Ozone (1993)

Detective Eddie Boone (James Black) and his buddy and partner Mike Weitz (Tom Hoover) are on the drug beat. One night they are lured into a trap by their snitch Squeaky (Michael Cagnoli). Mike disappears encountering some of the zombie-like victims of the new drug Ozone, while Eddie gets injected with a small dose of it.

The bust going tits up does of course lead to the expected trouble with the cops’ captain (Jerry Camp); on the other hand, he doesn’t seem too bothered with one of his men just disappearing for quite some time. Eddie, on the other hand, is very much bothered, and begins an odyssey through the strangest parts of his city at night, searching for his friend and encountering ever more bizarre Ozone-made mutants and weird situations. At the same time he also has to fight the psychological and physical changes that little dose of the drug he got hit with inflicts upon him.

Director/writer/editor/producer etc J.R. Bookwalter is of course one, if not the godfather of the DIY type of US indie horror. Ozone may very well be his magnum opus (unless there’s still something great coming from him, something I’d be very happy about). It’s a little wonder for a film of its type, the sort of thing where ambition, actual ability (I’ll always believe that Bookwalter could have been one of the great popular horror directors if a company threw some actual, no strings attached, money at him), and a bit of luck come together to make a damn good film, instead of “just” a damn good film made on the semi-professional level.

Sure, there are moments when the seat of their pants filmmaking is visible, and the acting’s not consistently great, but Ozone never feels like a film that needs its viewer to excuse its flaws with it being indie, because so much of it is simply exactly like it is supposed to be. Of the course, the way it is supposed to be isn’t necessarily the way a mainstream horror movie should be shaped – but that’s only a bad thing if you need all movies to follow the same rules all of the time. A horrible idea, if you ask me.

One of the clear stars of the production are the incredible special effects that begin with relatively standard pizza face pseudo-zombie business but very quickly - once Eddie starts on his odyssey through the night - escalate into realms of the creepily surreal close in style and quality to what Screaming Mad George sometimes did in/for Brian Yuzna productions. There’s so much incredible stuff on screen here – including a sex scene to ween anyone off of sex scenes for the future – the film would be worth your time for it alone.

However, Ozone also works very well indeed as one of those films about a character dropped into the dark side of his city, learning – potentially terrible – truths about the nightside of his world as well as himself. It’s actually rather effective at this, turning up the weirdness of living by night via the power of the surreal and the strange. Dark underbellies, it turns out here, are darker and much weirder than you think.

Apart from Bookwalter’s fun use of well-worn cop and action movie tropes, the film’s mood often feels like an early 90s indie horror version of the more surreal and weird end of 70s US horror, films like Lemora, a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural or Messiah of Evil, movies which, as this one does, weren’t afraid of ignoring the favoured filmmaking handbooks of their time and just went for doing what felt right. There’s a degree of fearlessness that comes with this territory I find absolutely admirable, a willingness to do whatever feels right for a film, rules and budgets be damned.