An American Werewolf in London – Blood and Porridge

July 3, 2023July 6, 2023

Cinematic heroes 4: Brian Glover

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Brian Glover’s Wikipedia entry begins with a quote from the great man that served both as a mission statement and as a career summary: “You play to your strengths in this game. My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.” For a quarter-century, Glover played characters that were shiny of pate, pugnacious of visage and flat of vowels in many a British movie, TV show and stage play, and in the process made himself one of the most recognisable character actors in the country.

Born in Sheffield and brought up in Barnsley, the young Glover initially followed in his father’s footsteps. His dad had been a professional wrestler and, while attending the University of Sheffield, Glover topped up his student grant by wrestling too. He fought bouts under the moniker of ‘Leon Aris, the man from Paris’ and was good enough to appear on television, featuring in the Saturday-teatime wrestling slots shown on the ITV programme World of Sport that, a half-century ago, turned such burly, grappling bruisers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Jim Brakes and Big Daddy into household names. He continued to wrestle long after he’d graduated and settled into a respectable day job, which was teaching English and French at Barnsley Grammar School.

One of Glover’s school colleagues was Barry Hines, who’d authored the novel A Kestrel for a Knave. In 1968, this was filmed as Kes by the incomparable Ken Loach. Loach needed someone to play the puffed-up, preposterous and loutish Mr Sugden, the PE teacher at the school attended by Kes’s put-upon, juvenile hero, Billy Casper (Dai Bradley). Hines suggested Glover. For his audition, and to test Glover’s believability as a teacher, Loach staged a playground brawl and got Glover to break it up. This obviously wasn’t difficult for him, being a teacher already and a wrestler.

Glover’s turn as Sugden, who organises a football match with his pupils, insists on captaining one of the teams, and then cheats, dives and brutally fouls the kids while spouting his own match commenatary – likening himself to “the fair-haired, slightly-balding Bobby Charlton” – provides a bleak film with its one shaft of comic sunshine. Come to think of it, Loach’s 1998 movie My Name is Joe has some funny footballing sequences too, and when he finally got round to directing a proper comedy, it was 2009’s Waiting for Eric with French soccer legend Eric Cantona. The beautiful game is clearly the one thing guaranteed to make the famously grim, anti-establishment Loach lighten up.

© Woodfall Film Productions / United Artists

Glover spent another two years teaching before his next acting assignment, which was a role in the Terence Rattigan play Bequest to the Nation. Thereafter, he swiftly became ubiquitous. On television he appeared in Coronation Street (1972), The Regiment (1973), Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeny, Quiller (all 1975), Secret Army (1977), Minder (1980), Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (both 1985). In that last show he makes a memorable exit when he’s blasted away by some Cybermen. He also gives notable performances in two 1970s shows written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who at the time scripted virtually the only British TV sitcoms set outside London and southeast England. In a famous 1973 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads he plays the devious Flint, who makes a bet with Geordie heroes Bob and Terry that they can’t get through the day in Newcastle-upon-Tyne without hearing the result of an important football match. A year later, Glover joined the cast of Clement and La Frenais’ revered prison sitcom Porridge, playing the hapless, slow-witted convict Cyril Hislop, whose key line is: “I read a book once. Green, it was.”

When not playing bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshire chancers and convicts, Glover could leaven his northern tones with a twinkly avuncularity, which made him popular among advertisers. Thus, when his face wasn’t popping up on TV shows, his voice was popping up on commercials between TV shows. He voiced the TV advertisements for Allinson’s bread – “Bread with nowt taken out” – and for Tetley teabags. In the Tetley ads, he played the leader of the Tetley Tea-folk, an animated tribe of diminutive, white-coated, cloth-capped characters tasked with the exacting job of giving each teabag its ‘2000 perforations’.

