CANNIBAL DEAD: THE GHOULS (2003)

Dir: Chad Ferrin

Depressing, cynical, amateurish time-waster that aspires to "art" by virtue of shaky hand-held footage and a tired one-note statement about how life basically stinks and mankind is nothing but a lot of jaded, selfish, media-obsessed animals. Further indications that this is a "movie with attitude" lies in its clunky jazz soundtrack, lack of real plot structure, and total disregard for the concept of an Ending.  Not to mention the opening logo "A Crappy World Production".  The film follows a video "stringer", a self-destructive chain-smoking scuzzball who makes a living hanging around the seedier parts of downtown L.A. with his camcorder looking for the worst crimes, accidents and tragedies to tape and sell to TV news shows. Halfway through what passes for the story, he sees a woman being torn apart and eaten DAWN OF THE DEAD-style by three zombie types, but since he forgot to load his camera (a real pro, here) he has no proof and nobody will believe him. Not that it matters, because nothing more really develops anyway.  Won't independent filmmakers EVER tire of insisting that people are inherently bad, society is hopelessly corrupt and human life is virtually worthless?  Taking such a negative view of mankind is as valid a point of view as any other, but these amateur horror hotshots keep forgetting that offering a milieu populated exclusively by shallow creeps makes it next to impossible to care what happens onscreen, to the characters or to the society as a whole. Like many another homemade cheapie, this offers no decent people to root for, as everybody is depicted as a foul-mouthed loser out for money, drugs, sex, and more drugs. Why are so many low-budget filmmakers so bitter and petulant?  Maybe it's because they have such a hard time finding producers and backers willing to fund their angry little productions. One wishes they'd get over themselves and stop using the film and video media to take out their frustrations.  Maybe if they'd try to offer something that's actually entertaining and scary, they'd be more successful in making names for themselves as auteurs. It's hard to judge the caliber of the acting in this movie because no one is ever called upon to do anything more than behave like angry jerks, shouting the F-word at each other approximately every 3 and a half seconds.  The cannibal ghouls are singularly unimpressive, sporting routine pale faced makeup and lurching around in a silly hunched-over manner like LORD OF THE RINGS' Gollum, or like masked extras who work the crowd waiting in line at Halloween Haunted House events.  As you might expect of such a nasty little chunk of cheese, the ghouls are never explained; they simply come out of the sewers at night to shred various embittered lowlifes who stumble into their clutches.  The editor deserves kudos for giving it the ol' college try, assembling some very effective combinations of split-second violent images with dramatic booming tones on the soundtrack, but the dark murky cinematography and lack of incident make this an immediately forgettable project. The movie seems to have been shot in a great hurry, with no frame of dark, blurry, ugly footage left to the cutting room floor.  At least the closing credits are creatively presented, for the benefit of those who are still awake when they arrive.  Joe Pilato, who played the mean, hateful loudmouthed dirtbag in DAY OFTHE DEAD,  shows up here to play another mean, hateful loudmouthed dirtbag.  The dull feature was released on DVD as simply THE GHOULS.

 

 

 

 

 CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1998)

Dirs: Adam Grossman, Ian Kessner

If you've seen the 1963 original you'll most likely be bored by this awkwardly redecorated remake which is also a rethinking of the old film's themes. As in the original, a young woman is haunted by weird visions and pursued by supernatural forces after an incident in which her car plunges into the water.  Since this version was made in the late 90's, a stupid serial killer subplot has been forced into the proceedings to provide a rationale for the ghostly events.  Bad move, since the older film's strength laid mainly in its mood of unpredictable surrealism.  The central character also spends much of her time surrounded by friends and family in this version, which means the sense of isolation, and thus the story's intimacy, is lost.  It would be pointless to go into great detail about this movie's continunity problems since it's one of those films where the director can simply chalk all the loose ends and sloppy plotting up to "nightmarishness".  There are a few effective scenes and even a handful of real scares, but most of the film seems like filler and the whole project just kind of collapses under the weight of its own cheap psychology.  As a child, the heroine of this retelling saw her mommy brutally murdered (for no reason) by a white trash psycho who works as a badly made-up clown in a traveling carnival.  She had the chance to shoot him but ran away instead.  We're told that her testimony put the killer behind bars, and now it's twenty years later so he's back for revenge.  (He even brought the same gun with him.)  Since the tenets of pop psychology maintain that water in dreams represents sexuality and the girl may have been molested by the evil clown way back when, it follows that she now has no husband or boyfriend and constantly dreams about drowning.  She even uses a sump pump to symbolically try to remove all the water from her life.  In between waking up from water-related nightmares she serves drinks at the family tavern.  (In the original, the girl was on her way to a job as a church organist, and her apparent lack of religious faith made her seem a lot more out of place than a well-known local bartender.)  Are there zombies?  Yup, plenty of 'em hang out at the nearby haunted carnival where they stand around amid barren sets that would have needed ten times as many stuffed toys and other background props to pass for a real carnival.  The best parts are the disturbing split-second cutaways to pale, violently quivering and thrashing ghouls (an idea copied from JACOB'S LADDER, a movie which itself copied the first CARNIVAL OF SOULS).  Get ready to freeze-frame the VCR on the awesome brief shot of the undead sitting around a table in the tavern--these are some VERY creepy visages, one of whom resembles Dr. Phibes and another whose eyelids appear to be sewn shut!  The lead actress is excellent, and all the cast is good, but the 1963 film was FAR scarier.

 

 

 CEMETERY OF TERROR (1985)

Dir: Ruben Galindo Jr.

Behind that nothing title lurks an above-average, legitimately tense little thriller that deserves to be seen by more U.S. fans. Hugo Stiglitz, also in NIGHT OF A THOUSAND CATS and CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, stars as a doctor in this Mexican film that offers a simple, almost old-fashioned spook story. It may be light on plot and empty of deep meaning, but the dark, eerie sets and atmospheric photography make for a suspenseful viewing experience that's a lot more fun than many better-known, more expensive pictures. On Halloween night, three dull young couples sneak into a decrepit old mansion filled with the kind of dusty, sheet-covered furnishings, looming shadows and enormous cobwebs that were common in haunted house movies of the 1930s and '40s. One of the guys explores the attic and finds a copy of The Book Of The Dead, the same darned device that caused problems in EQUINOX, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES, THE EVIL DEAD and others. Since their girlfriends don't want to make out with them anyway, the guys decide to steal a corpse from the local morgue and try a resurrection ritual from the book in the (great looking) cemetery by the mansion. A sudden thuderstorm forces the group inside but the bearded corpse does indeed revive and staggers off toward the house to finish off the meddling kids. A madman who likes to slash people to ribbons with his sharpened fingernails, the homicidal zombie is pretty scary as he creeps around in the shadows in search of victims. While busy shredding the teens, he happens upon the book himself. Then a group of younger kids, jack-o-lanterns in hand, shows up looking for spooky fun. A tomb bursts open, the ground starts to crack, tombstones topple, and all of a sudden the kids are surrounded by an army of decayed, impressively made-up and costumed walking dead. There aren't really any major surprises after that, but the last half of CEMETERY OF TERROR is fast-paced and packed with good sudden shocks and creepy attacking zombies. The biggest flaw from a dramatic standpoint is the constant cutaways to the ongoing police investigation as slow-witted cops try to reclaim the stolen cadaver while Stiglitz tries to save the kids. Often the action jumps from the intense situation at the zombie-plagued house to bland filler of Stiglitz and the police driving around town in police cars or talking on phones about where to look next. An aura of supernatural evil begins to overtake the house, resulting in an axe flying through the air, trees falling, flames shooting out of open graves, and other picturesque all-purpose horrific manifestations. One of the victims is played by Rene Cardona Ill, grandson of the director of numerous horror/wrestling films of the '60s and '70s.' A rare movie but one that's worth looking for.  It is a/k/a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.

 

 

 

 CHILD, THE (1977)

Dir: Robert Voskanian

  A young woman arrives at the isolated home of a grouchy old farmer to take her new position as governess for the man's lonely, moody little girl. The child, who has CARRIE-style telekenetic powers, hangs out at the nearby graveyard at night in the company of her "friends", rotted zombies who helpfully slaughter anybody the kid doesn't like. She also draws sketches of funerals, zombies killing people and various subjects that should have tipped the other characters off that the surly, hateful kid has issues. At the climax, the scary, mummified-looking zombies attack the screaming heroine and the child's grown brother in a sequence that's intense and harrowing, quite unlike the boring first three-quarters of the movie. For the most part, the editing is atrocious, the acting stilted, and the heavy-handed attempts to brew up atmosphere are mostly laughable, like the fact that many familiar old pre-recorded sound effects are used, including a howling wind sound that's often heard in shots in which it's plain that leaves and trees are utterly still. The overdone billowing fog used in the outdoor scenes often makes it look like there's a car fire taking place just offscreen, but at least somebody was trying. The worst thing about THE CHILD (which is also out on video under the title KILL AND GO HIDE) is its excruciating soundtrack. Prepare yourself for the worst excuse for scary music ever, as nearly every scene is backed with a noisy, unintentionally funny aural mess that alternates between sounding like a tired, overworked jazz band trying to improvise while drunk, a tornado hitting a music store, and a flock of angry geese demanding an explanation for the confused story. Strangely, just as the rest of the film finally gets good in its final reel, the music follows suit and finally introduces some eerie, screeching themes that add some real tension. It's interesting to note that this drive-in wonder contains closeups of prop zombie heads getting gruesomely bashed in, a zombie movie tradition that didn't become one until George Romero and Lucio Fulci would feature it in their films a couple of years later. I'm not sure why the dried-out looking corpses seen here would gush fresh, bright red blood from their wounds, but seen in a fantasv context, the contrast of those splashes of shiny red against the dusty blue-gray ghouls is shocking and provides a nice visual highlight. Like CARRIE (and a number of other Stephen King stories), this film purports to make a statement about the devastating effects of loneliness and betrayal upon children, but unlike more thoughtful approaches to similar material it offers viewers no real opportunity to sympathize with the troubled girl since she's depicted as a rude little brat from the beginning. Thus the message emerges as: Parents, think twice before punishing your kids. They just might have an army of zombies ready to come and rip your face off.

 CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD (2001)

Dir: Tor Ramsey

This quickie tries hard to look like a legit sequel to George Romero's 1968 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, but don't you believe it. It opens with a re-staging of that film's ending, with the last few zombies being gunned down by cops and civilians circa 1968. Tom Savini is on hand as a macho tough-guy zombie hunter, but for all his supposed expertise in dealing with the undead, his character is quickly bitten by a ghoul and thrown away by the script. In the present day, a vanload of teens argues about whether or not the local zombie invasion ever really happened or is just an old wives' tale (never mind that you'd think an event as catastrophic as corpses coming back to life might make national headlines and would probably be well documented in the town where it happened barely over thirty years later). They catch sight of a wandering zombie in the road, go sailing off a cliff to their deaths (instead of simply stepping on the gas and mowing him down), and revive as staggering, blank-faced ghouls who mostly stand behind trees or buildings waiting for someone to walk into their clutches. Turns out the zombie who caused the crash was none other than Abbott Hayes, a dead rapist/ serial killer who was the only ghoul to elude the posse back in '68. He's an effective, scary makeup creation but he's poorly worked into the plot.  He spends most of the film watching from the sidelines as if he has some supervisory connection with the newer zombies, a link which isn't explored. One wonders what this lone zombie has been doing for the past three decades, and since he's now just one more shambling ghoul, the fact that he was an evildoer in life means nothing and has no effect on his undead character (apart from seemingly making him enjoy being a zombie instead of just acting like he's in a trance like the rest). Mr. Hayes flexes his hands and fingers a lot and sometimes smiles right at you-the-viewer, but never speaks or does anything else particularly interesting. One subplot that goes nowhere concerns a man who comes to town to open a used car lot, only to learn that his corrupt realtor father means to build the business right on the grounds of a cemetery without removing the bodies.  So what?  The car dealership doesn't have anything to do with the zombies other than providing them with a few extra victims. As with other productions that involve John Russo and Bill Hinzman (two poor talent-barren souls who spent the next 40 years trying to parlay their involvement with Romero's 1968 film into big-time horror careers), there's no real storytelling here, just random events and arbitrary action that never comes together in any cohesive way and an overwhelming sense of people trying to make up something like a story as they go, when their real interest lies in shooting footage of zombies in the woods and playing with things like fog machines and stage blood.  Writer Karen Wolf must be from some distant planet, as she fails to come up with a single line of dialogue that sounds remotely like anything an actual human being would say in these circumstances.   Somebody really needs to provide Russo and Hinzman with a plot someday and I don't mean the cemetery kind.

 

 CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1973)

Dir: Bob Clark

  The darkly humorous title perfectly sumsup the attitude of this offbeat, low-budget gem that stands as a permanent reminder that horror movies can deliver real chills without overblown production values and big-name stars.  While it's not ever likely to be referred to as "A Good Movie" by mainstream audiences, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS remains a guilty pleasure for countless movie fans worldwide, and for some very good reasons. It overcomes its budgetary limitations through imaginative direction, spooky lighting and photography, and an incredibly eerie, mournful, howling-wind and dripping-cavern soundtrack that's unique in the genre (when is somebody going to put this score out on CD? ...Haunted House attractions across the nation could make great use of it!).  There isn't much in the way of plot (unless you count the ones in the cemetery), but here's the setup: An obnoxious, sarcastic, long-winded creep of a theatre director takes his small band of young actors to a remote island off the east coast to write and rehease a horror production.  The island seems to contain nothing but a creepy old house and a large graveyard.  The atmosphere slowly mounts as the disrespectful cad commits one act of self-indulgent stupidity after another, including digging up a corpse named Orville and literally using it as a plaything just to get a rise out of his cronies.  At first his actions seem fairly harmless, but he soon begins to carry the joke too far and the rest of the cast--and the audience--stops laughing.  The gang performs a ritual (found in an old book in the house) aimed at awakening the dead, and although the spell at first appears to fail, after a while the corpses in the cemetery really do begin to rise!  This sequence is almost unbearably creepy and gets my vote for the all-time best " zombies crawling out of graves" scene in horror history (the only one to rival it, oddly emough, is in the Michael Jackson music video THRILLER).  The zombie makeups (the work of Alan Ormsby, the guy who plays the director in the movie) are excellent, encompassing every conceivable sort of 'dead face', from dusty, pasty faces to slimy glop-heads to horrifying skull-like ghouls.  Many of them look really mean and angry and would make great masks, too.  Once the dead surround the house and begin their assault, the movie turns into a somewhat anti-climactic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD clone, with characters boarding up windows and doors and so forth while the zombies bang against the outside of the house.  Even though this part of the movie seems overly familiar, it's still very well-executed and filled with genuine tension.  The scene in which Orville, after being the butt of so many jokes earlier on, finally sits up with revenge on his undead mind, is unforgettably chilling (even though nothing particularly clever happens as a result).  The film's quiet final shot is at once both ominous and hilarious, helping to make this a unique, must-see flick for zombie fans.

 CHILDREN, THE (1980)

Dir: Max Kalmanowicz

No, this isn't a sequel to the 1977 zombie film THE CHILD. Instead, it's a cheap-looking, rather self-important little quickie that's practically slopping over with Relevant Social Criticism. THE CHILDREN seems less interested in being scary than in hammering home its simplistic moral view that America is full of unfit parents who are too caught up in their own petty little worlds to pay proper attention to their kids. (If the makers of this movie thought that was a problem back in 1980, they must be even more upset today, as I'm afraid our society has only gotten worse as a whole.)  I agree with the movie's disdain for selfish, disinterested, short-sighted young nobodies who have children they're unready or unwilling to care for, but it seems a little silly to take such an alarmed stance on such a safe subject in the context of a low-budget gore movie. A schoolbus drives through a cloud of Atomic Radioactive All-Purpose Horror Movie Impetus that emanates from an unsafe nuclear power plant (more social criticism). As a result, all the children on board are turned into radioactive killer mini-zombies with deathly pale faces, dark circles under their eyes and black fingernails. The majority of the local parents, shown to be not only too weak and immature to take responsibility for their kids' upbringings but also too thick to notice when their kids have become monsters, get their punishment at the deadly hands of the zombie children, who have somehow acquired the power to fry people into sizzling piles of smoking radioactive bloody goo with a touch. Things get pretty gruesome as the killer kids walk up to adults, arms reaching out as if for a hug, and then cook them alive on contact. Thanks in part to the efforts of one of the town's few nice, concerned, responsible couples, it is learned that the only way to kill the little boys and ghouls is to chop off their hands. This unlikely turn of events didn't make any sense to me in a science-fiction context, so I guess it must be symbolic of something or other. The townspeople arm themselves with axes and the sick gore effects (which are pretty unconvincing when kids wearing obvious rubber cut-off hand stumps fall over) really kick in. The biggest surprise here for monster fans who grew up in the 1960s will be the presence in the cast of pop singer Gale Garnett, who provided the voice of the sexy puppet Francesca in the legendary 1966 animated feature MAD MONSTER PARTY?, which also featured the voice of Boris Karloff.  As already noted, the makeup and effects are nothing special, and the film is undistinguished in most other departments too. The photography, acting, editing. and soundtrack are consistently mediocre, but they certainly aren't the worst you've ever seen if you're a regular viewer of low-budget monster mayhem. It may have its moments, but this is a horror movie that's derailed by its own overly-preachy tone.

 CHILLING, THE (1989)

Dirs: Jack A. Sunseri, Deland Nuse

After all the other " - ING " horror movies (THE HOWLING, THE SHINING, THE AWAKENING, THE BURNING, THE WHISPERING, etc.), I guess it was inevitable that someone would come up with the title THE CHILLING sooner or later.  And after her amazing and popular performance in THE EXORCIST (1973), you'd think Linda Blair could've found work in better projects than nonsense like this and the even worse GROTESQUE (1987), but here she is, surrounded by some unconvincing electrified zombies along with other familiar faces like Troy Donahue and Dan Haggerty.  THE CHILLING was released directly to video stores with a large, cardboard, very cool promotional light-up zombie display, but I doubt that it helped.  It's a silly movie that has a professional look but relies on a number of unlikely coincidences and even more unlikely character reactions to propel its slight story.  At a cryonics (or, if you prefer, 'cryogenics') lab in Kansas City, some goofball security guards move a bunch of canned, chemically frozen human corpses outdoors on Halloween night. There's a quick, movie-style thunderstorm and sure enough, each and every coffinlike barrel containing a cadaver gets struck by lightning (some days everything seems to go wrong).  For some reason, the electrical charge thaws and awakens each body as an angry (and hungry) semi-melted zombie with glowing eyes.  They shuffle stiffly around the grounds growling and terrorizing Linda and company while a heroic and likeable nightwatchman (Haggerty) tries to come to the rescue.  The scene in which the dead are revived feels strangely artificial and uninvolving, and the few zombies on hand don't get as much screen time as you might hope.  Thev're kept in the dark most of the time, making it hard to get a good look at them.  Linda Blair's lab employee character comes off as a fairly sensible, articulate professional woman with nice clothes and a nice apartment, which makes it hard to believe she'd be dating a drunken loser, but her boyfriend is shown to be a troublesome alcoholic jerk who shows up for a while just to add to the overall confusion.  The idea that she'd have anything to do with a guy like him never seems real, but neither does much else in this movie.  Like many another low-budget zombie flick, THE CHILLING offers a fresh (if far-fetched) method for bringing the dead back to life but then fails to offer anything exciting or original beyond that initial bite-sized bit of plotting.  The cast of reliable, watchable low-budget film stars isn't enough to keep this movie from having a phony, near-parodic feel.  The great grimacing zombie head shown on the video box cover is a rubber mask that used to be available from Death Studios, although the mask doesn't appear in the film itself.  Some of the effects work is okay, but you won't get many chills from THE CHILLING.

 CHOPPER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN (1989)

Dir: Dan Hoskins

Could any movie possibly live up to that title? Apparently not. Many fantasy films made around this time suffered from an unsure, uneasy balance between horror and comedy and this may be one of the strangest. It's a spoof of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES in the style of RETURN OF THE LIVlNG DEAD. An all-girl gang of life's losers who call themselves The Cycle Sluts rides into an isolated desert town where their rowdy behavior antagonizes the local rednecks. These ladies don't walk softly but each one carries a big schtick: one's an ex-hooker; one's an AWOL soldier; one's a traumatized mute; one's fleeing a bad marriage, and so on. In a scene that copies the famous death-outside-the-door sequence from THE LEOPARD MAN, a kid inadvertently unleashes a horde of slow-moving, moaning zombies from a mine that was shut down due to deadly radiation. They're the work of local crackpot Ralph Willum (RETURN's Don Calfa with black hair), who's been killing people with the help of his long-suffering dwarf assistant (Ed Gale, giving the film's best performance), re-animating the corpses by inserting a special battery into their brains, and sending them out to work the mine. Can the Sluts save the survivng townsfolk (along with a busload of cynical blind orphans) by using an ice cream truck full of raw meat to lure the zombies into an old church which can then be blown up? There are clever touches, unique situations and even some fairly interesting characters but it's not nearly as much fun as it should have been. Much of the dialogue makes so little sense that it's frequently hard to tell just what anybody's talking about and the action scenes are so sloppily shot and choppily edited that it's often a job to figure out what's supposed to be happening. Calfa gets one of the all-time great movie villain lines, though, when he bellows "I'm not doing this for science. I'm not doing it for glory. I'm just mean!" The zombies, looking remarkably believeable in excellent Ed French makeup, can be killed by a blow to the bead but Calfa's character survives being run over by a car, shot in the leg and bitten by several zombies and walks away only slightly the worse for wear until he's finally dispatched in a scene that was so poorly put together I had to watch it twice to see exactly what happened. The end titles include a credit for storyboards, but judging from the way this movie looks it's hard to believe any were actually used. And you won't believe your ears when you hear the music used to score the zombies' early appearances. Even in spite of the lackluster presentation and self-conscious feel, this has enough unpredictable events, eerie night scenes and sympathy for its maladjusted characters to keep it watchable. It has lots of rolling severed heads too. With a rare pre-fame appearance by Billy Bob Thornton and an even rarer post-fame appearance by Martha Quinn.

