ZRC Reviews: Slices of Life
(Slices of Life cast and crew at the World Premiere during the Horror Society Film Festival)
Slices of Life is the new anthology series from director Anthony Sumner, comprised of three of his previous short films along with an all-new framing device tying the stories together (which, in the interests of full disclosure, features ZRC acquaintance Marv Blauvelt).
We first encountered a segment from this anthology several years ago at The Dark Carnival, where W.O.R.M., now retitled ‘Work Life’ within Slices, showed as a standalone short and won the 2007 award for Best Special Effects. The rest of the film, however, was new to the Zombie Rights Campaign.
(Coincidentally, W.O.R.M./Work Life also is the segment that most directly bears on the issue of Zombie Rights)
Slices of Life opens with a young woman sprawled outside a sleazy roadside motel, surrounded by papers and a sketchbook. She is awakened and apparently rescued by Irma (portrayed by Helen Alter-Dyche), the owner of the motel and her handyman Tiny (Marv Blauvelt), who inform her that she is an employee named Mira, unfortunately prone to episodes similar to the one that seems to have left her in her current condition, bereft of memory. They seem certain that she will recover, and escort her to her post at the front desk, where she passes the time examining the sketchbooks that double as her journals.
What these rather menacing looking books spell out, however, doesn’t seem to be anything about her life at all; rather, they contain three stories about other peoples’ lives, and as Mira reads them (and the audience sees them, this being a film), she struggles to sort out their relationship to her own unknown identity, even as the stories begin to bleed into the present day.
The first, called either ‘Home Life’ or ‘Amber Alert’, concerns Vonda (played by Toya Turner), a young pregnant woman who begins to see strange visions of missing children amidst a wave of child abductions, including a little girl who not only doesn’t seem to be missing, but in fact, doesn’t seem to exist.
As the abductions go on day after day, her condition, both physical and mental, seems to deteriorate, and the line between reality and nightmare begins to blur.
Amber Alert may be my personal favorite of the stories in Slices of Life; it also has next to nothing to do with our noble cause. Well-acted and written, it subtly mixes elements of personal isolation, the threat of potential insanity and body horror together with the apparently supernatural. Amber Alert is also noteworthy for featuring strong performances by African-American actors, which is something we see all too rarely in indie horror.
The second segment is the former W.O.R.M., or in the context of Slices, “Work Life”, and it concerns one William Robert Moss (Jack Guasta), who aspires to be promoted at a nanotech marketing company (which currently employs him to handle electronic trash and old files). William’s problem is that nobody will give him the time of day, because… well, he’s a human doormat. His roommate abuses their friendship, his coworkers ignore him when they’re not openly mocking him, and his recent proud achievement of a programming degree from an online college gets him no recognition. Will’s office colleagues barely even know his name; they all refer to him as… Worm.
Just when things seem their worst for Worm, he acquires the code for one of the firm’s actual nanotech programmer’s pet projects: a program that can implant hypnotic suggestions via computer peripherals; in essence, you can infect people via their keyboards and mice. The goal was to sell products, maybe designer clothes or soda; but what happens if you try to sell a person?
Not to give away too many details, but W.O.R.M. is the segment of Slices of Life that features ‘Zombies’, and so it’s of greatest concern to the ZRC here. W.O.R.M. is part of the recent phenomenon of what you might call the Post-Boyle Zombie in independent film; once again, as with older Zombie films, the Zombie condition is used for social satire, but now updated for a 21st century audience. In W.O.R.M., Zombies are given a new and trendier origin story (nanotechnology)* and employed to comment darkly on the Dilbert-esque world of the corporate cubicle farm.
The Zombie Rights Campaign was not, to be frank, pleased with W.O.R.M. It is certainly true that the Zombies presented here are treated with more depth and complexity than a Romero shambler, and come across as more complicated characters than a Russo brain-craver. It’s also true that, if we are to be perfectly fair, they’re no worse people in their Zombified condition than their previous Living forms; in fact, they may be more honest and forthright. Still, it’s clearly supposed to be a horrifying situation, and the film is quite unhelpful in dealing with the hot-button topic of Zombie Coworkers. How are we ever going to integrate our offices and workplaces if Living people continue to be afraid that the new guy in the cube next door wants to devour them? How can a Differently Animated co-worker convince their fellows to loan them a stapler instead of fleeing for their lives?
And don’t get me started on how rarely Zombies in the office get invited to social functions. The whole situation is just a tragedy.
Moving on, the last segment in Slices of Life, “Pink Snapper” or “Sex Life”, is a complicated story dealing with sex and dark family secrets. Susan Ballard, played by Deneen Melody (full disclosure: Facebook friend of the ZRC) is a young woman who finally snaps after years of abuse and beats her policeman uncle with a frying pan. Susan and her brother, unsure if their uncle will live or die and understandably wary of the local police, take off in a hastily devised escape plan. Low on gas and options, they seek shelter in a secluded mansion in the suburbs after giving aid to its injured owner lying along the roadside. Only, as it turns out, said mansion has a terrible secret locked inside.
As all secluded mansions should.
After reading the three stories, Mira, back at the motel, is now prepared to learn the truth about her forgotten past.
As for said truth: I can honestly say I did not see that one coming.
It’s a shame that one of the most skillful and entertaining independent features the ZRC has seen all year can’t get a better rating from us, but such is the dilemma faced by a Zombie Civil Rights Organization such as ours. Slices of Life is a great movie and a thoroughly entertaining experience, containing no fewer than four original stories and many noteworthy performances; it has a distinctive style and does a fantastic job of putting you as an audience in a real place and then twisting reality at the edges for a good, creepy time. Yet the unfortunate and counterproductive imagery of Zombies contained within W.O.R.M., while light-years better than the vast majority of ‘Zombie’ movies out there, is hurtful and injurious to the cause of Zombie Rights and the movement’s ongoing efforts at workplace integration.
For these reasons, the ZRC has to give the movie our Anti-Zombie rating. Separately, the non-W.O.R.M. portions of the film rate at a Zombie Neutral.
We look forward to Mr. Sumner’s next picture and hope that it can feature the Differently Animated in a more positive light. The same goes for all of the talented people, cast and crew, who worked on this production.
*At least it wasn’t stem cells. You wouldn’t believe how often stem cell Zombies come up these days.
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