Homecoming

I got an advance copy of Homecoming, an hour-long film which premiers tonight on Showtime as part of its new Masters of Horror series. Based on Dale Bailey’s short story Death and Suffrage, and directed by Joe Dante (the George Romero protégé who directed Gremlins), Homecoming is a clever send-up of the Bush administration and their minions, centered on a war sold on "horseshit and elbow grease." It’s also a zombie flick.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll give you a few teasers—there’s a blond talk-show pundit who favors short black minis and S&M named Jane Cleaver, a political guru named Kurt Rand who likes to describe politics and war as a game, and a big fucking bunch of zombies in fatigues who beg to differ.

The scariest thing about Homecoming is what a short distance it is between the real people on whom it was based and the caricatures in the film.

From a recent Village Voice review of Homecoming, which you shouldn’t read in full if you’d like to avoid spoilers:

How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury (it was greeted with a five-minute ovation [at its November 13 premiere at the Turin Film Festival], the most vocal appreciation seeming to come from the American filmmakers and writers in attendance).

At once galvanic and cathartic, Dante's film uncorks the rage that despondent progressives promptly suppressed after last year's election and that has only recently been allowed to color mainstream coverage of presidential untruths and debacles. For all its broad, bludgeoning satire, Homecoming is deadly accurate in skewering the callousness and hypocrisy of the Bush White House and the spin industry in its orbit.

[…]

Dante hopes Homecoming functions as a wake-up call—not so much for politicians but for filmmakers. "If this spurs other people into making more and better versions, it will have done its job. I want to see more discussion," he says. "Nobody is doing anything about what's going on now—compared to the '70s, when they were making movies about the issues of the day. This elephant in the room, this Iraq war story, is not being dramatized."

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we're in," he continues. "It's been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war—now that they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. It's cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It's fucking sick." While gratified by the warm reception to Homecoming in Turin, Dante says he's eager for the right-wing punditocracy back home to see it: "I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it—and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are."

Atrios says this is a free weekend on Showtime. I couldn’t find any info either way; in any case, if you don’t have Showtime, check in either tonight at 10:00EST or tomorrow at 10:30EST, and you might be able to catch it. You can see preview clips of the episode here.