Dead Air (2009)

Motion pictures exist as story. Story begets myth. In 1984, Warner Home Video withdrew The Exorcist in the UK in (rightful) anticipation of the video being banned. Thus a whole generation – myself included – came to regard the film as mythical. It took 15 years for the proxy ban to be rescinded. Since 1999, millions of Britons have watched The Exorcist for the first time. Though the hysteria was dated, the horror was present and the myth justified.

This 21st century boom in horror will continue throughout 2010. The Hollywood mainstream has latched on like a David Cronenberg created leech and will not be sated until the box office blood drips dry. In 2009, the mainstream remade The Last House on the Left, Halloween 2, My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th. Even so, some of the biggest names have suffered release date delays – Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island has been pushed back from October 2009 to February 2010, Case 39 starring Renée Zellweger has been delayed from 2008 to 2010, and The Wolf Man starring Sir Anthony Hopkins has been postponed from 2008 to 2010.

How highly anticipated are these movies? Will the wait afford them legendary status from a grateful horror base, or will it cost them bitter criticism from disappointed patrons? Of course, it’s not just mainstream movies that are victims of postponements. Trick r Treat was originally slated for 2007 and was finally released direct to DVD in 2009. Carriers was initially screened in 2007 but had to wait until September 2009 for a limited release.

Dead Air had an original 2007 theatrical release date. It went straight to DVD in 2009.

Trick r Treat is only a couple of months old but is already beloved. It will be voted on many lists as the best horror film of 2009. Carriers fails as a dishonest mistake and won’t make any listed top 10. The long awaited Dead Air has a premise difficult to convince in an overcrowded landscape: isolation. How can story isolate its characters without contrivance? John Carpenter’s The Thing did so with aplomb, as did Alien. Such a scenario is rife with tension and paranoia. The Dead Air characters work the graveyard shift at a Los Angeles radio station.

To date, George A Romero (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) has not intimated what initiated his zombie plague. On the other hand, Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, 2002) chronicled the rage that spawned his monsters. Director Corbin Bernsen opens his movie with an epigraph from the bible: Matthew 6:34 mentions the word ‘evil’ – the soundtrack is an Islamic call to prayer. Cue the opening sequence where a terrorist cell unleashes a biological weapon of mass destruction on the City of Angels.

The terrorists flee from the basketball game scene of their crime and end up at the radio station. There, the surviving Islamist forces shock jock Bill Moseley and his producer/ex-wife Patricia Tallman to broadcast his hatred for the American way of life. Meanwhile outside, the infected zombie-like hordes hunt to kill and eat.

The synopsis of any zombie film should not exceed 20 words, eg zombies besiege radio station in LA. The undead is in the details – according to the works of George A Romero, Danny Boyle and Lucio Fulci. However Corbin Bernsen is a jobber actor with a camera, and his screenwriter, Kenny Yakkel, couldn’t write a cheque.

This film has been described as 28 Days Later meets Talk Radio. That’s a lie. The former was inventive, and the latter is dynamic. What makes the Oliver Stone film so is the dialogue. It’s concise, precise and finger pointing. The Dead Air dialogue is puerile, semi-literate and aimless. An unnecessary attempt to infuse tension amongst the radio staff is to have Moseley and Tallman bicker like an old divorced sitcom couple. The effect is cringeworthy.

The terrorists on a mission to destroy the world are bumbling, sweaty, hairy, balding, unbuttoned stereotype stock of the worst intent. Within the first 15 minutes, this film betrays its agenda; under the free speech cover of a phone-in, the characters discuss and defame Muslims and Arabs.

When the first call comes in reporting a disturbance, Moseley dismisses it the way any rational human being dismisses a distress call. When the staff watches a reporter being eaten on live TV, I didn’t know if to laugh – the scene was so unconvincing. This is a film where people stand in the way of a cannibalistic mob – the blonde TV anchor, Ted the security guy, Gil the sidekick. Wes Craven should watch this and satirise it in Scream 4.

The money shot of this movie is the Moseley rant against Muslims and Arabs – and the Chechen rebels. There are zombies in this film, too. They’re not really zombies. This is not really a horror film.

Pontypool, released earlier this year, had a similar premise. There was nothing offensive about that movie and there wasn’t much good about it either. It’s not the ingredients – it’s the chef. Watching Dead Air makes one appreciate the original Night of the Living Dead so much more. If zombies serve as an allegory, then perhaps they’re here to serve both left and right. The trouble with right wing movies is that they’re rarely entertaining – they’re always propaganda.

This film is so bad that Dr. Josef Goebbels would’ve had Corbin Bernsen executed for treason. In contemporary L.A., the movie machine postponed Dead Air, delayed it, then dumped it straight to DVD.

Hooray for Hollywood.

(Reproduced by kind permission of Thrill Fiction)