The Weirdest 'Freddy vs. Jason' Script EVER!

There were a lot of weird Freddy vs. Jason scripts floating around in Hollywood in the mid-1990s, but none of 'em were as brass-balled out there as the one penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore which saw Jason go on trial for mega-homicide and Freddy mass murder an entire shopping mall full of children. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Even now I'm not sure if 2003's Freddy vs. Jason was a rousing success or a dismal failure. At the time, I thought it was a goddamn hoot, but then again, me and my pals had also spent an hour in the parking lot before the movie started drinking Dr. Pepper and vodka and listening to Soundgarden, so there may have been some chemical influence on our perspectives. My second (and first sober) screening of the movie when it hit the DVD rounds, I wasn't anywhere near as impressed, and by the third time I watched it, I was wholeheartedly disappointed. I mean, shit, we've been waiting on this movie for more than a decade - that was a LOT of hype, and I don't think anybody, even the people who actually made the movie, would say that it came anywhere close to living up to its sky-high expectations.

Watching the movie now, though, I'm kinda' on the fence. There were some cool elements, but as a whole, it really didn't add up to anything truly transcendent. I can appreciate the writers' reluctance to fuck with the series chronology of each respective franchise, but considering how long people have been waiting for the flick, you sorta' expected them to hit us with some big go-home point that wedded the two brands together, like revealing Freddy was Jason's dad or that Michael Myers was the Kruegers' next door neighbor or something. Still, the fact that Ronny Yu's movie came complete with a coherent (even rational) plot can't be considered anything other than a minor miracle - especially considering how clusterfucky some of the proposed FvJ scripts were. 

You may not think the 2003 movie was the bee's knees, but compared to what we could've ended up with, it was a fucking cinematic triumph. One proposed script had a teenage cult resurrect Freddy so he could rape a retarded elementary schooler and bring about the Apocalypse. Another one had Freddy and Jason literally fighting each other in a boxing ring in hell, with Ted Bundy as the special guest referee. And in yet another, there's a scene where a character gets sucked inside Freddy's nostril and has to do battle with a giant talking wad of CGI snot. Actually, that's a lie on my part - that wasn't three different plots, those are all taken from a single script, which was THE ONE screenplay New Line Cinema almost produced (indeed, that it put the brakes on that turd of a concept might be literally the only good thing to come out of the Columbine massacre.)

I'm not quite sure just how many Freddy vs. Jason scripts were floating around in Hollywood - a great new book, Slash of the Titans, examines at least ten different ones - but of the ones that have made it to the Internet, in my humblest o' opinions the absolute weirdest one had to be the treatment penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore titled simply Jason vs. Freddy.

Now Braga and Moore (whose co-writing credits include the second Mission: Impossible movie, among many others) are no Johnny-Come-Latelies. Around the time of the script, Braga (who has since picked up a couple of awards for his work on Terra Nova and the Cosmos reboot and written a few 24 episodes), had already penned a pretty good number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. His partner Moore (who later wrote the Battlestar Galactica reboot and is currently writing Outlander) also had a fair amount of writing experience, not just on TNG, but also on a few full-length Star Trek movies, including Generations. Now, considering their sci-fi pedigrees, you'd expect their FvJ treatment to be more in line with Jason X than Yu's movie, but hold your horses: instead of making the crossover slasher movie a straight-up monster kung-fu movie, their treatment was effectively a courtroom drama.

Yep, you heard right - they literally turned Freddy v. Jason into, well, Freddy v. Jason. OK, so maybe it's not a full-length John Grisham legal potboiler, but it's certainly unlike anything we've ever seen in a Friday the 13th or Elm Street movie before or after. The full script isn't too hard to find with a little bit of Googlin', but for those of you who would prefer the CliffsNotes version, I've taken the time and the effort to sum up the whole dang thing for you below. Enjoy it, kids - it's some way out there shit.

We begin with these two land developers at Crystal Lake. They make jokes about Jason and get lost in the woods and take refuge in a dilapidated old house. The male developer talks with a realtor on his cell phone. The house is glutted with knifes, machetes, chainsaws and, of course, hockey masks. His female companion sees some odd newspaper clippings on the wall. Then her partner goes missing. She prowls around the house for a bit and finds him hanging on a meat hook, deader than the prospects of a Prodigy comeback. She grabs a knife and finds Jason just sitting in a recliner in the living room. She throws it at him, he grabs it in midair and in one fell swoop, throws it right back at her and through her skull.

Then an FBI assault team swarms the house. Meanwhile, Ruby Jarvis gets a phone call at three in the morning letting her know she's going to be the public defender in the capital murder trial of one Jason Voorhees.

Ruby discusses the case with federal prosecutor Keith Harding. She says the warrant was signed by a local judge and therefore remains in her jurisdiction. She visits Jason at the county jail and reads him his rights. He stares at the floor the entire time. She freaks out when he scratches his hand.

Ruby then speaks with her assistant, your stereotypical Asian sidekick Kwan. She says she wants a change of venue and the jurors sequestered. She thinks copping an insanity plea might be the best defense moving forward.

They go to video store and check out the horror section. She says slasher moves have made America prejudiced against her client. Kwan then picks up a copy of Friday the 13th, then Zombie Sluts From Beyond the Grave. So it looks like we're living in a diagetic world where Jason exists, but all of the previous F13 movies were also fictitious. Keep that in the back of your head for later on.

Ruby goes home and watches Friday the 13th Part 10: Jason's Greatest Hits and Chops for research. She mocks the movie and gets a phone call from the local sheriff, letting her know Jason has escaped. She hears a mysterious sound and fog starts rolling into her living room. She's soon attacked by Jack the Ripper, then Charles Manson tries to give her a swastika tattoo. She finds a severed head in a kitchen pot, then gets sneak-attacked by Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Then Jason approaches her. He slowly takes off his mask and it's Freddy! Of course, she wakes up right before he claws her.

It's a media circus at the Crystal Lake courthouse the next day. Some protesters have signs reading "Jason needs to die," others have signs reading "free Jason". Ruby speaks with a psychologist ("he's fucking nuts," he says, "and interestingly, it appears he doesn't sleep, ever.") Jason is literally wheeled into court with chains all over him. Harding mocks Ruby's outfit and literally takes all day to read all of Jason's charges. Ruby enters a not guilty plea at the arraignment and everybody freaks out. Then a guy who said Jason killed his sister runs into the courthouse and shoots him six times.

So Jason is taken to the hospital (He has Type O Negative blood and a resting heart rate of 180, in case you've ever wondered such) and shot full of barbiturates and gassed. He finally falls asleep and starts dreaming. He's a boy being chased though the woods, having flashbacks to pre-burnt Freddy K. having sex with his mama. He grabs a doctor during some x-rays but gets needled again and falls back asleep. Still a kid in the dream, Jason tries to escape Freddy in a metal canoe. Freddy attacks him in the middle of a lake, then a nurse sees what appears to be a metal glove on the X-ray monitor, swiping at his chest. Jason goes into violent convulsions. He wakes up, but remains deathly still on the table the second he regains consciousness. The public defender can't believe he made a full recovery.