© Wellborn / United Artists

Meanwhile, during the 1970s, Glover became a regular in British movies. These included Lindsay Anderson’s oddball 1973 epic O Lucky Man! and its follow-up, 1982’s Britannia Hospital (about which I intend to write on this blog very soon); Michael Crichton’s 1979 period adventure The First Great Train Robbery; and Terry Gilliam’s 1978 medieval comedy Jabberwocky, in which he plays the foreman of an ironworks that’s reduced to chaos when Michael Palin blunders into it. In Douglas Hickox’s 1975 London-set thriller Brannigan, he’s a minor villain who gets roughed up by John Wayne, playing a tough American cop on an assignment to the British capital – Wayne creates mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town. “Now,” he warns Glover, “would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”

In 1981, John Landis made his much-loved horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, the opening scenes of which, set in a northern pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, called for a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman. Obviously, there was only one man for the job. Landis duly cast Glover and the resulting scene, wherein he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke, is, along with Kes, his finest cinematic moment – both films show what a fine comic actor he was. Unfortunately, the pub’s jovial mood is then ruined when David Naughton and Griffin Dunn inquire about the strange five-pointed star painted on the wall. And as they’re ejected from the premises, Glover utters the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue: “Beware the moon, lads!”

© PolyGram Pictures / Gruber-Peters Company / Universal Pictures

Three years later, Glover turned up in another classic werewolf movie, playing a villager in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short story, The Company of Wolves. At one point, he’s involved in a brawl with the previous subject of this Cinematic Heroes series of posts, David Warner; and at another, he comes out with a very Yorkshire-esque line: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

Glover faced another monster, a slimy one rather than a hairy one, in 1992’s Alien 3, wherein he plays the warden in charge of a prison-colony on the stormy planet Fiorina 161. Sigourney Weaver crash-lands there, unwittingly bringing with her a cargo of egg-laying alien face-huggers. Directed by a young David Fincher, Alien 3 is a much-maligned film. It can’t help but seem anti-climactic after the previous film in the Alien series, James Cameron’s barnstorming Aliens (1986), and the fact that it begins by killing off most of the characters left alive at the end of Aliens didn’t endear it to fans. It’s got some wonderfully grungy set design, though, and there is something heroic about the film’s un-Hollywood-like, and commercially-suicidal, pessimism. Even Weaver herself gets it at the end.

One of Alien 3’s biggest problems is that, due to incompetent scripting and editing, most of its interesting characters – Glover, Charles Dance, Paul McGann – vanish from the story halfway through. Incidentally, for British audiences, Glover perhaps brought a little too much baggage to his role. When I saw Alien 3 in an Essex cinema, a scene where Weaver confronts Glover in his office, while he – voice of the Tetley Tea-folk – absent-mindedly dunks a teabag in a cup of boiling water, provoked guffaws.

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Glover must have got on well with Sigourney Weaver, for he subsequently turned up in 1997’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror, in which Weaver played the evil queen. Another late role was in the endearingly off-the-wall 1993 comedy Leon the Pig Farmer, in which a young Jewish Londoner, played by Mark Frankel, gets the unsettling news that he was the result of an artificial-insemination mix-up and his father is actually a Yorkshire pig farmer – inevitably a bald-headed, rough-looking one played by Glover. What makes Leon, which also starred Fawlty Towers’ Connie Booth and former Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, slightly melancholic to watch now is the knowledge that lead-actor Frankel died in a motorcycle accident a few years later.

Glover’s stage CV was as busy as his film and TV ones. He appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It (playing, appropriately, Charles the Wrestler) and Romeo and Juliet, while other theatre work included Don Quixote, The Iceman Cometh, The Long Voyage Home, The Mysteries and Saint Joan. Lindsay Anderson, a stage director as well as a film one, cast him in productions of the David Storey plays The Changing Room and Life Class and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. Such was Glover’s fame by the time he appeared in a West End version of The Canterbury Tales that it was advertised with a slightly amended version of one of his catch-phrases: “Chaucer with nowt taken out.”

