| Arts and Entertainment - Friday, October 9, 2009
Talking pictures: Tripping the dead fantastic
Dancer inspired by sluggish, stumbling bugaboo
by David Templeton
"Hey wait a second!" exclaims Amber Steele, stopping in her tracks and wheeling gracefully around to take a closer look at the blood-soaked poster for the new movie Zombieland, the very film Steele and I are now exiting. The film stars Woody Harrelson and Jessie Eisenberg as zombie-killers who team up with a pair of con-artist sisters (Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone) in a world overrun with the living dead. The poster inside San Francisco's Metreon Theater, where we've met up this afternoon, depicts Stone wielding a chainsaw. The other cast members, including the 13-year-old Breslin, all pose with various firearms.
"I never saw a single chainsaw in the movie, did you?" Steele asks me, flashing a dazzling I-just-love-talking-about-chainsaws smile. "And the girl with the rifle. Did she ever actually shoot a zombie, on purpose? She accidentally shot one guy in the head, but she was aiming for the control box on the amusement park ride, so I don't think it counts. This poster is a bait-and-switch."
As we continue on in search of lunch ("Zombie movies always make me hungry," says Steele), my guest—a dancer and choreographer, and the founder of the notorious Living Dead Girlz dance troupe—comments on the confusing interior of the Metreon, a now mostly deserted high-tech shopping complex that seems totally comprised of dead ends and escalators going the wrong the direction.
"I would not want to be trapped in this place during a zombie pandemic," Steele remarks. "This is like one enormous zombie feeder in here."
Steele is a sought-after dance instructor and choreographer in the Bay Area, having graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in dance and comparative literature. She founded the Living Dead Girlz (www.livingdeadgirlz.com ) five years ago as a way to combine her enthusiasm for modern-jazz-hip-hop dance and George Romero's gory anti-consumerist zombie films. During performances of the Living Dead Girlz—a popular act on the national new-Vaudeville scene—Steele always tells a choreographed story, usually a tale of female empowerment, with some poor mortal woman being saved from the clutches of a condescending male when the Girlz suddenly pop up and, you know, rip his organs out and eat them. An LDG show is not for the squeamish, which also goes for Zombieland. An exhilarating collision of the classic zombie-themed horror film and a comedic road movie, Zombieland is 90 minutes of nonstop zombie-crunching fun, throughout which Steele frequently squealed with sweet, spontaneous glee ("Yayyyyyyy!"), whenever a zombie appeared in all its dripping, oozing glory.
"I really liked Zombieland," Steele says, once we've found a Japanese restaurant and ordered up some raw fish. "I hate to admit it, but I liked that it had a feel-good ending. I liked that the girls, in the path of their character development, didn't go from being irritating to slightly less irritating, which is what usually happens with attractive female characters in these kinds of movies. In Zombieland, they started out as over-defensive and distrustful, and then eventually learned to trust more. That's not the same-old, same-old—at least, not in horror films."
"You know what surprised me," I mention. "For a zombie flick, there were a lot of moments when the four zombie-killers could just walk down the street, wander up and hot-wire a car, visit famous people's houses in Hollywood—without a single zombie popping up. Until the end where thousands of zombies descend on the amusement park, the zombies are kind of an underrepresented breed."
"The usual rule, when traveling across a zombie-infected world," points out Steele, "is that you should avoid areas that used to be populated, because that's where zombies hang out. But in this case, the zombies evidently had other places to congregate. Another rule that was changed a little is the whole kill-the-brain, kill-the-zombie rule. In this movie, you can shoot a zombie pretty much anywhere, and it's down. Though I did like the 'double-tap' rule."
In the film, Eisenberg's tremulous, phobic Columbus (named after his hometown, as are all the characters in Zombieland), has stayed alive by observing a list of rules. "Always double tap" is a reminder that even when whacked hard in the head with a banjo, a zombie might still be alive enough to reach you. If you are lucky enough to have smashed a zombie with a blunt instrument, be smart—hit it again even harder, just to make sure.
"And always, always, hit a zombie in the head," Steele remarks, "even if you've just unloaded a shotgun into its chest."
"You never know when a zombie will be wearing a bulletproof vest," I agree.
"Exactly, especially cop zombies," Steele laughs. "In zombie movies, you rarely get a sense of what the zombies did before the zombie apocalypse. That's why I loved it when they come to Hollywood and are chased by the zombified Charlie Chaplin impersonator. That was hilarious!"
As someone who regularly dons zombie attire herself, Steele was impressed with the zombie makeup on display in the film, though unlike the Living Dead Girlz, the zombies of Zombieland are decidedly un-sexy.
"When I was first starting out with the dance troupe, we developed a few rules of our own," Steele says. "One of the most important rules was no gross teeth. There is nothing less sexy than gross teeth, and I have to say, Zombieland had some impressively bad teeth. With us, we put on the zombie makeup, and then finish off with lipstick and long eyelashes, so we're dead, but still attractive. That's important. Even if she's just risen from the grave, a girl can always wear hot outfits and look sensational!"
"So, what's sexier, a zombie or a vampire?" I ask.
"I know people think vampires are sexy, but not me. Give me a zombie any day. Zombies are just hungry, they want what they want, and they go out and get it. Vampires are always assholes about it."
Trade tales of the undead with David at talkpix@earthlink.net |
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