 CHUD 2: BUD THE CHUD (1989)

Dir: David Irving

The first CHUD (from four years earlier) was a solid, effective monster movie about that old monster-makin' standby, Toxic Waste, being illegally disposed of in New York City's sewer system and causing the area's homeless people to mutate into vicious bug-eyed monsters. This embarrassingly unfunny comedy has nothing to do with that movie but swipes its title to dupe you into thinking it's a sequel. Imagine your disappointment when you find out it's one of way too many clumsy teen-oriented horror comedy flops that flooded video store shelves in the late '80s. A slew of familiar faces from TV including Robert Vaughn, June Lockhart, Norman Fell, Clive Revill, Bianca Jagger and Rich Hall can't save this tedious imitation of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985). Vaughn has what may be his worst role ever as an over-the-top Army commander in a satiric stereotype that doesn't work. Once again, the U.S. military is up to no good, trying to create an army of indestructible zombie soldiers but ending up with dangerous, hungry living corpses who won't take orders and are capable of spreading a deadly, highly contagious zombie plague. You might not think this gruesome premise could work as comedy but the morbidly funny RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD proved it could be done. No such luck here, though. Gerritt Graham is the last of the zombie flesh-eaters. nicknamed Bud (in a nod to George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD, which featured a zombie called Bub).  In an attempt to get a passing science grade, two dimwitted college slackers in the Bill-&-Ted tradition steal Bud's cadaver and bring him back to "life".  He quickly escapes and staggers around town biting people and turning them into cannibalistic zombies too. Things climax (if you can call it that) at a public swimming pool during a Halloween dance. The pasty-faced zombie makeup is good and Graham does a fine job of combining horror with humor in his non-speaking role but this movie is insufferably boring and predictable and all the innocent local folks being killed and revived as the living dead is too depressing, mean-spirited and repetitive to generate laughs. (There was one really good joke. though, early in the film. In case you're thinking about renting this one I won't spoil it for you, but you'll know it when you hear it.)   The direction by David Irving (brother of CARRIE co-star Amy) tries for some style but the lowbrow script (by the usually-reliable Ed Naha, author of the indispensible and hilariously funny reference book Horrors From Screen To Scream and here using an old WC Fields gag pseudonym) is too slow, unpleasant and unoriginal to allow a director to do much with it. There ought to be a law against giving crummy movies misleading titles to falsely pass them off as parts of a series. Write your congressman. monster fans. 

 

 

 CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD (1980)

Dir: Umberto Lenzi

This environmentally-aware Italian/Spanish co-production endorses the completely valid scientific theory that messing about with nuclear power will only lead to radioactive killer zombies.  Like the similarly preachy NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES, this one pretty much exhausts its supply of creativity in setting up an effectively ominous opening sequence, which leaves the bulk of the movie (action-packed though it is) as comparatively ordinary.  A mysterious unmarked plane makes an unscheduled landing at a busy airport, and when surrounded by the military, opens its doors to release a horde of unusually energetic ghouls.  Seems that a scientist on the plane had been contaminated by a radiation leak and somehow single-handedly managed to turn everybody on board into a deranged radioactive killer pseudo-zombie.  The monsters in this film differ from most movie zombies in that they kill with weapons, such as knives, axes, razors, lead pipes, and even guns(!!), which makes them seem more like homicidal maniacs than true members of the undead.  Although they don't talk, the ghouls appear to have at least a little memory of their human lives (one of them apparently knew how to safely land an aircraft).  Knives are definitely their weapon of choice, and this movie has to set some kind of record for 'Number Of Stabbings Per Reel', especially once the creatures go on a rampage through the city, attacking a TV station, a military base, a hospital and an amusement park.  The heroes are a TV reporter and his doctor wife, who go on the run but encounter the bloodthirsty killers at every turn. There are chases, shootouts and assaults galore, all aided by fast-paced editing, but the zombie makeups are among the worst ever.  A few of them are effective, but the majority of the creatures (and we get to see a lot of them) look like handfuls of lumpy brown crud slopped onto the faces of extras.  Unintentional laughs come from the fact that most of their hands still look perfectly normal (guess the makeup man ran out of crud).  In fact, it's a little shocking just how cheesy the makeup is for such an ambitious, otherwise expensive-looking movie.  Realistic monsters would've helped a lot, but most of these guys look like rowdy drunks on their way to a Halloween party.  The dialogue is mostly generic, and it seems especially odd to hear an 'anti-progress' speech coming from a doctor (the hero's wife, who of course at one point gets hysterical and has to be slapped by her loving husband....Gag).  Watch for the shot in which a zombie minister slowly turns toward the heroine to reveal his half-rotted face, starting from a position in which she would've seen his 'bad' side to begin with!  Did the editor really mean to leave that shot in the film?  Mel Ferrer is on hand as a general who, much like director Umberto Lenzi, doesn't know what to make of the situation, and the ending is copied from the classic 1945 British chiller DEAD OF NIGHT.  A picture of Elvis is seen in the background and one character listens to a rare Grace Jones song on a radio.  The uncut version is titled NIGHTMARE CITY.

 CONVENT, THE (2000)

Dir: Mike Mendez

When you see the superbly shot, artfully edited prologue, in which a crazed teen girl torches a Catholic boarding school and guns down the nuns while Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" on the soundtrack underscores the shocking events, you think this is going to be one exceptional horror movie.  As the story proper gets underway, however, you notice the script and situations getting gradually dumber and dumber until the film ends on the same old senseless "the horror's not over" cliche that was already making audiences roll their eyes and moan "Oh brother" twenty years earlier.  Clearly made by people who have been watching too much MTV, THE CONVENT is a high-energy, quirky, virtual remake of 1988's NIGHT OF THE DEMONS but with a bit more background story and more accomplished photography.  A gang of boorish college creeps, spewing dialogue of the tiresome "we all really can't stand each other" variety, sneak into the creepy old establishment of the title 40 years after the opening massacre. Of course they get bumped off, but then they are re-animated as demonic, twitching, spastic zombies.   The mayhem this time is the fault of the funniest satanists in movie history, a gaggle of losers led by an obnoxious Dairy Queen employee.   They spend their nights hiding in the basement, staging meaningless rituals, faking accents and calling themselves "the 13th coven", "the son of evil", "the embodiment of lust" and other hilariously pretentious drivel.   The film's depiction of devil cultists as silly, insecure, clueless posers is a laugh riot and even though it may have been inspired by the "Goth Talk" skits on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE it will definitely make THE CONVENT stick in your memory.   Of course these twerps have no idea what they're doing and run in all directions screaming like scared gradeschoolers when they find that this time they really have unleashed forces of evil.   As you can probably guess, the satire here is funny, insightful and on-target.  But this film suffers from a severe split personality and the frequent shifts back and forth from parody to shock tend to be more confusing than surprising.  The gory purple zombies are creatively made up in Wildfire fluorescent paints and shot with blacklights, giving the monster scenes a uniquely bright, high-contrast carnival spookhouse flavor that's enhanced by kinetic camerawork, exciting music and the pixilated, hyperactive movements of the zombies.   A surprisingly well-preserved Adrienne Barbeau shows up to save the day but plays a one-dimensional character.   The best performance is by Megahn Perry as Monica a/k/a "Mo", the smart-mouthed goth chick who's always a step ahead of the macho clods around her.   She's immensely appealing and when they nonchalantly kill her off, the movie never recovers from the loss of its only interesting character.   One of the shortest releases in years, the whole thing clocks in at only an hour and fifteen minutes long.

 CORPSE EATERS (1974)

Dir: Donald R. Passmore

This long-thought-lost Canadian zombie quickie opens with a shot of a chubby, balding, middle-aged man taking a seat in a theater to watch this movie.  What follows is an unbelievable gimmick: A narrator tells us that, due to the stomach-upsetting content of the film to follow, viewers with "sensitive stomachs" will be warned to close their eyes whenever a gruesome shock is about to appear by means of a siren sound effect accompanied by footage of the man in the theater reacting in horror, trying to keep from throwing up. This gimmick is used a few times, but the editor must have fallen asleep at the switch, as several gory shots appear without the "warning" heralding them. Despite the bloody footage of zombies eating flesh, the most "upsetting" scene shows someone's arm being poked with a needle as a blood sample is taken, for real,  in extreme close-up. Ouch!  CORPSE EATERS is only 56 minutes long and feels decidedly unfinished, as though a lot of climactic material is either missing or was never shot.  The confused feature opens at a mortuary, where a hearse, coffins and real embalming equipment are seen.  The local undertaker is a two-faced cynical old grouch who laughs at people for spending good money on his services. After way too much speedboat and swimming footage, two young couples enter an old cemetery on Friday the 13th.  One guy remembers a black magic ritual performed by his uncle (?), and thus the world's fastest, easiest, simplest ceremony for raising the dead is performed for no reason. As is usually the case, the dead are ungrateful for the interruption of their slumber and crawl up out of the ground to bite bloody hunks out of the living. Impressive, scary zombie makeups are showcased as pale gray crusty hands thrust up out of the ground. Along with the zombie makeups, the bloody gore FX are mostly very well handled too. The movie is sometimes too dark, looks grainy and suffers from uneven sound, but this is a super-rare feature that isn't in any of the reference books and has barely ever been screened anywhere. The guy who made it also made two other long-lost horror movies, and although a print of the forgotten CORPSE EATERS was found soon after the director's death, it is unlikely that his other features still exist anywhere in any form. After the horrors in the graveyard (which include a sudden thunderstorm with scratches-on-the-emulsion lightning), the surviving couple are forgotten about as the film returns to the undertaker from the begining. He stays late at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, sitting at his desk looking at a sheet of paper and getting drunk from an incongruously elegant looking bottle of wine he keeps in the drawer. In a creepy scene, he hears strange noises and discovers that the room where the bodies are kept now contains a bunch of empty caskets.  The ending suggests that the whole thing may have only been the undertaker's booze-induced nightmare. This virtually unknown zombie cheapie isn't a rediscovered classic, nor is it likely to ever be thought of as a 'good' movie, what with all the bad acting and editing and the absence of a real storyline, but the makeup is effective, a lot of the camerawork is stylish and the overall mood is suitably eerie and dark. A unique viewing experience, to put it mildly.

