Richard Cheese is having a moment

If you haven't heard of Richard Cheese, then you haven't been listening to parody lounge music.

Okay, no one's been listening to parody lounge music. But I did listen to it like 20 years ago, when I first discovered Cheese, who is actually a man named Mark Jonathan Davis. His accompanying band, which he does not always play with, has cheese-related names as well -- Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu. But it seems like the whole thing is designed to make us think of a variation on the lead singer's name -- Dick Cheese. Sophomoric, but amusing enough.

In 2000 -- though I think I discovered it three or four years later -- Cheese and company released an album called Lounge Against the Machine, which was comprised of lounge covers of alternative music from that time. I just checked iTunes, and the 11 tracks I have may have been acquired through a music sharing service or something because they contain some of the tracks from Lounge but then some others that are not on there. Anyway, the ones I remember most from my collection are "Suck My Kiss," "Smack My Bitch Up" and "More Human than Human," though the one that gets played the most in the general world is his cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness."

If you can imagine a cheesy (pun intended) lounge singer singing "Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up" in a swing style, with an imaginary martini in his hand (though he usually requires both hands for his piano), you get what Cheese is all about. It's amusing to be sure, but you aren't going to listen to him round the clock or anything. It's not that kind of thing. It's Weird Al adjacent.

"Down With the Sickness" was what appeared in Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. I'd been turned on to Cheese just a year or two before that, so this was not where I discovered the musician. However, I feel like it was one of the most recent times I'd actually been reminded of him. Which is not all that recent. 

Until the past month, when his work has now appeared in two different new movies.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was actually released in February, but I didn't watch it until the last day of April. Here, Cheese appears as a lounge singer in the titular resort that Barb and Star visit, though he's not singing White Zombie covers. The song from this movie that may have crept out into the zeitgeist a bit is called "I Love Boobies," and it's perfectly in keeping with Cheese's puerile sensibilities. One appearance in the film might have served him best, but they go back to him three or four times, with diminishing returns.

Then last night it was Snyder again with Army of the Dead, as both Cheese and Snyder come full circle to the origins of our general awareness of them. Dawn of the Dead, another zombie movie, was the film that introduced most of us to Snyder, before he became a particular type of director with films like 300, Watchmen and all his work for DC. He returns to that realm and brings Cheese with him, as the classic Snyder opening montage -- which was so great in Watchmen -- is accompanied here by Cheese's music. I suppose a White Zombie cover would have been thematically appropriate, but instead it's Cheese's take on "Viva Las Vegas," as the movie is about Vegas getting overrun by zombies and walled off from the rest of the world to contain the infection. 

Snyder is obviously Cheese's biggest fan, as he also used Cheese in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the internet now tells me. I must not have noticed or it must not have made an impression on me, because it really had felt like the middle of the aughts since I'd last thought of Cheese.

Who knows if this is the beginning of a Cheese-assaince, or just a director returning to the same well for the third time and one random one-off appearance. But I'm sure Cheese is pretty psyched about it, because if I, one of his "biggest fans," had not had occasion to think about him in 15 years, I doubt many others had either.

Dawn of the Dead, post zombie saturation and post Snyder

By bad-mouthing cinephiles who set out on horror-themed viewing projects in October, in this post, I've cursed myself to a pretty lackluster month of horror viewing. I've tried, but all I've summoned forth is mindless slasher movies (Most Likely to Die), or mindless remakes of slasher movies (A Nightmare on Elm Street).

With two days remaining in October, I hoped it wasn't too late to turn things around.

The problem was, Monday night wasn't a very good night for a horror movie, as it was the night I'd set aside to carve this year's jack-o-lantern. Of course, that doesn't mean I wasn't going to watch a horror movie while carving it -- I definitely was. But because I wasn't even going to be turning out the lights -- you can't carve a jack-o-lantern in the dark -- it needed to be something I either didn't care about or had already seen, and I've already seen enough horror movies I don't care about this October. But even with something I'd already seen, I wanted it to be something that didn't too much depend on mood, so I'd be going for something without much in the way of startle scares or atmosphere.

Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead fit the bill perfectly. That movies takes place mostly during daylight hours, and (if memory served) it's more awesomely gruesome than scary. And I'd seen it only once, this despite ranking it in my top 20 of 2004 (#19).

There was another reason I was interested in watching this movie, though. Two reasons, actually. Two of the film's defining characteristics -- being about zombies and having been directed by Snyder -- have taken on new meaning in the 13 years since this movie came out. I wanted to see if it held up, despite being directed by a guy who's now a bit of a critical whipping boy, and despite featuring subject matter that has been done to death (or maybe undeath) in the 13 intervening years.

Dawn of the Dead was a bit of a trailblazer in the zombie movie comeback of the last decade-plus, following closely on the heels of 28 Days Later as some of the first films to capitalize on that trend, and the first real Hollywood movie. But would it still feel ahead of its time, or would it seem kind of old hat?

The answer is, both. While I still remember the ways Dead felt very fresh in 2004, and was reminded of them as those moments arose on this viewing, I did catch myself thinking things like "The Walking Dead does that a lot better now." I also remembered the movie being more fun than it felt this time. I suppose it's not intended as horror comedy, but it seems unlikely that Snyder et al didn't want it to be at least a bit funny, as it features an ironic lounge lizard version of Disturbed's "The Sickness," sung by Weird Al heir apparent Richard Cheese.