Ruby, Kwan and the psychiatrist go to the hospital basement to read Jason's old medical records from when he was a (human) kid. They learn his mom died from ovarian cancer in 1969 and his dad was named Elias (so, uh, I guess it's sticking to the official Friday canon, I suppose.) Ruby says that although a string of murders did happen in the 1980s, all those damn Friday the 13th movies have confused the realities of Jason's life to the general public. The records suggest Jason has insomnelence, an extreme form of insomnia where he goes without sleep for three months at a time. Ruby says that could explain his violent behavior and potentially get him off by reason of insanity.

What - you thought I was making this shit up?

They hook Jason up to a brain scanning EEG machine and dope him up on 47 ccs (did you know that stands for cubic centimeters?) of Valium. "If we're lucky, maybe he'll fart in his sleep” one tech remarks. Two hours later, Jason finally hits R.E.M. sleep. He dreams about being a kid again and walks in on human Freddy fucking the shit out of his mom (again.) Then Freddy in his more recognizable burnt form chases him and says he ain't getting away this time but when he hits him with his glove, a hockey mask magically materializes over his face. Jason becomes full grown, grabs an ax and dismembers Freddy, Evil Dead style. But Freddy (with green blood!) reassembles himself. Jason IRL starts convulsing. Freddy's arm pops out of Jason's chest and slices the jugulars of Kwan and a cop on standby. Freddy's thrashing hand catches Kwan's ponytail and drags him into Jason's chest and thusly, the dream world. Ruby and pals try to yank him out but accidentally inject Jason with more hypno-juice. Freddy fucks up Kwan's face something fierce with his claw and spits his corpse out into the real world. Then Jason wakes up - of course, right before Freddy can escape from the dream world.

Ruby is grilled by Harding about the murders. She is adamant Jason didn't do it and the razor hand she saw was real, dabnabbit. She goes home and scans a police sketch of the glove into a federal murder weapons database. Sure enough, it pulls up a file on Freddy, who was supposedly burned alive in the late sixties. Then, she finds a report on the 1984 Springwood child murders ….

Then Ruby visits the psychiatrist (they just call him by his last name, Dr. Sena) and tells him the classic Freddy backstory. Apparently, Springwood is just eight miles from Crystal Lake (this, despite the official mythos of each franchise putting the series in Ohio and New Jersey, respectively, but as they say in France, "fuck continuity.") She brings up a few reports of teens saying Freddy visited them in dreams and tried to kill them. She looks at the EEG-thingy and it clearly shows two distinct brain waves while Jason was sleeping.

Next there's a big FBI dig at Jason's old place. They find 47 bodies buried on the premises. Ruby finds a fedora in Mrs. Voorhees' bedroom with the initials "F.K." written on the inside. Dr. Sena hooks Jason to to the EEG thing and sedates him again. This time, though, it's being filmed. Meanwhile, Ruby goes under Mrs. Voorhees' bed and it starts shaking violently. She gets out and sees young Jason in the house, but not unlike John Cena, he can't see her.

The EEG machine explodes and Freddy hops out of Jason's body into our real world. He mind controls four guards to blow each other's brains out and Ruby and Harding return to Crystal Lake. There are dozens of dead bodies everywhere, with a whole slew of cops getting blown away by invisible bullets. Ruby finds a newswoman's camera. She rewinds the footage of an invisible jail break, in which 50 dream men attack the cops in a bloody shootout. Then the newswoman gets ghost raped by some sort of unseen presence, and Freddy pops up on camera at the very last frame.

Ruby returns to the jail. Jason's still sleeping and Dr. Sena, surprisingly, is still alive. He says Freddy has the ability to induce mass narcosis - basically, to create walking nightmares in real life. They look under Jason's bed and hey, young Jason has apparently crossed over from dreamworld too.

Elsewhere, Harding's driving on the interstate when he sees a couple of girls in white dresses playing in the middle of the road. This causes a massive pile up, but Freddy manages to reassemble the cars so they are perfectly parked on the highway, but inside everybody remains mangled and decapitated with the radios and engines still humming. "Don't dream and drive," Freddy quips.

Then Ruby speaks to boy Jason. He's terrified of Freddy. At one point, four bloody claw marks show up on his forehead and Ruby wipes it off. He talks about Freddy trying to drown him in the lake, but surviving and living the rest of his life in the woods, growing angrier and angrier. Eventually boy Jason snaps and beats Dr. Sena with a billy club. Ruby hugs him and he starts crying. Adult Jason wakes up and boy Jason disappears. He grabs his hockey mask and ax, leaves the room and hits the city streets.

We enter Springwood, which is described as a city of hundreds of thousands of people. If Freddy's whole shtick is killing teens, Dr. Sena says he's probably headed to a place where there are a lot of teenagers to shish-ka-bob - the local mall. And on cue, Freddy enters the Elm Street Shopping Plaza. Ruby gets a shotgun and Dr. Sena gives her a stimulant that will keep her from dreaming, but it only lasts ten minutes. Well, that's not foreshadowing or anything.

Freddy gets on an elevator and kills two punks by making their tattoos come alive and their piercings grow Hellraiser-esque barbs and dig into their flesh. He then places an invisible gate around the mall, and says "it's time to shop till they drop."

From here, it's absolute bedlam. An invisible semi crashes through the mall and invisible Rottweilers attack little girls. Kids get sucked into a man-eating ball pit and teens popping pimples have snakes come out of their faces. Hairspray turns into flamethrowers and horny nerds are strangled by mannequins. Then the food court explodes and people have their legs eaten off by escalators (which has always been one of my greatest irrational fears, by the way.)

Ruby and Dr. Sena finally arrive. Now a "real" fire has broken out. They shoot up the stay-awake juice and free some people.  Ruby shoots at Freddy, hits a coffee machine and sprays his face with espresso. Dr. Sena gives another Freddy-reversing  injection to a girl who thinks she's being attacked by dolls. A nurse saunters on up to Dr. Sena (who is painted as a big perv earlier in the script) and she flashes him. But instead of nipples, she has gnashing teeth. Now, his anti-hallucination drugs haven't worn off, so it doesn't kill him. Then Freddy says he has to finish the job himself. Ruby shoots Freddy and he runs off into a movie theater. Inside are piles of dead ushers, complete with one guy stuffed inside the popcorn machine. Ruby sees a cardboard standee for Jason 2010 … a fictitious movie that eerily foretold the coming of Jason X in 2002. Naturally, the standee comes alive and attacks her. "The verdict is in bitch," Freddy says, "you're guilty of fucking with the wrong guy." Yeah ... his dialogue could've used some work.