 CORPSES (2004)

Dir: Rolfe Kanefsky

It's a little surprising to see Jeff Fahey in something that looks this much like an amateur project, but here he is, playing a dorky smalltown sheriff in an uninspired zombie comedy.  Hoping to come up with a winning formula by mixing equal parts RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, NIGHT LIFE and RE-ANIMATOR, this dreary quickie has a few decent moments and a number of good gags and amusing lines but doesn't try very hard to be funny. Working on a recipe for new improved embalming fluid, a harried mortician accidentally discovers the glowing green serum that resurrects the dead seen in RE-ANIMATOR, but his version of it only brings them back to life for an hour at a time. He resurrects some baseball-paying teens, a night watchman, two mean bikers, a hooker and a few other locals as growling, stiff-limbed walking corpses who carry out his orders in exchange for regular injections. Of course this discovery could make him rich and famous beyond anyone's wildest deams, but all the guy really wants is (for some reason) to win back his shapely but horrible, shrewish, superficial, selfish ex-wife (who is now sleeping with Fahey).  Tiffany Shepis is Fahey's troubled 19-year-old daughter but her character is such a total bitch that it's impossible to sympathize with her even though we see the causes of her bad behavior.  There aren't any female characters who are remotely likable,  as all the women in town appear to be trashy, snotty, awful people.  There are a few mildly funny ideas, like when a zombie uses the torn-off arm of a victim to smash a glass case during a jewelry store robbery, but most of the time the crude direction, homely camerawork and unsure acting take their toll. The editor tries hard to make the movie seem funnier than it really is, but after a while the constant wipes and cutaways only seem distracting and out of place.  People argue and complain and trade sarcastic barbs a lot but none of this is much fun to watch.  A comic highpoint is when the attacking zombies tear Shepis's clothes off. Standing there in her underwear, she demands to know, "Was that really necessary?!"  The zombies are a disappointing lot, staggering around with standard pale faces decorated here and there with random bloody chunks of generic goop.  It's a shame they didn't come up with at least one cool zombie makeup design.  The gore effects include shootings, throat rippings and dismemberment. They're handled efficiently enough but they're nothing horror fans haven't seen a hundred times before.  Sheriff Fahey finally gets to go all Bruce Campbell on the ghouls and turn into a zombie killin' tough guy in the last reel, but he's kind of embarrassing strutting around swinging various garden implements at the dead (even though he knows bullets would work just as well against them) and wearing sunglasses in the dark just to look cool.  In Fahey's defense, he probably wasn't given much of an idea of exactly how he was supposed to play his inconsistent semi-satiric character. At the supposed climax, the dead predictably turn on their master and tear him limb from limb because he ran out of serum, even though it's obvious they should really have attacked the teen who kicked the vat of the stuff over instead of immediately killing the only guy who could make more of it for them. That turn of events is typical of how unimaginative most of the movie is, with a style and story that are every bit as flat, uninventive and forgettable as its generic one-word title.  If you're a big fan of "zomedies" you might find it a fairly painless way to kill an hour and 23 minutes but, as stated above, it really isn't much fun.

 CURSE OF THE BLUE LIGHTS (1988)

Dir: John Henry Johnson

This unique, outrageous independent feature is extremely ambitious and contains at least one shot at just about every type of makeup effect imaginable. Too bad the plot is ridiculous, the script is boring and the acting is horrid. In the woods behind a Pueblo Colorado cemetery, a fat green monster (aided by a talkative witch-faced corpse and a three-fingered, pig-nosed ogre in a silly wig) melts bodies down into something that resembles Wendy's chili. Their goal is to resurrect the Muldoon Man, a seven-foot-tall petrified gargoyle who's been buried in the ground nearby for centuries. Wouldn't you know it, a group of meddling teens stumbles across the giant creature on the very same night. The resulting struggle involves a magic talisman, a wildly overacting witch, a walk-through mirror, melting bloody faces, a disbelieving patrolman, and a very stagebound graveyard that disgorges an impressive horde of elaborately made-up zombies. The homemade sets and costumes are tacky but imaginatively detailed and some of the featured makeups are very complex and well-executed. They look like early efforts by a highly talented artist. I just wish they would have looped in the monsters' dialogue, since the heavy latex appliances on the actors combined with the weak performances and overall poor sound quality makes it awfully hard to hear what the various ghouls are supposed to be saying. For some reason, once the hulking stone creature is finally revived, the first thing he does is kill the chubby ghoul who brought him back to life. The lengthy climax includes an amusingly slow swordfight, a handy bottle of nitroglycerine and lots of prop zombie heads getting blown apart by the cops. The ending makes no sense at all. In fact, the whole production really has nothing much to say. It's just a lot of noisy mock heroics with teens fighting monsters and a very formulaic attitude toward its characters: the guys are brave, wisecracking men of action and the girls are helpless screaming nobodies. I liked the idea of monsters and zombies working toward a common goal and the discovery of the fossilized remains of a weird creature nicely conjures up memories of interesting real-life incidents like the case of the Piltdown Man, but every chance for an authentic 'urban legend' type of horror/mystery is rapidly discarded in favor of simple-minded, poorly-staged funhouse-style thrills.  And by the way, if you were wondering about the title, the muddled script and garbled dialogue make it a little hard to tell but I'm pretty sure the mysterious blue lights the townspeople see in the woods at night are nothing more than railroad lanterns with blue glass, carried by the monsters (not all monsters can see in the dark, you know). The score is drab and generic and sounds like it would be more at home in a Disney TV-movie than here amidst the gore.  Watchable but forgettable.

 

CRYPT, THE (2009)

Dir: Craig McMahon

The most unlikely team of graverobbers in human history-- five girls who look like Playboy Playmates and a guy fresh out of prison who looks like he'd be more at home in a '90s-era Seattle garage band-- are pestered by the walking dead in this hokey feature from the maker of the MACHINED movies. If you can get past the choppy editing and slow pacing, there's still a bothersome lack of realism to contend with. The girls are all so determined to keep their shapely legs uncovered that they wear shorts on their planned excursion through damp, dark, crumbling, underground stone tunnels. Every now and then one of them dies due to either falling mortarwork or direct assaults by the annoyed undead. The chick who planned the heist claims to have been down in the subterranean vault before. She explains that she even saw the ghouls there last time but that they just hung around and watched and never hurt anybody(?!). Apparently enough is enough for these corpses, however, and they're not nearly so agreeable this time around. You'd think first-hand foreknowledge of the walking dead would be sufficient to keep most people out of the cryptrobbing business, but not this tough cookie and her emptyheaded friends. Some scenes and conversations appear unfinished, the characters' behavior seldom makes sense and far too much time is spent wandering around in the dark while nothing is really happening. The only thing that works in this movie is the ghouls themselves, ghostly greenish apparitions that look convincingly like honest-to-goodness ambulatory dead people, complete with dead white eyes and flaking skin that recalls the excellent makeups in Hammer's THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES. They're among the creepier undead of movies from this era, and most of the scenes in which they appear are shot with a careful eye toward light and shadow. According to the script (assuming there was one), they're supposed to be "foreigners" who had their valuables buried with them at the time of the Great Depression, but that still doesn't explain why the men were apparently buried wearing hats. The irritable dead in THE CRYPT can materialize and vanish at will (I think) and their baleful presence is the only thing that might keep anybody watching long enough for this boring, poorly told story to creep to its confused conclusion. Ten points for the makeup but an enthusiastic "thumbs down" for the feature.

 CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD (1982)

Dir: Tony Malanowski

Scraping the bottom of a very deep grave, someone actually released this hopeless home-movie shot in Maryland.  It's so atrocious that even Midnight Video's Bill Knight (something of an authority on Bad Horror) called it "the PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE of zombie films."  Come to think of it, since PLAN NINE was itself technically a zombie film, maybe that description doesn't quite make sense.  That's OK, though, because neither does this film.  Three hunters and their unfriendly, unattractive, throughly unappealing girlfriends stumble onto a Civil War cemetery while getting themselves lost in the woods.  When one guy steals an old diary of the slaughter of Confederate troops that took place there, the South rises again in the form of a gang of flesh-eating ghouls.  The survivors finally get the idea to give the book back to the zombie captain, a guy with a fake beard and a painted-white face.   Although it probably wasn't intentional, this movie comes off as highly demeaning to women since the girls in the group spend the whole time complaining and whining.  (Check out the blonde girl--if there's ever an award given for Worst Actress Ever In a Horror Film, she just may get my vote.)  On a technical level, this is a disaster, with ugly cinematography, crude editing, laughable sound effects and pathetic gore.  One girl is supposed to be blind but never acts like it, looking directly at people's eyes when talking to them.  The sound is so ineptly looped in that you can hear the tape recorder starting and stopping in the background of some of the characters' lines.  Some of the zombies are extras in adequate rubber masks or crusty makeup, but many of them are simply Halloween party-style white greasepaint jobs.  I guess there weren't enough fake Civil war uniforms to go around either, as most of the dead wear old overcoats and some even sport plain old blue jeans and plaid shirts to complement their very 1982 haircuts!  A scene of zombies pulling what looks like pig intestines out of the shirts of a couple of dead bozos seems to go on forever, accompanied by noises that sound like somebody crunching potato chips.  Probably the most hilariously bad special effect, though, is the use of filmed exploding fireworks, shown IN REVERSE, superimposed over shots of burning prop corpse heads!  This was directed by one Tony Malanowski, who's also the culprit behind the similar NIGHT OF HORROR, another Civil War spook movie.  To his credit, Malanowski tries valiantly to generate some tension during the climax, but he only comes up with tedium since he's stuck with bad actors, a repetitious soundtrack and the fact that the climax is stretched out to about half the length of the film.  There's some silly talk about "you can't take their pain away from them", and I had no idea what that meant, but someone must've liked the sound of it, because it's in the script a lot.  This dud is also sometimes known as CURSE OF THE CANNIBAL CONFEDERATES, and that version may or may not contain more footage.

 DARK ECHOES (1986)

Dir: George Robotham

Here in the U.S. of A. we don't get to see many Yugoslavian monster movies. If DARK ECHOES is a good example of what they're like, we haven't been missing much. This ridiculous movie tells the story of an alcoholic psychic playboy called in to help police solve a series of senseless, poorly-filmed murders plaguing a small Austrian village. The superstitious townsfolk believe that the killings are the work of Captain Gohr (really), a sea captain whose ship mysteriously sank nearby 100 years before, killing everyone on board. With little information to go on, the board of inquiry blamed Gohr for the deaths and now it would seem he's coming back from the dead to clear his good name by creeping around in the shadows killing anybody he can get his hands on. The martini-obsessed psychic (who we first meet via some tedious time wasting "ski holiday" footage) is able to see visions of the murders before they happen, but even with that advantage the rotted corpse manages to stay one step ahead of him and the cops throughout most of the movie. The psychic flashes are signalled by silly zooms in on the character's serious-looking face, accompanied by cliché double exposures and stings of dramatic music. After the first couple of times these scenes tend to invoke laughter instead of intrigue. The mystery aspect of the plot is ruined by the fact that we've already seen the captain rising from the water during the opening credits, so much of the film is spent waiting for the heroes to figure out what the audience already knows. More time is wasted on characters who have no function in the plot, including a nosy British reporter, a local witch and her cult of dancing white-robed paganists, and a dim-witted American tourist apparently played by a relative of the director. The makeup for the zombie captain is credited to Mark Reedall, John Chambers and Tom Burman Studios. This is hard to believe since Herr Gohr looks like a guy in an average rubber skull mask with some vaseline smeared on it, his supposedly century-old uniform looks brand new, and he moves with all the speed and agility of any ordinary, still-alive human being. In fact, he comes off as so phony that through much of the film I was expecting a SCOOBY-DOO ending, wherein it turns out that the villain was really some criminal wearing a costume and taking advantage of a local legend. But no, he turns out to be the real thing, and in the dopey ending the townspeople force him off a cliff with mirrors (he can't bear to see his Halloween-masked face) and he falls into the lake--where he was headed at the time anyway--and the heroes somehow conclude that a fall into the water would be enough to kill the 160-year-old walking corpse. The photography and scenery are nice but this is more of a throwback to the low-budget monster-on-the-loose films of the '50s than anything else.

 DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979)

Dir: George A. Romero

Romero returned to flesh-eating undead territory with this masterful belated sequel to NOTLD that's remarkable for several reasons.  Besides being one of precious few horror sequels that's smart enough to stand as an entirely new and different viewing experience from the original while still remaining true to its spirit and mythology, this movie actually improves upon many aspects of the first film.  Believe it or rot, DAWN actually inspired more copycat zombie movies than NIGHT did, even though it was using the same basic concepts established by Romero a decade earlier.  This time the walking corpses have increased their numbers to the point of causing an all-out war between the living and the dead, and DAWN is loaded from start to finish with nerve-jangling close calls, thrilling action sequences, shocking and bloody violence that's often so extreme as to be downright cartoonish, and (best of all) excellent scripting that emphasizes believeable human reactions to the breakdown of social order.  After a series of chaotic shoot-outs in an unforgettable opening sequence, DAWN focuses on four characters trying to stave off the attacking ghouls by holing up in a huge (closed due to marauding zombie hordes) shopping mall.  Being trapped in a situation where sudden, violent death is always a present danger but where they're surrounded by every sort of creature comfort imaginable gives our heroes a chance to live out their consumer fantasies while learning to actually enjoy running through the besieged parts of the mall blowing apart zombie heads with increasing recklessness.  The zombies, it seems, have gravitated to the place that meant the most to them in life, and since this is the good ol' greed-oriented U.S. of A., that means the shopping mall is a prime target. That may sound a bit silly on paper, but believe me, this flick's brilliantly wicked sense of humor is buried so far beneath its layers of suspense, terror and visual shock that you won't be laughing (except, of course, for when Romero wants you to).   The acting and photography are uniformly excellent as well, and special credit should be given to Tom Savini's outstanding exploding heads and other great gore effects, plus the wonderful, haunting, "dead-on" Goblin soundtrack.  In short (yeah, I know it's already too late to make this review short), DAWN OF THE DEAD is not only my personal #1 Favorite Zombie Film Of All Time, but its undeniable status as one of the zombie genre's few genuine masterpieces make it a must-see movie for every horror fan. See it NOW!

 

 DAY IT CAME TO EARTH, THE (1977)

Dir: Harry Z. Thomason

Fans of vintage Don Post Studios masks should look for this. It's the movie that uses a Post "Mummy 5000 BC" mask, right off the shelf of some costume shop, for its monster. It's also one heck of an off-the-wall production, with an overall air of satire even though there's nothing particularly funny about it. Too good-natured to be effective as horror, it appears to have heen intended as a "teenagers vs. monsters" drive-in flick in the tradition of THE BLOB or INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN, only made twenty years too late. Ostensibly set in the '50s, it starts out as a gangland stool pigeon is gunned down by his cronies. They dump his body in the shallowest lake you'll ever see, and as luck would have it, a meteor falls to earth and plunges into the same lake, apparently the very next night. Unexplained alien forces from the stone revive the corpse, who shambles out of the water in search of the gangsters who did him in. He kills them off with no problem and spends the rest of the movie frightening (but never attacking) dumb teens and assorted background characters. Although he's a scary sight with his skull-faced head and soggy chain-dragging body, this monster never gets to do anything other than throttle two mobsters early in the film. Much of the movie is spent with four naive college students and the wisecracking local cops.  Comedian George Gobel, of all people, plays the kids' geology professor.  He never gets to do much either, but he does deIiver this line of dialogue with a straight face when asked for an opinion on UFO reports: "Of the accounts thus far advanced, many of them are probable but they're still a little sketchy. I personally would like to see more light shed on this subject but until such time as a more conclusive case is presented, I would like to reserve my judgment."  With that kind of a gift for using as many words as possible to say absolutely nothing, the guy should have run for President. The acting is pretty terrible, but I suppose that's what one would expect from a cast that uses first names like "Wink" and "Delight". The underwater footage of the zombie is great but most of the film looks washed-out, grainy and too dark.  The blue-tinted, day-for-night shots are especially obvious since some of the actors are clearly wearing sungIasses!  People who see the guy-in-a-mummy-mask monster are at a loss for any way to describe him besides "lt was something not human!".  Along with the jokey dialogue, the other thing that makes this feel like a spoof is the fact that the authorities dub the monster  a "geegagoo",  short for "geological gaseous goon". The film feels unfinished, ending with a radio report voiceover telling us the gangster's body was found and identified. A second meteor splashes down at the climax but nobody notices and it seems to have no effect on the zombie or the plot. The director went on to produce the TV series DESIGNlNG WOMEN, one of the lead actresses would later marry Tom Hanks, and the Mummy mask was reissued by Post in 2000.

 

 

 DAY OF THE DEAD (2008)

Dir: Steve Miner

All right now, let's all take a deep breath.  Let's remain calm.  Instead of simply comparing this generic action/ horror programmer to the work of Romero, let's treat it with the serious consideration it deserves.  Which of course isn't much.  If you thought the original 1985 DAY OF THE DEAD was something of a letdown, wait 'til you see this dreary re-hash.  It plays more like an Uwe Boll movie than a good movie, but they did do a few things fairly well and there are plenty of great exploding heads. The 2004 DAWN OF THE DEAD remake at least retained the original's shopping mall milieu and element of social satire, but this forgettable feature discards everything from its inspiration apart from the title and some character names.  People are called "Captain Rhodes", "Dr. Logan" and so on, although the characters here have little or no similarity to their namesakes from the '85 movie.  Instead of the fascinating "Bub" from Romero's film, this movie offers "Bud", an oddly pacifistic soldier who becomes a zombie that refuses to eat human flesh because he was a vegetarian when he was human.  If that sounds like a better idea for a comedy than a scary film, well, that's what I thought too.  Much more is taken from 28 DAYS LATER and the RESIDENT EVIL films than from Romero's movie.  A group of army cyphers runs around a small town trying to contain the zombie plague, which infects people like a cold virus.  Victims first get nosebleeds and pasty complexions, then swiftly morph into flesh-eating lunatics with cliche' pale eyes and unlikely open sores that suddenly appear on their faces thanks to the miracle of affordable CGI.  As in many previous zombie tales, it's all because of a government experiment in chemical warfare.  And of course there's a selfish, arrogant young guy in a suit who knows all about the project and helps deliver the necessary exposition when the time comes.  None of this has anything to do with anything from the DAWN remake or any other zombie movie that came before.  The concept of the living dead has degenerated so far by this time that the term "zombie" no longer fits. There's no sense of anything like life-after-death with these super-powered monsters.  They don't look or behave like anything one could reasonably be expected to accept as reanimated human corpses. They move in silly fast-motion, act like angry rioters, and, in what must be one of the most ill-advised alterations to zombie lore ever used in any movie, they develop the sudden ability to stick to walls and ceilings like Spider-Man.  If you're going to make up a new set of rules and powers for your monsters, it's probably not a good idea to plug them into a movie that's publicly sold as a remake of something that adhered to an entirely different, well-established mythos.  Nearly all the creatures' scenes are ruined by the disastrous use of fast-motion, which makes them look more like The Keystone Murderers than anything to be seriously feared.  Another lame-brained idea is these "zombies'" inexplicable tendency to burst into flames and crumble to ash instantly when touched by fire.  In most zombie films, the undead fear fire because their dried-out old bodies go up quickly, but the zombies here are all people who have changed very rapidly.  So apparently the virus turns their blood into gasoline.   Some of them run around with their clothing hanging in zombie-style tattered shreds, but since they're all people who transformed in a few hours instead of corpses who spent time rotting in the earth, one wonders how they managed to tear their attire to ribbons so quickjly. The script tries for real characterization here and there and often succeeds, but it's too bad they had to include characters like The Oversexed Teens and The Embarrassing Black Stereotype.  The disposable feature ends with a radio announcement telling us the contagion has been halted and everything is now just fine again, as a final insult is delivered to the audience's intelligence with the entirely predictable end shot of one last zombie sticking his face into the camera.  But DAY OF THE DEAD 2008 isn't a crime against humanity.  It's just a below-average horror movie with a weak script.  Miner also directed the second and third FRIDAY THE 13TH movies, the seventh HALLOWEEN movie and LAKE PLACID, so viewers shouldn't have been expecting much. 

 DAY OF THE DEAD (1985)

Dir: George A. Romero

 I'm such a devoted fan of the talent and intellect of George Romero that, in light of his numerous film achievements, I'm even willing to forgive him for DAY OF THE DEAD, a follow-up to DAWN that can best be described as a Bloody Disappointment. The setting has been changed from the microcosm of the shopping mall to a drab underground bunker where trapped survivors are split into two sharply divided opposing sides: pacifist, humanitarian scientists determined to find a cause and cure for the zombie plague; and ridiculously rednecked militarists led by a trigger-happy, utter nut case who inexplicably has risen to a position of authority over all. The central character is Lori Cardille, a strong-willed young woman who, disappointingly, is given little to do besides bicker with the bad-guy soldiers. Her boyfriend, a whining loony, is bitten by a ghoul early on and in a truly sick scene has his arm amputated to prevent the infection from spreading. After the doctors and the soldiers swear at each other for what seems like hours, the one-armed goof, for some reason--maybe because he just wanted all the pointless arguing to stop--decides to just open the gates and welcome a teeming mass of zombie flesheaters into the base, allowing for some audience satisfaction to finally arrive as we get to see most of the unappealing, foul-mouthed dopes torn to bloody shreds by the creatures. The well-drawn characters and sharp dialogue of DAWN are here replaced with one-dimensional stereotypes who deliver most of their lines with either ponderous solemnity or shrieking soap-opera histrionics. On the plus side, the zombies are more elaborately made-up for a really decayed look this time around, there are occasional bursts of show-stopping gore effects and a few all-too-brief scenes featuring "Bub", a sympathetic zombie who's slowly being trained to recall certain memories of his former human life by a comic-book style mad scientist. These sequences are truly fascinating, and I could've watched an entire feature about Bub and the psychological experiments being conducted on him, but unfortunately every time the Bub stuff starts to get really chilling and thoughtful, back we go to the screaming, gun-toting (and boring) bad guys.

It's been well documented that DAY failed to live up to its makers' expectations and that late-in-the-game time and budget limitations imposed upon Romero forced him to abandon his original, much more elaborate scenario for this film. Even so, I was expecting a lot more from this one. It's still worth a look just to see Bub's scenes and a few other memorable moments (like the sight of an experimented-on zombie whose head has been removed except for the brain, eyes and spinal column, and a quick opening shot of "Dr. Tongue", a sinister-looking ghoul with no bottom jaw and a dangling, bloody tongue), but the shortage of actual zombie footage, the endless and redundant shouting matches, and a rushed, irritating non-ending keep DAY sadly below the previous two films.

