Zombies and Ghouls
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, we go digging in the dirt, with three films featuring some of the less pleasant members of society. With wine, pairings, of course.
In 1986 Stuart Gordon gave us From Beyond, which was based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. Gordon had a tough time getting an R rating for the film, because the Motion Picture Association couldn’t single out one shot or one scene that they felt made it offensive. They told him the whole movie was the problem. Well, Gordon snipped a bit here and sliced a bit there and eventually got an R to hang on the credits.
The story is a little hard to follow, or hard to believe, but that’s the horror genre for you. A couple of researchers decide they want to poke into a pineal gland and juice it with a gadget called the resonator. This is why you don’t see many pineal gland researchers getting invited to dinner parties.
The resonator was invented to allow perception of things in other dimensions, and boy, does it work. Creatures from another world become visible. One of them grabs the chief labcoat, takes him out for a spin, and returns him as a ghastly shape-shifter. Forget dinner parties. He won’t be welcome at McDonald’s anymore.
We find out that when the resonator is turned off, the horrible creatures disappear. Guess what? When you disable your resonator, some idiot is bound to plug it back in. When they do, people get hurt, disfigured, decapitated, maimed, brain damaged, and embalmed. It feels like I’m reading from the MPAA’s email to Gordon. This is when you say “Oh, hell no.”
I wouldn’t look for a happy ending in From Beyond. A satisfying ending might be too much to expect. An ending will be fine enough.
Dave Phinney’s Orin Swift Cellars has a wine that fits here, called Advice From John. The advice, printed on the label, is You Had Me at Hell No. It’s mostly Merlot and you have to join the wine club to get it, but it is a pretty cool label. Oh, and Phinney’s wines never disappoint.
Zombie, which you may know as Zombi2 or Zombie Flesh-Eaters, because of the cavalier attitude Italian film producers have with names, is from 1979. It’s from a few years later in the U.S. because it just is. You can dig further into the mess on Reddit, but be advised: that’s a real can of worms.
Goremonger Lucio Fulci made films for some 50 years, many of them either comic or spaghetti westerns. His name is written in blood, though, in the horror/slasher genre. Fulci directed this film, which put him on the bloodsports map. It was designed to be a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which was called Zombi in Italy, hence the Zombi2 moniker. We get to see a zombie epidemic, zombie dinnertime, an eye gouged out, and a fight between a zombie and a shark. That’s called “jumping the zombie” in the biz, by the way.
I wanted to find an Italian Zombie Zin, and it occurred to me: Primitivo is the Italian name for Zinfandel. The Apollonio Primitivo di Manduria is as dark as the darkest zombie humor. And it’s a damn good wine, maybe good enough to justify shooting corpses that reanimate and rise from the grave.
http://www.nowandzin.com/search?q=Manduria
1980’s City of the Living Dead was the first in Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy. If it seems like he basically made the same movie over and over, you must not be a true slasher fan. Turn in your credentials on the way out the door.
Christopher George stars, looking a little older than in his Rat Patrol days, but aren’t we all. Fulci oversees a script that has, all together now, a gate to hell. This time, it opens because a priest commits suicide. The tiger team that’s assembled to close the gate are a reporter and a psychic. When the end of the world is near, please tell me we have better than that to throw at the problem.
This film caught a lot of criticism for the graphic violence, and deservedly so. The film features such horror tropes as people being impaled, through the head and elsewhere, disembowelment, hanging, and a corpse in the kitchen, just to name a few of the ghastly pleasures crammed into an hour and a half. It’s no wonder the British, in all their dry humor, called many of Fulci’s films “video nasty.”
From Chateau Diana in Sonoma County comes Zombie Zin, a blend of Zinfandel and Syrah that’s sure to get those zombies back in their graves. $20.
Randy Fuller
NowAnd Zin Wine – www.nowandzin.com
Twitter – www.twitter.com/randyfuller1
LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/randyfullerlax/