Editorials
Remembering ‘Left 4 Dead’s Unkillable Bill
The five year anniversary of the death of one of the most beloved Bills in the history of video games went by unnoticed this year, so rather than try and make it up to him next year or five years from now, I thought I’d get this loving tribute out of the way with a piece I like to call Killing Bill: The Story of the Bill Who Killed the Unkillable Bill, or for SEO purposes, Kill Bill: An Anti-Smoking PSA.
William “Bill” Overbeck was so much more to the Left 4 Dead community than just a wrinkly advertisement for Big Tobacco. Like an onion, all it took was being around him to make a lot of people cry. Also, he had layers. I know it sounds like I’m legit insane when I say there was more to him than the stoic exterior that would often get him mistaken for the stone carving of a man you might expect to see perched outside a neglected veteran’s memorial or AA clinic, but that’s my version of the truth.
Many thought him to be immortal, but few know what he did to inspire such rumors.
It happened before the passing of the years that would lead to his passing in The Passing. After getting separated from his fellow survivors, Bill sought shelter in an abandoned department store. He spent a month in that store with a coven of Witches as roommates. He spent the first few days observing the Witches as a mannequin before he was able to make out words in their sobbing. When he felt he had learned enough, Bill used their language to turn them against each other.
To this day, no one knows if Bill has ever cried. Even those who saw his tears in person can’t say for sure that he wasn’t just speaking Witch.
When he wasn’t cry-talking gibberish like a damn Witch, Bill preferred silence, especially from those around him. He once asked me to join him over a fire he had started with half a corpse and an extinguished cigarette butt. I was nervous he was going to force another of his war stories on me, but neither of us spoke a word, and that was the only conversation either of us needed.
The layers that made up that smokey specter of a man run deeper even than the unlikable nature of his personality, the extent of which psychologists claim they’ve only seen in an individual who endured literally the worst childhood.
I met with one of these experts while researching this timely tribute to a devoted father, friend, brother and lover of violence. When I asked her what Bill had to endure as a kid in order to become so comically gruff, she asked me to construct the worst possible setting for a child to grow up in, then bury it under enough soul-crushing events — missed birthdays, disappointing Christmases, dead family pets, etc. — to bring that child right to the edge, just short of creating another Michael Myers. Only then would I have an idea of what it was like.
I tried this for hours and I never got past the nightmarish image of Bill’s head on a child’s body. Incidentally, this chimera recently started haunting my dreams and now I’m paying the same psychologist more money than I have so she can free me from his dead eyes.
Anyway, back to Bill.
Those would’ve been the years that would come to define him, had he not forced the first twenty years of memories in grow a persona of his own design using the only thing he ever really understood: war. It was in Vietnam that Bill would truly become Bill. In movie terms, this chapter would have Rises or Rising in its title.
I won’t bother exploring this critical decade in Bill’s life, mostly because the only thing I know about the Vietnam War was taught to me by Apocalypse Now, but also because anyone who spent any significant amount of time with him before his agonizing demise will have almost certainly heard them all by now.
All we need to know about Bill to make him a man who’s worth honoring is that he was an old dude who earned the respect of his peers by firing more guns than Milla Jovovich has across all of her movies. When respect wasn’t available, he would demand fear. He never bothered being friendly because no one ever told him what the word meant.
He saved countless lives, and he did it while struggling to save his own from the lifelong inner war that is a legitimately hardcore smoking addiction. Remember kids, smoking kills.
Actually, so do Tanks. It’s not the slow death of cancer, but it can be a surprisingly slow way to die. Bill could clarify for me if he hadn’t met a cruel end as a Tank’s stressball.
The reason why I’m honoring Bill with words, which we all know he hated in life even if he could never gather enough of them to adequately explain why, is so I can finally talk about him in a way he would’ve hated enough to justify murdering me if he wasn’t super dead right now. I should be okay, so long as Google wasn’t lying when it told me ghosts aren’t capable of punching the living no matter how powerful they were in life.
Remembering Bill for his jam-like consistency or the puddle of man pulp we found him as would do him a disservice. Bill was a dusty old pervert who took about as much pleasure in popping Boomers from afar as he did ensuring his beret was always tastefully angled. He didn’t smoke for the bonus it gave to his already incalculable badass quotient, he smoked because it was his only defense against the most terrifying monster of all. Withdrawal.
Nobody survives forever indeed.
Wait! Did I mention that time he anger-yelled at a charging waddling Boomer causing it to prematurely explode, or later that day, when he beat a Witch in a thumb wrestling match, and that’s why they cry now.
Oh, and give us Left 4 Dead 3.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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