Glover was a literary figure as well. He was a prolific playwright and writer, was responsible for over 20 plays and short films, and penned a column in a Yorkshire newspaper. Asked to contribute a script to a 1976 TV drama anthology called Plays for Britain, which also featured writing by Stephen Poliakoff and Roger McGough, Glover found himself short of inspiration. He ended up paying a visit to a police station and inquiring if they’d experienced anything unusual lately that he might be able to use as an idea. While he was at the station, a woman trooped in to the front desk to report indignantly that someone had pinched her front door. Suddenly, Glover knew what his story would be about.

Meanwhile, I remember seeing him on a TV arts programme, discussing – with Anthony Burgess, no less – Paul Theroux’s acerbic 1983 travel book about the British coastline, The Kingdom by the Sea. Glover, who during his wrestling days had toured many of the towns Theroux wrote about, took particular exception to a comment Theroux made about Aberdeen: “…the average Aberdonian is someone who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.”

© UK Film Council / Entertainment Film Distributors

Alas, in September 1996, Brian Glover met his own Alamo. He underwent an operation for a brain tumour, although a fortnight later he was back at work, making one of his final films, Up ‘n’ Under. Fittingly, this was about the north-of-England sport of rugby league and was made by the playwright John Godber, whose debut play Bouncers has become a much-revived classic. Glover was among the first people to go and see Bouncers when it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 and was quick to offer Godber encouragement. Despite the surgery, the tumour eventually killed him in July 1997.

Thanks to his gruff-but-lovable persona, unmistakable voice, and talent for stealing any scene he was in, Glover lives on in the memory of people like me, who grew up watching a lot of television and movies in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Those folk include actor Jason Isaacs, who admits to using him as inspiration for his star turn as the Soviet war-hero and Red Army commander-in-chief Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s historical satire The Death of Stalin (2017). While he played Zhukov as a blunt, abrasive and – crucially – Yorkshire-accented bad-ass, Isaacs said, “I had a picture of Brian Glover in my head. Magnificent actor.”

Meanwhile, Glover is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London, where a simple gravestone describes him as a ‘Wrestler… Actor… Writer’. Not just a Yorkshireman, then, but a true Renaissance man.

From wikipedia.org / © Edwardx

August 31, 2021September 11, 2021

Many moons ago

© Universal Pictures / Polygram Pictures

When I think about the films that I saw and loved during the formative years of my mid-to-late-teens, films like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), George Miller’s Mad Max II (1981), Terry Gilliam’s The Time Bandits (1981), Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs (1982), I instinctively assume they were released, oh, maybe a quarter of century ago. It scares me when I actually do the maths and realise that no, 40 years have now passed, or will have passed soon, since their original release. Yes, I know the platitudes – ‘Time waits for no man’, ‘None of us are getting younger’ and so on. Still, it comes as a mighty shock to realise these films are now as far back in time from 2021 as Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne, or The Wizard of Oz (1939) with Judy Garland, were back in time from when they first hit the cinemas in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Anyway, August 2021 has served up yet another cinematic reminder of what a dribbling old fart I now am. I’ve discovered that exactly 40 years have elapsed since the release of John Landis’s much-loved horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London (1981).

The film won the first-ever Oscar awarded for Best Make-Up, courtesy of legendary make-up artist Rick Baker. Though what Baker pulls off when he transforms star David Naughton into the titular werewolf, elongating his face into a muzzle and his hands into paws, making fangs sprout from his jaws and claws from his fingertips, having long black fur ooze through his skin, is more a triumph of practical special effects. Ironically, while American Werewolf deserves to be seen on a cinema-sized screen for those effects to be appreciated in their full glory, I’ve only ever seen it on a small screen. My first viewing came in 1982, at a private hostel called Balmer’s in the Swiss town of Interlaken, where the management would entertain its guests in the evening by showing them recent movies using a TV set and video-cassette recorder. The evening I stayed there, they showed American Werewolf on video and I watched it amid a bunch of American backpackers not dissimilar to the pair of American backpackers, David (Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne), whom we’re introduced to and then see savaged by a werewolf during the film’s opening minutes.

Since then, I’ve seen it umpteen times, through late-night TV showings, or on video (invariably at a mate’s house and accompanied by a carryout of beer), or more lately on my laptop, and it’s never failed to work its magic on me.