 DAY X (2006)

Dir: Jason Hack

An obscure indie feature with pretty good acting, dialogue that's easier on the ear than that of most low-budget efforts, and videography that is, if not particularly creative, at least handled with enough care to look competent.  The downfall here is that DAY X does nothing to distinguish itself from the hundred other interchangable zombie action cheapies that followed in the success of 28 DAYS LATER... and the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake.  When yet another government-funded biological weapon is accidentally unleashed, yet another ill-matched group of clashing personalities find themselves trapped in a building together while growling, limping extras in greenish-gray facepaint stumble around outside waiting for their next opportunity to pull handfuls of bloody guts out of survivors.   Ken Edwards is excellent in the lead role of Chambers, a tough, gun-toting employee of the Institute of Disease Control who keeps a cool head while those around him panic and shout insults and pointless threats at each other.  Most of the supporting players are decent in their roles too, but it isn't enough to rescue the production from boredom.  The human characters and the flesh eaters themselves are all straight off the low-budget horror assembly line, offering no surprises and no deviations from formula.   Chambers is transporting a creepy little girl (copied visually from the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by way of RING) whose infected blood somehow offers a cure, but this potentially interesting concept goes nowhere. There's a running thread about how it's not technically correct to call the creatures "zombies" since the "Series 14"  nerve gas responsible for this latest cliche' tragedy mutates the brains of victims while they're strill alive instead of causing actual death and resurrection.  But it's only a matter of semantics.  For all the impact it has on the action, they might as well have called them kangaroos.  Dead or not, they adhere strictly to zombie movie tradition, groaning and growling as they drag their legs limply along, hands outstretched and flailing.  One minor shift from formula is that those bitten in this movie simply die, as opposed to turning into flesh-eaters themselves, but this tiny flicker of originality makes little difference in the overwhelmigly familiar milieu.  One character calmly explains that zombies are "real", while vampires and werewolves are strictly fictitious.  Supposedly one in seven people has a natural immunity to the gas, which is why a fair number of survivors are still around to bicker.  Most of the time this fanboy feature is watchable and even occasionally interesting, but it's a shame the script is so barren of creativity when it comes to characterization and plotting.  The copout non-ending is guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth.  If they had at least thought of a reasonably decent way to conclude it, DAY X might have made a blip on the zombie movie radar.  You've gotta love the director's name.  Let's hope his next effort is a little less derivative.  Because as far this one is concerned, that's all.... She's rote.        

 DEAD & BREAKFAST (2004)

Dir: Matthew Leutwyler

Strained comedy wants to be the AIRPLANE! of zombie movies but only succeeds during a few brief moments. There are a few truly funny, wacky instances of inspired parody, but it's a shame that most of the time the humor is limited to crude silly behavior and making sure the characters all swear at each other constantly like they're in a Rob Zombie movie. A gang of college-age friends on their way to a wedding lose their way and end up trapped in one of those creepy little out-of-the-way redneck Texas towns commonly associated with Leatherface and his family. They stay at a bed-&-breakfast run by weirdo David Carradine, who soon dies and gets to claim his paycheck and go home early. His cook is Diedrich Bader (Oswald on DREW CAREY), a hostile Frenchman who also shows up just long enough to get his name in the credits. Gina Phillips from JEEPERS CREEPERS has a major role but she deserves better material.  A cursed Chinese demon box called the Ku-man-thong is disastrously opened, releasing an evil spirit that possesses a guy and causes everyone he kills to come back to life as murderous redneck zombies. "They're not really zombies", one guy keeps insisting, but since they're dead people who can only be permanently deactivated by a blow to the head, the other characters can be forgiven for referring to them as such.  Nearly everybody dies but very little of the humor works. The funniest bit is a running gag involving a guitar playing folk singer who pops in every now and then to serve as a Greek chorus kind of narrator, adding to his ongoing ballad of the demon-zombie invasion.  His stuff is genuinely funny, at least until the very long and completely jokeless plot summarization song during the closing credits. A scene in which the undead perform an impromptu song-and-dance number is good too, but these zany moments feel jarringly out of place in what is simply another zombie movie most of the time. If this had contained about twice as many jokes it could have been a winner. But as it is it's just a little odd, seemingly nudging the viewer with a "Look at me, I'm a cult movie!" self-consciousness at every turn.  The gore effects are excellent and imaginatively presented and you get to see a lot of them, so gorehounds won't be too disappointed. The internal logic is also well thought out and consistent, especially for a satire.  As can be said of most horror-comedy movies, everything covered here in 90 minutes could have been done better by a good animated cartoon show like THE SIMPSONS or FAMILY GUY in under 20.

 DEAD ALIVE (1992)

Dir: Peter Jackson

Made as  BRAINDEAD but retitled to avoid confusion with the 1990 U.S. film BRAIN DEAD, this New Zealand spoof is commonly known as 'the goriest movie ever made'. That may be true, but the vast amounts of spurting blood and flying body parts never detract from the pure fun of this ingenious, involving, high-energy 'splatire' of horror films. The reluctant hero is Lionel Cosgrove, a nervous nerd whose domineering, manipulative old mother is bitten by a rare demonic  "rat-monkey" while spying on her son and his date at the zoo. She kills the silly, stop-motion animated beast but soon deteriorates into a cannibal ghoul in a series of scenes that play out as an increasingly demented, gleefully tasteless comedy of manners. Monster-mom bites a number of peripheral characters, turning them into slobbering bloody zombies too. Poor Lionel, accustomed to a  lifetime of his mum's "What will the neighbors think?" attitude, tries to hide all evidence of the zombie plague but things get more and more out of hand and soon he finds himself tending to a basement full of growling undead monsters. DEAD ALIVE is amazingly  well constructed for such lowbrow material and is packed with more ambitious, surprising gore effects (as well as more of a story) than any dozen Hollywood horror movies.  When a greedy uncle uses the family mansion to host a party for his drunken friends, all zombiedom breaks loose and people get torn to bits in scenes that somehow manage to be shocking and hysterically funny at the same time (no easy feat). I've never seen any other movie that comes up with so many truly creative ways to mangle a human body (many of which would just simply never work in reality, human anatomy being what it is), which adds to the already present  feeling of witnessing a wacky but sick cartoon nightmare. The acting and characterizations are excellent, with even minor supporting characters giving evidence of fully thought out personalities and attitudes. In fact, there's so much going on in this gross but good-natured spoof that you really need to see it more than once to fully appreciate how clever it really is. The split-second editing that makes many of the effects work is positively brilliant and a real love of filmmaking is evident in every frame. And despite all the mayhem and depravity, the romantic subplot is genuinely charming. The film occasionally goes awry, like when director Peter Jackson gets carried away and allows two zombies to mate, causing one to instantly give birth to a stupid rubber puppet zombie baby that looks phony but not funny, and at the climax when Mom inexplicably mutates into a ludicrous monster as big as a house and somehow regains her human memory in the process.  These flaws of excess aside, this is a wildly fun ride that's a must for anyone who considers himself a horror fan.  It's available in both a cut 'R' and an unrated version.  Of course, the unrated one is the one to see.  Hard to believe the director of this went on to become a Hollywood fat-cat helming mainstream epics like the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy and the KING KONG remake.

 DEAD AND BURIED (1981)

Dir: Gary A. Sherman

   Jack Albertson was a long way from the innocuous comedy of CHICO & THE MAN when he appeared as a mad mortician in this brutal, unbelievably sadistic gore movie. Visitors to a small New England fishing village are senselessly murdered in hideous, painful ways by a gang of townspeople who are really corpses brought back to life by obscure, ill-explained voodoo rites. Some novel ideas and a strong cast (James Farentino, Robert Englund, Melody Anderson, Michael Pataki) are squandered by director Gary Sherman, who made the much better DEATH LINE (a/k/a RAW MEAT) in 1974. Although there's nice, moody soft-focus photography used to depict the misty village and consistently solid direction of the actors, the main emphasis is on barbaric cruelty and human suffering instead of the spooky graveyard atmosphere that could have made DEAD AND BURIED a winner. Farentino is surprisingly good in an underwritten role as the sheriff who's just as confused as the audience. Faced with a series of horrendous killings and graverobbings, none of which ever seem to attract the attention of any media or law enforcement agencies outside the community, he stumbles his way to the gruesome truth: Albertson has already had half the town killed and has resurrected them as normal-looking human zombies (only their hearts are buried in their graves) for no other reason than to give himself a hobby. Obviously a man with too much time on his hands, old Jack enjoys reconstructing mangled faces so much that he has all his subjects horribly disfigured just so he can rebuild their smashed and mutilated heads, working from home-movie film and snapshots taken by his minions during the murders. Once revived, the dead don't age, although they do need to report back to him every week or two for minor cosmetic touch-ups as bits of their fake flesh occasionally peel away. They have only the memories he chooses to give them (?) and appear perfectly normal when they're not nonchalantly setting people on fire or bashing their brains in. There's one artful, inventive sequence showing a dead girl's head stripped down to the bone and rebuilt and a beautifully nightmarish finale in a room full of flickering movie projectors, but Sherman and writers Ron Shusett and Dan O'Bannon (of ALIEN fame) keep pushing their underdeveloped concept into the background in favor of showcasing prolonged scenes of sick violence against innocent people, perhaps lacking confidence in the story and thinking that falling back on extreme gore was the easiest way to make the film scary. According to some sources, though, a number of the gore scenes were added later to up the horror ante (which would at least help to explain the appearance of one sadly fake-looking rubber head). In any case, the graphic murders here aren't as disturbing as knowing that they were somebody's idea of entertainment.

 DEAD AND DEADER (2006)

Dir: Patrick Dinhut

Gotta love that title.  Too bad the movie is a stagey, unconvincing zomedy (that's short for "zombie comedy"...but  you knew that already, right?) that covers the same turf as the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD movies.  It isn't especially bad or incompetent in any big way, but it's stale, unimaginative stuff in spite of a good sense of humor.  Soldiers on a mission to a medical center in Cambodia are bitten by a weird strain of scorpions (incorrectly called "insects" in the script even though they're arachnids) that burrow into human bodies and head straight for the victim's heart, instantly changing their luckless hosts into flesh-eating zombies with dark green blood and the usual pasty faced look.  The main character is Lt. Quinn (Dean Cain, who was Clark Kent/ Superman on the LOIS & CLARK TV series), who manages to cut the critter out of his body before it reaches his heart, leaving him semi-zombified with superhuman strength, the illogical ability to heal wounds almost instantly, and the occasional need to chow down on raw meat.  Cain is a pretty stiff stiff, however, and the show is definitively stolen by Guy Torry as poor Judson the Army cook, who gets all the best lines as he's dragged along on a silly mission to stop the plague of the undead from spreading beyond a ridiculously isolated U.S. Army base which is supposed to be in California but might as well be on the Moon for all the help and attention it gets during a major crisis. Torry is really funny. He carries the film most of the time and his constant witticisms are delivered with perfection, which is more than can be said for most of the other constantly wisecracking characters.  The script contains more movie and TV references than an all-night FAMILY GUY marathon.  At one point our heroes (Cain, Torry and the inevitable token tough-cookie hot chick who tags along) break into a costume shop in search of disguises. They emerge with Cain dressed as Don Johnson in MIAMI VICE and the girl dressed in pseudo-Madonna garb, while Torry's character intentionally chooses a shiny red mid-'80s Michael Jackson jacket because, he explains, the zombie invasion makes him feel like his life has turned into Jackson's THRILLER video.  This and a lot of the other jokes are right on target, including a funny scene in which people pause to discuss the relative merits of the original DAWN OF THE DEAD and the 2003 remake right in the middle of a "real" zombie outbreak, but the film is riddled with continuity errors and distracting logic problems.  Judson's handcuffs simply disappear in one scene, a thick metal chain apparently breaks from exposure to broken glass, and some bitten-off fingers look noticeably like rubber.  Characters who are bitten (all but Cain) transform so fast it's ludicrous, especially when their blood has to instantaneously turn green. The tired plot gets around to introducing a ruthless mad doctor and his idiot henchmen and culminates with a cliche' explosion at the underpopulated base, where red lights flash on and off in a lockdown plan apparently designed to induce total panic by making it impossible for anyone to see clearly.  The noisy, fast-moving zombies aren't scary and Colleen Camp is wasted as a funny character who is introduced and then quickly thrown away by a script that seems to be burdened with a need to kill off another character every so often in order to hold viewer attention.  There's a lot to like in the joke-packed dialogue but an endless string of pop culture references is no substitute for a clever story and DEAD AND DEADER has an air of creative fatigue that stifles the fun after a while.  Not the worst of the undead spoofs made around this time, but it's no SHAUN OF THE DEAD, that's for sure.  Watch it only if you're desperate to see anything and everything that has to do with zombies.  