And here's the part where the "real" Jason makes the save and fights robot Jason. Then Freddy makes 50 of Jason's victims appear as zombies and attack him including the two land developers from the opening scene. Jason fights them off and Freddy says they should join forces and he turns into his mom … only for Jason to grab the razor glove and stab Freddy in the throat.

Ruby yells from a dentist office. She's trapped in a chair, which has been transformed into a  torture device. Jason tries to free her (wait, what the fuck is Jason doing trying to SAVE somebody else's life?) and what do you know, it's actually Freddy and he criticizes Jason for going soft in his old age. Freddy hits Jason with some laughing gas and he starts to doze off. He tries to jump back up out of dreamland and pops out of Freddy's chest, then Ruby hits Jason with another dose of anti-sleep juice and it basically fuses Freddy and Jason into a Siamese twin freak of nature. They run around the fiery mall and Ruby fireman carries Sena to safety. Jason tells her to leave - yep, he can talk in this script - and Freddy and Jason, sharing the same body, keep fighting. Jason hits a propane tank and the mall goes kaboom. "My client is dead," Ruby remarks, "but he's a free man."

We cut to the Voorhees house getting demolished. Before cutting to black, we pan to a photo of boy Jason - only instead of looking scared, he actually looks happy. Then the wall comes down, and that's all she wrote, kids.

A computer simulation of the original ending of Freddy vs. Jason.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good treatment, even though I do have some major complaints about the way Jason is depicted. Ultimately, they made him far too sympathetic, and if there's one thing Jason should never be, it's a victim. Oddly enough, almost all of the major FvJ scripts out there had the same motif, with Freddy playing the "real" bad guy and Jason doing a Godzilla/Venom-like face turn. Really, only the one used for the 2003 film seemed to get away from that concept, and for as much shit as we give that flick, we should at least be thankful it kept Jason the emotionless psycho killer we all know and love.

The nightmare sequences, though, would've been awesome, and the grand finale kill-fest at the mall would've been a hoot and a half. It's kind of a pity nobody's attempted to translate the script into a comic book mini-series, or even better, a DCAU-like feature length animated movie. The script, as a whole, never would've worked as a full-fledged live-action movie, but it could've been pretty cool as a non-canon spin-off in a totally different medium. I mean, at the absolute least, we should've got an action figure of the Jason/Freddy Siamese twin monster, and there's no excuse for McFarlane Toys never giving it to us. 

An aside, but I've always thought it was odd New Line would just let the Friday rights lapse without giving us a proper FvJ sequel. I mean, the movie did make a ton of money, and it wouldn't have been too hard to crank out a follow-up every Halloween, Saw style, if they really wanted to. And there were certainly no shortage of novel approaches to the crossover hook, as evident by the kookiness of Braga and Moore's script. 

Who knows. Maybe one day Freddy and Jason will once again be fighting under the same corporate umbrella again, but it's a pity we didn't get more of a good thing back when Robert Englund and Kane Hooder were willing and ready to do it. Alas, each and every Friday the 13th, we can always reflect on what could've been - and as bad as a movie about Jason being put on trial for 400 counts of murder and Freddy killing people by turning their tattoos alive might have been, there's no way it could've been worse than most of the crap that passes for "horror" in this day and age ...

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'It' / 'Dark Night'

What better way to usher in the unofficial start of the Halloween movie season than watching lots and lots of preteens getting brutally murdered?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I keep getting these emails from people askin' me what makes a good contemporary slasher movie. I have no idea why, except for the fact that I'm probably the only person in the world who's willing to review modern B-splatter movies in an unironic manner on a regular basis, or maybe it's 'cause my criticism ain't rooted in radical fanboy-ism like everywhere else on the Internet. Anyhoo, I'm sick of having to type up the same responses over and over, so I'm just going to spell it out for you people right here and now. You better bookmark this shit, because I ain't sayin' it again. 

If you want to make a great slasher movie in this, the almost 2020s, here are the ten rules you must follow at all times in the pre-production, production and post-production cycle:

Rule No. 1 - Don't try to be anything other than a slasher movie

If you're gonna' make a slasher movie, make a dadgum slasher movie, not a "supernatural thriller" or a "psychological drama" or - heaven help us - "a culturally cognizant social horror film." The recipe cooks itself: kids are introduced, the kids do stupid things, the psycho killer shows up, the kids get killed in progressively more outrageous ways and then the only kid in the movie that has any horse sense grabs something sharp and does in the murderer. This shit is a time-tested formula that's proved effective since the late 1960s and the further you get away from the central essence of the subgenre the greater the likelihood your movie's going to suck dick.

Rule No. 2 - Embrace the fact your movie is a product of the times

I hate it when modern slasher movies try to "pay homage" to all the stuff from the 1970s and 1980s. I'd venture to guess that a good 70 percent of all slasher movies made this century are nothing more than a bunch of nerds getting together and saying "golly gee, wouldn't it be plain peachy if we spent $500,000 to make a whole bunch of references to Elm Street and Evil Dead for 90 minutes and impress the heck outta' all our message board buddies?" Invariably, when you try to make a movie feel like something that came out 30 or 40 years ago, it sucks. Why? Because the films never recognize their own ephemeral value. Halloween worked because John Carpenter knew the shit was '70s as fuck and rolled with it. Shit, all of the Sleepaway Camp movies absolutely wallowed in their chronological trappings and they all turned out amazing, too. You've got to recognize your movie is going to feel dated in a few years anyway, so forget all about trying to do something "timeless" or imitating a different cinematic decade. Take advantage of all the kitschy idiosyncrasies of the day - the lingo, the fashion, the technology, etc. - and just make the best testament to/indictment of the times you can afford to.

Rule No. 3 - Take your script seriously

Nobody seems to remember how to make a straight slasher movie no more. Granted, horror-comedies have been around for a long time, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is all these "neo" slasher movies where the producers, directors and actors look like they're trying to make a shitty movie on purpose. The acting is stilted and stultified, the special effects are hokey, the plot keeps getting self reflexive and self-mocking and the whole flick just feels like it's trying to win the audience over by goading 'em into embracing just how strategically campy and corny everything is. Long story short, if you can't find the wherewithal to make a serious genre movie, you shouldn't be making a genre movie period. A sincerely bad slasher movie can still be entertaining, but an insincerely bad one is just flat out unwatchable.

Rule No. 4 - Hire some people who actually know how to act

While the acting in all those Friday the 13th and Night of the Demons movies were hardly Oscar-worthy, they at least came off as authentic and believable. I can't tell you how many damn neo-slashers I've seen where the actors and actresses sounded like monotone junior high schoolers dead-panning their way through A Midsummer Night's Dream dress rehearsal. Their deliveries always have that artificial intonation that dips and waves, like they're trying to express emotion through these slight changes in the modulation of their voice even though their faces remain stock-still. Again, nobody's expecting anybody in the cast to pull off a Daniel Day Lewis-caliber acting job, but they ought to be able to at least feign basic human emotion ... or at the absolute least, be able to scream like a motherfucker.

