LAT: Using horror to make a political statement: Showtime's "Homecoming"

The Big Picture
Patrick Goldstein

It takes a zombie to speak out
Director Joe Dante's short film for Showtime highlights the advantages of using horror to make a political statement.


Hollywood has always been portrayed as a hotbed of liberal activism, so who would've imagined that its first full-blown anti-Iraq war movie would come not from a famous political loudmouth like Oliver Stone but from Joe Dante and Sam Hamm, a pair of horror-thriller aficionados?

Their hourlong film "Homecoming" premiered Friday as part of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. Adapted by Hamm (who wrote "Batman") and directed by Dante, who made "Gremlins," the film is a barbed political satire and zombie thriller: It has the creepy resonance of a version of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in which everyone with a pod under his bed is made out to be a Bush supporter. (The film airs again at 11 p.m. Friday on Showtime.)

Set during the final weeks of a fictional presidential reelection campaign, the story kicks into gear on a TV talk show when the president's political consultant fends off the distraught mother of a dead soldier by saying he only wished her son could come back to life to remind the country of the war's importance. Voilà! Blood-encrusted soldiers killed in Iraq rise from their graves and head for the polls, voting against the president before they crumble back into dust.

Dante has made sci-fi fantasies and thrillers for years, going back to his early horror films, "Piranha" and "The Howling." But with "Homecoming" he emerges as an indignant satirist, as caustic as Dennis Miller or Aaron McGruder. At a campaign strategy meeting after the dead soldiers begin lurching around the country, one consultant jokes, "Why don't we just ignore them, like regular vets."

Although the film is ostensibly set in the future, the campaign slogans — "Four more years" and "Mission accomplished" — make the satire's target clear. The film's key characters include an Ann Coulter-type leggy blond pundit (who has a torrid affair with the political consultant) and a ruthless Karl Rove-type presidential advisor. Both die the kind of grisly deaths that occur in sci-fi films when an arrogant scientist defies all warnings not to tinker with frozen aliens or unstable atomic isotopes....


http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-goldstein6dec06,0,4970377.column?coll=la-tot-promo