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.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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