 DEAD CLOWNS (2003)

Dir: Steve Sessions

Unlike the clever KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE, this moronic time-waster fails to find anything funny in using traditionally harmless icons of humor as ruthless murderers.  Agonizingly slow and bereft of plot, it simply strings together a bunch of scenes of people walking around basements and apartments looking more baffled than frightened, occasionally offering a moment of cheap gore trickery and some badly matched stock storm footage.  Poor Brinke Stevens acquits herself admirably, as they say, as the closest thing this mess has to a character.  She explains the childish, unlikely backstory about how a traveling circus train went off a local bridge during a storm in 1954.  Town officials decided to just leave the sunken clown car at the bottom of the bay rather than go to the expense of finding the bodies and giving them proper burials.  During a stock footage hurricane, the clowns inexplicably decide to finally come up out of the water (offscreen, of course, since actually showing that would require some fairly complex camera setups) and slowly stagger around a few dark buildings.  Brinke's character's father was the man held responsible for the original accident, but the zombie clowns don't seem to know that; she gets randomly bumped off just like the handful of other people sleepwalking through this pointless bore.  Writer-director Sessions handles the whole thing as though he couldn't have cared less what was in front of his camera.  The footage of people (including scream queen Debbie Rochon as a non-entity who evidently can't find her way around her own cellar) simply walking around in the dark seems to go on forever.  Even the zombie clowns are embarrassments by any standards. They have faces like rotting skulls but their amazingly rot-proof off-the-rack clown suits (some with white gloves) aren't even particularly dirty after being buried in mud and silt for a half century, much less authentically decayed.  I guess the costumes were due back at the rental shop the day after the clown scenes were shot.  The fake blood at least looks pretty realistic if you can remain conscious long enough to see it, but an attempt to recreate the famous eyeball skewering scene from ZOMBIE looks laughably fake and silly.  The unscary dead losers use poorly chosen weapons (like steak knives and a small ballpeen hammer) to do away with the bad actors they periodically bump into.  People who die don't even scream, none of the so-called characters ever get around to actually doing anything, and the routine gut-munching footage is marred by inappropriate sound effects and by the fact that the camera lingers on each shot for far too long, making it obvious that the extras in the skull masks aren't really doing any eating.  (If you want to give it any thought, the flesh-eating angle doesn't really make sense here since these zombies are coming back simply to avenge the way they were left to rot.)  This laid on a shelf for 4 years before the desperate hucksters at Lionsgate threw it onto DVD.  There really wasn't enough footage to assemble anything like a real movie, but here it is anyway: a collection of extended "walking around in the dark' scenes that often look like outtakes, with no sense of style or pacing and no story progression.  The wretched non-movie ends with one more random guy getting bitten by one of the dead clowns, as though his death would carry any more dramatic weight than anybody else's, and then Sessions simply gives up and lets the closing credits roll.  You can find much better horror stories made by kids with camcorders and posted on YouTube.   Completely without interest even if you're a zombie fanatic.  OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES looks like a masterpiece compared to this drivel.   

 

 DEAD GIRL WALKING (2005)

Dir: Koji Shiraishi

This is one of a series of six short features based on the horror stories of successful Japanese illustrator-animator Hideshi Hino. DEAD GIRL WALKING gives its audience exactly what its title implies.  Director Koji Shiraishi adopts an overtly David Lynchian style to tell the tragic tale of a teenage girl who is introduced as having a mundane home life with a normal middle-class Japanese family. She dies of an apparent heart attack (presented in bizarre fashion) but inexplicably revives as a living corpse. At this point the film switches from color to black and white. With her memory intact but her intelligence seemingly diminished, the poor thing is forced to suffer the horrors and indignities of decay as her body very rapidly and gruesomely decomposes. Her family decides to "kill" her once and for all but their attempts all fail and they destroy themselves in the process.  It's essentially a female remake of I, ZOMBIE with only some stylish camerawork and a few oddball twists to distinguish it from that British entry. The one-note story is presented with the simple but relentless logic of a nightmare rather than through trying to make the grim scenario seem really believable. The doomed heroine wraps herself in a dark canvas to conceal her increasing ugliness, thus turning her into a ghostly figure while simultaneously reducing the need for elaborate gore effects. It was a good approach, because the startling sight of a rotted-off arm plopping out from under that shroudlike canvas is somehow more chilling than a high-tech gory special makeup effect would have been.  It's all very pointless and it's mostly the same old body rot that's been done before, but DEAD GIRL WALKING is touchingly downbeat viewing as its main character pitifully bleeds, drips and oozes her way to oblivion.  It would most likely be a pretty harrowing viewing experience for people not accustomed to the grim tone of the zombie genre. It's only 44 minutes long.

 DEAD HATE THE LIVING!, THE (1999)

Dir: Dave Parker

Loaded with more pseudohip in-joke movie references than all the SCREAM movies combined, this unusually violent Full Moon offering could have been called CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS: THE NEXT GENERATION. It has the crew of a low-budget horror movie sneaking into an unidentified empty building to shoot some zombie scenes.  After a lot of witty film industry banter between the leads, the group stumbles upon an unlikely-looking machine (it's a big standing coffin decorated with runic symbols) that can bring the dead to life.  Although they have no idea what it is, they decide to use it in their film as a machine that brings the dead to life.  Now there's a coincidence. Inside it is the body of a guy dressed up as Rob Zombie, who turns out to have been a mad scientist who invented the thing to revive his dead wife.  (Why she's still there on a lab table, revived as a sickly zombie, isn't explained.) When they fire up the machine, a gang of real zombies emerges and begins killing off the young cast and crew.  Although it's totally without logic and low on originality, the stars give spirited performances and their realistically smart-aleck dialogue keeps the film watchable, especially since a lot of the wisecracks are honestly fresh and funny.  Characterization was given more thought than in most such low-budget shockers, and it's to the credit of writer-director Dave Parker that the stars come off as well-rounded, believably human characters whose behavior only occasionally strays from human nature in order to advance the thin plot.  The movie's worst flaw is that, unlike the makers of CHILDREN SHOULDN'T..., Parker didn't realize that the comedy should've been curtailed when the real horror kicks in.  Since the funny stuff continues even during the zombie attacks, there's nothing in this movie that will truly frighten anybody, making it a far cry from the brutal Italian zombie films it so desperately wants to emulate.  And despite good photography and fine effects, that same anonymous air of artificiality that pervades most Full Moon releases hangs over this one too.  The zombie makeups are varied and imaginative, and for that reason alone this is worth a watch for any fan.  One memorable musclebound monster who looks like a zombie wrestler gets a lot of screen time, showing off his bizarre scary face which has no nose whatsoever! (In spite of this, he's still able to smell the difference between the living and the undead, but that's only one out of about 300 instances of logic being ignored, and anyway, he's still a great-looking monster.)  The feature is followed by a long, rather embarrassing  'pat-ourselves-on-the-back' "Making Of" segment in which it becomes apparent that the cast and crew somehow believed they were doing something new and different.  At least you can tell they had fun doing it, and you might have a little fun with this one too.  The ending is swiped from Fulci's THE BEYOND.  A ripoff DVD set called "Tales From The Grave" re-titled this one BEYOND DEATH to try to fool prospective buyers into thinking they were getting a new feature.

 DEAD LIFE (2004)

Dir: William Victor Schotten

Another strong contender for the honor of Least Creative Movie Title.  This backyard Romero imitation  suffers from the same problems as most homegrown zombie efforts.  Namely, weak acting, entry-level metal banging away on the soundtrack and a lack of any real story.  As is so often the case, a small town (and later, we're told, the whole country) is overrun with staggering zombie flesh eaters as a result of the careless (offscreen) handling of chemical weapons compounds.  A handful of young slackers argue, swear a lot, smoke pot and die, and that's all you get in terms of plot. Most of the running time is devoted to redundant bickering, cars driving along, and footage of extras in blue greasepaint trying to walk like Lon Chaney Jr. did in his old Mummy movies.  Sometimes their heads incongruously jerk around in fast-motion like the ghostly visions in JACOB'S LADDER and its imitators. There really isn't any sense of momentum or pacing, but DEAD LIFE is still a lot better than most indy zombie invasions. For one thing, much of the dialogue is above average for this sort of thing and some sincere attempts at characterization are made. The zombie attacks are nicely staged, and often they're even somewhat scary.  There are also some RING-influenced segments shot in grainy B & W which, even though they're derivative, are genuinely creepy and nightmarish. One thing that helps is an extremely creepy sound effect that's kind of a cross between a cricket chirping and a heartbeat.  These bits, and some of the zombie scenes, are impressively disturbing and artfully composed.  One wishes they'd been used for a movie that had any of its own ideas, as all that good work seems largely wasted in such an unoriginal and otherwise bland project.

 DEAD MEAT (2004)

Dir: Conor McMahon

It was inevitable that somebody, sooner or later, would use Mad Cow Disease as a "cattle-yst" for a zombie invasion.  Well, here it is.  But aside from that extremely minor bit of innovation, this Irish-made movie shows not the slightest flicker of originality. Playing like a cross between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and the French GRAPES OF DEATH but without the shock value of the former or the dreamlike mood of the latter, DEAD MEAT is your typical, by-the-numbers zombie programmer. All we're told is that cheapskate farmers fed their cattle on the remains of dead animals of some sort.  Bingo!, that's apparently all that's needed for half the population of the Emerald Isle to begin staggering about with gray smudges on their faces, biting people. Evidently this particular zombie plague was started by zombie cows. (Really.)  This foolishness is all expertly photographed, artfully edited and well-acted, and at least there are some good "startle-the-audience" style scares every so often. The fine camerawork is successful in making the peaceful Irish countryside seem somehow vaguely disquieting and ominous.  But the professional look is about all this film has to offer, as it copies low-budget American zombie projects right down to offering a cast of foul-mouthed, unlikable characters (including a mean but funny football coach), a frustrating non-ending, and a low-grade, cheesy hard rock theme song.  Viewers who haven't seen many zombie movies may be impressed by the occasional suspenseful scenes, but zombie fans will most likely be bored by this one's "udder" lack of a story and its failure to showcase any interesting zombie makeups.  Several of the gore effects are obvious re-stagings of ones in DAY OF THE DEAD.  Maybe they should have called this movie "ZOMBEEF"...No?  How about "DAMNBURGER"?....Or maybe "CATTLEFIELD EARTH"?... Thank you, I'll be here all week.  Don't order the steak.

