Rural Escapes

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon serves as a weird signifier of the pandemic, at least for me. Aardman’s stop-motion sequel to its delightful Shaun the Sheep Movie had opened in the UK in the fall of 2019, but it wasn’t released in North America until Valentine’s Day 2020, as a Netflix exclusive. I was in the UK a couple of weeks later, saw the 4K disc in an HMV and thought about buying it – but I talked myself out of it, and of course I haven’t been back to London since.

But now that bivalent boosters are here to (hopefully) blunt the next wave of COVID and finally, finally start us on the road to proper recovery, Shout! Factory is releasing Farmageddon in a Blu-ray/DVD combo edition in North America, and god dammit I am seeing that as a bookend to the pandemic.

Yes, I am aware the above is a very wobbly metaphor, but so what, I’m feeling hopeful. And the Shaun the Sheep movies, so you’re damn right I am embracing them. Also, it’s just fun to type “farmageddon”.

I reviewed the film for NOW at the time, but if you’re not interested in clicking (harrumph) it’s a Shaun the Sheep adventure that finds Shaun and his pals at the Mossy Bottom Farm helping a little lost alien find her way home. Chaos reigns, but it’s an affectionate, woolly sort of chaos, with Aardman’s animators once again demonstrating their remarkable creativity with a non-stop run of sight gags, puns and gorgeous visuals. It’s all so sweet and goofy, and every frame offers some sort of rapture. It’s such a pleasure watching these things work.

And of course the world of Shaun follows the rules of silent comedy, so dialogue is mostly just mutterings and squeaks, with characters communicating through frantic gesticulation and ironic slapstick is the law of the land. And where the first movie took Shaun and his flock on a trip to the big city the sequel escalates everything by adding spaceships and government agents sneaking around the farm, while the Farmer himself is distracted mounting a disreputable sci-fi fair in his field for a quick buck. It’s just so wonderful, and revisiting the film so soon after rewatching Mon Oncle for a SEMcast earlier this month I was delighted to see how closely Aardman follows Tati’s cascading gag structure – even if Shaun himself is more of a Chaplinesque instigator than Tati’s hapless Hulot.

The disc’s transfer is splendid, offering a bright, pleasingly tactile image that lets the eye linger on the tiniest details; I especially love the slightly messy state of Shaun’s pals woolen coats in contrast to the Plasticene smoothness of the alien Lu-la. And the lively DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is also peppered with charming, unexpected foolishness, as sheep and government agents alike bumble around in the soundscape.

The supplemental section leans heavily on the movie’s web marketing, with kid-friendly videos about drawing Shaun and Lu-la and making your own crafts and slime (which, why?), but there are a pair of brief featurettes which could have gone on much longer for my money. One’s a charming history of Shaun’s evolution over a quarter-century of Aardman productions, starting with his introduction in Nick Park’s Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit short A Close Shave, and the utterly delightful Making Farmageddon, in which directors Richard Phelan and Will Becher explain their process of shooting live-action reference video for pretty much everything in the movie, sharing clips of themselves and a dozen other Aardman staffers running around as government functionaries, bonking each other with foam mallets and doing double-takes as Bitzer the dog. Maybe Shaun the Threep or whatever they end up calling it will come with an entire alternate-angle version of the finished film. I’d snap up that 4K disc in a heartbleat.

That’s your fun family option for Halloween-night viewing, but if you’re looking for more … mature goings-on in the middle of nowhere, you can’t go wrong with Night of the Living Dead. (Yes, it’s a strange segue but you’ve gotta go with what the calendar gives you.) And Criterion’s new 4K upgrade of its excellent 2017 special edition is the perfect excuse to revisit George A. Romero’s seminal zombie classic.

What’s left to say about Night of the Living Dead, really? More than half a century after its release, it remains one of the most elegant and unsettling American horror movies, its black-and-white handheld approach lending an almost unconscious level of documentary realism to a simple story of a random assortment of folks trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse by an army of the reanimated dead. The casting of Duane Jones in the lead was seen as radical, though Romero always insisted he was simply the best actor they saw – and while that may be true, the iconography of a Black man arguing about morality and decency at the height of the civil-rights movement adds another layer of social commentary to the picture.

