Since Keith was on a bit of a Spanish horror kick for a while, I ended up dusting off my copy of Morbus and putting it back into the vcr for the first time since the only other time I watched it about four years ago. Morbus apparently came out in 1983, and the only copy that I've ever seen available is a standard fourth-generation vhs dub with no subtitles. IMDB has less than five votes posted for it. So that said, I gather it's a relatively obscure zombie film--not that there aren't scores upon scores of those out there, I guess...

Oh, and I guess there are spoilers herein. So if you're worried about my ruining this incomprehensible and weird, but not entirely horrid, movie... well, skip this review.

All told, Morbus is a weird movie. My Spanish isn't perfect, but I understood most of the dialogue--much of which is similar to the line, for instance, "¡Ahora, no estas desnuda!" [Now you're not naked!], which the one guy says after giving a naked girl a sweater... so if you don't speak any Spanish, it probably won't hurt your understanding of the movie in a particularly substantial way.

The film begins with some hopelessly dark and grainy footage of some guy in a cemetery. The bushes rustle, the camera does the "I'm a zombie!" stagger, some bells for some reason start jingling to add to the suspense, and the guy does the old "Hm... Just looking over to my left... no reason to look anywhere but left... boy, it's sure enthralling to really scrutinize those rocks and that little plant--WaitohmyGodwhat'sthat?!?!?!?" schtick. Then we get an anchorman talking about recent attacks just before being attacked on camera. That's when the title screen comes up.

"Morbus," if I'm not mistaken, means disease in Latin. I'm not really sure why they chose that title; of the two explanations for zombiism which I'm aware of in the film, neither has to do with disease. But hey, so be it.

So then we get some guy with his back to the camera talking about how he can't go to the party because he has to work. It's a short, boring scene, and you're not likely to remember it later until the "surprise" ending, but it seems to be crucial to an understanding of the movie. Regrettably so, in fact.

Then that same guy goes to a drug store to get a pill for his headache. The chemist there hooks him up with something, apparently sympathizing with the fact that he's an "intellectual," and then that same chemist soon leaves to finish working on some kind of formula, taking the plot with him. I really couldn't understand as much as I wanted to about the formula because the man speaks like a machine gun. I mean, I understand that Spanish is a relatively fast language. It takes some getting used to. But once in a while, you'll hear a Spanish speaker who doesn't seem to breathe. This guy... he just churns out his words faster than I can even catch them, let alone comprehend them. Given, however, that his lab is comprised of the standard-issue beakers-bubbling-over-with-colorful-liquids and a microscope, I'm pretty sure that I visually caught the gist of it all.

Anyway, finally the formula is completed. I presume that it has something to do with raising the dead, but I never really picked up on any dialogue to support that idea. Nonetheless, he takes his sexy young female lab assistant down to the hospital to swipe the keys for the morgue. Liz of "And You Call Yourself A Scientist" would likely be particularly amused that the chemist's first plan is to unbutton the assistant's shirt and shorten her skirt to show more of her leg, hoping that she can charm her way into obtaining the keys. To assuage her, the man says, "Remember, it's for science! For science!" Her charms don't work on the desk worker, who it turns out is looking at a porn rag, but she steals the keys anyway, and then, also apparently "for science," gets a little nookie from an orderly who happens to come by carting a hospital patient.

People have commented that the horror genre is very conservative; if you have sex, you're probably going to die. Chances are, if you're a character in a horror movie, you're going to die anyway, but I guess there's an element of truth to that idea of conservatism, particularly in the early 80s in a country that's overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. So the chemist never comes out of the morgue, but a homicidal zombie does and chokes the assistant and orderly both. And I guess that means that, ultimately, that girl was martyred for science.

Then, suddenly, we're looking at damaged footage. Oh wait, no, we're seeing a stripper, and I guess the blurring is supposed to make it seem like her client is drunk? I dunno. But the stripper does her thing. Then we see other women ostensibly on dates and/or making out. I'm not really sure of the connection. Then three strippers are socializing with each other, something about how blondes are always skinny, and two of them take a call that turns out to be a guy who wants them to read a story to him in his car out in the woods. It's not sex per se, but they seemed to be ready to try it until he dissuaded them, and so zombies come and kill the man and one stripper. The other flees, and then gets hit by someone in the bushes and passes out.

