Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch every zombie movie ever produced. Yes, all of them. How many is that? The current total is more than 600, and we will try to watch them in order of release date with a few flash forwards for fun. We look forward to watching zombie cinema evolve and become what it is today. I'm John, and I'm joined by my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. Join us for this journey to see which of us makes it to the end alive. Hello, producer Brad, hello, Andy.

Hi, John.

Hey, John. Hey, Brad.

Are you ready to jump from the 40s back into the 2000s? And for our listeners, a 2002 ritual, it seems like a big jump with Whiplash, but I feel like we landed in the 80s on this one. Like this is a direct to DVD, quote unquote, zombie movie that has all the aesthetic sophistication of a 80s direct to DVD movie, which it didn't even, DVDs didn't even exist yet. But man, this does not feel like a movie of its time.

So John, did you watch this? I mean, I assume you own this in every format it was released in.

Well, I busted out my Blu-ray, you know.

Okay, yeah.

For this episode, but whatever you got to do. You know, I'm curious, like not to tip our hands too much. This isn't the worst movie we've watched though, is it?

No, no, no.

And I'm afraid of that, actually. Yeah.

So, hey, before we get into it, let me just start us off here with a quick discussion of content warnings. This movie has, I think, if this movie isn't technically an exploitation film, it's got a certain amount of that in its DNA.

It's not from lack of trying.

Yes, which means we have a lot of depictions of Black Jamaicans that I think borders on a little bit racist. Then the movie as a whole, I guess the term you might say is male gaze. I would call it a leering movie. It leers at the actresses in it, and an awful lot of scenes in this movie feature women in various types of skimpy outfit or undress. So, yes, that's all a little bit gross. But to save us from having to repeat that in every single scene we discuss here, I'm just going to caution you up front that that's what you're in for as you listen to this episode, and God forbid if you watch this movie.

Yeah, apologies to everybody who watched it in preparation for this episode. We swear we're not bad people. This does lead me to a question, though. Brad, I just want to make sure, Andy and I didn't offend you in some way, or we didn't, like, we're not being punished in some way that I don't understand by your choice.

No, we are just being completists.

Okay, all right, I can buy that.

This is the second movie we've watched, the first being Maniac, where I had to watch it with one eye on the screen and the other on the doorway into the room in case my wife or kids came in at an inopportune time, which is about 60% of this movie would be, I'd describe as an inopportune time to come in.

Yeah, I was originally started watching in the living room, like on the big TV, and then I was like, and my wife's like, what's all this screaming? I'm like, you know what, I'll be in my office.

So, hey, Brad, do you want to give us the rundown on this movie's history and making?

Ritual is a loose remake of I Walked with a Zombie from 1943, which we watched for last week's episode. This movie was made in 2002, but did not have a US theatrical release. Instead, it went straight to video in 2006. Now, there are at least two different versions of this film, and I think we watched at least two of them between the three of us as a kid, and I think we'll get into it.

Oh, okay.

One of the home video releases had additional scenes before and after the credits with the Crypt Keeper from Tales from the Crypt.

Yeah, mine did not.

Exactly.

Oh, mine did. Oh, I'm very excited to talk about those things too.

I'm mad now. God help me. I'm going to go back and watch the Crypt Keeper scenes.

Don't, John.

Don't.

You and I paid to rent it on Apple, and we got the Crypt Keeper free version. Andy watched on YouTube, and for free, you got to see the Crypt Keeper.

Yeah. The indignity is further amplified by the fact that I had to pay to watch this movie.

And I think what happened at some point, the studio decided that if they slapped the Tales of the Crypt logo and put the Crypt Keeper on it, people would come see it or would buy the movie. The movie is directed by Avi Nescher, and he co-wrote it with Rob Cohen. Rob Cohen is best known for directing The Fast and the Furious, Dragonheart, and Dragon the Bruce Lee story. Ritual does give credit to the original writers of I Walked with a Zombie. They get their own card in the front of the film. Now, I don't know if you noticed, the producer credits had a lot of big names in front of this. Robert Zemeckis, Walter Hill, and Joel Silver were all listed. And I went back and they were all credited for the previous Tales of the Crypt movie. So I assume they're attached to this franchise.

So they get a nickel every time.

They might've got a penny for this film, who knows?

Did this movie come out and then it was later folded into the Tales from the Crypt branding?

The information is conflicting from what I've read on the Internet. It looks like when it went to DVD, they added it. But then I'm not sure why the home version that John and I watched did not have the... It said Tales from the Crypt productions at the top, but it didn't have the Crypt Keeper.

Yeah, I was a little surprised. Because they actually have a photo of the Crypt Keeper on the title card when you rent the movie. He's in the corner like we saw in the poster. I'm like, where's my deranged Crypt Keeper scene?

Who knows? Someone made a decision somewhere.

Yeah.

I'm sorry. It's really blowing my mind that I'm the only one of us that watched the Crypt Keeper parts of this.

Well, maybe we should buy the expanded DVD version with behind the scenes so we can get all the low down.

I would have thought my Criterion Collection Blu-ray would have had the Crypt Keeper scene on it. I'm a little angry.

Well, the cast has Jennifer Grey, who plays Alice Dodgson. We all know her from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Dirty Dancing.

Craig Sheffer. Right before this though, sorry, I'm going to interrupt you a couple of times during this and I apologize. Right before this, she made a short-lived sitcom called It's Like You Know, and she played a fictional version of herself, and the running joke in that sitcom was that she had had a nose job. The very first episode was like, you're Jennifer Grey, but something's different, what is it? And she's like, look, I had a nose job, and that's the running joke of the show.

I forgot about that.

Anyway, sorry, carry on.

Craig Sheffer plays Paul Claiborne. Many people know him from One Tree Hill, and then in the 80s, he was in Some Kind of Wonderful.

Oh my gosh, he was the jerk in Some Kind of Wonderful.

Daniel LePain plays Wesley, and I recognize him from Muriel's Wedding. He played the Olympic swimmer who marries Muriel.

Oh, that's right.

And then of course, we have Tim Curry in a small role, probably cashing a big check to get his name on the front of the poster.

Also, the one I don't want to forget actually is Kristen Wilson, not only because she has to be naked in most of this movie, but more importantly, I recognize her from a mid-90s movie, and so does Andy. Andy, what mid-90s movie am I thinking of? Starring Jeremy Irons.

Oh, boy.

Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, my goodness, are you serious?

She was the elf with the short hair and the pointy ears. Yes.

Yes.

So, there you go.

She was also Eddie Murphy's wife in the Dr. Dolittle films.

Yes. A fun fact, Andy has seen, I think, every Dungeons and Dragon movies, even the terrible straight-to-video ones.

That's right, I have, yes. Ask me anything. I was going to say that this actress caught my attention more because, John, on a scale of one to ten, how excited were you that her name is the same as the name of a celebrated multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson?

You mean Caro by Robert Caro? Yes, I was very excited.

This movie is a lot better if you, in your head, you imagine that she is authoring this biography series on Lyndon Johnson in between movies.

I couldn't agree more.

Okay. Sorry, Brad, we're really dragging this out.

No worries. The music is by Shirley Walker. You recognize that name? She composed much of the music for Batman, the animated series.

Oh, okay. You know, it's funny about that is that Danny Elfman did like the big splash, but the rest of it was her.

Right.

Right, which is interesting.

And then this movie opened with a reggae cover of the song Shame and Scandal and the Family, which we heard in the first film, sung by Sir Lancelot. And he wrote this song too. He's credited as a writer.

And I wonder if it's just like an update of that song, because I didn't listen to the song that much. Now that you tell me, I wish I had. But again, that would involve me going back and watching the movie again.

We'll pause, come back. The credits in front of the film also list a single card for special makeup effects by Kurtzman, Nico Tarot, and Berger EFX Group. Does that name mean anything to you guys?

It does not.

Greg Nico Tarot later did makeup effects for The Walking Dead and became executive producer of the series and the spinoffs.

Oh, okay. Yeah, there's one great practical, I mean, it's not great, it's disgusting, but practical death in here that I imagine is why they get this credit.

And it also makes me think that we need to track zombie royalty. We've had Tom Savini in our first episode, Dawn of the Dead from 2004, and he's famous for having done the makeup in the George Romero films.

Yeah.

And now we have Nico Tarot. So we have two of the big heavyweights in the zombie era. So we should just keep track of any other royalty that pop up.

Absolutely. And hopefully these names will show up again and we'll recognize them.

And that's my rundown.

John, you want to talk to us about what was going on in the world when this movie changed the course of history by being released?

