced by Quentin and directed by Rodriguez.
Director Robert Rodriguez is also a well-known Hollywood director, whose masterpiece is "The Murder Trilogy" and the comic book "Sin City", and he, like the film's executive producer Quentin Tarandino, is regarded as a geek director in contemporary Hollywood.
The reason why the two ghosts can work together is because they were both fascinated by the low-budget B-grade films of the sixties and seventies.
"Planet of Terror" is actually part of a set of movies called "TortureHouse", and the so-called Grindhouse is actually a synonym for a popular underground private cinema, which was very popular in the 50s and 60s, often showing some low-cost exploitation movies, the theme is nothing more than horror hunting, bloody and violent B-grade films.
Both Quentin and Rodriguez were fascinated by this kind of "execution chamber" movie when they were young, so in 2007, in order to pay tribute to this disappearing film genre, the two ghost directors decided to work together to make two tributes, and the film "Execution Chamber" was released.
Rodriguez wrote and directed Planet of Terror, while Quentin directed another film, Proof of Death (aka King Kong Is Not Bad). It is worth mentioning that in order to pay tribute, the two directors deliberately made the film old after filming, and also inserted several pseudo-trailers in the middle, which achieved the original style of restoring the ancient early execution room movie.
Speaking of "Planet of Horrors", the film has two big directors to join, so although it is positioned as a B-grade film, it has a luxurious star lineup, Hollywood action superstar Bruce Willis plays the villain in the film, "Thanos" Josh Brolin also participates, and Quentin, a director who is keen on playing soy sauce, made a cameo appearance in this film as a rogue soldier who died a very tragic death.
Let's talk about the story of the movie.
Like many zombie films, disaster begins in a remote town.
Late at night, a heavily armed U.S. army squad arrives at a nearby military base to secretly trade with local gangster smugglers.
It turned out that this U.S. army squad had just returned from the Middle East battlefield, they had encountered a poison gas attack on the battlefield, and their bodies began to mutate, and the only way to alleviate it was to continue to absorb this poison gas, so they found the local arms dealers and wanted to buy a batch of poison gas.
However, what the arms dealers did not expect was that these fierce American soldiers had no intention of paying at all, saw the goods and directly shot and slaughtered, but they did not expect that in the melee, they hit the tank containing the poisonous gas, resulting in the leakage of poisonous gas.
So the gas drifted down the wind in the direction of a nearby town, and a terrible disaster was about to sweep through it.
Meanwhile, there is a showgirl in the town, Cheri (Rose McGowan), who is tired of selling out her hue profession and chooses to quit her job and plans to escape her past life.
Cheri sullenly arrives at a barbecue near the town, intending to think about his future, only to meet his former boyfriend Ray in the barbecue.
Ray is a man with a mysterious identity, and judging from the tattoo on his arm, he seems to have worked for a secret service of the military, which is about the equivalent of a special forces soldier.
Cherry is in a state of frustration, but unexpectedly reunites with his old love, and the meeting between the two in the barbecue restaurant is very awkward.
Boyfriend Ray wants to relive old dreams with Cherry, and the two drive away on the way, only to suddenly appear on the road with a strange creature.
Ray, who was in charge of driving, dodged and caused a car accident.
Fortunately, the two were not seriously injured, ray mistakenly thought that he had just hit an elk crossing the road, and as a result, just when the two were terrified, several zombies appeared and directly dragged Cheri into the grass.
Ray quickly took out a gun and fired at the zombie, eventually killing the monster, but unexpectedly, Cheri was already seriously injured and unconscious. What's worse is that her right leg is bleeding profusely, and her entire thigh has been eaten by zombies!
Ray saw that his girlfriend was unconscious, and quickly carried Cheri to the hospital in the town for rescue.
In addition to Cherry, the film has another heroine, Dakota, a female nurse at the town's hospital.
She and her husband, William, both work in the town's hospital, a respected surgeon in the hospital, and the couple have a young son, Tony. In the eyes of outsiders, the relationship between husband and wife is harmonious, but in fact, the family is full of rifts and shadows.
The husband, William, is a control freak and often abuses, while his wife, Dakota, is actually a "female lace" and has an underground lover, who is Tammy, a female employee in a barbecue restaurant.
Dakota wants to get rid of her husband's clutches, so she quietly contacts her girlfriend Tammy, planning to take advantage of her husband's night shift to the hospital to find an opportunity to escape with her son.
But the husband William obviously had doubts about his wife, so he always stood up to his wife's every move.
A sudden outbreak of the virus crisis shattered the tranquility of the town.
Late that night, the patients in the hospital were surprisingly much more, and the patients who came to the hospital claimed to be infected with a strange disease, and the skin began to decay so badly that the disgusting pus flowed out, so that the hospital's examination room was full of pictures of very bad meals.
William was a surgeon at the hospital and happened to be responsible for treating these patients.
As a result, he found that the bodies of the infected people began to mutate. Some patients die quickly, and then unsurprisingly become walking dead, and are extremely bloodthirsty, and when they see a living person, they have the opportunity to pounce on it.
Soon a zombie crisis broke out in the hospital, the hospital was bloodied, the police were powerless to stop the zombie attack, and more and more zombies began to sweep the town, leaving the town an apocalyptic hell overnight.
Taking advantage of the chaos, nurse Dakota dumped her husband William and planned to escape with her son, and the two drove to find their girlfriend.