When I first watched it, I thought it a rather strange film. Movies that combined horror and comedy weren’t anything new, and the previous decade had seen both Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) and Stan Dragoti’s Dracula spoof Love at First Bite (1979). However, those and pretty much all ‘horror-comedies’ until then had emphasized the comedy and used the horror merely as a seam from which un-bloody, family-friendly jokes were mined. Little or nothing was shown that was actually horrifying.

American Werewolf, on the other hand, quite happily treats its audience to images of flesh being ripped, throats being slashed, heads being bitten off and so on. Indeed, much of the humour is generated by the visceral horror, especially in the scenes where Jack, killed in the opening minutes, returns as an affable, chatty zombie to warn David that, having been bitten by a werewolf, he’s going to turn into one himself come the next full moon. With each appearance, Jack is considerably more decayed. At one point his alarming appearance prompts David to exclaim, “I will not be threatened by a walking meat loaf!”

© Universal Pictures / Polygram Pictures

Also strange is the film’s unconventionally leisurely pacing up until its main event, David turning into a werewolf and going on a rampage, which takes place at the hour-mark. Not that anything before that key moment is boring. The film is an endearing hodgepodge of sub-plots, themes and observations that happen to take director / writer John Landis’s fancy. These include David’s romance with Alex Price (the radiant Jenny Agutter), a nurse working in the London hospital where he ends up following the initial werewolf attack. This has been hushed up and passed off as an attack by an ‘escaped lunatic’, a term that shows the film’s age a wee bit. I don’t think you can talk about ‘lunatics’, even in a horror film, in the politically correct 2020s. Come to think of it, when David and Alex finally get it on, it’s to the strains of Van Morrison’s Moondance, which shows the film’s age too. It’s been a long time indeed since the curmudgeonly Van Morrison could be associated with anything horny.

Landis also shows us David suffering from bizarre dreams, presumably the result of the lycanthropic gene that’s now in his body. These include one memorable sequence where he dreams of his family being slaughtered by decayed-faced werewolves in Nazi uniforms while they watch The Muppet Show. And Landis makes some bemused observations too about British life in the early 1980s – the less-than-rosy reception that David and Jack get when they blunder into a Yorkshire pub (the Slaughtered Lamb) at the beginning; the London Underground being full of surly punk rockers; British TV consisting of three terrestrial channels that show only darts, News of the World adverts and the BBC Test Card; British kids being weird little brats who shout “No!” all the time or laugh manically when their dogs bark at you; grumblings about inflation; grumblings about British food; and the rain. The rain depicted in American Werewolf isn’t typical horror-movie, thunder-and-lightning rain. It’s just grey, depressing British rain that always seems to fall at the wrong moment.

This social commentary continues after David transforms from man to werewolf on the next full moon and paints London red. His victims represent both ends of the spectrum of the nascent Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. They include homeless down-and-outs huddling around a fire down by the edge of the Thames and an annoyingly cheerful proto-yuppie couple, who continue to be annoyingly cheerful even after they’ve been torn apart and, like Jack, come back to haunt David as the living dead. Landis also has a dig at the then-sleaziness of central London by having the film’s climax (ouch!) begin in a porno cinema in Piccadilly Circus, where the punters are watching a spectacularly gormless British sex movie called See You Next Wednesday. A fictitious ‘film within a film’, See You Next Wednesday is foreshadowed earlier on. When David claims a victim in the Tottenham Court Road tube station, we see a poster advertising it on one of the walls.

© Universal Pictures / Polygram Pictures

One thing about American Werewolf that doesn’t get enough praise is its supporting cast. David Naughton, Jenny Agutter and Griffin Dunne have all won plaudits and yes, they’re great, but there’s plenty of solid acting talent backing them up. John Woodvine gives a commanding and unflappable performance as Dr Hirsch, the medical man who resolves to find out what’s really going on after the injured, seemingly-raving David arrives in his care in London. Up north, meanwhile, the role of main villager at the Slaughtered Lamb pub required a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman and only one man could handle the job, the splendid Brian Glover. Although Glover is fondly remembered for his comic turn as the pompous PE teacher Mr Sugden in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), the scene in American Werewolf where he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke is surely as funny. Those patrons include a young and shifty-looking Rik Mayall. I assume Mayall and Glover hit it off because, years later, I recall Glover making a guest appearance in Mayall’s TV show Bottom (1991-95).