Just to give people context of what 2002 was like for movies. Movies that came out that year, Spider-Man, like the first one, like Sam Raimi, Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers. So that's the era we're in and this stands on the shoulders of those giants.

Yeah, tough competition. It was a tough year for movies.

Yeah, the interesting thing about the cultural context here is that the big thing, right, the big weight of history here is 9-11. Now, I imagine the screenplay was written prior to 9-11, because if this was made in 2002, like your screenplay usually gets written a little ahead of time, I don't really see the marks of American modern culture on this film in the way that we've seen it in most of the other movies. This feels like a movie from... I wasn't joking about the 80s thing. The whole thing feels like something from the 80s, not just the bad sensibilities. You know what I mean?

I 100 percent agree. I mean, it's tempting to wonder if this film is playing on that post-9-11 consciousness, but it doesn't feel that way, and it feels very much like a 90s movie. It's the 80s to 90s I could buy, but it just has the aesthetic and a certain lack of weight, I think, that maybe we've come to expect from movies post-9-11, if we're still saying that phrase.

It feels like a movie that wants to be transgressive. It isn't all that transgressive, but it's definitely designed for like, let's knock out a quick horror movie kind of thing. Kind of like The Bowery at Midnight or Maniac, not Maniac so much, but just like a movie that's thrown together and not really of its time.

I think that's a good way to put it. So John, do we want to revisit the poster real quick before we dive in?

Let us revisit the poster.

I mean, I just can't get enough of this poster.

So yeah, so again, it's all in red. Everybody's like in a red filter. I originally didn't recognize the people here. Top corner, there's the Crypt Keeper wearing dreadlocks, I now see, so I guess I'm glad. I didn't hear the Crypt Keeper. You're gonna have to tell us, Andy, but.

Oh, I can't wait to tell you. That's right, Gary.

Andy, would you tell him what the Crypt Keeper said about his hair?

Is it, I don't know, I assume it was a pun, deadlocks, maybe?

Deadlocks.

Deadlocks, okay, yeah. There's a lot of puns in his two-minute intro.

Gotcha.

But we'll get to the Crypt Keeper in just a minute.

Okay, so it says Tales from the Crypt at the top, then there's three actors from left to right, there's Tim Curry, Craig Schaeffer and Jennifer Grey, and then it says Ritual, and underneath that is a voodoo doll, which by the way does not appear in this form in the movie. So first thing, when you first showed me this, I couldn't recognize the person in the middle, Craig Schaeffer, because like, are you sure that's not David Borentz? Like, are you sure they're not the same? Like, have they ever been in a movie together, is the question I'm asking. You know, like Clark Kent and Superman, though I don't know who would be Superman in that scenario. They are so similar looking and similar sounding, it was a little stunning to me, but yes, it's Craig Schaeffer.

This movie poster aesthetic is just really late, screams late 90s to me. I don't think you would see posters like this today, but it's really simple. It's just a picture of people with sort of that red filter on it to make it look horny, I guess.

You know what? And I would say it's probably not actually a poster. I speculate that there might not have been a movie theater poster, that this is the cover of the DVD.

Yeah. It screams video, home video poster cover.

That's my theory, which tracks too, right? 90s is the time of DVD. We want posters that fit on these little boxes so we can get people to buy random.

Maybe we can just talk about this now. The top of the poster or the cover says, Tales from the Crypt presents. It has that picture of the Crypt Keeper. Can we talk a little bit about what that suggests to you before you even start the movie? What does the Tales from the Crypt branding, I guess to use a word I hate, what does that suggest to you about the experience you're about to have?

I associate that with really sort of ridiculous over the top, almost corny horror movies. They can still be scary and gross, but they're definitely like, verisimilitude is not in the equation here. They're going for big, broad, ridiculous horror. That's the way I always read it. When I think from the Tales from the Crypt movies, they're these really extreme stories that are not sort of grounded in reality in any way.

I haven't until now seen any Tales from the Crypt movies. But when I think about shows like It and Creep Show and others, they have a sort of comfortable rhythm to the stories they tell, I think. You know, they try to be a little shocking and exploitative, I think, within the bounds of what could appear on TV at the time. And they often are these sort of really over-the-top kind of, I don't want to call them morality tales, but what I think of them is like that ironically fitting ending that a lot of the stories have, where the bad guy is undone in some sort of very fitting or ironic way. So that primed me for, I think, a different experience than this movie offered me, which makes a lot of sense if this is a movie that they slapped the branding on after the fact, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, and just to point this out to people, the Crypt Keeper and Tales from the Crypt was never, it was not small and culturally obscure to movie fans. There was one where Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared with the Crypt Keeper and did a sketch before a movie. He teased the Crypt Keeper for being out of shape. It was, I don't wanna say a major cultural force, but it wasn't totally niche. Is that your memory? I remember it being a thing.

At this time in my life, I was not watching Tales from the Crypt or anything, but I knew who the Crypt Keeper was. He was in the zeitgeist, I think.

Yeah, but that was well before this movie was made.

Yes, that's very true. Okay, well, John, have we delayed so long that we just gotta jump into this one?

Let's do it.

We need to talk about the Crypt Keeper here, and this makes a lot more sense. So the other day when I was watching this, I chatted with you guys that I said something like I always appreciate it when a movie states its thesis right up front because this movie opens with a shot of a bikini babe's cleavage. Now that I know you guys did not see that scene, I understand why you didn't reply to that message in the chat.

Yeah, because there is a scene near the beginning where Tim Curry is looking down somebody's shirt, and I thought that's what you were talking about.

The camera zooms right in.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So that's where I thought you were coming from.

So let's go through this Crypt Keeper scene real quick. It's a, I think I would call it painfully unfunny sequence in which the Crypt Keeper is on a beach, and he has dreadlocks, and he's talking in a fake Jamaican accent. I think we would have no choice but to cancel him were he to try this act in today's world. He makes a lot of puns, and while this is happening, I think he is surrounded by just super cheesecake footage of women in bikinis splashing around in the beach.

Nice.

It doesn't add anything. I don't know, I mean, I know he's kind of known for doing these intros, but I don't, he doesn't really tell us anything that sets up the movie in an interesting way. I guess at the end, you get some bloopers of this, they're fake bloopers of this sequence. And the running gag is that the Crypt Keeper is like this diva actor. And you're laughing, but stop laughing because they're not funny. If you're laughing at my description of it, I promise you whatever you're thinking in your mind is better than the actual bloopers.

You know how people normally say, I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you. In this case, it's actually the reverse, Andy. I am laughing at you for having to see the Crypt Keeper scene.

Five times this movie started, I had heard every possible pun that could possibly be drawn from the content of this movie. Great. I felt pretty primed for the opening sequence, so let's jump in. It opens on a 90s style rock band playing at a big garden party in an estate in Jamaica. I'm pretty sure I learned the Jamaica thing from Wikipedia and not from this movie, but this is in Jamaica.

If you did learn it, it's about halfway through.

Okay. This is like a fancy birthday party for a man named Wesley, although Wesley is not in attendance because he is feeling sick. The camera cuts over once or twice to this ominous looking. It's not a tower exactly, but it's a standalone building that has a towerish look.

Covered in vines and foliage. It's looking very dilapidated.

It does. It has a little bit of that Gothic tower vibe, which I think is what they're trying to evoke. And it's suggested that Wesley is in the tower. So that immediately, of course, evokes way back in I Walked with a Zombie, the wife locked in the tower. The wife with this somewhat vague mental condition is locked away in the tower. We mill around the party for a bit, and we get kind of introduced to some characters that we'll not see for a little while. One I wanted to mention, so did you guys recognize Eric Avari?

Yes.

I think that's how you pronounce his name. He is in every, at this time, he was in every TV show that ever possibly aired.

Yeah.

At this time in history.

I remember him featuring prominently in the show Heroes.

Yes.

And he has this horrible opening there. He's like, Mahindra, everybody knows. Like he does the worst exposition intro ever to a movie. In the beginning of Heroes, yes. But this movie is filled with like, hey, it's that guy.

And he had some bit parts in some pretty big movies. And I like one of the joys of this podcast, you know, and of movie viewing. I love seeing people like this. Like they're working actors. You've seen him in a ton of stuff. They've never really risen to become household names.

Yep. He was Electra's father in Daredevil. The Ben Affleck Daredevil.

Really?

Okay. Which I've never seen.

Me neither.

Well, put it on the list, Brad, if we can shoehorn it into the zombie genre.

Isn't Electra a zombie at some point? I feel like she comes back from the dead.

She does come back from the dead.

There you go. All right. It's on the list.

Write up your case for that being considered a zombie movie and submit it to producer Brad for review, John.

All right.