She wakes up naked in a strange bed. Some people might feel, I dunno, unnerved by that sort of thing, particularly women. But not this girl. She thinks about putting on a shawl, then thinks better of it, and just gets up and walks around to explore, still naked. It turns out that she's in the house of a famous horror writer who happens to have some weird, perpetually-giggling bald old lecher also living on the premises; the lecher is a handyman or something I guess, though he's mostly just a voyeur and weird giggler on the screen. The writer gives her his sweater (that's where the line I quoted comes in) and our heroine tells the writer about her tale, something like "I'm naked and alone here because we were attacked by zombies!" This tale of course, is to him preposterous, though he's working on (or has already written; I forget) a novel on the "living dead," ostensibly disdaining the very use of the word "zombi" despite that he himself uses it at least ten times before the movie's over. If it weren't for that last part, I'd be on his side on avoiding the word "zombi(e)"; in movies, unless it's referring to the original Afro-Caribbean legends, it's usually a word to avoid. It's no coincidence that Romero tries to avoid using it, nor that in Shawn of the Dead, the eponymous hero abjures the use of the word because "that's ridiculous!" In fact, as a general rule of thumb, the intelligent effort that went into composing the script is inversely proportional to the number of times a character says "zombie" (and each mention counts as five uses if it happens to be screamed with expletive backup at a risen corpse--see House of the Dead, for instance).

I'm always pretty immediately skeptical of the whole "I'm a horror writer in a horror movie" idea. It can be done well. Frankly, I'm of the mind that anything can be done well. Whatever it is, it's possible to do it right. Humanly possible? Hm... maybe. Possible for an independent Spanish director with a low budget? Um... *cough*. I dunno. In this case, they're sort of walking the line of metacognition, or if you prefer, self-awareness. Y'know, characters treating their lives like the movie that we're actually watching. And... that's a tough line to walk. I'd say that if you include too much of it, it'll take a weird genius to pull it off.

This movie... well, it takes what seems like an obvious metacognitive device and just kind of lets it sit there and go nowhere. Mind you, I didn't understand every single word of the dialogue. Let's say 70-80%. But other than vaguely irritating comments by our writer friend, nothing is really made of the fact that he's a writer.

Oddly enough, he doesn't make use of that fact either, even when he could easily use the "I'm a writer and I just heard you say you love my work" card with the naked girl who appeared in the woods near his home. Instead, in a time-honored Spanish horror tradition which I've seen in at least one other movie (the bafflingly awful Horror of the Zombies by Amando Ossorio), he just kind of falls on her and makes as if to rape her, but seems content with licking her face and not really removing her clothes, while she protests halfheartedly and struggles kind of feebly. I know that writers can be sort of hermitlike and perhaps not socially adept, but... come on.

Also part of that sexual assault tradition in Spanish horror seems to be the fact that after that scene takes place, no one mentions it again and it seems to have no ramifications for the rest of the movie. No trauma, no post-traumatic stress, no apparent hostility, nothing. Just "Hey, can I get naked again and use your shower?" "Sure, I'll just keep being a writer and stuff."

Another cute touch: purported "sadomasochistic gear" adorning the writer's home. When asked why he has whips, blades, and other things hanging up on the walls, he responds "For inspiration. I'm writing a novel with sadomasochism in it." It's not so much what he says but how he says it. It makes it sound as though maybe he's just giving an excuse. And the girl seems to have that "maybe I believe you and maybe I don't" air when she says, "And has it kept you inspired?"

You might expect that suggestiveness to go somewhere, somehow. It doesn't. There's no real point to it, except maybe some clumsy attempt at foreshadowing. It mostly seems like they just kind of wanted to put whips and the suggestion of chains in the movie. Like it's some obligatory part of making a horror film.

