Free It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive by Mark Kermode Page B

pluck-and-recoil manoeuvre. Baffled, but still moving forward, I hit the brakes which simply put the van into a skid and sent it lurching back across the carriageway toward the opposing barriers, upon contact with which it conducted another vehicular hokey-kokey, putting its front end in, its back end out, in-out in-out shake-it-all-about-and-turn-around, while in the cabin I went all knees bent, arms stretched, ra ra ra!
    By the time the van came to rest in the middle of the slip road, I had managed (very effectively) to knock seven bells out of all four of its corners, prompting the question upon my return to the City Life office, ‘Which direction were you actually travelling in when you hit the barrier(s)?’ From the look of it, the van had been at the centre of a complicated four-way pincer movement in which the entire motorway had risen up from north, south, east and west and struck the unsuspecting vehicle from all sides at the same time . It was pretty impressive.
    In the wake of the van incident it was decided that I could probably do less damage behind a desk, and since I’d been promised some writing assignments when I first came on board, it seemed the right time to let me loose in the pages of the magazine. The first major piece I filed was an interview with Douglas Adams, who was in town to promote the newly published scripts for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radioseries. I was a huge Hitchhiker’s fan and grilled him with the intensity of a sci-fi stalker, which he seemed to find at once flattering, annoying, and unsettling. As for my prose style, I had graduated from writing like a tea boy at the offices of the NME to Minister in Charge of Paper Clips at the Department of Pedantic Dullardry. I saw this as a huge improvement, and indeed ‘pedantic dullardry’ remains a touchstone of my journalistic endeavours to this day.
    The first film I reviewed for City Life (and therefore my first ever properly published film review) was of Dan O’Bannon’s workaday horror spoof The Return of the Living Dead . A cheeky riff on the legacy of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead , this splattery romp was played broadly for laughs; in the US, Return was released with the self-parodic tag line ‘They’re back from the grave – and they’re ready to party’ whilst in Germany it was retitled Verdammt, die Zombies kommen which roughly translates as ‘Oh crap, the zombies are coming!’
    The film was flawed, but the gruey special effects were fun, including reanimated bisected dog corpses and various undead dismembered limbs. Apparently, Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper had at one point been planning to film it in blood-splattered 3-D, a format which had experienced a fleeting return to fashion in the mid- eighties with the spaghetti western Comin’ atYa! , followed by the schlocker sequels Jaws 3-D , Amityville 3-D and (most famously) Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D . Today, were are all being told that ‘3-D is the future!’ once again, thanks to a string of flashy kids’ digimations ( Monsters vs Aliens 3-D , Bolt 3-D , Toy Story 3-D , Ice Age 3-D , Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs 3-D ), scrungy horror throwbacks ( My Bloody Valentine 3-D , Scar 3-D ), pop-concert films ( U2 3-D , Hannah Montana 3-D , The Jonas Brothers 3-D ) and big-budget fantasy adventures (Cameron’s Avatar , Spielberg’s Tintin , etc.). The truth, which should be apparent to anyone with a vaguely cynical soul, is that 3-D will always be the past , and is only being rammed down our throats as something excitingly ‘new’ right now because it is much harder to pirate 3-D films than good old flat ones. Big Hollywood studios want you to believe in 3-D because they want to carry on believing in their own bank accounts. It has nothing to do with ‘the future’ of cinema, merely the future of film finance.
    As for The Return of the Living Dead , the real joy for me was the fact that I was seen as some kind of expert