Frank Oz appears briefly as a snotty American Embassy official – Oz recently noted, “Whenever John (Landis) needed a prick in a film, he called me” – and Cockney actor Alan Ford pops up as a talkative London cabbie who enlightens David about the carnage he caused (but didn’t remember causing) the night before: “Six of ’em… all in different parts of the city, all mutilated… He must be a real, right maniac, this fellah!” In micro-cameos, you might just spot Landis himself as the poor schmuck who, during the final werewolf-induced carnage in Piccadilly Circus, gets struck by an out-of-control car and is knocked through a shop window, and legendary James Bond stuntman Vic Armstrong as the driver of the double-decker bus that also comes to grief.

© Universal Pictures / Polygram Pictures

If the film has a fault, it’s that it ends so abruptly. I guess Landis was trying to be shockingly and modishly nihilistic in depicting David’s final fate, but it feels like a cheat that there’s so little build-up, tension and drama in those last minutes. That said, Jenny Agutter as the now-distraught Alex still gives the truncated finale an emotional punch.

Even the last couple of minutes of American Werewolf, disappointing though they are, are a hundred times better than the entirety of the belated sequel An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), made by a different team from the one that made the original. It’s a dire, slipshod, intentionally dumb-assed film that shits werewolf-dung all over the memory of its predecessor, not least because it dispenses with Rick Baker’s practical effects and renders its werewolves in lousy-looking, cartoonish CGI.

More recently, there’s been talk of a remake. But a new American Werewolf in London couldn’t hope to capture the essence of the time – as opposed to the place – that made the original so special. The 1981 film is unique because it showed the personality of London, and Britain, that existed 40 years ago, albeit through the eyes of a bemused main character and bemused writer / director who were both outsiders.

I doubt very much if a tale of an American werewolf prowling around 2021 London would win the affection of audiences. We’re talking a charmless modern London of oligarchs, dirty money, hollowed-out neighbourhoods, rapacious developers, Mayor Johnson’s ego-trip skyscraper developments, embarrassing white elephants like the Millennium Dome, Emirates Air Line and Marble Arch Mound, and exorbitant housing and living costs – there’s no way Nurse Alex could afford a flat of her own, for David to shelter in, as she did in 1981. Mind you, I might warm to a remake if it had the werewolf chomping on Nigel Farage’s head.

Here’s a lovely re-invention of the movie poster for An American Werewolf in London by the artist and illustrator Graham Humphreys. I hope he doesn’t mind me using it here.

June 18, 2021June 21, 2021

Dave of the dead

I’ve finally caught up with one of the most hyped films to land on Netflix last month, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021). I’m not a massive fan of Snyder’s work, though I can’t say either that his films rouse in me the antipathy that they seem to rouse in thousands of other movie-fans, who regularly spray adjectives like ‘bloated’, ‘dour’, ‘humorless’, ‘prolonged’, ‘hollow’, ‘overbearing’ and ‘overstuffed’ at them, while dissing Snyder himself as some sort of dumb-assed filmmaking dude-bro.

Mind you, I’d only seen two of his earlier films. The first was his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s masterful 1978 zombie epic Dawn of the Dead. I have mixed feelings about Snyder’s version of Dawn. Its first 25 minutes are terrific, but thereafter it becomes a routine, if slick, affair, with no attempt to replicate or develop the satire on mindless consumerism that made Romero’s original so enjoyable. (Incidentally, I recently discovered that Romero shared my opinion of the remake.)

