Out of the Inkwell

Day 5
A couple of reviews

Our story so far: In honor of Halloween, your humble blogger is going to write about horror films, etc. each and every day of the month.

Caution: Mike reviews one very nasty little movie and one quite good one.

“The Objective” has one of the best trailers I’ve seen of any recent movie and I’m happy to report this film from writer and director Daniel Myrick, the co-creator of “The Blair Witch Project,” lives up to the hype.

Set in November 2001 in Afghanistan, A CIA operative leads a group of Special Forces soldiers into the mountains to supposedly find a Muslim cleric whose support would be valuable to win the hearts and minds of the non-Taliban citizens of the country.

That, of course, is not the real deal. Actually the agent is pursuing a phenomenon he heard about when he was training Afghans to fight the Soviets. This force is an unstoppable weapon.

There are some familiar themes here. The group of soldiers being picked off by unseen foes harkens all the way back to John Ford’s “The Lost Patrol” and continued more recently in a film such as “Southern Comfort.” Myrick makes it work though.

To say much about the film would be a disservice to viewers. It is an extremely solid, adult film that delves into the same territory as “Blair Witch” in that people in a natural environment are facing something quite unnatural.

There are some good thrills, but unlike “Blair Witch” which pretty much scared me as no film had done so since I was a kid, “The Objective” filled me with an uneasiness and dread – a different reaction but an effective one.

This is definitely a film to see. It’s on DVD, so what are you waiting for?

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Here comes the nasty part; Kim avert your eyes.

I received a copy of “Dead Girl” and I had little idea what I was getting into. I hadn’t read any buzz about it other than the pitch from the publicist that promised a horror film that was more about a rite of passage of two teenage friends and the testing of their friendship as two high school outsiders.

The word “poignant” was actually used to describe this movie.

After watching the film, I wondered how the hell I was going to write about it in the weeklies I edit. These are family newspapers and how do I describe a movie in which two high school losers discover the naked body of a what appears to be a dead woman in the basement of a closed hospital. Except she’s not dead exactly, but is a flesh eating zombie. And one of the boys decides that since she isn’t really alive it would be okay to have sex with her. Repeatedly. And to sell this privilege to other losers.

Poignant indeed.

Boy howdy this necrophilia movie sure reflects a rite of passage that most of us men will recognize from our mis-spent youth.


Apparently someone lost the will to actually sell this movie for what it is. As it stands it is an amazingly nasty zombie movie – not so by effects or visuals but by idea. I’m sure that would have appealed to a certain audience.

Apparently, according to the “making of” feature, everyone wants to talk about the friendship and teen angst angle. I suspect someone might be just a little guilty about making a movie in which teenagers violate a dead body – even though that dead body wants to eat them – and not in a good way.

Cue Beavis and Butthead giggle here; "He said eat me."

If mean-spirited zombie movies are your cup of tea, grab some “Dead Girl.” If not, like me, watch something better.
© 2009 by Gordon Michael Dobbs