The Poop Shoot
Kevin Smith's site MOVIEPOOPSHOOT reviews the HoW trailer in "Trailer Park"
http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/trailer/index.html
Prognosis: Positive. Nothing says “wicked awesome” better than paring a WWII movie and Nazi zombies together in one film. Usually it’s one of the three which get my motor runnin’ but all three together is like a mutated pairing in heaven.
Also, what’s important to note, is that there’s no messing around here. We get right into things tout de suite without any background bull crap that usually hampers indie trailers.
Yeah, the exchange between two Allied soldiers who want to talk about “what they’ve seen” seems a little stiff but the quick cut to the all red screen with the visage of a zombified Nazi doesn’t even begin to explain the delight I felt when I see the white eyes of the undead cutting in and out of the screen as some other soldiers walk a night patrol. I don’t have any context to where we are or when this verbal exchange is happening but it’s just enough that we’re somewhere in the battle of WWII.
I also appreciate the effects work that is on display here. The shot of a plane with its wing on fire, the battle scenes of guns going off with bombs of smoke trying to create the realism of war, the cutaways of the mad scientist’s lab where these zombies are being created should impress even the most ardent stickler of details.
Sometimes the most tragic thing that a movie can do is to have its characters loaded with one-liners and dialogue so stiff it feels like a corpse but intermingled with the scenes of action, which should also be testament to the amount of work which was put into trying to mimic some kind of battlefield realism, but this is the exact kind of lot which should be delivering these kinds of lines. This is WWII, the era of pulp fiction, of Mickey Spillane and these army guys’ grandiose delivery is easily glossed over in order to try and understand why there is this Master Zombie which doesn’t look like he is so easily put down by ordinary machine gun fire.
As we come close to the end we should be pleasantly surprised that the trailer doesn’t follow the current trend in trailer construction which states that you blow your wad in explaining, and showing, everything that’s going to happen. The cards aren’t all on the table, as our narrative stops just as our men in green are going to after the last zombie in the line, “daddy” they call him, and it’s much appreciated as it leaves the audience with just enough questions about what is going on in this movie.
Kudos.
- Christopher Stipp
Feb 2006