The second was his 2013 Superman movie Man of Steel, which I thought was underrated. I didn’t mind it being darker in tone than the Superman movies of the late 1970s and 1980s and liked how it showed Superman getting a hard time, initially at least, from a suspicious humanity. Admittedly, Henry Cavill as Superman and Amy Adams as Lois Lane didn’t engage in the way that Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder did in those roles three decades earlier, but the splendid supporting cast – Michael Shannon, Laurence Fishburne, Russell Crowe, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner – more than compensated. That said, not being a fan of DC Comics overall, I felt no inclination to watch Snyder’s later ventures into the DC Extended Universe, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017).

As its title suggests, Army of the Dead sees Snyder return to zombie territory, although this new movie takes place in a different universe from Dawn of the Dead. Whereas in Dawn, the zombie outbreak happens everywhere and brings civilization to its knees within days, in Army it’s localized and quickly controlled. It begins with holidaymakers, gamblers, croupiers, showgirls and Elvis impersonators succumbing to a nasty, bite-y zombie virus in the casinos and hotels of Las Vegas, after a top-secret convoy transporting the bug crashes in the nearby Nevada Desert. The US military responds and manages to contain the virus, plus all the zombies carrying it, by sealing off Las Vegas behind a towering perimeter wall of metal containers.

Although it was obvious from the start that I was going to be watching a big, dumb, action-fantasy-horror movie, even at this early point I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. From where did the military suddenly rustle up all those giant containers? And how come the Las Vegas they seal off seems to consist only of the downtown area with the casinos and hotels, but with nothing else attached? Doesn’t the real city sprawl a bit? Doesn’t it have suburbs? I’ve never visited it, but I had the impression that Las Vegas was more expansive, thanks to reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) and watching David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).

Oh well. Now under zombie-lockdown, Las Vegas is completely inaccessible. This is frustrating news for casino tycoon Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), who has 200 million dollars in cash sitting in a vault under a casino in the city and would like to retrieve it. The fact that the US government has just announced that it’s going to erase the zombie plague by nuking Las Vegas in a few days’ time gives extra impetus to his desire to retrieve it. Thus, Tanaka approaches a tough ex-mercenary called Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) and offers him a generous portion of the 200 million in return for putting together a ‘team’, breaking into Vegas, blasting their way through the zombies and liberating the money before everything goes up in a cloud of mushroom-shaped radioactive smoke. Ward was involved in the original military operation to evacuate non-infected people from the city and seal it off and so is the best man for the job, but he carries psychological baggage. His wife perished during the operation, which has so traumatized him that he’s been reduced to flipping burgers in the kitchen of an out-of-the-way diner.

Indeed, food seems to have become the Bautista character’s way of dealing with post-zombie stress disorder. He’s still blathering about lobster rolls near the movie’s close, two-and-a-half hours later. (Yes, two-and-a-half hours – this is a long film.)

The set up reminded me less of past zombie movies than of John Carpenter’s rugged sci-fi actioner Escape from New York (1981), in which tough guy Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is sent into a future version of Manhattan, sealed off and transformed into a giant, hellhole prison run by its own inmates, to rescue the US president whose plane has just crashed there. The president was played by Donald Pleasence, so the film was eerily prophetic in its vision of a dystopian future America run by a president called Donald.

The difference is that Carpenter would have established the premise, introduced the protagonists and got them into the zombie-fied Las Vegas within the first quarter-hour. Snyder, it’s fair to say, is a less economical filmmaker. While Bautista was in the middle of assembling his team, and no one had got anywhere near Vegas yet, I checked my watch and realized 45 minutes had already passed. Herein lies Army’s greatest problem. It takes its time getting going. And even after it gets going, there are still periods when everything stops going again so that Snyder can shoehorn in ponderous, talky, supposedly character-building stuff. I can’t help wondering how much better the film would have been if some studio bigwig had told Snyder that Army wasn’t allowed a 150-minute running time. No, it’d only have 90 minutes maximum in which to tell its story. I’m sure the result would have had much less flab and far more momentum.

