Zombies Attack George Bush: Joe Dante's brilliant anti-war horror show.

Just when things looked like they couldn't get any worse for President Bush, here come the zombies to vote him out of office. They arrive courtesy of Joe Dante's Homecoming, a one-hour movie made for Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series that airs tonight and tomorrow and will be rebroadcast throughout December. One part satire of soulless Beltway insiders, one part gut-crunching horror flick, Homecoming kicks off when the flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq burst open and the reanimated corpses of dead veterans hit the streets, searching for polling places where they can pull the lever for "anyone who will end this evil war."

The mandate for Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series was to give one-hour slots to name-brand shock auteurs such as Takashi Miike and John Carpenter, granting them total artistic control in exchange for low budgets. So far, most of the directors have squandered their creative carte blanche on extra boobs and more blood, but Joe Dante has elected to do something actually terrifying: engage with the real world.

His characters seem like people we've just watched on MSNBC. There's David Murch, a political consultant for an unnamed Republican president who sounds exactly like President Bush. His new girlfriend, Jane Cleaver, is a bullying pundit cloned from Ann Coulter's DNA. There's also a James Carville look-alike and a Jerry Falwell doppelgänger, complete with quivering jowls. Dante delivers the thrill of watching familiar figures spin the issues and dole out doublespeak, yet he doesn't stint on the satisfaction of seeing them have their brains eaten afterwards. He's the first horror director to take the bits of media flotsam and jetsam that have been drifting around—the flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base, the talking-head cable shows, the internment camps, the Ohio and Florida recounts, the "Mission Accomplished" banners—and make something electrifying out of them.

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What's shocking about Dante's Homecoming is that he dispenses with the usual horror subtext completely. Pundits go on TV to defend the living dead's right to vote until they find out they're not voting Republican. Zombies rise from the grave, wrapped in the American flag. There's even a Cindy Sheehan stand-in with a zombie son. Nothing is too recent or too raw. Dante has always had an ax to grind—his film Small Soldiers was an anti-violence carnival of killer toys and even the lovable Gremlins had an anti-consumption message. But Homecoming is on another level of guilty pleasures, a junk-food adrenaline rush that debunks the myth of glorious war, presenting every ugly wound in gory latex detail, while having nothing but compassion for the lonely, lurching, living-dead soldiers.


http://www.slate.com/id/2131378/?nav=tap3

thanks for the link :toast:

peace

that read "BSH BABE" so you even the dimwitted would know this was a Bush-bashing show. It was delightful, in the sense that finally someone is taking on these bastards head on.

I watched this with my mouth open the whole time. I somehow think they didn't let anyone see this before it aired because the scrubber censors would be all over it like a cheap suit.

So great that we ordered showtime so we could see more of this show. I'll see if I keep it, but for now, I'm fascinated.

I could not believe that they were so right there. Who was Murch supposed to represent was the only one I couldn't guess right away. Any suggestions?

is not directly based on any one person. The other characters were fairly transparent, though. I was amazed by how hard hitting the show was. Want to see it again, in case I missed a line - I almost missed the one about falsifying election results for America's good.

and I could tape it off for my sister who doesn't have satellite. There were lots of really hard hitting lines that need more air time.