So the only other thing I wanted to mention is we also see it catch a glimpse of Tim Curry mailing around in this party. He's going to vanish for an hour or so, but then he'll come back into the movie later. Yeah.

I think the thing that is most disturbing about his performance here is it's all bad jokes and lewd comments, and he does it so well. I'm like, Tim, you're killing me.

He's a natural.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know anything about Tim Curry as a person, but he sure looks pretty comfortable in this type of role. Yeah. So yeah, anytime Tim Curry is in a scene, which isn't that many, I've got the sense that they got, they hired him for an afternoon's worth of shots or something.

Yeah. Not to digress too much, but I think this is a thing and people don't talk about it that much, but sometimes big actors that are filming something else or just around, will take a big check just to do a few days' work. Most famously, Ben Kingsley was in Blood Reign, directed by Yui Bol, and I think he would just happen to be near the production and they're like, we'll give you a million dollars for a week. I don't know the details, but come in and do a week and you can make a pile of money. So I think that's a thing. I don't know that that's what Tim Curry is doing here. Maybe I overestimate his appeal, but it sure feels like something like that.

Well, it's fun to see Tim Curry, even when his character is unlikable and unpleasant. So let's talk about that real quick now just to get out of the way. Tim Curry, when we first meet him, he's making a crude comment about a woman's appearance. This movie, it's pretty gross in that regard. It really ogles all of the women in it, and a huge number of scenes, the women are wearing something skimpy, and the camera just makes sure to follow it around. It's like a gross aesthetic that's layered across everything else you see in this movie. And it feels a little bit of the times, I guess. I mean, this would have been gross in 2002 if you watched it too, but this type of leeringness, I don't really think it's in vogue anymore, would you say?

No, I think it's an attempt to be transgressive, but only in one very particular way, which is to appeal to 90s males DVD watchers, you know, something to be titillated with. So I think that's the goal. It's then that's also why it feels 80s. Maybe as we get closer to the 90s, I'll be like, oh, I guess this is 90s too. But it's just the aesthetic of that leering quality just is so 80s to me.

So I don't want to spend too much time on this because we have lots of ground to cover. But the point of this whole sequence is that we do see Wesley up in a room in a tower, and he's having some sort of mental breakdown. And we get a special effect is not the word for this, but we get a series of like kind of flashbacks thrown at the screen really fast, like a 90s music video.

Yeah, did this remind you of anything? Because it reminded me of another movie we've watched.

Oh, interesting.

This is a worse version of the credit sequence in Dawn of the Dead. Like, I don't know what patient zero of this kind of cut sequence is, where you sort of show a name or something, and then you cut to like a horrible scream and show some blood flying or something. I don't think it's either of these movies, but as a trope, Dawn of the Dead does way better than this movie.

That's okay. That's interesting. What is depicting is some sort of what looks to us like a voodoo ceremony, like a really sensationalized version of people, you know, ecstatic dancing people in elaborate costumes. There's like a really striking costume design of like the high priest that will that will come back in this movie. We're going to get versions of this flashback to a voodoo ceremony several times throughout the movie. So I'm just describing it now so we can file it away and never speak of it again. Okay. But the key part of all this that is building up is we, this is like the prologue to the movie. So because later that night, the party is over and somebody is creeping through this estate and it is a black woman who appears to be dressed like a maid or a servant. And she is stealing the hairs off of a hairbrush, which I interpreted as some kind of like ingredients for like an occult ritual based on some of the other movies we've watched. Later, it may be suggested she is getting this for like the purposes of DNA testing. But this is Dory and she presses Dr. Winsford, who is a doctor who lives on the estate. And this is a played by Eric Avari for a DNA test. It's suggested that she thinks... Well, when I saw this scene, I thought she thought he might be the father, but later, I think she is trying to identify who the father of her child is. Is that right?

I think so. I was confused by this. And I think it comes out later, like at the very end, that that's what she was doing.

Yes, I think you're right.

I don't think she's trying to find who the father... She knows she's trying to prove to everyone else.

She's trying to prove it.

Okay, and that proving your lineage, I think, is going to be important in the way this movie's story wraps up. So that makes a lot of sense. But this is where all of the special effects for Gore went this scene, right? Because while the doctor is running some tests, the temperature in the room starts to rise. We see glimpses at this thermometer and the temperature is spiking. And he's getting hot and uncomfortable.

And by spiking, you mean 10 degrees a second.

Yes.

Yeah. It's like 200 degrees in the room after a few seconds here. And he starts flailing around and he basically burns slash melts to death in the middle of his little medical lab.

He like boils to death inside his own skin. It's pretty excitingly gruesome.

This is a good Gore, I thought.

Yeah.

But importantly, when people rush in to see what's going on, he is laying there and although he is lying dead on the floor, he is not boiled and burned and the lab is not trashed. He has just fallen over. So it's suggested that whatever just killed him happened in his head, not in reality. And that's going to be important. Yeah.

And somebody actually says, was it all in his mind? So thank you.

Just in case you are a really slow viewer of this film. So was there anything else? Because now we're going to have to lurch into the movie for reals. Is there anything else you want to talk about this intro scene?

This special effect made the film seem very promising in terms of what it could do.

Yes.

If you wanted a more sort of like super gross, like practical effects show, you were like, yes, now we're getting somewhere. But alas, this is just about it.

Yeah. We can talk about this later too, I guess. But I think that's an important thing to say. Because for all of this movie's ogling of its women actors and the dramatic Crypt Keeper talking up and this really gruesome initial death, this movie is generally speaking much more tame than I think it wants you to believe.

Yeah. You see other people dead, but you actually don't see other people get killed generally.

Yeah.

You see the after effects. Yeah.

Nothing this gruesome happens for the rest of the movie. I would go so far as to say, they have a fairly complex story they're trying to tell. Yes. However it wound up being shoved into that exploitative aesthetic, I think at least some of the people working on this movie were trying to tell a fairly non-exploitative story.

Do you think the source material is where this comes from? I Walked with a Zombie?

Not that I recall.

It's got to be. All of the interesting themes and ideas are things that we saw in I Walked with a Zombie. All of what I would call the dumb stuff is newly added. That's a hot take there, but what do you think?

It's so hard to tell with movies because things are so complex. I think, I'll give another example of a terrible movie where you get this feeling. Do you remember Highlander 2, The Quickening, aka The Sickening? Well, that movie feels so disjointed and not like a sequel to its original movie because it's based on a script for another film. Somebody took the Durand, I don't know if you know this piece of trivia, but they took the Durand-Durand Wild Boys movie. They reskinned it and turned it into Highlander 2. The reason that movie makes no sense is it's just a producer grabbing a script they have some rights to and trying to shoehorn it into this other story they want to tell. That's what that felt like to me. I don't know that that's the case here, but it seems like a classic Hollywood like, well, we have a script we can work from, so let's just do that and we'll just throw all the other stuff in as we go.

That certainly would explain why this movie seems to be of two minds. I do think there is a fairly serious movie in here, and then there's a lot of this other garbage that we won't belabor it anymore. Because now we cut to New York City, where we're going to meet the protagonist, our heroine. We see Dr. Alice Dodgson, this is played by Jennifer Grey, and she is trying to save the life of a young girl, patient in her hospital, but nothing is working. Frantically, she's trying everything, and we get a pretty good glimpse of her character when she races down the hallway and begs her supervisor for permission to try an unorthodox treatment.

Just hear me out. I know you said no to the Reptilizin, but we've got nothing to lose, and it's been working really well in the clinical trials.

For God's sake, that's enough. The review board takes a long time to determine compassionate use, and you don't want me to repeat my speech on the use of non-FDA approved drugs and disastrous career consequences.

This child is not going to make it through the night.

Do not turn me into the heartless, crusty head of a department who's going to be making big speeches about liability and insurance companies and all that crap. You know better.

I like this exchange. It tells us a lot about her character. I also enjoy the stock character of the heartless bureaucrat just in movies in general.

Also played by I Hate That Sky. He was in Groundhog Day as Ned Ryerson. What's his name?

Steven Tobolowski.

Steven Tobolowski. He was in Sneakers, I remember. In Groundhog Day when Bill Murray steps into the puddle, and the guy says, that first step is a dizzy or whatever it is. That's the same actor. I love that. We're getting into my era of movies, so I make these connections all the time.

Sorry. No, that's fine. I'm going to call her Alice for now, I don't know if that's right. Alice has been rebuked, but she lies to her staff or team, and she uses this experimental treatment anyway, but it doesn't work in the patient flatlines. Then back in her apartment, she is having nightmares about this kid coming back to life. I wondered if this was our first zombie, but I don't think so.