Rule No. 5 - Make your characters worthy of a gruesome death

This is a mistake way too many filmmakers make. In a slasher movie, you've got to kill off at least 95 percent of the cast, so there's not really a point in making the characters likable or relatable. In fact, the movie works even better if EVERYBODY in the film is an asshole so stupid you can't wait for them to get knocked off, so be sure to fill the script chock full of dope smoking retards, man-stealing whores, downright imbecilic jocks, one-dimensional goths, punk rockers and/or metal heads and at least one black dude who really, really likes to investigate mysterious noises. The only character in the movie who should have any sort of redeeming qualities, of course, is the final girl, but you can't make her too squeaky clean. Still, that's no excuse to not feature her prominently in at least one shower scene, though...

Rule No. 6 - Nobody wants a damn murder mystery

That shit went out with Prom Night and Terror Train, for Christ's sake. The absolute best slasher movies are the ones where either you know right from the beginning who the psycho murderer is (The Burning, Silent Night, Deadly Night) or the movie doesn't even bother telling you who's the one doing all the killing (Black Christmas.) People don't go to see slasher movies so they can play Clue or Guess Who? in the back of their noggins, they go to see slasher movies so they can watch nekkid women get carved up and stupid assholes named Chad have chainsaws shoved up their buttholes while they're taking a leak. If people want to watch a mystery, they'll go home and watch Monk or something on Netflix; and by golly, if they pay money to see a SLASHER movie, the last thing any of them want to see is a goddamn episode of Poirot.

Rule No. 7 - Knowing how to deliver the goods is far more important than building up suspense

Fuck serial actress-rapist Alfred Hitchcock, any motherfucker off the street can do suspense. I mean, fuck, how difficult is it to make people wait for things to happen, anyway? It's not too difficult to build up tension when there is a character being stalked who doesn't know they're being stalked, but like a bunch of delayed ejaculators, most neo-slasher movies have no idea how to off-ramp from the suspenseful stuff and make good when it comes time for the shit to get real. Invariably, what we wind up with is minutes and minutes of build-up and then a kill/scare that lasts maybe a second or two, if we're lucky. I mean, really, what's the point of making people just sit there for five minutes watching some dude or dudette getting chased only for their onscreen demise to last four or five seconds? If you want to make a successful 21st century slasher flick, you've got to tone down the cat and mouse nonsense and ratchet up the full-on violent impact. As a general rule, the grisly payoff should be at least half as long as the build-up, and the shorter the build-up, the better. I'd recommend the pursuit/stalking stuff never last more than two minutes at any juncture in the movie and that no kill be shorter than 30 seconds, from the initial point of contact to the part where the body stops twitching. And along those same lines, how about coming up with some more inventive ways of killing people, guys? I mean, you can only see people get their throats slit open so many times before it gets boring ...

Rule No. 8 - Once the deaths start rolling, keep 'em rolling

This is a time-tested slasher diktat that hardly anybody brings up - or even recognizes, for that matter. Most old school slasher movies took their sweet time setting everything up, and you'd usually have to wait until the movie was halfway over before people started getting chainsawed and shit. But what you'd notice about the truly great ones is that once the butcher knives started flying, they didn't take their foot off the gas for the remainder of the movie. Once the first major kill was registered, it was just accelerated mayhem from there on out, with people getting decapitated, disembowled and dismembered en masse every five to ten minutes - and the closer we got to the paint-the-room-red grand finale, the higher the kills-per-minute ratio got. Well, if that little formula worked for the old guard, it'll work just as dandy for your production, kiddos; once the shit goes down, you better find a way to keep the mayhem rolling along or else. 

Rule No. 9 - There must be tits

Slasher movies are the ultimate Freudian genre, combining the competing, diametric instincts of man - the urge to fuck and the urge to kill - into one big, fat goulash of sex and violence. Simply put, you can't make a movie about people getting stabbed and sliced up by some slow-moving, phantom-like figure without also filling it with people doing it and young women showing off their perky nips and areolas. For every kill in the movie there should be AT LEAST half as many exposed female breasts and preferably, one fuck scene per five onscreen kills (and one lesbian fuck sceneper every ten onscreen kills.) Again, this is a mathematically proven formula, and only stupid people would ever argue against math, wouldn't they?

Rule No. 10 - End on a high note, not a sequel hook

Look guys, it ain't 1985 anymore. Odds are, your movie won't even recoup half its production costs, so if you're thinking you're going to be able to finagle some producer into giving you an advance for another movie simply because the ending of your last flick left the door open for a sequel, you're S.O.L. Your shit ain't Saw or Elm Street and it certainly ins't the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so you better do what you can to make this one-and-done slasher flick as entertaining and memorable as possible, and if your movie doesn't have an especially well-down final five minutes, you might as well just say "fuck it" right now. All of the really good jump scare finales (i.e., the grand finale of Friday the 13th) have already been done and NOTHING is shittier than ending a slasher flick on a comedic non-sequitur (see: every fucking thing Eli Roth has ever done.) So my advice is either end the movie right after the big bad gets dispatched (preferably, in a manner that entails a bare minimum of 20 gallons of blood sprayed all over the set) or with a last-second swerve so out of left field, it royally fucks up everybody who watches it for life (i.e., Bay of Blood, Deranged and the first Sleepaway Camp movie.) Really, your whole movie is just an excuse to make it to the final five minutes - and if you don't have some truly awesome shit in store for the reservoir tip end of your movie, you might as well not even bother renting a camera, cabron.

So there you have it, aspiring filmmakers of tomorrow. Either adhere to blueprint I just laid out for 'ya and make a great neo-slasher or eschew 'em and spit out another turdy one. The choice is yours, kids - and don't you dare say I didn't do my part to help all ya'll jackoffs. Don't you even.

It is a horror movie? Seriously, this is the most I've laughed at the movie theater all year round. 

Speaking of movies that could've benefited from following Jimbo's Ten Golden Rules of Slasher Flicks, the newfangled It movie nails about half of 'em despite most people thinkin' it's something more refined than just another psycho killer movie. Granted, it's a movie about a psycho killer with reality-warping metaphysical powers, but at heart, there's really nothing thematically different about it than Halloween or The Prowler. Hey, a movie about stupid kids getting killed off for not having manners and doing stupid shit is still a slasher movie, no matter how bad you want to church it up into something more ... sigh ... dignified.

