Monday, November 12, 2012

Juan of the Dead in 275 Words or Less

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I can understand why this film was gleefully gobbled up by the ravenous fan-boy hordes since it aims for the back fences with it's slobby-chic posturing - you can practically reach out and caress the smooth plasticky texture of the inevitable adult-sized action figures. They each have their outfits, and their weapons, and their strident pose before ass-kicking, amen. And admittedly there are moments of terrific fun to be had in this vein - there are ingenious bursts of wacky violence up in here. But it suffers from the same problem that Attack the Block, a similarly nerd-heralded genre picture recently anointed to the cult pantheon against some of my objections, did - namely, what a bunch of dicks. 

These characters reveal themselves to be sociopaths, they kill innocent people repeatedly, and it's played for laughs - in my opinion, flat, patently unfunny, movie-killing ones. Now of course there's a tone you can strike that makes that sort of thing work - black comedies have been doing it for ages, and I've been enjoying them for thirty-five years of that time. But this film wants us to care about its characters too much in too haphazardly a manner - it paints Juan and his cohorts as people to sympathize with time and again, and then five seconds later it has them whoopsie off an old lady with a harpoon or use a man in a wheelchair as zombie bait, hilarious. Except, you, know, ick. I don't so much care if these folks manage to rebuild their fraught inter-personal bonds at that point, ya know?
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