I don't think so. This is the first of many, many Jennifer Grey having a nightmare. A lot of the scary action is not actually occurring. It's Alice having a nightmare and waking up. She'll be tormented, and then it was all okay.

There are numerous points where someone is having a nightmare, and something really exciting happens, and what a drag it is to realize it was a dream, and we have to go back to this boring. Anyway, sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. But she has been fired, and her medical license has been suspended, and she's single, and we see a little montage of her job hunting for some kind of a position that doesn't require a medical license, and she finds one to take on a position as a caretaker for somebody in Jamaica.

Yes.

So she takes the job after a little scene, and we cut to her arriving in Jamaica. In the movies we've watched, so many of them involve white people arriving in a Caribbean nation. It's interesting to me how the rhythms that these introductions share. So why don't you tell us about it?

Well, it's interesting because I had the exact same feeling that I've had in many other movies. It's the journey to the exotic place, they get off, and then she gets in a car, she gets, somebody's holding a sign for her, JB, we meet, and JB and her have a drive, and it's like the, I'm starting to call it the exposition drive, right? White person comes to town, local tour guide, taxi driver, whoever, fills them in on all of the exposition they need to know about voodoo and every other thing on the, in the place. And it had that same vibe going all the way back to like white zombie, right? Where the driver is telling the newly arrived what this place is like.

Do you think if this were set in America that the taxi driver would fill them in on like the details of like Protestant denominations in the US?

Right. Welcome to New York. First of all. Yeah. New York was found in 18, you know, that's not a thing.

So what is happening during this scene that specifically did not happen in I Walked with a Zombie?

I don't know.

Reggae music is playing.

Oh, that's right.

And yes. Reggae, I mean, although reggae is so heavily associated with Jamaica, it's maybe one of the first things that might pop to mind when you hear the word Jamaica.

Right.

But it wasn't, and in the Caribbean in general, I would say, but it wasn't really popularized until I think the 1960s or so.

I mean, it didn't really exist until the 60s. It's a fairly, yeah.

I think, so according to my Webcomedia reading, I think 40s and 50s is when it came into existence.

Right. But the form we know now with like Bob Marley and stuff was the 60s. Yeah.

Yeah. So in retrospect, it is interesting that we watched a bunch of movies set in the Caribbean, but this very stereotypical audio marker was not available to those people at that time.

That is interesting. It didn't occur to me, but that's a good point.

There is something about reggae also. I mean, I don't know anything about it musically, but the vibe is a positive jaunty vibe. So maybe that will turn out to be a nice contrast with the movie or maybe not.

I'll say just quickly, JB is another Hey That's Guy. I've seen him in multiple other things. But anyway, keep going.

I like the character JB. I like this actor quite a bit in the movie. Yeah. So as he's doing his expedition drive, he's driving Alice to the estate where she's going to be working, his message to Alice is, don't be fooled by the touristy mask around this place. That underneath the skin, this is a dark and desperate and dangerous world. Yes. I don't know how convincing I found this, but they certainly pull out all the stops with a lot of really menacing imagery of black people wielding machetes.

Yes.

It felt uncomfortably over the top to me, but this did feel like a mirror of that, of in I Walked with a Zombie when the estate owners is basically telling her, you see this surface beauty, but underneath it, there's a lot of darkness.

Yeah, exactly.

All right. She arrives at the estate where she'll be working, and she meets Paul Claiborne, the estate owner, and he is the brother of Wesley who is sick.

So in I Walked with a Zombie, the brothers are Paul and Wesley. Their last name is Holland. I'm sure it was a good idea to change the name, though I couldn't tell you why. But the first names are the same. The last name is different. I don't know that that's important, but it just stuck out at me.

Well, she's going to be caring for Wesley, who Paul professes to love his brother very much. Yes. The movie will test whether or not this is true or not.

Yes.

But let's hear him describe this. Of course, Wesley's condition is a little bit more complicated than Alice has been led to believe. So let's hear a description of what's going on with Wesley.

Mr. Claiborne, if your brother has encephalitis, there's not much I can do for him, except monitor his condition and put him on a healthy regimen.

It's not gonna be easy. You see, encephalitis is just part of the problem.

What's the other part?

Well, he has brain seizures and...

Oh, that's not uncommon for someone with encephalitis. You see, what makes the medical problem difficult is... This is gonna sound strange.

My brother, he thinks that he's a zombie.

Well, not really a zombie. He thinks someone is messing with his mind.

Interesting. A very well-timed thunder clap there.

Yeah, that's perfect.

I wish my life were that dramatic sometimes.

Do you, though? Do you?

No, no, no. So any quick thoughts before we move on to meet a few other members of the cast here?

No, I think they get to it pretty quickly and establish that relationship. And they do actually do a pretty decent job of making Paul seem like a decent fellow here early on.

I think so. From watching I Walked with a Zombie, so I was primed to know that there's more going on with these family relationships than meets the eye. But yeah, I agree. He does a pretty good job. We meet a couple of other people named Violet and Ramon, and they are two black, I guess, servants or helpers who have been with the family for decades since the brothers were young.

Can I ask you a question?

Please.

If you had somebody in your employ as sinister looking as Ramon, like Violet seems lovely, but Ramon has like, it's not just his eyes are bloodshot, like his beard is scraggly and uneven. He has a cane and walks. They go out of their way to make him appear to be like villains.

And he's glowering in every scene he's in.

Yeah, and he glares at everybody.

Yeah, he doesn't smile. Yeah, this movie for a long time, and I mean, I bought it that he was a bad guy. This movie tries to suggest to you, through most of its runtime, that when bad stuff starts happening, Ramon is probably behind it. At least that's how I read it. Spoiler, he is not.

He is not. But he is involved.

He is involved, yeah. So that night, Alice is doing some research on Wesley's condition. I should mention, Alice doesn't realize that she's replacing that doctor who boiled to death. She'll learn that a little bit later in the movie, but she doesn't know that. When she encounters this movie's other major character, a woman named Caro, and Caro is, how would you describe Caro, John?

Caro is a free spirit, I think we're meant to believe. She is the, they're sort of like, Alice and Caro are like the odd couple, right? Alice is the really uptight one. They actually go out of their way at one point to point out that she does the Einstein thing. She just wears the same set of clothes every day, where Caro is free-spirited and loves to dance, and is trying to get Alice to live it up and loosen up a little bit.

Although Caro is the subject of this movie's worst leering, I would say, I genuinely like the friendship that evolves between Caro and Alice.

It's the best relationship in the movie. Like when the two of them were together, it was the least painful part of the movie, I would say.

Yeah, so this is where, so Caro fills Alice in on a little bit more about what's going on. This is where Alice learns that the doctor she's replacing was burned to death. Apparently it was recorded as a heart attack. So this is upsetting to Alice to hear, because it seems like something you should probably be told before you take a position. But Caro says also that she's a sculptor. She describes Wesley as sick as he is, as a great musician, and she seems in love with him, and she says that everybody loves Wesley, he's the best. This is not the impression I'm going to have when we meet Wesley in a minute.

But they don't really sell that though, I think is what you're saying.

So that's the start of their friendship, which is going to grow over the course of the movie. With Alice being the straight guy in the relationship and Carol always, the more flamboyant trying to draw her out a little bit. That night we hear our old friend menacing voodoo drums. These movies love their voodoo drums. I am genuinely curious, not ever having lived in an area where voodoo is practiced, are voodoo drums a thing and do they play at night like this? I don't know. I suspect not, but I could be wrong.

Curiously, unlike the previous movies where there have been a plantation or something, there's land here, but they don't actually say what they do here. You know what I mean? Like in I Walked with a Zombie, it was a sugar cane plantation. There's people around here with machetes hacking stuff down. They don't actually say that. Am I wrong? Is that weird?

They do say sugar because when it's on fire, JB says they're burning the sugar cane. They're preparing it for the harvest or for the next harvest.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. I take it back.

So the next scene we get is a mirror, a sort of a mirror of one we saw in I Walked with a Zombie. Alice late at night sees Wesley out wandering by himself. And she creeps out and follows him and she sees him getting into a car with a Jamaican man who's not identified. And when she asks around, she learns that Wesley goes out like that a lot at night. No one knows really what he's doing. And I guess that'll be a little bit important later. But so there's Wesley is not like catatonic the way his counterpart and I Walked with a Zombie was like he's conscious most of the time. He's just acting pretty weird. Right. Then we get our we get a big jump scare. This movie pulls out some jumps there's a couple of times. The first of many scenes that turns out to be a dream. And then you're disappointed because the dream would have been pretty awesome. Alice is grabbed, bound and gagged by Ramon, who then empties a box full of spiders onto her. It's all very scary and creepy. In the dream, Carrow pops in to figure out why Alice is screaming and is macheted to death by Ramon. And that, I thought, wow, this movie's really gone from zero to 60. And then Alice wakes up. It was just a dream. Bewildered after the dream, she wanders into her bathroom and she finds a grizzly voodoo doll there.