In a lot of ways, this is the best Freddy Krueger movie that never got made. You've got a bunch of distressed and depressed kids whose daddies try to rape 'em and have overbearing mamas and have a lot of guilt about their dead brothers and there's this supernatural force that tries to kill 'em by turning into their worst fears, and it's always shape-shifting and making wisecracks and toyin' around with its victims before growing three thousand teeth and peeling the skin off their bones like an original recipe KFC drumstick. In fact, the big paint-the-walls-red finale might as well be a scene by scene remake of the denouement from Elm Street 3, right down to the monster getting a metal rod jammed down its esophagus and trying to trick one of the kids by turning into a dead family member. Hell, even the cast is similar: just like in the third and best Freddy movie, the protagonists include this wimpola nerd in glasses, this one take-no-shit tomboy, this scraggly haired dork who don't talk too much and even an angry black kid wearing a grey sweatshirt.

Now, for those of you that actually read Stephen King's 1,200-page cinder block of a novel, you prolly assumed a couple of things wouldn't have made it into this adaptation. We knew they weren't going to include the scene where a bunch of fifth graders run a train on a 12-year-old in the sewer. We knew they weren't going to include the scene where a bunch of sociopathic middle school bullies jerk each off in a junk yard and have their faces eaten off by flying leeches. And we knew they weren't going to include the scene where Pennywise the Clown pops up and starts doing a minstrel show performance and calling everybody the "n-word." But would they have the guts to include the scene where a first grader gets his arm bitten off, or the part where the mullet-headed juvenile delinquent psycho jabs a switchblade into his daddy's throat? Well, rest assured there's a lot more stuff from the novel that made into the movie than you'd probably imagined, and if you're wondering whether or not they pussed out on us, well, less than ten minutes into the movie we've already got kindergartners getting turned into bloody mud puddles and lambs having their brains blasted out with nail guns and a scene where a girl has a garbage bag of dookie dumped on her head. And for that, these filmmakers ought to be commended. 

By now we all know the gist of the story. It's a small New England town, circa 1989 (yeah, I know in the novel it was set in 1958, but get over it.) We've got this rag tag group of hypochondriacs and Jews and negro farmhands and fat kids that get tortured at school and have parents that abuse 'em and they all start having these weird hallucinations about this bucktoothed mime who sounds like a French Canadian turning into syphilitic hobos and Edward Munch paintings and trying to chew their faces off. So naturally, they all band together one day and start doing their town history research, and as it turns out every 27 years or so some really bad shit always goes down, and eventually they figger out it's all the doing of that Ronald McDonald lookalike in a frilly dress so they do they only thing that makes any sense: they decide to waltz on in to the monster's lair and kill him with bolt guns and broken beer bottles. After they all nearly get killed by the demon, though, they reckon they need to reconfigure their strategy heading into the final battle, and they definitely learned their lessons from last time; now they're bringing more sharp metal rods with 'em, and they know EXACTLY which intestine they need to puncture to make this grease-painted asshole go down for good.

Considering the movie's already made more than $200 million after just one week - in tandem with the surprising financial success of stuff like Split and Get Out - we can only hope that this spells the end of Hollywood's infatuation with super heroes and the beginning of a new golden era of big-budget splatter and slasher movies. Watching God-men save millions of people from CGI explosions is such an outdated holdover from the Obama years; this is Trump's America now, and by golly, the masses don't want to see people getting saved, they want to see 'em getting their guts scrambled on the pavement - and the younger and whiter the victims, the better. 

We've got 24 dead bodies. No breasts (and if you're looking for 'em in a movie like this, it's only a matter of time 'til somebody puts you on a government watch list.) Heads roll. Arms roll. Knife to the jugular. Fireplace poker through the skull. Stomach carving. Face eating. One bathroom blood explosion (which I'm pretty sure is meant to be a metaphor for having a period, but I'll let those hippie-dippy media studies grads at UCLA do their own goddamn term papers.) One rock fight, set to Anthrax's "Antisocial." Zombie children. One leper. One reanimated headless corpse. Gratuitous New Kids on the Block. One blood ritual, with preteen palm slicing. Cattle gun fu. Abstract art fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some serious coulrophobia fu.

Starring Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Clown, who doesn't blink once and sometimes trails off into Swedish for no real reason whatsoever but because it sounds so damned creepy they decided to keep it in the movie; Jaeden Lieberher as the stuttering kid who can't quite get over his brother being chewed to death by a subterranean jester; Finn Wolfhard as the practical joker who has the movie's best line - "he's leaking motherfucking Hamburger Helper!"; Sophia Lillis as the redheaded girl who chops her mane off so her dad will stop molestin' her; Chosen Jacobs as the black kid who has to murder barnyard animals on his grandpa's farm because his parents got firebombed by the Klan; Wyatt Oleff as the Jewish kid who's always kvetching because he can't remember passages from the Torah; Jack Dylan Grazer as the asthmatic kid who's afraid of catching AIDS with an overprotective mom I'd like to call a helicopter parent, if it wasn't for the fact she was closer in size to a jumbo jet; Jeremy Ray Taylor as the fat kid (and you can tell it's the late 1980s because there's only one fat person in the whole movie); and Nicholas Hamilton as preteen psychopath Henry Bowers, who decides to go on a mass-stabbing spree because Lamb Chop's Play-Along told him to.

Writing credits are split between Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga (whose original draft had a scene where a kid jacks off on a birthday cake, among other NC-17-caliber larfs), and horror movie re-writer extraordinaire Gary Dauberman, who also wrote all those damn Annabelle movies. Directed by Andy Muschitetti,  whose only major film credit before this one was that 2013 Jessica Chastain snoozer Mama.

Anyhoo, I'm giving this one three stars out of four. It's a hoot from start-to-finish, even if there's a bit too much syrupy bonding going on - boy, you PizzaGaters are going to have a field day with the sequence where all the kids go swimming in their tighty whities - and just not enough per capita slaughter to truly excel as a post-Charlottesville, neo-neo-neo-slasher flick. That, and I don't think it was necessarily all that frightening, neither; even compared to Tim by-God Curry, this newfangled killer clown is such a pantywaist he makes Marcel Marceau look like John Wayne Gacy. 

People getting massacred during a Batman movie? Geez, where do these filmmakers come up with such wacky ideas!

If you're looking for a way scarier outing at the local cineplex, though, I'd advise you to scour the local arthouse theaters and see if they're playing Dark Night in your neck of the woods. It's a movie that technically was released last year, but it didn't pick up any decent distribution until a couple of months back (and since I live in the pop cultural arsehole of the United States, naturally, the flick is just now getting around to us.)