The girl is forced to stay at the writer's house when his assistant, for whatever reason, sabotages the writer's car and he can't give her a ride back to town. Instead, they keep having the same "I was chased by zombies"--"But there's no such thing!" conversation over and over again, sometimes over breakfast and sometimes while walking through the woods. Somewhere in there, they also decide to just go ahead and get it on by the woodstove...and frankly, that's not a bad idea. What else are they going to do as just one man and one woman, mostly alone in the woods, with scant vestiges of actual plot to give them something else to do?

Then the film sort of randomly changes gears, and we witness some manner of Satanic ritual where a girl is stripped and tied to a table, and then all of the men and women present strip, anoint the girl and each other with some sort of oil, and then have a mild orgy (wait, did I mean "wild?" Hm... No.). Eventually they all dress in burlap sacks and chant some incantation, and then suddenly zombies just kind of come upon the scene and start strangling and/or eating everyone. One girl escapes, just happening to run from the ramshackle church they were in to the writer's house.

That whole episode is, I feel, a bit odd. First of all, it seems to offer a second reason for the zombie attacks. The conflicting explanations for the rising of the dead might remind you of such classics as Zombi 4: Afterdeath, and perhaps that's enough said already. Second, the characters are introduced and then removed again very abruptly, and the whole Satanic ritual thing seems kind of like the whips on the wall and the obligatory "No means yes" scene, in that I get the impression that it's just there as part of some inscrutable convention. Like no Spanish horror film of this period is complete without whips, not-quite-rape, and nude Satanic debauchery. And while I'm a bit skeptical of the exploitative use of rape in film, the rest of it's all in good fun as far as I'm concerned... it's just that it's pretty random fun.

That randomness, the disjointedness, might be the key to understanding the movie.

So that Satanist girl shows up at the writer's house. The creepy handyman comes in and offers her some clean clothes, and the girl says, "He's nice." The other woman, rather disturbingly, just says nothing at all, and then the handyman/assistant takes the girl to his quarters, where it turns out he ties her up naked and threatens to perform sadomasochistic acts on her; I say threatened because he mostly just brandishes things at her and doesn't really use them. He picks up a whip and then puts it down... He picks up needles or maybe incense and then puts them down... He picks up a burning candle, kind of rubs the holder against her body, and then puts it down... He picks up some sharp metal implement, rubs it along her legs, then puts it down... Then he lights a blowtorch and at that point the movie finally stops procrastinating and just gives him the comeuppance that he's been setting himself up for the whole time. Besides, anyone who's that boring a Satanic torturer deserves to die.

So zombies converge upon the writer's house. The handyman decides to let them kill the girl he tied up (so he's a sadist only in a non-sexual sense?), but his self-satisfied tittering leads them back around to kill him. Then the tied-up girl's Satanist friend happens by and rescues her.

Meanwhile, zombies are breaking windows and bashing down doors where the writer and the prostitute/stripper are. They retreat into other rooms, and eventually head outside to the woods, where they get separated after deciding that they love each other. He finds her later, dead, and as he cradles her dead body for what's clearly meant to be an ominously long time, she wakes up and chomps into his neck.

At this point, the guy who couldn't attend the party awakens and turns around, revealing himself to be the writer in the dream. He is then called on by three strange figures in obvious masks; he himself is frightened, but they pull the masks up to reveal that they're three women from the movie. Then a new masked figure appears; he pulls off the mask to reveal that he's that weird housekeeper, whose grin is no less disturbing even when his character is ostensibly benign.

So what I gather of all of this is that the strange, random nature of the movie is possibly meant to imitate the nonsense of nightmares. Fulci more successfully aspired to the same effect, and in literature Thomas Ligotti has perhaps mastered the technique. I think the opening scenes must be intended to represent the non-partygoer's writing, and then the ensuing movie is just a bunch of distorted dream nonsense resolved by the Wizard-of-Oz-style ending. Frankly, the film doesn't pull the effect off.

So it's not the best zombie movie ever made, nor even the best one made in Spain. But it is a fair amount of fun, as long as you can enjoy the good things in life. How bad can anything be if it boasts zombies, random orgiastic Satanism, and almost as much nudity as a Jess Franco venture?*

(*Note: It might be best not to answer that question. But although Morbus does get kind of dull sometimes, it's still a good time.)

Labels: Horror: Zombies