Yes, it's like a doll. It's got nails driven through it. It's hanging in her shower. And the next morning, she goes to show it to Carrow. But I have a question here that was the first, it's one of those things in a movie where like, gosh, that's not how I would act. Everybody I know, if they found that in their shower, would be like, oh my gosh, was somebody in my house? Like, and she doesn't seem to be concerned, about that at all.

Well, actually, we have some audio queued up here. Let's hear her talking to Kara about what she found in her shower.

So listen, last night, I found something in my shower.

A mongoose? They're all over the place.

No, not a mongoose.

Yeah. It was a doll with rusty nails stuck in it.

Somebody put obi on you, but don't worry, it only work if you believe it does.

What's obi? Obi?

It's voodoo, Jamaican version. You don't take it too seriously, it's like disco.

Voodoo is like disco?

Yeah, you know, you dance hard, drink a lot of rum, smoke some ganja, your head goes to a different place if you're sexy and fun, really, really loose.

You can hear the jaunty music piping up there as that scene ends. So this is as good a time to any. She mentioned Obeah. Did you know what that was, John, before watching this?

I have never heard of it.

All right.

So I don't know if it was made up or real.

No, this is real. So with the caveat that this is like 10 minutes of reading Wikipedia and not any real knowledge, it's worth talking about what Obeah is, Obeah. Obeah is a separate religion from voodoo. Although it shares some similar roots with voodoo in African tradition. Whereas voodoo is associated with Haiti, Obeah is prominent in Jamaica. And it differs from voodoo in a couple of ways. It has a more individual focus. So where voodoo has like a communal focus and has, I think, more of a positive vibe about it, a community building focus. Obeah is more about just individuals and your individual relationship with the divine.

Right.

And it involves interactions with spirits, but it doesn't have the pantheon of deities that voodoo does.

Okay.

And I would say that generally, Obeah has a lot more negative stereotypes of like black magic than voodoo does. So yeah, I learned that. I mean, that's what I learned. I'm sure there's an enormous amount of depth and context I didn't touch on there. But so this movie is going to use these terms voodoo and Obeah kind of interchangeably.

Yeah.

I don't know how zombies really fit into Obeah if they, but I don't know if someone listening wants to enlighten us, please, please do so.

Yeah.

All right. So where are we? So Alice and Carol go to meet Wesley. Alice is going to introduce herself to Wesley as his doctor. He's locked away in a separate building. He's in pretty rough shape like he's got a bad hangover. He's still drinking. Yeah. He's super obnoxious to her and she is very business-like in response, and he starts calling her, he gives her the nickname Polly Dory. This was Byron's personal physician. Do you know what Polly Dory is famous for?

You know how I know it?

Tim Powers.

Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regards. So Tim Powers wrote a book, A Fictionalized Account of Byron's Life, along with Mary Shelley and some other people, who wear vampires are real, and they're actually vampire fighters. And in that book, Polly Dory is a main character. But what I find interesting about this relationship is, the vibe that I get when I learn more about this relationship is, Polly Dory was in love with Byron, but Byron did not reciprocate and was cruel to Polly Dory. Isn't that the case?

I think so. That's certainly what this movie is hinting at too.

Yeah, so Polly Dory was Byron's doctor. So they set up this relationship where Wesley is like the tortured artist like Byron and Polly Dory is like the one trying to save him from himself, kind of.

Exactly. So long story short, John, I'm gonna sort of start speeding up through this section of the movie, because we're hitting sort of the middle stretch and there's a lot of kind of filler here.

This movie, yeah, it's got a complicated plot with a lot of wrong turns and red herrings and I don't, you know, we could go through them all, but, but gosh, there's a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. So let me try to sum up the next stretch of the movie. So this movie wants to toy with the contrast between, you know, quote, rational medicine and rational science and magical science and magical thinking in a similar way that I Walked with a Zombie did. So Alice starts doing research into zombies. And she had learned earlier from JB, the exposition guy, that his dad is a voodoo priest. Like, and he serves as basically a doctor for the people of the community. So while she's doing this research, she decides she's going to go out and talk to the dad to find, just because Wesley thinks he's being mind controlled by someone. She's going to talk to the dad to see what's up with that. And while this is happening, we do get some little clips that show us that there is a villain out there performing a voodoo ritual. They're using a, we don't see who's doing it, but we see that somebody is jabbing pins into a little, a voodoo doll. In this case, it's like a stand-in for JB.

It's a squish ball with a smiley face on it.

Yeah, it's a squish ball. And so that I don't have to explain this every time it happens. Throughout the movie, somebody periodically uses voodoo to cause other characters to hallucinate.

Right.

We don't know who it's, you know, presumably some sort of evil priest is doing this. And in this scene, the voodoo ritual causes JB to hallucinate. Later, Carrow is going to hallucinate, Alice will hallucinate. And they, basically, the hallucination is like a scary, sometimes accompanied with bad special effects.

Right.

A scary sense that you're about to die or to be killed. Right.

And often accompanied by CGI, this movie has really bad CGI in it.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's some branches. Yeah.

Would it have been bad in 2002? I mean, I guess Lord of the Rings was in theaters. So that set a pretty high bar for CGI.

I guess I'm being over critical. It is a schlocky horror movie. So yeah.

So I do want us to touch on one little audio clip here. And this is when Alice goes in and she is talking to JB's father, the voodoo priest, saying, what's the deal with this zombie business and can you help? And here is what she learns from that exchange.

I want to ask your advice. I have a patient who who thinks someone's made him a zombie.

Wesley?

Yes.

There is nothing I can do to help him. The Obi-Man doing it to him is bigger than me.

So this is kind of interesting, I think. It sounds like there's no help to be found against this threat, right?

Yeah. And I think what's interesting is that they set up JB's dad as the white sorcerer, right? And this bigger man as the dark sorcerer. JB's dad does magic, but he does it all in the service of his community and would try to help if he could, but even he's afraid of this other person. Yeah.

And this is punctuated because after he's done explaining that to Alice, he himself has one of those hallucinations. Whoever this sorcerer is, they can hit him, even this good wizard as well.

Yeah, exactly.

So I'm going to speed things up, John, to get to this next part. Sure. Because a lot happens in this movie, and I don't want to say it's all unimportant, but there's a lot of repetitive scenes where people hallucinate, have dreams and things like that. Yeah.

It's like, oh no, there's an evil sorcerer. Here's an example. Here's another example. Yeah.

Exactly. Here's how the middle stretch of this movie plays out. Basically, Alice starts to learn more and more about what's going on. Her friend JB does a little sleuthing around the estate, and he discovers basically a voodoo or an Obeya ritual lair, suggesting that someone in the estate might be connected to all of this. Right. While this is going on, there's repeated incidents of more people having these frightening hallucinations and dreams. At a certain point, Alice decides that she is going to leave. A couple of things have come together that have suggested to her, she needs to get out of there. Yeah. One is her friend.

Well, more people keep getting killed, right? Even people she doesn't know, like the realtor and the realtor's husband, and all these people start dying for some reason, and we're not sure why, but it seems related to whatever is going on with Wesley.

Exactly. So let me lay that out for a minute here. So her friend, her friend JB is warning her, I think, in good faith to leave because he is worried that the sorcerer, whatever sorcerer is doing this, is going to turn his attention to Alice next. But basically, another person is killed. Alice doesn't know her, but she was at a party when this person was. So there are dead bodies starting to crop up. So we have the dead doctor, and now we have a dead woman from this dinner party they were at. Alice has started to suspect that Wesley might be the killer. Is that the vibe you got?

Yes.

He is indeed looking very suspicious. He says he's been going to these voodoo ceremonies at night, and he's not able to stop himself. It's suggested that Alice might be next. But ultimately, she is convinced to stay by Paul, the older brother and the owner of the estate. And John, in this point in my notes, I have in all caps, where is Tim Curry? Yes.

Yeah. Where has he been all this time? Yeah.

I was promised Tim Curry by this movie. So he is about to enter the movie. So Alice decides to stay, but her focus starts to shift here, that she wants to find a scientific explanation for why a lot of people are dying mysteriously and those that aren't. A lot of people seem to be contracting whatever, contracting a disease that causes them to hallucinate.

Yeah.

So for the rest of the movie, she's going to be trying to approach us from a scientific perspective.

Yeah. She finds out that Tim Curry is a veterinarian.

