ZRC Reviews: Cabine of the Dead
Posted By John Sears on November 8, 2010
Cabine of the Dead proved to be a great disappointment to The Zombie Rights Campaign, at least relative to our earlier fond hopes for a stirring realist piece of cinema depicting the struggles of the Differently Animated to gain fair and equal access to public services or the use of facilities normally open to the public, in this case, a phone booth.
Rather than being such an expose, ‘Cabine of the Dead’ is a slickly produced, shot and acted short in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, mixing Romero-style Zombies with a comedy of errors as the protagonist tries, and fails, to get help from his circle of friends and acquaintances over the phone.
Is this a social commentary on contemporary life in France? Are the Zombies being used here as a metaphor for social disconnectedness in the modern age? What is the significance of the phone booth in an era utterly dominated by cellular phones, anyway?
I mean, when’s the last time you saw a fully operational, well-maintained phone booth?
These are perhaps all interesting questions (in a film theory, abstract sort of way) but not the ZRC’s focus; we are concerned not with the use of Zombies as some sort of symbol, but to the treatment of the Zombie condition by the filmmaker, and here things are far less ambiguous: ‘Cabine of the Dead’ is NOT Zombie Friendly. No sir.
Why must so many aspiring filmmakers use Zombies as set decorations? Zombies are people too, not mere objects or automatons to place your *important*, i.e. LIVING, characters in peril, or merely on hand to advance the plot. I mean, for pity’s sake, even George Romero and John Russo had Zombie characters in their major anti-Zombie films, albeit in an Amos and Andy, token, not-quite-real-people sort of way (and of course Romero pulled a complete 180, having utilized fully realized individual Zombie characters in Creepshow).
For ‘Cabine of the Dead’, the Zombies are just something to keep Patrick in his little well-lit booth and to make him dependent on others for his survival; in an alternate universe, they might be rabid dogs or a flock of angry birds. We never learn what these Zombies could want, why they’re after Patrick, or where they eventually go. We never get explanations or backstory on these important character elements, any more than you get details on a storm that forces a movie hero to take shelter under an awning; astonishingly, the hows and whys of Zombiism don’t matter, so long as the set is dressed and the stress applied.
Incredibly exploitative.
In addition, as mentioned above, these movie-Zoms fall into the same old Romero tropes, shambling, groaning, ravenous flesh-eaters entirely fixated on devouring the people graced with speaking roles. They are used and yet not used, employed and forgotten, tossed aside when no longer needed, forced to reinforce all the old prejudices and intolerances along the way.
For all of these reasons, and for repeatedly presenting violent altercation as the only reasonable course of action for interaction with the Differently Animated, the ZRC is forced to give ‘Cabine of the Dead’ our worst rating, that of being Living Supremacist.
France can now join the sad list of nations that actively produces and exports anti-Zombie propaganda. For shame.