Didn't expect the son to be a bear child, Dakota originally left the gun and his son in the car, let the son hit the zombie with a gun in a critical moment, did not expect the son to actually take the gun to himself, hey, is to play, the result is not to die, on the spot a life whining.
Unwilling to believe what was in front of him, Dakota took his son's body and continued to flee outside the town.
On the hospital side, with the sudden outbreak of the zombie crisis, boyfriend Ray rushed back to the operating room to find Cheri.
At this time, Cherry had just undergone an operation, and for a dancer, losing a leg meant that she could no longer dance, which made Cherry feel devastated and thought that she was a waste.
Ray didn't say a word, and directly found a stool leg and placed it on Cheri's broken leg.
Cherry is worthy of the family, after installing a temporary prosthesis, he can already walk normally, and followed Ray out of the hospital.
Ray and Cherry flee all the way to the kebab shop, while Dakota, who is holding his son's body, also arrives at the kebab shop, where everyone meets and plans to escape from the town together in the owner's expensive sports car.
Although there is a sea of corpses and blood everywhere outside, Ray and Cheri have rekindled their old feelings in this fight.
However, the zombie army also smelled the smell of people and came to the barbecue restaurant, and after a big scuffle, the crowd broke out.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, and the protagonist group that had just escaped from the zombie town actually fell into the hands of the mutant AMERICAN army squad.
The boss at the head of the group is Bruce Willis, and he has an aide-de-camp Quentin.
Everyone is imprisoned, but quentin's aide-de-camp is moved by the beautiful heroine Cherry.
Knowing that his body is inseparable from the gas mask, he has to take off the mask in order to force the overlord to take off the bow, causing the body to begin to melt.
At this time, the male protagonist Ray and the owner of the barbecue shop together launched a counterattack, risking to knock down the soldiers guarding him.
The male protagonist also installed a new "prosthesis" on the short leg of the heroine who escaped from the predicament, a fully automatic machine gun.
Originally, the heroine's thighs are very flexible, so it is easier to control this machine gun thigh.
The heroine has a weapon to open and hang, and with the cooperation of the male protagonist Lei, she begins to kill the four parties,
Easily kill the big boss and lead the others out of the base.
When the crowd learned that there were military helicopters at the base, they planned to leave by helicopter.
Unexpectedly, when Dakota got on the plane, he found that her husband William was waiting for him, and the other party had turned into a zombie, but he still wanted to control his wife in his hands.
Fortunately, at the critical moment, the sheriff intervened, simply and neatly to understand the scumbag William, ending Dakota's nightmare.
However, at the last moment, the male protagonist Lei finally died tragically in the mouth of the zombie in order to cover the female protagonist's plane.
The male protagonist confessed affectionately at the last moment, telling the heroine not to be sad, and emphasizing that he has a special function, which has left a seed in the heroine's body.
At the end of the story, the whole world has become a terrifying planet occupied by zombies.
The heroine, on the other hand, gives birth to Ray's child and takes the surviving humans everywhere in search of a new home.
At this point her right leg prosthesis has been upgraded again, turning into a Gatling...
This "Horror Planet" is more like a game work of two ghost directors, the film is almost not in order, completely homage to the 60s and 70s of the execution room movie, so the film is more rough in plot, more emphasis on exploitation and curiosity, all kinds of violent plasma scenes emerge in an endless stream, wandering in the blurred area of commercial blockbusters and B-grade films, the plot design is crazy, and imaginative.
As a zombie film, the zombie setting in the film is more old-fashioned, and it is still the traditional routine of the whole town infected by the military's poison gas leak. However, the biggest feature of this film is that the scene is very poor, the infected person's body will fester and bleed pus, and the crew does not hesitate in terms of plasma, and the scene of fighting zombies is simply a variety of stumps flying around, and the cult flavor is full.
In terms of plot, although the film has many characters, the story is not chaotic at all, which shows the director's skillful control of the narrative rhythm. What is particularly impressive is that this film as a B-grade horror film, the story has a strong spoof nonsense style, in addition to the characters in it are all strange and strange coffee, the action behavior seems to be incomprehensible to ordinary people, the funny style of this film is that the characters in the film obviously look like eight hundred but make a bunch of very human things, which belongs to a kind of deliberately created black humor.
The most brain-opening place in this film is the setting of the machine gun beautiful girl, the heroine who originally had no combat effectiveness instantly opened and hung into a super Saiyan after loading the machine gun, and the body began to improve, the machine gun thigh killing zombies was like an autumn wind sweeping leaves, and it could also be loaded with howitzers to bomb the enemy, and at the end, it was directly upgraded to Gatlin, and the director's brain hole was really outrageous.
Incidentally, about the setting of such machine gun beauty girl warriors fighting zombies, the following year Japanese cult director Iguchi Sheng also made a special film "Machine Gun Girl", which is a gangster action film, but the core setting is a high school girl who is persecuted by gangsters, transforms her right arm into a machine gun and then takes revenge.
Speaking of the movie "Horror Planet", the film is a tribute film with a spoof spirit, the execution room movie itself is a kind of crazy exploitation of the B-grade film, and "Horror Planet" under the blessing of the two ghost directors, it is to play this hunting style to the extreme, the story can not be studied in detail, pure pursuit of sensory stimulation and entertainment attributes.
Even if you're not a zombie movie fan, purely as a popcorn movie, this movie is definitely worth watching.