Yes.

I think the one redeeming part of him cashing a check here is when she goes to his house and he shows up standing there lovingly holding a baby goat.

Yes. That is the scene I have described in my notes as the sexy beach party plus sexy food fight scene. So all of that has been happening and I'm going to zoom back in here because basically, they're Wesley and Alice and Kero are all hanging out with Tim Curry's character. Tim Curry's character has a name, but I'm just going to call him Tim Curry.

Yes, that's fine.

That's who he is.

That's how he is in all my notes.

This is where I realized that Tim Curry is a vet, like a veterinary doctor, which explained the scenes in which he shows up holding an animal, which left me bewildered before. I just want to mention the scene because this movie really, really wants us to believe that Alice and Wesley are falling in love.

Yeah. Did you buy it, Andy?

I did not buy this for a second.

Not for a second.

First of all, Wesley is a loser and a jerk. He looks like he's about 18. But this movie really wants there to be sexual tension between these two characters. They share a kiss and I do want to play a piece of audio because it made me laugh. So can we hear this little bit of audio after a brief makeout scene between Alice and Wesley?

Oh, this is great. I can't wait to call home and say, guess what, I just kissed a zombie.

You know what else? I've seen people turn into zombies up in the hills. They have the dust blown into their face, the whole thing. Isn't that what's wrong with me? I have something different. I have someone messing with my mind.

So I actually pulled that plot, not just because it's some cheesy, sexy dialogue, but because it's our first mention of maybe the mechanics of zombie that we're dealing with in this show.

Yes.

So John, where did we first see zombie dust?

We saw zombie dust first in Revolts of the Zombies.

So Wesley, in this movie, keeps talking about how he thinks he's a zombie, but we really haven't seen anything that looks very zombie-like in this film.

He's manic. He's not like a zombie. And we haven't really seen him be controlled, except for one dream sequence where we think he stabs Alice, but that's just another dream that we don't need to go into. But otherwise, he doesn't seem like a zombie in any way.

Yeah. Later in this movie, we are going to see some traditional voodoo zombies appear. But so far, the zombies, as people talk about them, they don't really bear much resemblance to any zombie, new or old.

No.

Moving on, more people continue to be murdered. Kero's boyfriend gets killed. I never figured out why he was killed, by the way, even after the end of Revelation.

Yeah, he just was...

He was killed because he was killing the other people, the realtor and then the maid who were killed. He's the one who did it, so they're covering up their tracks, the bad people are.

I gotcha. I didn't connect that.

I didn't make that connection either. Okay. Thank you. The important thing of all this is that Alice learns that she has come down with this illness, whether it's supernatural in origin or scientific in origin. She has contracted this violence. There are more dream sequences that are more exciting than the actual movie. Yeah.

It feels like they shot a second movie and we couldn't watch that movie. That would have been good, but that's not the movie we're watching.

I think this is where the movie's final act kicks in, because the stakes have just been ramped up considerably. Alice has whatever this disease is, so she needs to find a cure.

She does determine this by getting blood tests and finding out it is actually a disease.

Yes, she does. So this next sequence of stuff is kind of convoluted just thinking about it, so I'll try to order in a way that makes sense. What happens now is we shift over to basically a group of bad guys who have been plotting this whole time. Right. We are about to learn what is kind of the secret of this estate here. What's really going on behind the scenes? And what's going on is that Paul, the older brother, and Tim Curry, the vet, for some reason, and one or two other people like a local corrupt police chief, have all set up this plan that they're... I didn't really understand it, but they're going to sell the estate for a whole lot of money and leave. And I didn't totally understand the mechanics of what was going on here. This is bad because it would leave in the lurch, like a whole community that has grown up around and on this estate, like a whole local community.

Right. Who Paul professes to love like family. He's made this profestation several times already.

Yeah, so we've... Yeah, we've heard several times that people love this family. They rely on this family. So they're all very sinister. And when Tim Curry, one of the conspirators here, says, it's a bummer that Alice has gotten pulled into this. Can we at least give her a little clue about what's going on? Can we just let her know some stuff? And Paul says, no, don't. But Tim Curry decides that he is going to reach out to Alice, who by now is quite sick and hallucinating. And he says, I have something important to tell you about your sickness. Will you come see me? Right. When she gets over there, Tim Curry has been murdered by an unknown assailant. So someone has silenced Tim Curry so that he won't share the secret.

I thought we saw the police commissioner kill him.

Oh, yes. It is the police. There is a corrupt police commissioner. I've left out of this because it just complicates the task of explaining this. Maybe Tim Curry has been silenced by his fellow conspirators, basically, because it's important to them for some reason that Alice not learn what her illness is. So it's suggested that if Alice can figure out what that is, that's going to be some kind of a key to unlocking this whole situation.

Right. And I think what we're starting to learn at this point, and I think you're about to get here, but that all the murders that have taken place haven't been random. They're all part of a plan to silence everybody who knows about this sale. That's why the realtor was killed. That's why the young woman and the doctor were killed, because they know that Paul had fathered a son by a servant, and that's the DNA test at the beginning. The pieces are starting to come together, but only because they explain it to me, not because it's obvious from watching the movie.

Exactly. They have to have the villains look at the camera and explain their whole plan to you, because there's no way you could follow the threads here. What John says is correct. People are being killed off. I find this interesting. We've seen this in some of the other movies we've watched. The motives are very, very mundane.

Yes.

Greed, jealousy, that sort of thing, despite the seemingly supernatural. I don't know. I always like this when horror movies do this. They trick you into thinking something epic and supernatural is going on, but really, it's just people being people, even if the tools they have at their disposal are creepy and supernatural.

Yes. The other threat here is now we're trying to figure out also, we don't know who the bigger man, who is driving all this. We know this plot, but we don't actually know who the voodoo practitioner is.

Yes.

They're still a sorcerer. That's the mystery of this part. Is it Paul? Is it Wesley? Is it somebody else? We don't know.

Now, let's keep our listeners waiting with bated breath for the revelation. But I want to ask you at this point in the film, John, had you figured out who the sorcerer was?

I will not lie to you. I didn't figure out till they revealed it. I feel like a dope. Because when they reveal it, it's the last significant character that we haven't suspected yet. I'm like, how did I not see that coming? Only from context clues. You know what I mean?

Listeners, I want you to pause right now and write down on a piece of paper who you think the sorcerer is, and we'll check it in a couple of minutes when it's revealed. So there's a lot of stuff. Wesley is still sick. So Tim Curry is killed before Alice can hear what he has to say. But she makes draw some conclusions about this, and she starts researching. She turns her research in the direction of like animal disease.

Yes. We get a nice science montage here. We get two consecutive science montages.

Yes.

Of her figuring this out in like 30 minutes.

There's test tubes, there's everything. Yes. So here's what she learns. She learns that everyone, Wesley and everyone else who has gotten sick, including her, have been infected. I'm sorry. I did laugh when this was revealed. They've been infected with feline leukemia. They do specify that it was modified to work on humans, but I don't know anything about feline leukemia.

Also, by the way, when she's describing the cure, she's not describing an antidote, she's describing how a vaccine works, and that's not what they're doing at all. You can only take a vaccine before you get it. Anyway, I don't really think this movie-

Well, she did lose her medical license at the beginning of this film, John. So the other thing is, she does have one final conversation before this movie's climax arrives with JB's dad. And I want to play it because it tells us a little bit more about what this movie thinks a zombie is, which is about to become important. So let's go ahead and hear her conversation with JB's dad.

What about powder, dust, that you use to make zombies, does that really exist?

I do not make zombies.

But if you wanted to, could you?

To make someone into a zombie, you will need a lot of hate in your heart. Anger.

I understand it's illegal and I'm not going to tell anybody, but technically, do you know how it's done?

He could make a zombie if he wanted to, but he wouldn't. But there is a way.

I do like that she assures him that she knows it's illegal. I think the word she wants is immoral because maybe there's a law against making a zombie.

Yeah. I feel like that's implied.

I don't know my Jamaican law.

A lot of other laws.

The way she delivers that line at the end, it's the first time I hear her character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that sort of petulant teenager. Yeah, I know it's illegal, but did you hear that too?

Yeah.

That's great.

Yes. But his answer is interesting because what he says is, yes, there's a dust, and he essentially says chemically, it's the same stuff that we discovered during the Gulf War as a poison dust. So this Obeya practitioner is saying, look, the way a zombie gets created is actually scientifically explainable.

Yeah. Just like in Revolt of the Zombies. It's mystical, but you can also write down the formula of chemicals you have to mix together to make it. This is, I think, the first time this has been explicit. Well, we learned that there's an antidote powder to unzombify somebody.

