Blog Monster Movie Double Matinee Monday: The Mad and Altered

The Mad (2007)

Starring: Billy Zane, Maggie Castle, and Jordan Madley
Directed by: John Kalangis
Written by: Kevin Hennelly, John Kalangis, and Christopher Warre Smets
Production Company: 235 Films and Peace Arch Entertainment Group

Zombies, it seems, are riding an impressively persistent wave of popularity, and naturally they’ve come out in all kinds of forms. We’ve had the serious like Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead. We’ve had the not-quite-a-zombie flick 28 Days Later, and the dark comedy Shaun of the Dead. John Kalangis, continuing the zombie wave, brings us an even better dark zombie comedy. Well, not quite a zombie comedy. Also, related to yesterday’s holiday, Father’s Day, it’s a touching tale of a father and daughter bonding. Not “bondage”, sicko, “bonding”. If that sounds like a craxy mix, well...it is The Mad.

Doctor Jason Hunt is going on vacation with his girlfriend, Monica, his daughter, Amy, and her boyfriend, Tommy. As you could expect, it’s a tense vacation. Jason doesn’t like Tommy, but he’s trying. Amy doesn’t like Monica or how she’s affected her father, and Monica is intent on setting Amy in her place as she plans her marriage to Jason. The four stop for the evening in a small town. Of course, no one is very happy about Jason’s choice of stops, except the ever brown nosing Tommy. At the local restaurant, everyone is eating the special, hamburger made from local meat. This meat, contaminated with some strange, mutated mad cow virus, sparks a zombie plague.

But is it a zombie plague? The film gives us a funny scene where the characters debate whether or not the assailants are sick, but living humans, or undead zombies. There is a lot of humor in this film and it keeps it up throughout with scenes such as Tommy getting attacked by a meat patty, father-daughter arguments in the midst of carnage and gore, and the best…Jason and Amy having a wonderfully healing father-daughter bonding moment as they crass a field and kick zombie butt.

Yeah, ok, we don’t have Oscar winning performances, but Billy Zane plays a wonderfully comedic father gripped by mid-life crisis, and Maggie Castle is great as the nagging daughter. Jordan Madley is captivating as the hard-as-nails waitress. Actually, all of the characters perform their roles with entertaining, over-the-top relish. Their comedic timing and ability to personify their stereotypes adds to the enjoyment of this comedy, where more emotional performances may have taken away from the funny.

For the record, I feel The Mad is a better horror comedy than the revered Shaun of the Dead. Granting myself an off-topic aside, I felt that Shaun was off balance, with the beginning being wonderfully funny, and the middle and end being standard horrific zombie fare. The Mad doesn’t replace comedy with drama in the middle. It’s a funny romp throughout.

Our second feature today is...

Altered (2006)

Directed by: Eduardo Sanchez
Written by: Jamie Nash and Eduardo Sanchez
Starring: Adam Kaufman, Brad William Henke, Michael C. Williams, Paul McCarthy-Boyington, and Catherine Mangan
Production Company: Haxan Films

In Altered, Jamie Nash and Eduardo Sanchez show that a smart, simple script can still produce an edge-of-your-seat horror film chocked full with tension and suspense.

Altered starts off with friends Duke, Cody, and Otis off in the woods hunting. We quickly realize they aren’t hunting game, and we soon find out that their target is an alien. Nash and Sanchez don’t waste any time, starting off right away with action and tension, and for 88 minutes, they don’t let us relax.

Panicked from actually capturing one of the aliens, the three friends reluctantly go get help from old friend Wyatt. It turns out the four friends were abducted by these aliens several years ago and experimented on, leading to the death of a fifth friend. Duke, Cody, and Otis want revenge, while Wyatt just wants to be left alone.

What follows is nonstop stressful conflict. The three friends want to kill their alien captive, while Wyatt insists that doing so will bring the other aliens down on them for vengeance, and the town could be at risk as well. Wyatt’s girlfriend Hope wants to know what’s going on and her misunderstanding brings in the Sheriff. Meanwhile, the alien wants to contact the others and escape, and it will do anything it can to do so. To add to the troubles, there is no love lost between Cody and Wyatt, forcing Duke and Otis to try and keep the two from bashing each other’s head in.

What I find interesting is how the roles from the friends and the aliens seem interchangeable. The friends were experimented on, tortured, released, save for one death. The friends are now torturing an alien that at least one is trying to release. There’s a scene where Wyatt cuts into the alien to remove a tracker from the alien’s intestines, and later the alien disembowels one of the four. Wyatt fears retribution for the killing of one of the aliens, and the friends are seeking retribution for the death of one of their own. The parallels are unmistakable.

While we don’t have award-winning performances, the actors play their roles with sincerity. All of the characters are people you know. You can recognize them. This helps when they do something that appears to be stupid. Seriously, now, in a high tension, highly emotional set-up as being reunited with former friends, drinking beer, hunting aliens, and having to decide what to do with the captured one with a girlfriend who knows nothing about aliens or what happened in the past, tell me in real life some idiotic decisions wouldn’t be made.

Before I forget, I do want to add that the alien effects are some of the more interesting I’ve seen. The alien is scary and malevolent in its appearance, and considering the parallels between the aliens and the friends, it makes you wonder how scary and malevolent we humans can appear…without much alteration.