I like lists. This may owe less to the utility of a nice, well-organised, well-presented list, than to my own placement somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum, but whatever. As you may have seen, there’s an alphabetical list of movies somewhere on this blog, in an attempt to make it a bit more user-friendly and allow me to keep track of things. One problem with maintaining the thing, however, is what to do with foreign movies?
The thing is that these usually rock up either under a completely new title or get translated into English – and so the movie known as Habemus Papam in its native Italy turned up in the UK called We Have A Pope, Le Quattro Volte arrived as The Four Times, Hodejegerne as Headhunters, and so on. But where are you supposed to put films like this in an alphabetical list? Under the original title or the translated one? I am aware this is even less of a concern for normal people than most of the things I get exercised over hereabouts, but even so…
An interesting further wrinkle in this particular area is presented by Alejandro Brugues’ new movie, which is called… well, here’s the thing – it’s being marketed and reviewed under the title Juan of the Dead, but the on-screen title is Juan de los Muertos – which the subtitles helpfully translate as John of the Dead (having said that, the subtitling on the print I saw has, shall we say, some issues). So what am I supposed to do with that? Eh? Eh?
Hey ho. I suppose I should stop airing my own personal issues and talk about the movie (for sanity’s sake, we’ll go with Juan of the Dead). As you may have deduced, Juan of the Dead is a new entry to the never-more-healthy zombie apocalypse genre (having given this a moment’s thought, I can’t think of any recent zombie movies not involving apocalypses – though a golden oldie that fits the bill is being revived at the Phoenix in the not too distant future), with obvious aspirations to emulate Shaun of the Dead.
Our eponymous hero (given life by a notably deadpan performance from Alexis Diaz de Villegas) is a middle-aged waster and small-time crook content to rub along in his life in downtown Havana. He is lazy and irresponsible, engaged in all manner of reprehensible behaviour, and a severe disappointment to his comely teenage daughter (Andrea Duro).
You would think that the eruption into everyday Cuban life of shambling hordes of the living dead would only make Juan’s dubious situation even worse. Certainly, the official response to the crisis – which is to say that the zombies are US-funded political dissidents – does not bode well.
However, the zombie menace appears to trigger some deeply-buried impulse in Juan, resulting in an unlikely manifestation of private enterprise. Juan and his pals respond to the crisis by setting up a business called – wait for it – Juan of the Dead, which specialises in disposing of their clients’ undead family members (‘we kill your loved ones’ is the company’s slogan and USP). So, in the short-term at least, things look rosy for Juan – but how long can they carry on, as civilisation continues to collapse around them?
Juan of the Dead is being trumpeted as Cuba’s first full-length zombie horror comedy movie, and I’m prepared to believe that this is true. So I am happy to announce that this is the best Cuban zombie horror comedy movie I’ve ever seen – I went to see it with my special advisor on Latin American affairs and motorsport (a member of the support team who doesn’t get out much) and he enjoyed it even more than I did, so there you go.
Of course, there’s an element of ‘first in a field of one’ going on here, and I have to say that Juan of the Dead doesn’t set the bar for Cuban zombie horror comedy movies fantastically high – this is a good, fun movie, but not an absolutely great one by any stretch of the imagination. This is largely because it is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely all over the place.
I have heard some people wittering on about the clever use of zombies as a metaphor for the Cuban political situation. Hmm. I’m not quite sure what the zombies are supposed to be a metaphor for, in this reading of the film – the satirical joke seemed to me to be that the zombies are standard-issue zombies and the Cuban government’s response to them is ludicrously inept and doctrinaire. (Being excessively pedantic there as usual, I expect.)
But the political satire is a relatively small element of a film which is much more interested in doing broad, knockabout, slapstick comedy. Parts of it are jawdroppingly incorrect – there’s a bit where a naked woman who’s just survived a zombie attack haltingly and sincerely recounts the details of her ordeal to Juan’s best friend, completely oblivious to the fact he’s staring unwaveringly at her breasts throughout – and a lot of it is really coarse. It is very funny, though, and often surprisingly inventive – at one point Juan finds himself manacled to a zombie and the resulting fight somehow turns into the two of them dancing a strangely violent tango.
That said, the pursuit of laughs is really all-consuming and this is not a film which is notable for its narrative focus – it happily wanders off on all sorts of tangents in pursuit of good gags, which may be just as well as the actual plot is nothing special. In the end it turns out to be simply another(!) zombie apocalypse comedy film, rather more in the vein of Zombieland than Shaun of the Dead. That said, the film has a willingness to tear up the conventional grammar of the zombie horror story which gives it a real sense of energy – you never quite know what’s coming next or how seriously to take it.
All this betrays a deep knowledge and appreciation of this genre on the part of the film-makers, and it must be said that the Cuban zombie apocalypse is impressively mounted. One particular scene with massed zombies walking on the sea bed instantly made me think of World War Z, and would not disgrace a much bigger (or indeed more serious) film. The strangely inconsistent behaviour of zombies in other movies – basically, can they run or can’t they? – also has a joke made at its expense.
And it seemed to me that the film-makers had some aspirations to making a film with serious elements to it – Juan’s difficult relationship with his daughter is, to some extent, played straight, and parts of the climax strikes a rather earnestly serious tone: both of these seriously jar with the vast bulk of the movie surrounding them. They seemed to me to be rather contrived, and crowbarred into the film.
Nevertheless I enjoyed Juan of the Dead a lot – it has good jokes, is engagingly played, and it’s completely unpredictable. It may well be the case that had a film with this level of humour and discipline been made in English, it would have been much less generously reviewed by the proper critics, and I think there’s a danger of overpraising it simply because it’s a (badly) subtitled foreign film. But that doesn’t mean it deserves no praise at all.
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