Basically, it's a thinly veiled dramatization of the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, even though there's a scene early in on the movie that actually shows James Holmes on trial on CNN, so canonically, I guess you really can't call it a re-enactment. Taking their cues from Gus Van Sant's outstanding Columbine-influenced Elephant, it's not so much a movie about the massacre as it is a day in the life of a whole bunch of disparate characters just hours before they all get gunned down in a hail of autism-powered gunfire. But Dark Night differs from that movie in at least two major respects; number one, the movie doesn't actually show the massacre take place ... we see the guy walk into the theater with a garbage bag filled with ammunition and then it's time for the end credits. While that'll probably piss off some of your morbid motherfuckers, in a way that actually benefits the movie because it's basically an old-school, early 1980s-style whodunit slasher movie (albeit, one without any actual slashing.) Whereas in similar mass shooting pseudo-documentaries like Elephant and the absolutely amazing Zero Day you know who the killers are going to be from the get-go, in Dark Night pretty much anybody in the cast could be the guy who FINALLY goes off the deep end and starts filling preteens full of hot lead.

Will the mass killer wind up being the skinhead Counterstrike addict who wears Freddy Krueger sweaters and has hallucinations about the paparazzi following him around and beats his pet turtle to death for no real reason? Or will it be the mop-headed guy who drives a rusted out Volvo who pops pills like Sweet Tarts and has to count the exact number of steps from the mall parking lot to the food court every time he visits Hot Topics? Or maybe it's the jarheaded Iraq War vet who doesn't say a single line of dialogue throughout the movie, even when he's got Operation: Enduring Freedom vets crying on his shoulder and pulling off suspiciously accurate head shots on the paper targets down at the shooting range? And hey, don't sleep on those skateboarding teens who color their hair the same hue as V-8 and vape like the world's supply of douche is gonna' run out tomorrow - especially that one that likes to look somberly off a bridge for some peculiar reason.

So basically, we've got your classic dead teenager movie a'la Massacre at Central High where pretty much anybody in the cast can get killed or start killing everybody else at any minute, and you wait the whole movie for the shit to go down because come on - it's a movie about a real life mass shooting - except it never happens. But it's kinda' like Waiting For Godot in a sense that the fact nothing happens is kinda' the whole point of the movie. It's all about tension and building-up suspense, and a good goddamn, will this movie have you on edge all the way up until the very last scene. As a matter of fact, this movie has what I consider to be the single greatest jump scare since the "nurse scene" in The Exorcist III ... and the whole thing happens in broad daylight. If you want to see minimalism par excellence, the guys who made this movie deserve a fucking medal for it. 

Of course, it's not a perfect movie. This is one of those flicks were the director is really big on symbolism and masking narrative red herrings as social commentary (and vice versa.) The problem is, the imagery is just way too blunt. We've got kids playing shoot-em-up video games in the lobby of the theater before the massacre begins and the victims showing up for the screening literally dressed as skeletons. And then there's this one part where a girl is walking through the woods and she sees a traffic sign obfuscated by a tree limb that kinda sorta resembles a heart. Even now I have trouble figuring out what that has to do with the rest of movie, so I'm just guessing the director literally spotted it out of the blue and said "well, might as well add this one for artistic effect while we're here" and nobody had the gall to tell him the whole sequence didn't make a lick of sense. And while some of the red herring bits are pretty good - all of those passages where wayward youths take selfies over and over again and and describe how their only voluntary human interaction comes in the form of World of Warcraft dialogue boxes makes for some rye commentary on how digital communications is making Gen Z more antisocial in real life - some of them are just bamboozling. I mean, why is there an entire sequence where a girl goes to a cancer survivor support group, or the scene where an overweight Hispanic Costco employee wades back and forth in a swimming pool to sad-sack indie acoustic rock for five minutes? 

But by and large, this is a really, really good movie, and probably the most nerve-wracking I've seen all year. Your tolerance for pretentious art-house snobbery will determine how much you enjoy it, but as a connoisseur of esoteric, no-budget cinema, I can soundly say this one is WAY above par for its ilk ... and the fact it doesn't wedge any gun politics drivel into it (nor try to blame mass shootings on homophobia, as does Gus Van Sant) is prolly reason enough to check it out.

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. Two exposed female buttocks. Gratuitous juicing. Gratuitous vaping. Gratuitous hair dyeing. Gratuitous hair styling. Gratuitous "You Are My Sunshine." Gratuitous selfie-taking. Gratuitous gun-polishing. Gratuitous turtle fondling. Gratuitous slo-mo skateboarding. Gratuitous twerking. Gratuitous unrequited love sketching. Google map fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - subplot overdose fu.

Starring Robert Jumper as the bushy headed guy who screams the names of random people while driving and periodically has to pull his car over so he can puke for no discernible reason; Eddie Cacciola as the veteran guy who stares vacantly into space a lot and spends his free time waxing up his collection of AR-15s; Aaron Purvis as the bald-headed social isolate who says "when people die for real, they don't respawn" and likes to point his finger like a gun at random pedestrians; and Anna Rose Hopkins as that one girl who wears really bright red lipstick and is supposed to be playing a teenager even though I'm pretty sure she's in her late 30s.

Written and directed by Tim Sutton, who is basically a poor man's Gus Van Sant - except his movies are better than anything Gus Van Sant has crapped out over the last 15 years, so I'm not really sure if it even constitutes a back-handed compliment anymore.

I give it three and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, 'cause I guarantee it'll be the tensest experience you'll have in a movie theater all year round. Well, unless a dude really does go into the theater and start shooting at 'ya for real. And in that case - well, I hope they at least give you a refund, or extra butter on your go-home box of popcorn.

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The ORIGINAL Day of the Dead (1985) Script!

What was going to be the third installment in Romero's revered zombie trilogy was very, VERY different from the movie we actually saw in 1985. And yeah, it would have been WAY more awesome, for sure. 

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

In hindsight, there was really no way Day of the Dead (the 1985 version, not that atrocious 2008 straight to DVD "remake") could have been anything other than a big old disappointment. I mean, after the one-two knockout combination of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, how in the world were George Romero and pals supposed to outdo themselves? The expectations for the third installment of the epic zombie opus were sky high, and it is downright ridiculous to assume they could catch lightning in a bottle three times in a row. 

Still, it's pretty hard to look back at the 1985 trilogy-capper and consider it anything other than a big letdown. I think everybody was expecting, essentially, Dawn of the Dead 2, especially in the wake of the spectacular Return of the Living Dead (which, really, did more to shape our cultural perspectives on the zombie archetype than even Romero's first two Living Dead outings.) So when Romero eschewed the wider, more open-ended atmosphere of the ’78 flick for a darker, danker, and more claustrophobic movie more reminiscent of the ’68 film, a lot of people were mighty - and understandably - miffed.

The thing is, Day of the Dead was originally plotted out as a much different movie. The characters were entirely different, it had a new locale, it introduced different villains and the entire zombie mythos was carefully rewritten to make the creatures a little less brain-dead than they were in the first two Romero films. The scope of the film was much more ambitious, but the backers of the film were hesitant to pump so much cash into a production that was almost certain to get an X rating. So, ultimately, they gave Romero an ultimatum: they would give him all the moolah he needed to make his vision come to life, but only if he scaled back the gopher guts and exploding heads. Naturally, Romero told them to take a hike, so he wound up reworking the script into its scaled back cinematic incarnation we recognize today.