Far and away the most interesting aspects of this film are its human elements. The zombie kills are truly been there and done that, even if these things hadn't particularly been done in 2004. But I don't recall anything in subsequent zombie projects that I found quite as endearing as the relationship between Ving Rhames' Kenneth and Bruce Bohne's Andy. The relationship exists entirely at a remove of two parking lots away from each other, as the two men hold up signs to communicate between the rooftops of a mall and a gun shop, respectively. Even when words are necessarily few and can only be viewed with the assistance of high-powered binoculars, they develop a joking rapport, and can even play an entire game of chess with each other. It's any port in a storm in a zombie apocalypse, but even though Kenneth has a dozen possible friends to choose from over at the mall, his really simpatico kindred spirit is stuck on that other roof.

I was also curious to see how much Zack Snyder would be ZACK SNYDER in his directorial debut. In some circles nowadays he's thought of as little better than a slightly more talented Michael Bay, but in 2004 he was just a hot shit up and comer who was giving us something we wanted (albeit already at the advanced age of 38 years old). Some great visual touches signal him as a person worth paying attention to, and there is a little bit of the slow motion that would later become his trademark. But nothing like in 300, which may still be Zack Snyder's most Snyderian film. I wasn't a huge fan of 300, but Snyder did have at least one more great accomplishment in him (Watchmen) before things started to take a turn he hasn't yet recovered from. Still, he's not so bad these days that I would say my current impression played much of a role as I watched Dawn of the Dead.

I'm starting to lose a bit of focus here -- it's just after midnight now (Happy Halloween), and I still have one little thing left to do on my son's costume. Yes, kids do trick-or-treat in Australia, but we must have brought it with us, as we've noticed a big uptick in participation in just the four years we've been living here. So, I must sign off for now, even though I'm sure I have a few more profound thoughts about zombies and bombastic directors rattling around inside my brain.

But oh yeah, I'll leave off with the fruits of my labors. Here's this year's jack-o-lantern, with a bit of Australian flavor to it.
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Zack Snyder's ultimate test

Zack Snyder is a figure of some controversy among knowledgeable movie fans.

There seems to be near-universal acclaim for his debut feature, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. But from that point onward, the opinions on him diverge sharply. Some see him as a masterful shepherd of big pictures with big ideas; others see him as a latter-day Joel Schumacher. However, even those who are in his corner seem to recognize that there's something not-quite-right, something impure about championing him as one of today's true visionaries.

So far, this has not mattered all that much, because the "big pictures" Snyder has directed have been big in scope and budget only. Movies like 300 and Watchmen are definitely "big," no question about it -- but it's largely because of how they were marketed to us. Most people were not readers of the graphic novels/comic books that inspired these movies, so our expectations of them were limited to being excited over the first trailers we saw. We had few preconceived notions of what he might ruin or might do correctly. And indeed, some of us were disappointed in 300 (me) and in Watchmen (certainly not me), but it was only because of how they were executed within themselves. It's not because Snyder "got them wrong" -- unless, of course, you were one of the limited groups of fanboys who did have a passionate love for the source material.

Then his next two films, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole and Sucker Punch, were genuine flops, disliked by many if not most of the people who saw them. Sucker Punch in particular, with its problematic gender politics, contributes as much as anything to the negative opinions people have of Snyder. However, again, these were not "big movies" in the sense that they had to either live up to, or fail to live up to, our expectations. Sucker Punch, in fact, was a completely original concept -- a first for Snyder.

So this all changes today, when the latest Superman reboot comes out. Now Snyder can genuinely ruin something we all care deeply about ... or make it transcendent.

You never know which way Snyder's going to go.

The funny thing is, I'd say that I generally like (Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen) fewer of Snyder's movies than I generally dislike (300, Guardians, Sucker Punch), yet I feel like I'm one of the aforementioned Snyder apologists. I think it's that I liked what he did in those two movies so much, I tend to forget that I didn't like some of his decisions in the other movies. The good decisions outweigh the bad ones, especially in the case of Watchmen.

One thing I like about Snyder is that he makes errors of commission, not errors of omission. Anything he does that doesn't work is not for lack of trying. He puts bold ideas out there. Sometimes they don't work. In fact, sometimes they fail miserably.

Then again, you could say that Michael Bay also makes errors of commission.

But I choose to be plenty excited for Man of Steel. The only other pure superhero movie Snyder made, Watchmen, is my favorite of his movies. I do think he has the ability to take this material and make it transcendent, and the original trailers I saw for it (I've tried to avoid them more recently) only confirmed that notion for me. Plus, Michael Shannon as Zod? I'm there.

Just not this weekend. Sunday is Father's Day, but my sister is in town, and Sunday is also her birthday. I do actually think we'll see a movie that night, but I think it'll be This is the End.

Then again, perhaps I should reconsider promoting that movie more than the others that are out there ... since she arrived on Tuesday, I've shown her both Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and Galaxy Quest, and neither of them were the hits with her I was hoping they'd be.

Perhaps comedy is not the right choice for her ... though I doubt that superheroes would be either.

So I may need to seek a compromise. That's the price I pay when I share "my day" with somebody else.