Watching it this time, it’s also clear that Romero was right; Jones is easily the best actor in the whole movie, a capable and reasonably resourceful everyman hero whose frustrated resolve in the face of Judith O’Dea’s catatonic Barbara and Karl Hardman’s craven Harry Cooper is totally relatable. Romero said they didn’t change a word of the script when Jones was cast, even though Jones wanted to play up the racial tensions – but Harry’s constant put-downs of Ben feel racially driven all the same. Maybe it’s just that Hardman isn’t as strong an actor as Jones, and his attempts to shout down his co-star have an undercurrent of overcompensation that reads as insecurity. Or maybe it’s just in the air.

Something else I noticed this time around is that the zombies are quicker and smarter than I remember. That first ghoul in the cemetery goes sprinting after Barbara’s car, and there are multiple instances of the dead using tools and even problem-solving – picking up rocks to smash car windows and even taking out the headlights on Ben’s truck. It’s instructive to see what elements Romero kept as the mythology evolved in the sequels, and what he discarded; the Venus probe certainly seems to be the cause of the resurrection in this one, but it never came up again, and it isn’t until Land of the Dead that the dead start acting with any agency again. (Okay, there’s that moment where someone starts clawing at the drywall at the end of Dawn but that’s probably just a flicker of memory in a freshly reactivated brain. Oh, and the thing where Bud kinda remembers his military training in Day. Maybe I should rethink this.)

Every time I watch Night of the Living Dead I worry it won’t hold up, and every time I’m happy to be proven wrong. Its lack of interest in jump scares and long stretches of quiet still work, letting the hopelessness of the situation just sort of accumulate around the trapped heroes. The sudden, shocking deaths of the teen couple – who’d normally be the last ones standing in any drive-in horror picture – is a smart swerve, but Romero’s decision to use that moment to finally show us the cannibalistic actions of the ghouls, which up to that point had only been alluded to in news reports, is where the film tilts all the way into waking-nightmare territory, creating the modern zombie and marrying it to vampires and other predators of legend. They don’t just want to kill you; they want to feast on you, ideally while you’re still nice and warm. That’s some very dark stuff.

The only new offering in Criterion’s 4K edition is the Ultra High Definition presentation of the feature, which is the same Film Foundation restoration offered on the Blu-ray. That version was 2K, of course, and the step up in resolution does make a meaningful difference on a large enough screen, with an increase in small details (like the toes on Barbara’s stockings) and improved grayscale in the B&W cinematography. It’s a crisp, clean transfer, nothing at all like the various public-domain versions of Night that I grew up on … though if you’re curious to see how the movie looked back in the day, Criterion’s also included a 16mm workprint version, bearing the title Night of Anubis and missing a chunk of the second reel, that offers an experience of Romero’s classic in all of its splotchy, splice-ridden glory.

The rest of the extras are exactly the same as the earlier release; indeed, the 2018 Blu-rays are packaged with the new 4K platter in the case. The invaluable cast and crew commentaries produced for the Elite Entertainment laserdisc special edition back in the day are here, as are archival interviews with Romero (on Tom Snyder!), Duane Jones and Judith Ridley, an illuminating reel of dailies and a truly lovely conversation between Romero and TIFF’s Colin Geddes at the Lightbox in 2012. Light in the Darkness, a more recent doc on the film’s impact and enduring appeal (featuring contributions from expert witnesses like Guillermo Del Toro, Frank Darabont and Robert Rodriguez), is a standout, though it still irks me that no one’s ever managed to import the feature-length 40^th anniversary documentary One for the Fire, which appeared on the UK Blu-ray and was pretty good, overall.

So should you buy the 4K version if you already own the Blu-ray? Unless you have a very big screen, it’s probably not essential. But if you haven’t gotten around to picking up the BD set, I’d suggest future-proofing and getting this one. And also Farmageddon, because you’ll need a pick-me-up afterward.

Next week: A24 and Elevation release a 4K trilogy of terror, and we have another contest brewing. See you there, boys and ghouls!