Fantômas Unleashed is the 1965 sequel to Fantômas, it's French, where it's called Fantômas se déchaîne. The story starts in France and then the action moves to Italy. Plenty of nice city and country scenery. André Hunebelle and Haroun Tazieff are co-directors, Jean Halain and Pierre Foucard wrote the script. André also directed three of the OSS 117 series.
All the main cast is back from the first movie, Jean Marais plays the reporter Fandor, the supervillain Fantômas and Professor Lefèvre, Louis de Funès plays Police Commissaire Juve, Mylene Demongeot plays Fandor's girlfriend Hélène Gurn, Jacques Dynam plays Juve's assistant Bertrand. The young boy in the picture is Olivier de Funès, the real life son of Louis de Funès, he plays Hélène's brother.
Fantômas is kidnapping scientists and he has an eye on Professor Lefèvre who has a machine to control people. Juve and Bertrand are on the case and Fandor has a plan to substitute himself for the real Professor Lefèvre. There's plenty of people disguising themselves. Some of the makeup works better than others. Juve also has some new crime fighting weapons that mostly add a few laughs. The movie seems be be more comical than the first in the series but I didn't find it a problem, I like a bit of slapstick.
There's plenty of activity and I found that entertaining. Nice scenery, costumes and sets. The villain's lair was even grander than the previous film's lair. I'm happy with the set so far, I'll certainly want to watch them again.
The Dead Don't Die is a 2019 Jim Jarmusch film about the zombie apocalypse. He wrote and directed. All the action takes place in the small town of Centerville. I enjoyed Bill Murray in this quite a bit, same with Danny Glover, the rest of the cast were no slouches either. Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny are the police, Tom Waits, Caleb Landry Jones, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Tilda Swinton, Carol Kane, Larry Fassenden are among the locals, the RZA is the WU-PS driver, Rozie Perez is a TV newscaster, Iggy Pop is a zombie with a taste for coffee, Selena Gomez is a victim.
There's much going on in the story, murder, polar fracking, the earth shifting on it's axis, animals disappearing from houses and farms, zombies, popular culture commentary, all this is told to us from the local's conversations and new sources. As the endless day progresses there are murders, Bill and Adam find an open grave, zombies become more plentiful. So plentiful that hardly anyone survives their attacks. Sad, because they are the slow moving kind, just run the fuck away. There's not that much gore and what there is, is rather toned down, often there's a quick cutaway to a reaction shot.
It wasn't a popular movie, it struggles to get a 5.5 on the IMDb, and that's with almost 30K votes. The comments on the IMDb are often harsh but I enjoyed the droll take on the genre. If there's something that's being beaten to death in the horror genre, it's zombies. They're so mainstream, grandma's like them, country singers sing about them. The movie didn't make me a fan of country singer Sturgill Simpson, he sang the opening title song.
It made some money but it was a pretty cheap movie, $2.5 mil with a $14.4 mil return. There's a fair number of jokes, some big and some small. Generally it's all low key and slow moving. The living have as little urgency as the dead. It's self referential, maybe that was a problem for some people, maybe it was the slow pace, the complaints on the IMDb are all over the place, some make little sense. All I know is I'd like to see it again and hope to pick up a copy at some point. It's pricey now but it'll be under 10 bucks in a year or two, I can wait.