Thankfully for film historians such as ourselves, it's not too hard to go out there in Internet-Land and retrieve Romero's original script. While it bears some resemblance to the 1985 movie, it is nonetheless a drastically different movie, which all things considered, almost certainly would've resulted in a much better motion picture than the one George and pals actually wound up producing. Wondering what could've been? Well, wonder no more, cretin and degenerates, as The Internet Is In America takes a look at the ORIGINAL Day of the Dead screenplay ... 

All right, so the film proper begins in the year of our lord 1987 in the great state of Florida. It's been five years "since the dead first walked," the pre-title crawl tells us. There are gators everywhere in the city streets, with human skeletons (including skeletal children, still locked in their car seats) strewn all about. A hanging, rotting corpse falls from a tall building and shatters on impact with the sidewalk below. 

Now we meet five "guerrilleros" named Sarah, Chico, Miguel, Tony and Maria from somewhere in the Caribbeans (I'm guessing Cuba, but the script never describes which country, exactly, they hail from.) The show up in boats and try to siphon gas out of all the stationary vehicles, on land and on water. Naturally, they wind up getting into a gunfight with fellow survivors down by the docks. One is bitten by a zombie so his comrades hack his arm off at the elbow and torch the wound to keep zombie mania from running wild in his cerebral cortex. Another gunfight breaks out and one of the pirates is mortally wounded. He comes back as a zombie and eats Maria, leaving Sarah, Chico and one-armed Miguel to hit the high seas until they locate what they think is an uninhabited island of the main peninsula. 

So our trio of survivors eat coconuts and almost shoot a gator while Miguel is slowing going nutzoid from the zombie bite. They find a giant elevator to an underground military base where zombies, apparently, are being trained to be soldiers. You see, the humans use these cattle prods to keep 'em in line and feed them human remains out of ice chest as rewards for good behavior. We are then introduced to the Sergeant Barnes and Sergeant Elias of the film, the sadistic Captain Rhodes and the bleeding heart researcher Toby Tyler. The normal zombies attack the pirates, so Rhodes sends his "red coat zombies" to investigate. Miguel keeps screaming "kill the priest, burn the church" over and over again when he is confronted by Rhodes, who pushes a button on his belt to signal his zombie troops, whom promptly kill Miguel by shooting him in the heart. Rhodes captures Chico and leaves him hanging from a giant rope, demanding he tell him if anyone else followed him and where his base is. Rhodes lets us know that he feeds dead soldiers to zombies, and to demonstrate his sick streak, he stuffs a grenade in a disobedient zombie's mouth and cackles with glee when his head explodes. Chico's body falls from the rope - looks like somebody mercifully shot him in the back of the head. Of course, Rhodes thinks Toby did it, so he's put on "trial" for his misdeeds. 

Meanwhile, Sarah encounters yet another gaggle of survivors. They include John, a black man from the Caribbean who speaks in jive talk that only white writers thinks exists; a whiskey-drinking mechanic named Bill (who reminds me of that guy from Jade Empire who was always drinking wine, for some reason) and a small deaf woman named Spider, who is described as being "armed to the teeth" at all times. The tribe refers to zombies as "bees" and they tell Sarah the island is actually called Gasparilla, named after a pirate who sailed the waters near Florida hundreds of years ago. Oh, and the states's head honcho, Governor Dickerson, has assembled his own private army and set up a fortress compound there. The quartet make their way through underground caverns littered with zombies, with John telling Sarah to not worry about the "bees" just as long as they are wearing the same uniforms they are (you see, they've been conditioned to not shoot or eat people wearing uniforms with giant circles on them.) After a zombie gets macheted to death, John and Sarah have a discussion about the root cause of ZombieMania '87, with Sarah stating it's a parasite infection and John believing it's some kind of biblical curse. This offends Sarah, so she says "fuck you Moses, I'm outta' here" (no, for real) and runs off into the night. 

Of course, Sarah falls into alligator and snake infested waters immediately and is attacked by a zombie with a pole sticking through its gizzards and one of its eyeballs dangling out of its skull. Big John saves her before she gets eaten, though, and takes her back to his underground refuge. From there, we travel to the subterranean military base, where there are TV monitors and old-ass computer equipment everywhere. The undead are being shown videos of people in orange vests not being shot, so they "learn" to not go after their superiors. Enter scientists Julie Grant and Mary Henried. Rhodes walks into a zombie jail cell with a bag of severed heads, and we meet a gaggle of the living dead troops. They have names like Tonto, Fatso, Samson and Bub because ... well, take a guess. Rhodes rolls one of the zombie heads on the floor and the shit is still blinking and breathing and moaning. So he shoots it and freaks the hell out of the female researchers. By the way, Rhodes keeps bragging about having sex with Julie this one time, and keeps referring to her as "Miss Science."

So Julie is walking around the underground fortress, evaluating all of the debauchery going on. There are hookers fist fighting each other, dudes shooting up heroin and snorting coke, and even one guy running around with a dildo glued to his head. Meanwhile, Toby is sentenced to Stalag 17, where a pregnant woman solicits him for sex and a drunk fat dude pukes on him. Then, we're introduced to Dr. Logan, a brain surgeon with some expertise in zombie-neurology. John and the gang come up through the planks and get some ammo (and whiskey refill) from his office. Then they go down to the underground hospital (where people are having sex and doing drugs in the waiting room) and we watch Tonto and Bluto eat human brains with forks. You know, because they are becoming more civilized and whatnot.

Mary goes down to the underground shooting range. While all the other "redcoat" zombies have a hard time hitting targets, Bub is nailing the bull's eye like he was John Wayne. In an underground council meeting, we meet Gov. Dickerson, who for some reason, wants to be referred to as "Gasparilla." Romero describes him thus: "He's a fat man with a handlebar mustache that makes him look like Pancho Villa. As an indication of rank he wears a military jacket but underneath is a Hawaiian shirt with a bold flamingo and palm tree pattern. Around his neck, nestled in the rolls of fat there, is enough gold to stake a small business."

All the prosecutors are his golf buddies (Rhodes among them.) They sentence a guy accused of swiping a government radio a year in the stalag for hard labor. Mary walks in and tries to tell the governor that Toby is innocent and Rhodes is doing all sorts of nefarious stuff. The governor promptly tells her to STFU, but not before he invites her to his "secret workout chambers" later that evening.

