ZRC Review: ‘Juan of the Dead’ (Plus Zombie Politics, Communism, and More)
Posted By John Sears on April 18, 2012
‘Juan of the Dead’ was one of the titles we wanted to evaluate most for the ZRC, and fortunately Chicago Fear Fest just about dropped a screening opportunity in our laps.
The film has gotten considerable attention over the last year, both from the international press and from the Zombie Rights Community. Some see the film as a chance for the high brow but isolated Cuban film industry to break out into broader markets, while those of us in the activist community were of course very concerned that yet ANOTHER country seemed to have succumbed to malign Anti-Zombie influence. This concern only grew when it began to see distribution deals pop up worldwide. For many viewers ‘Juan of the Dead’ will represent their first taste of Cuban filmmaking, and its success can only encourage imitation. The potential for an Anti-Zombie movie cottage industry loomed large.
But all that, of course, depended on the movie itself. How is ‘Juan of the Dead’ for Zombie Rights? In a word: dreadful.
JotD is, naturally enough, centered on the life of Juan, the charismatic slacker and ringleader of a loosely affiliated criminal enterprise in his rundown Havana neighborhood. Juan spends most of his days hanging out drinking with his best friend/sidekick Lazaro, who in turn spends a lot of his time watching out for his skirt-chasing son California.
Yes, that really is his name.
Juan hustles enough to get by, sleeps with neighborhood women while their husbands are away, and drinks to pass the time. His life is adrift, and although he swears he’s content, it’s obvious that Juan is waiting for an opportunity, anything, to fall from the sky and give him a chance at something bigger and better.
Being a Zombie movie, this opportunity soon shows up in the form of, you guessed it, an outbreak leading toward the Zombie Apocalypse.
Not that Juan takes advantage at first. As the streets fill up with unfortunate and undoubtedly confused Zombies (whom the government labels as ‘dissidents’ supposedly acting under American orders), Juan retreats to his rooftop hideout to conduct business as usual. Eventually, however, he has an idea: the Zombie Apocalypse can be his shot at making a fortune.
And so, over the objections of his estranged daughter, Juan repurposes his little criminal organization toward running a new business: ‘Juan de los Muertos’, a murder-your-Undead-relatives mercenary shop. Half-rates for elderly or child customers, double for foreign tourists.
*sigh*
Things only go downhill from there. JotD is full of ‘comedic’ violence, ie lots of graphic mayhem against the Differently Animated, set against a backdrop of Juan’s already tattered little piece of Cuban society falling further apart due primarily to indifference. The state is concerned only with maintaining its image and is profoundly ineffective at providing security, while the people either hide in their homes or run around aimlessly in panic. The latter group of course increasingly end up Zombified and then victims of Juan de los Muertos in turn.
As the title suggests, Juan of the Dead is heavily influenced by earlier Zombie movies. References to prior offenders in the genre abound; Lazaro can be seen as a Cuban version of Ed from ‘Shaun of the Dead’, there’s a very blatant reference to ‘Dead Alive’ and its kung-fu priest, a spoof of the military survivalists in ’28 Days Later, and so on. The characters even discuss, and slyly poke fun at, the sharp divide among Zombie movie fans (and Zombie movies) regarding ‘Fast Zombies’ and ‘Slow Zombies’.
As an organization ‘Juan de los Muertos’ seems to have learned from those other Zombie-hating movies as well, for Juan’s quintet of Zombie-bashers constitute that rarest of breeds in Anti-Zombie film: a tactically effective, emotionally and mentally stable band of survivors. Amoral, greedy, violent survivors, sure, but Juan’s seen enough Romero movies to know where infighting gets you during the Zompocalypse.
And yet, for all this genre knowledge and reasoning, the film still can’t see past its own prejudice against the Differently Animated. The state labels the Zombies as ‘dissidents’, but Juan, and presumably the filmmakers, see them as an annoyance, an opportunity, and eventually, as an obstacle to overcome; never as people. Just things, targets, entities to drive the story. What a waste.
The film’s politics are also worth discussing from a Zombie Rights perspective. While on the surface the film feels genuinely critical of the contemporary Cuban government, casting it as ineffectual and absentee at best, as Juan’s struggle to profit off of innocent Zombies grows, Juan de los Muertos (the business) clearly takes on a revolutionary fervor. Juan himself compares it to the Cuban revolution at one point. In this respect, Juan of the Dead establishes a bit of a secular, political parallel to REC 3′s religious condemnation of Undeath. To be a REC Zombie is to be damned individually; to have Zombies in the streets of Havana is to be damned *politically*, on a societal level. Cuba wouldn’t have a Zombie ‘problem’, the film seems to say, if it governed itself properly, if it had lived up to the ideals of a populist revolution.
If your society falls to (marginalized, oppressed, misunderstood) Zombies, it’s not that, say, Communist Cuba failed, but that *you*, or in this case, Juan, failed Communist Cuba.
Naturally The Zombie Rights Campaign disapproves of secular scapegoating of Zombies every bit as much as religious scapegoating of Zombies, and we strongly condemn this Zombies-as-political-crisis metaphor.
‘Juan of the Dead’ has a lot going for it, purely as a movie. The acting is superb, the characters interesting and well-realized, the movie never drags or feels repetitive. It’s even a very pretty film, dark and moody visually.
Pity that it has to put all that talent and skill in the service of promoting hatred of the Differently Animated.
The ZRC rates ‘Juan of the Dead’ (original title: ‘Juan de los Muertos’) as Living Supremacist.
For shame.