Yes. Well, she makes it, right? Yeah.

You can make a chemical to zombify someone, there's another powder to unzombify somebody. People in the past movies we watched on the show, John, have come back from their zombie state, but I feel like it's never been explained.

Right.

What happened. But that makes a certain amount of sense within this. I don't really understand why people are doing what they're doing at this point in the movie. But she attends a voodoo ceremony with Violet, the maid we met way back in the beginning. We are led to believe that Violet and Ramon were sinister, but here I think we kind of learned that they actually are just carrying friends of the estate. They attend a voodoo ceremony, and I just wanted to mention this because we've had a couple of movies now, including I Walked with a Zombie, where a white person stumbled across a voodoo ceremony and even took part in it. I did wonder about partway through, she stops doing sort of the jerky, ecstatic dancing, and she switches into what my notes call a sexy dance. And I'm wondering if they were like, do you remember what you did in dirty dancing? We need you to bring some of that to this voodoo ceremony.

And, but I think this is also the point where she has the revelation about how to create the antidote. Like she figures it out as part of this ceremony.

Yes, she has, it's implied she has like a vision as a result of getting ecstatically swept up in this religious ceremony. She has like a supernatural revelation almost. And it does that, it does that scene where it shows you flashbacks to earlier parts of the movie, but now they have a new significance that we now know. And so this is where she makes the connection.

And don't forget, Tarot said that voodoo is like disco.

That's right.

Oh, yes.

You feel sexy and fun and really loose.

All of these threads are just coming together. It's just a perfectly crafted.

It takes three of us to figure it out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So we're coming on to the end of the movie now. She has a plan to keep Wesley alive. She can make an antidote for this cat leukemia that they all have. And now she has the anti-unzombie powder handy. She goes and in what I've seen, I enjoyed, she goes and she confronts Paul, the older brother, and she basically says, I know everything you've been doing. This is where I learned for the first time what the movie's plot was because it didn't make a ton of sense at this point. She explains it to Paul. She says, I know what you've been doing. You have been keeping Wesley sick but alive because you need power of attorney to sell the estate because you know Wesley wouldn't allow you to do that if you were in his right mind. But you don't want him to die because he has written out a will that wills all of his earthly possessions to the people of the local community. So in order to be able to sell the estate and make a huge profit, they need Wesley alive but out of the picture. So they infected him basically with this quote zombie status through some combination of Obeya and the cat leukemia, I guess. We still don't know who the sorcerer is yet, but things are coming to a head. Wesley is kidnapped by one of the conspirators and Alice goes in search of him. So she gets Carrow to help her out.

Right.

And they have a little adventure basically following the sound of the drums that they hear.

They steal poor JB's car who has disappeared and they go to and they try to track this down, but they run into a roadblock and they've got a, there's a scene where they go running together like they did earlier in the movie.

There is a neat little scene. The way they wind up, basically their route is blocked by the conspirators. To get out of the estate and over to where the ceremony is taking place, Kara leads Alice through this old tunnel that was made as an escape tunnel by the original owners of the plantation. But it wasn't made as like an escape tunnel for the slaves to escape, it was made for the owners to escape in the event of a slave revolt. I do appreciate since one of the themes of I Walked with a Zombie was sort of that generational sin of slavery that's still lingering through the generations. I did kind of appreciate that this movie nodded. This is the movie's only real nod to like the racist institution of slavery from previous generations. I should note also since I'm talking about things that flash us back to I Walked with a Zombie, in a lot of these scenes we have seen like the sculptures that Kara creates, and I thought that they were all pretty evocative of the tea misery sculpture.

Yeah, the figure head.

Which is the figure head of a suffering slave. I thought those are some kind of neat touches. At any rate, Alice and-

Can I just say Andy, it's really generous of you to take the time to notice these things at this point in this movie when we're like, oh my God, when does it end? But you are still being thoughtful and noticing these things.

I'm trying to get us over the finish line here.

Well, not so much you, but just in the process of watching it, I didn't see that because I'm like, it's got to stop, like, you know, like.

It's like I said earlier, this is a trash movie. I think people were trying to do something good with it at the same time. I think, I don't know, someone involved in the making of this film had more on their mind than just let's show a bunch of like scantily clad women getting macheted. So I just want to call that out when I see it.

You're a generous soul, Andy. Yeah.

So Carol and Alice proceed towards the ceremony, but they get separated. So Alice arrives at the ceremony alone, and JB arrives, who is, I forget how she encounters JB on the way.

JB just disappeared and then he came back.

Yeah, JB is here too. So she and JB arrive at the ceremony, and they're hiding on the edges of the ceremony. It's your classic voodoo ceremony as depicted in all of these movies. People are dancing, drums are going. There is a, I thought it was a really cool outfit, a high priest here. I thought this was pretty neat with a big elaborate mask.

The important thing about this costume though is it keeps, it's so large and the mask is so large, you can't really guess who it is. Like at this point, the movie has established that somebody we've met is the zombie, the bigger man, as they say. But we don't know who it is and there's no clues from looking at the costume.

So the purpose of the ceremony is to zombify Wesley, officially zombify him. So Wesley is there, he's being held captive. His brother Paul is there as well. And when Alice and JB, they hatch a scheme to go in and disrupt the ceremony, and it looks like they're about to succeed, but then this is where we get our big, Revelation, Scooby-Doo style, now we'll see who you really are, the mask comes off. The high priest removes their mask. And John, can you just describe the shocking turn of events here?

It is Caro, the lighthearted, frivolous, devil may care artist we have met before.

Yes, often naked.

Often naked. We find out not only is she the quote unquote bigger man, but she has been the architect of all of this. And she further is, we learned at some point in the movie that she is the child of Paul's father and a local woman. And what we determine is that she is actually running a plan to trick them all, and she is going to end up with the plantation. And that has been her plan all along. And she is using voodoo as a tool to create these hallucinations, but also as a cover to get them all to do what she wants.

She has been orchestrating this with her fellow conspirators. But here it turns out she is planning to betray them all along, because as in the audio clip before, we did get a clue, you know, who would be the sort of person who makes a zombie, someone who has great hate in their heart. So the idea here is she has been nursing all her life this hatred of this family, that she is a child of the family, but she has always been cast to the side. She was not recognized by her father. So she's been plotting this for a long time. And Paul, her co-conspirator, she grabs him here. And it's clear that they have a good little line. He says, I would have given you a lot of money. And she says, I don't want a lot of money. I want all the money. Yes. That was a good little line. I should have clipped the, grabbed the audio for that. Yes. Sheenanigans and Sue and Karo. I realize Karo sets herself up here for her own downfall with what I was up to say.

Which I saw coming. Yeah, she tells Alice to blow the zombie dust in Paul's face, right?

Yeah, she's like, wouldn't it be more fun if you had to, no, it's to blow the dust in JB's face.

To blow the dust in JB's face.

She's like, haha, it won't it be so deliciously fun if I mind control you and make you zombify your friend JB. So let's all put our heads close together. Here's Alice, you hold the zombie dust and let's all lean in close together and now blow it on your friend JB's face. And what happens, John?

And she blows it on Carrow's face and Carrow becomes a zombie and mayhem ensues.

Chaos ensues, shenanigans erupt. And then this movie in a style that is pretty familiar with the much older movies we're watching, this movie just like crashes to its finale. So Carrow has hardly has she fallen to the ground, zombified, that we cut to Alice and Wesley getting married.

Right.

This was weird. And I wrote, oh, no, no, no, on my notes at this point, because I didn't really understand what was going on. Alice and Wesley get married at the estate, and then it cuts to the corrupt police commissioner, like carrying Zombie Carrow, who is in a wedding dress and laying her down on the bed. And it was like, stop, stop.

Yeah, stop. Can we stop? Can you cut now? Yeah.

Then it cut to the credits and the Crypt Keeper blooper reels. And then I was like, well, stop this, stop this too, please.

Just like. Oh dear.

So everybody, all the conspirators died with the, except for the corrupt police commissioner, who's, I guess, still around.

And he is. Yeah, why does he face no consequences?

And he hung on to Carrow's zombie corpse for his own awful purposes. So.

Andy, I have a question for you. Yeah. Having seen this movie, I have a clip that I asked Brad to clip that I would like him now to play. It's not from this movie. It's from our podcast, Episode 2, about the girl with all the gifts. And here it is.

I like a good trashy zombie movie and we'll be watching plenty of those.

Did you stand by that statement, Andy?

I am being hoisted by my own guitar. Sorry, Andy. I have a slightly more nuanced take on this film. Let's go through our questions that we always ask. Then I think I do want to hear what you thought of this movie. So first of all, let's go through our questions, John. Is there a party of heroes in this movie?