There, the governor sits in a neon-tube bedecked tanning bed, with topless harem jogging beside him on treadmills. Servers bring them sushi, coke and weed. He's drunk and tries to goad Mary into doing some lesbian stuff and jokes about the hors douveres being brains. Mary says there are signs that some human survivors have made outposts in Philadelphia and Detroit, but the governor remains convinced that his island kingdom is the last remaining homo sapiens stronghold on the planet. He then spits out this maddened monologue: "There's no place like this place. Warm climate. This facility. Christ, there ain't nothin' like this no-damn-where! Even the Feds knew that. That's why they stored so much o' their shit down here. It's all mine now. All mine. Just let 'em try ta come after us down here, which they will some day...take a likin' ta what all we got an' come after us. They'll hafta get past my army! An army that ain't afraid ta die...ha ha ha...'cause it's awreddy DAID! HA HA HA HA...."

For no real reason, Rhodes decides right then and there is as good a time as any to blow away some people on the hospital cots while Sarah, John, Toby, Dr. Logan and the rest of the gang uncover a cache of weapons for a potential uprising. Huh, the luck there, eh? 

The rub there is, Dr. Logan has kind of gone psycho. He's made some synthetic nitrogen and reveals to the gang his plans to hit the facility's reservoir of gun powder, which, I am sure you guessed, means the whole underground fortress will go ka-boom. There's an argument about the attack claiming innocent victims, but after awhile, everybody agrees to disagree and we all sally forth. 

The ragtag band of zombie island revolutionaries find some "daturas," a nightshade type plant they plan on using to knock out some guards. We also learn that Dr. Logan put the nitro inside Spider, and is leading her through the marshlands to be used as a suicide bomber. He is attacked by zombie lugging a steel hook, but he survives (relatively) unscathed. 

Julie helps facilitate the inside job and the gang gets inside the inner workings of the subterranean fortress. They immediately dispatch two guards and a security alarm sounds. The gang enters the main communication room and shut down the control system, so all of the doors to the outside open swing open and redcoat zombies start pouring in. At this point we learn the fortress does have some semblance of being a real society, with families and children all residing in fairly decent underground apartments separate from all of the military happenings and drug-fueled orgies. 

Dr. Logan sounds the "feeding siren," which of course draws pretty much every zombie on the island towards the wide open compound. He offers himself as a "communion" offering to the undead and is literally torn asunder by the zombie hordes. And now it's all out anarchy, with the zombies devouring everybody. Rhodes and his men find themselves fighting a two-front war, with the human rebels on one end and the living dead on the other. And then? The zombies breach the governor's chambers.

Mary runs into Bub, and she thinks he is going to ear her, but he gives her a military salute instead, allowing a gaggle of nurses and children to escape the zombie apocalypse. She then tries to teach all of the "trained" zombies to start shooting people wearing vests with the orange circles. Now Bub and his fellow military corps(e) are in hot pursuit of Rhodes and his men. 

And here's the part when the zombies get a hold of the governor. Let's let Romero himself paint the picture for us, why don't we?

MONTAGE: as ALL OVER THE ROOM THEY STRIKE. This is it, gore fans. The gross finale. The intestine-tugger. THE ZOMBIES GET THEIR SUPPER. THEY FEAST AMONG THE PILLOWS, like Romans at an orgy. MUSIC still plays over the gymnasium speakers, rock-a-billy in a gleeful tempo. GASPARILLA has retreated into his tanning-coffin but a pudgy arm and a leg are dangling outside. ZOMBIES CHEW HUNGRILY on the juicy morsels. From inside the coffin, where ultraviolet glows brightly, come the piercing, agonized screams of the fat general.

Rhodes gets bitten and Bub shoots him a couple of times. The survivors make a run toward the escape boats, with John declaring "Damn you, island, damn you ta' Hell and worse!" 

Bub chases Rhodes down and they have a very wild west-like "gunfight" finale with the zombie beating the sadistic general to the punch. Dramatically, a zombie throws a test tube at Spider right as Rhodes goes down, and ... kablooey. As the walls begin to crumble around him, Bub does a military salute before he is engulfed in a fireball.

The refugees (which also includes a few surviving kids) find a remote island. John baptizes the young ins (get the symbolism?) and they bury one of the fallen military men. John eulogizes him thus: 

"Satan ain't sent this man back. Not yet, anyway. So we all hopin' that maybe he's up there with you, Lord. This might be the first decent soul we been able ta offer ya in quite a few years. That's a fact. We just gonna... pray, Lord. We gonna pray that what seems ta be happenin' here...is really happenin' ... and I'm gonna take the chance and speak these words that I ain't been able ta speak for so long ... May he rest in peace."

And the grand finale? Rather than paraphrase, I'll let Romero describe it in his own words: 

EXT. THE BEACH - NIGHT THE CORPSE lies in the MOONLIGHT. NIGHT CRITTERS SCREECH AND BURBLE in the jungle behind the sand. It's an eerie scene. SARAH is sitting up, her RIFLE ready in her lap, watching the body. JOHN steps in behind and she startles.

JOHN: Just me. I'll take the next shift.  

He settles easily down beside the woman. The two stare together at the shrouded corpse.  

SARAH: How long do we have to watch him?

JOHN: Forever, darlin'. Forever.'Til he turns ta dust and blows away on the wind. 

THE BODY lies silent, rigid under the KHAKI ARMY BLANKET that rises and falls, rises and falls with the Gulf breeze. Suddenly ... A LOUD MUSIC CHORD! A SUDDEN MOVEMENT! It's the movement of RED LETTERS that spin up off the head of the corpse and settle before our eyes. The letters read: "THE END (I PROMISE)"

Oh, George, you kidder, you. Ending the whole Living Dead trilogy with a self-reflexive in-joke that also doubles as an ultra cheap jump scare. Corny scriptwriting of the sort fully explains why you never won an Oscar, but totally makes it clear as day why you were a Fangoria Hall of Fame first balloter.

Romero's original script, without question, was WAY better than the one that was actually filmed. I'm not quite sure if it would've resulted in a genre masterpiece on par with Dawn of the Dead or Night of the Living Dead, but it at least would've given us something that felt a little fresher and more thoughtful than the '85 Day. Of course, quite a bit of stuff from the first screenplay did indeed make it into the final film, but at the expense of nearly half the cast and a whole lot of downsizing. Eventually, we would see some elements of the original script recast in the 20-year-late sequel Land of the Dead, and the whole "militarized zombie" theme was indeed used as the backbone for Return of the Living Dead 3. Still, as ambitious and inventive and gore-soaked and paranoia-gripped as the plot was (remember, this was penned around the same time as nuclear holocaust porn Threads and The Day After), one can only wonder what a bigger budgeted, plot-faithful Day of the Dead would've been like in the mid-1980s. 

Would it have been all-time awesome? Eh, most likely no, but it certainly would have been quite a few degrees more awesome than the Day we did get. Which sort of begs the question: now that zombie-mania is all the rage and studios would give Romero all the money he wants, how come he hasn't taken a stab at bringing this script to the big screen, in all its gory, high-concept glory? 

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