Another issue I have with Army is its derivativeness. I don’t mind films containing little nods and homages to other films, but Snyder not only pinches a major subplot and supporting character from James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) but also rehashes at least two of that film’s legendary action sequences. As the film progresses, it also increasingly calls to mind the Will Smith sci-fi / horror movie I Am Legend (2007), with Bautista and his crew discovering that there aren’t just ordinary, common-or-garden zombies shambling mindlessly around downtown Las Vegas. There’s also a more evolved variety that can sprint, climb, communicate, experience emotions, reproduce, organize themselves and even wear metal headgear, making them impervious to that normal zombie-stopping technique, “shoot ’em in the head.”

Frustratingly, like the film I Am Legend (and unlike the marvelous 1954 novel by Richard Matheson on which it’s based), nothing is done with these creatures once they’ve been introduced. They merely become another threat to be blasted away, like a new foe that’s appeared on a new level of a computer game. Considering how it’s clear at this point that both Bautista’s team and the evolved zombies are being shafted by unseen corporate villains, it would have been interesting if the script had had Bautista try to communicate with the creatures and enlist their aid against the common enemy.

One other irritant is Snyder’s use of music, which is meant to be ironic but just seems clunkingly obvious: Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas (1964) and Suspicious Minds (1968) to evoke the setting and the Doors’ This is the End (1967) and Credence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Riding (1969) to evoke the apocalyptic mood. Most of these appear as cover versions by the likes of Richard Cheese and Allison Crowe, Theo Gilmore and the Raveonettes, which suggests Snyder didn’t trust the young audience the film was targeting to be able to handle hearing the songs in their original forms. Worst of all, though, is his deployment of the Cranberries’ Zombie (1994). I’m not a fan of that song but it was written to protest the killing of children by the IRA. Using it on the soundtrack of a Hollywood blockbuster about zombies doesn’t strike me as funny, but as crass. (Also, when Zombie plays in the background of a scene, it gives away an important, upcoming plot twist.) Still, I laughed when Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me (1982) made an unexpected appearance. Musically, Snyder got one thing right, at least.

Despite everything – the film’s bloated-ness, overlong-ness, derivativeness and unimaginative use of music – I did quite enjoy Army of the Dead. Largely this is due to the cast. Even though he’s the size and shape of a muscular Michelin Man, Bautista comes across as a likeable human being, while the other performers do a good job of creating characters you can relate to and root for. Well, apart from the character who might as well have ‘I’M A SCUMBAG WHO’S GOING TO BETRAY EVERYONE’ written on a signpost above his head. Particularly good are Ana de la Reguera as Bautista’s capable deputy, who quietly carries a torch for the big fellow; Tig Notaro as the helicopter pilot tasked with flying them out the disaster zone before the bomb drops on it, who displays Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy levels of loveable crankiness; and Omari Hardwick and Matthias Schweighöfer as, respectively, a macho, chainsaw-wielding mercenary and a nerdy, mild-mannered safecracker, who get involved in an unexpected bromance.

And the action and suspense scenes, when they come, are exciting. It’s just a bit disappointing that, as I’ve said, so many of these scenes evoke similar scenes in earlier movies – Aliens or I Am Legend or, say, 1981’s An American Werewolf in London (two blokes crossing some desolate terrain at the film’s start, trying to escape a slavering monster) or the 2013 Brad Pitt vehicle World War Z (Bautista’s team having to make their way through a building that’s crowded with zombies, who are all in a statue-like state of hibernation but will wake up if there’s any sudden sound). Definitely worth waiting for is a gory sequence featuring the movie’s best original touch, possibly its only original touch, a zombie tiger that’d originally belonged to Vegas magicians / entertainers Siegfried and Roy.

To sum up – plot-wise, Army of the Dead is as ragged and hole-ridden as the undead creatures that inhabit its dystopian setting, but it remains entertaining. Its main problem is its inordinate running time. If an hour had been chopped off that, you’d have had a thrilling, engaging action-horror movie as fast-moving as its evolved tier of zombies. Unfortunately, the two-and-a-half-hour-long Army too often resembles its other tier of zombies, the ones that just shamble.