This weekend is, if you didn’t know, Nevermore at the Carolina Theatre of Durham. For this year’s weird dichotomy, there’s a children’s chess tournament or conference or thing going on at the Civic Center next door. Walking through the lobby of the Carolina I was surrounded by vintage horror posters and props and TVs playing trailers and such and then I walked through the double doors into the Civic Center to grab a bite to eat and was surrounded by hyper-intelligent children running, screaming, in every available direction. Their parents pile into hallways and fiddle with laptop computers while they, between matches, play handheld game consoles. The bar of the Marriott was unusually – seriously, way unusually – full of parents who looked lost in a kind of fog. I do love Nevermore weekend.

I’ve seen two of the full-length films – Dead Alive and Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell – and the collection of shorts titled Anthology of Errata.

Dead Alive is, of course, a classic. If I remember correctly it’s Peter Jackson’s first film. This is easily the goriest movie ever made but it’s also one of the funniest. Timothy Balme – whom you’ve likely seen nowhere else unless you’re a fan of New Zealand television shows – is simply incredible at physical comedy and his sheer physicality – incredible flexibility and the sort of precision necessary to pull off performed clumsiness – is really what sells the rest of the movie. Dead Alive is a zombie movie, yes, but it’s much more a romantic comedy than anything else. If you watch this movie and don’t laugh then there’s something wrong with you (or you just don’t like it, I guess?).

The collection of shorts has a number of really great films in it. Night of the Hell Hamsters is a fun bit of gore with some genuinely hilarious moments. Facility 4 is deeply creepy and a part of its creep factor is the business-like reaction of the soldiers in it; I think there’s potentially a real discussion to be had there. The Listening Dead is a beautiful few minutes. Zombie Hunter kind of left me rolling my eyes but I liked it. A Nevermore first: I couldn’t sit through all of Oculus. I was watching it by myself, sitting in the balcony, and I just had to get up and walk out. Itsy-Bitsy is probably what ties Facility 4 for being my favorite of the whole collection. The entire collection plays again tomorrow (Sunday) at 2pm in Fletcher Hall.

Finally, I just – like, an hour ago – got out of Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell. This is definitely this year’s American Astronaut: a really fun, funny movie made even better by the fact the cast is so obviously having fun, too, staged and shot in a way that really creates and maintains a sense of the characters’ charisma. Another similarity to American Astronaut is the clever way in which the makers employ the limited resources available to any independent film so that they come away with a really glossy, finished product but have almost nothing in the way of sets and a relatively tiny cast. The story itself is hard to encapsulate, but it’s a post-apocalyptic political campaign with a Kennedy determined to become Vice-King of New America. His girlfriend is named Cannibal Sue. Pants Wilder plucked the thought from my mind when he noted how shocked he was the makers didn’t mention Fallout as an inspiration. Richard III? Really? You could have said Fallout. It would have been OK.

The writer/director/star, producer/star and a lot of the technical crew were in attendance and did a fun little Q&A after the movie. It won’t be playing again this weekend but they’re trying to hammer out a distribution deal for 20 cities this summer and a DVD this autumn and have plans for two more films about the characters in the film. Also there’s a comic about the robots Yul and Quincy at their website.