I think so. Yeah. I feel like the group, it's Alice. We think it's Carrow. She turns out to be the villain, but it's Alice, Carrow, Wesley.

For most of the movie, Carrow is definitely a hero member of the Good Guy team.

Right. You can even throw Tim Curry in there at some point. But yeah, there's a hero team.

Yeah. How many survive? What's the body count here? Were any of those body counts accounted for by zombie murders?

No, there's no zombie movie murders in this. Then only Wesley and Alice survive, technically.

Yeah. So it's comparing to a lot of the other movies we watch. This has a pretty high body count, actually, I'd say.

Yeah. But anybody who's killed is really killed by somebody with a machete. They're not really killed by zombies.

Yeah. I don't think a zombie kills anyone at any point in this movie.

No. And we barely see zombies. It's just for a second at the end when they blow dust in their face.

They're like a zombie. Is the world threatened?

Not really.

No, I don't think so either. This is another movie like a lot of the older ones we've done, where the problem is not only very local, but it's bound up in a small group of people's neuroses and ambitions and flaws. And as long as you don't get entangled with their little feuds and hatreds, you're totally safe. Yeah.

And I think the zombies that are here are to further another plot. When we came up with the apocalypse business about zombies, zombies were sort of the point here. Zombies are a red herring for somebody trying to steal money.

This isn't a question we can usually ask, but this is a remake, a loose one, as Brad said, of I Walked with a Zombie. And do you feel like it represents, does it carry over the important stuff from I Walked with a Zombie in your mind?

In my mind, it does not for a couple of reasons, but one of which I think is there is an actual mystical zombie in I Walked with a Zombie. And here, I don't get the feeling that the zombies or the illnesses were actually real in any way. They were all sort of part of this plot. I didn't get that sense. I felt like it was just sort of, hey, let's grab some names and remake this thing.

Yeah, I Walked with a Zombie really rests on the strength of the relationship between the brothers and the nurse and unpacking their bitternesses towards each other and their history. And this movie nods at that stuff, but it's much more simple and less interesting.

It doesn't do it very well. And the only relationship I buy is like a genuine, heartfelt relationship is Alice and Kero in the middle section of the film. Yes. I don't believe that Alice loves Wesley. I don't believe that Paul and Wesley love each other. Like I just don't buy any of it.

Yeah. 100% agreed. Do we see any new strain of zombie in this movie?

No. It's sort of like a hit. There's a comparison I want to make, but I haven't seen it recently enough. This is like science zombie, zombie voodoo technology as science. And what I want to do is when we get to the serpent and the rainbow, I want to remember this movie and be like, are these movies similar in any way? Because I feel like there's a strain here, but it's not new. You know what I mean? I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.

Well, that conflict or at least the friction between the scientific worldview zombie and the magical supernatural zombie is interesting.

Yes.

This movie has some good elements of that theme in it. They didn't really come together in a way that worked for me. But I think it is in its way carrying on the tradition of some of the movies we've seen in this podcast that center that split between world views about zombies.

But ultimately, it felt like honestly an episode of like NCIS or even Murder, She Wrote, where there's like a plot going on, and there's a bunch of rich people that are like playing a game, but somebody just, a smart outsider comes in and unmasks them all. And it felt very sort of TV-ish to me in terms of plot and tone.

All right. So the last thing we need to do, John, is go through your zombie pillars. Can you check those off for us? So, going fresh into this movie when I started watching it, I had, I wondered if we might hit a lot of these pillars, because this is a much more modern movie than the most of the ones we've watched.

I think that was most surprising, is that we really didn't, because the first one obviously is an apocalypse or a catastrophe, not, this is a small story set in a single plantation. Next would be contagion, which we know is not true. A, obey a practitioner can turn you into a zombie using the right chemical substance, but one zombie does not turn another zombie. Tough moral choices I didn't really see here. Nobody has to kill somebody to prevent other people from dying. There's no sort of the zombie train problem that's not here. And then finally, loved ones turning against you. Not really. There's a dream where Wesley kills Carrow and Alice, but that turns out to be just a dream when he's a zombie, and that's the only instance of that. Did you think a better case for any of those?

No, I agree. I mean, Carrow betrays everyone at the end and turns out to have been a secret bad guy, but that's not the same as what I think you meant when you made that pillar of the zombie movie.

What's interesting about this is in 2002, what I expected, I think when we came in to this podcast, I had this vision that all zombie movies involved this set of tropes about the apocalypse and don't get bitten and your loved ones will get bitten and what are you going to do? And this movie has none of that. So all of these early movies with a couple brief exceptions have really made me think that the zombie genre has made a huge turn somewhere that we haven't hit yet.

Yeah, I have the same thoughts and I am excited that we must be coming up on that turning point or that branch point.

My hope is that we don't come up to Night of Living Dead, 1968, and there's just this huge right turn. It really was all George Romero and there were no hints of this turn coming ahead of that. That may happen, but I hold out hope that we will, that we'll see more evidence of that before that happens.

And I think we will because in the dozen or so movies we've watched, I feel like we have seen some shifts in the genre, so. Yeah, I agree. Our last question, well, I guess we got to ask, would you survive the zombie world?

Again, just like a white zombie, I just wouldn't get involved with these rich people. They're really annoying.

Yes, a lot of unlikable people leave them to their little supernatural drama.

To their intrigues, yeah.

John, should listeners of this podcast Zombie Fans watch this movie?

You know, I also enjoy a good trashy zombie movie. I don't think there's enough to recommend it or it adds enough to the genre to say, yeah, this is a must watch. This feels like we watch this, you don't have to kind of.

Yeah, I didn't hate this movie. It's trash, but it's not the worst movie you've ever seen.

No, what's interesting is it has a really bad like, I never do this, but I looked up the tomato meter and the popcorn rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's really low. So I think maybe that set my expectation that it was going to be unwatchable, and it's not unwatchable. It's just kind of mediocre.

I came of age in the 90s when this feels very much like the sort of stuff that was just on cable on Saturday afternoon. There's a comfortable trashiness to this. That's not to downplay its flaws, which are many, but if you're listening, unless you just really love the sound of what we described, go and watch a re-watch I Walked with a Zombie. You get the good themes without the garbage, I guess. There is one thing that I don't think we have the context to answer, but that I did wonder. Coming out in 2002, this is way after, I don't know, I'm going to call it the Romero shift, but you just provided some nuance of that. This is way after zombies have turned away from their Caribbean local religious roots in religious horror. In 2002, by the time this came out, there had been a lot of movies that much more closely fit our idea of the modern Romero style zombie movie. I do wonder if in 2002, if this might have felt like a bold return to the roots of the zombie genre.

Yeah, because I think that's what I feel like. Again, I keep talking about this movie. It's been so long since I've seen it. 1988, Serpent in the Rainbow feels like the outlier that turns back to those mystical voodoo roots. But maybe there have been ones dotted all along, and this is just another example of it. I don't know.

I don't know that either. I will say that I can't really recommend this one, but it's better than other movies you could be watching, I guess. Yes, yeah, for sure. That's where I'm going to leave it. So I think I'm going to call it a wrap on Ritual.

Yeah, so one nice thing about this movie is, we enjoyed I Walked with a Zombie so much that when we were confronted with Ritual, it was real panic-inducing, but I feel like having just sat through Ritual, there's very little producer Brad can do to us. So give us your worst, producer Brad.

Well, next week we are going back to the safe, clean confines of the 1940s. For Revenge of the Zombies, take a look at your chat.

Oh, a very busy poster.

Whoa.

Oh, John Carradine.

Really? Interesting.

John, there's a lot going on in this poster. Can you try and describe it?

Yeah. It shows a number. There's a couple of doctors or scientists, maybe the same scientists. We appear to be standing in some jungle. It's like a photo collage, and there's a doctor in a jungle. There's clearly some zombies around that doctor. There's a woman with red hair and a white cloak, and then you see that same scientist in a lab doing something. It's got that colored Bowery at Midnight vibe too, where it's a photo montage and they differentiate the scenes with different shadings of color.

Yeah. They didn't match up the colors of the four different pieces of photos that they slapped together on this poster. I'm taking a more negative view than you are, John.

Well, and we got to remember, these are all colorized photos, right? So that's why the red-headed woman has orange skin and the people in the bottom left corner are just green. So John Carradine, have I seen John Carradine in a movie? I know the name because of his son or sons.

Yeah, same here. I don't know. We're about to find out, John.

I think so.

Everyone stay tuned and use the next week to watch Revenge of the Zombies.

Thanks everyone. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.