 

 DEAD MOON RISING (2007)

Dir: Mark E. Poole

Generic, uninspired DAWN OF THE DEAD clone that tires to inject some humor into the tired situation (you can't really call it a "story").   The main character is a young guy who works at Cheapskate Car Rental, and since he often breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to the camera right in the middle of a scene, we mostly witness the unexplained zombie invasion from his point of view.  TV sitcoms that used this gimmick, like MALCOM IN THE MIDDLE and SCRUBS, might have provided inspiration.  As in every other low-budget zombie clunker, the movie focuses on a small band of bickering survivors who fight off the hordes of hungry ghouls while making their way from one vague locale to another.  A number of efforts at real characterization are made, as when the hero enlightens us regarding the childhood tragedy that gave him an aversion to firearms (only not, as it transpires, in quite the way we're led to think).  Other characters include an obnoxious, gorgeous blonde "tough cookie" with a great figure and a repellant one-joke personality, a whimpering teenage girl, an idiotic religious stereotype, and a couple of all-purpose jerks.  The funniest character (and the best performer here) is the hero's perpetually rude, sarcastic grouch co-worker Nick, who gets all the best lines and who remains fun to watch throughout the whole film in spite of (or perhaps because of) his mean, impatient, cynical attitude.  All your favorite zombie movie cliches are trotted out, including the traditional argument over whether or not to go ahead and kill a character who's been bitten before he has a chance to turn into a danger, but nothing clever is done with any of the trite situations and rote personality conflicts. The editing is sometimes creative and there's a good spoof of the old "it was all a dream" routine, but the near-total lack of directorial style, interesting sets and professional lighting results in zero atmosphere.  The zombies themselves are among the worst ever seen onscreen.  They're just people with yellow greasepaint smeared on their faces (yes, yellow) who go "Grrraaarrgghh" a lot and hop around like chimpanzees.  Their silly hunched-over posture and loping gait means they never look like anything more than crowds of extras running around trying to keep a straight face.  One of DEAD MOON RISING's worst flaws is the miserable sound quality. The film is plagued with all kinds of camera noise and sound that stops and starts abruptly.  The ending is an outrageous total letdown even considering the low quality of all that's come before.   A gang of ticked-off bikers rushes headlong into a crowd of zombies, resulting in an ambitious streetwide free-for-all that's so poorly shot and edited that you can't tell what's happening (not that you'll care much by this time), after which the film simply ends, the narrator promising to tell us what happened next in the sequel.  One of the homeliest independent features ever, it offers a few good laughs but, trust me, it's nowhere near worth it.   

 

 DEAD NEXT DOOR, THE (1989)

Dir: J.R. Bookwalter

I feel bad for finding fault with a movie like this one.  It's extremely ambitious, it was obviously a very personal project for its makers, and it clearly required a lot of sincere effort from a lot of people to make it come together.  Unfortunately, though, in any attempt to review THE DEAD NEXT DOOR, the fact that it really isn't very good must be mentioned.  It's essentially a low-budget copy of Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD with a very "fan-made" feel and no plot.  The acting is mostly awful, the script sounds phony and the scene blocking is utterly artificial (hordes of zombies suddenly turn up in the middle of open areas and nobody sees them coming because they were just out of camera range.)  We're told that a new virus has created the living dead and that "the only part of them that's alive is the virus itself". If that's the case, then how come the virus knows how to walk, attack, and even speak English in a human body?!  To make sure you know you're watching a fan-boy project, the major characters have names of genre celebs (Raimi, Carpenter, etc.), a practice that I've always found distracting.  The only even half-hearted attempt at any characterization is the knowledge that the mad scientist likes to wear his hat.  Other than that nobody has any particular personality traits at all--they're just Good Guys because they're not zombies.  A special Zombie Squad is dispatched to battle the flesheating walking dead in Akron, Ohio and basically spends the whole movie shooting zombies or being bitten by them.  There isn't even a proper ending.  In fact, the movie ends with a simple joke!  Okay, I admit it was a good joke, but it hardly serves to conclude a full-length feature film.  The story is cluttered up with a meaningless subplot about a girl who may or may not be somebody's daughter but since the parties involved all end up as zombie chow anyway, this extraneous little chunk of plot goes nowhere and adds nothing.  (This odd part of the story feels like maybe it was supposed to have some real signifcance but got cut down due to either time or money shortages.)  A few of the zombies are fake-looking rubber puppets but many of the makeups are excellent.  My favorite scene shows a still-living, cut-off zombie head swallowing a human finger which then pops out of the bottom of its neck stump!  A gag to make you gag!  This and a few other very clever ideas (like an "Equal Rights For Zombies" protest and a religious fanatic trying to use the ghouls for his own selfish ends) give hints that there was a genuine sense of humor at work here.  It's too bad they didn't decide to just go all the way and make a comedy, because a lot of the gags are really fresh and funny while NONE of the scares work.  The tape I have ends with one of those embarrassing self-congratulatory "Making Of" bits one normally finds on Full Moon videos.  Sorry, but this is for completists only.

 DEAD ONE, THE (1961)

Dir: Barry Mahon

Listless zombie horror from Barry Mahon, a guy who usually made cheesy sex movies. A man and his new bride travel to the family plantation home in New Orleans he has just inherited.  His cousin, a jealous and greedy voodoo witch who currently resides there, resurrects her dead brother Jonas to commit the required murders necessary for her to retain legal claim to the property. Much time is wasted on middle-of-the-road New Orleans nightclub acts and footage of people driving (and sometimes walking) from one place to another. The acting is mostly only so-so but the actress playing the villain is awful. Brother Jonas shambles around like Frankenstein, and some shots of him making his way along the woods up to the house are repeated. The zombie makeup looks great, consisting of a misshapen pale green face with swollen features and staring black-rimmed eyes and a wild mane of long, stringy black hair. Jonas has a slow creepy walk as he lurks silently around in the dusty formal suit in which he was buried, and if the movie hadn't been directed with such total disinterest he might have become a well-remembered spectre in low-budget monster history. But the deal-breaker for many monster fans will be the film's failure to give its undead menace so much as a single closeup. Jonas stays a good fifteen to twenty feet from the camera during the entire movie, which is really a shame since they had such a creepy and persuasively dead looking makeup job on him. At the closest thing there is to a climax, a trigger-happy idiot police officer somehow manages to shoot the bad girl in a poorly staged scene and the zombie, caught by the first rays of the morning sun, disappears completely as in NOSFERATU!  The main impression left on the viewer is a feeling of tired indifference. The DVD release of this obscure feature, re-titled BLOOD OF THE ZOMBIE (rather inaccurately, since nobody bleeds and the zombie's blood is never even mentioned) claims it's a 90 minute film, but they lie like dogs. It's really only 68 minutes long, and even at that length it drags.

 DEAD PIT, THE (1989)

Dir: Brett Leonard

Stylish photography and moody (well, okay, blue) lighting help elevate this confused but entertaining zombie tale to above average 'cheap horror film' status. At a weird insane asylum where the rooms are kept dark and misty (not to mention lighted in blue) and attractive female patients roam the halls in their underwear, a too-young-for-the-part mad surgeon conducts sinister experiments on the brains of resident lunatics. When they die, he tosses the bodies into his handy formaldehyde-filled pit. Another doctor finds out what the evil genius has been up to (although the audience never does), kills him, and seals up the basement room containing the pit. Twenty years later, a young woman with no memory of her past arrives just as an earth tremor cracks open the seal on the hidden lab's entrance. The surgeon is now a decayed red-eyed ghoul who's able to cause the new patient to experience gruesome hallucinations (or something like that). The zombie/ghost/mad doctor can only be seen by the heroine except when he's about to kill somebody, at which times he apparently materializes in the flesh. The well-meaning psychiatrist who'd murdered him, still haunted by guilt, becomes even more unraveled when his attempts to delve into the mind of "Jane Doe" result in hints about "people in the cellar" who want out and, eventually, a hysterical fit in which the girl talks in the murdered doctor's voice. You just know those corpses in the title pit are going to get up and go on a rampage sooner or later. DEAD PIT raises a lot more questions than it ever answers, which will make it furstrating viewing for those who will take it as the mystery it at first appears to be. After a while, once you've accepted the fact that no explenation for anything that happens is forthcoming, it's an easy film to enjoy on a purely aesthetic level. A creepy clock tower keeps ominously bonging away, many excellent makeup effects are seen and the eerie blue lighting keeps things looking like a morbid music video. The exact nature of the experiments is never revealed and the script combines science with the supernatural in a way that never works (the zombies are show to be the result of radical brain surgery, yet they can be killed by holy water). The MacGyver-style finale involves a scheme to blow up a water tower that's been blessed by a nun in order to flood the pit.  Despite the lack of logic, the zombies are effective as they stagger around with blood dripping from their cut-open heads. The heroine spends most of the film crying or screaming uncontrollably, and although the actress is fine in the part she certainly isn't a character with whom we can easily sympathize. One character reminded me a lot of Pierce Brosnan, and director Leonard went on to make THE LAWNMOWER MAN starring the actual Brosnan. The dumb ending may make you groan but the strong visuals keep DEAD PIT watchable.

 DEADHUNTER: SEVILLIAN ZOMBIES (2003)

Dir: Julian Lara

An imbecilic import from Spain that has exactly four things going for it: There's a clever turnaround of events just after the opening setup, a good joke about "Plan B" during a zombie attack being to put on a rubber zombie mask and start staggering around like one of the undead in order to keep the real ones from noticing you, a hilarious scene in which a guy escapes from some zombies by doing "The Handkerchief Dance" to confuse them, and a proper ending (which may not sound like much but it is an element missing from the majority of zombie movies).  Beyond that quartet of assets, DEADHUNTER is entirely empty of imagination, wit or entertainment value.  The title refers to a group of... well, volunteers, I think... who get to wear sunglasses and long black overcoats as they strut through the city gunning down the unscary zombies who occasionally shuffle out of alleys to bother people.  Their leader is an old fool who periodically makes them gather round a large table at Deadhunter Headquarters so he can shout at them.  Those who don't follow official deadhunter protocol are penalized by being locked in a small cell for a while, even though you might think a zombie invasion would call for as much help as possible.  The (barely explained) trouble is traced to a cave-in that trapped a bunch of workers in the sewer system beneath the streets, but you'll be laughing too hard at the sheer incompetence of director Lara to notice much of what can charitably be termed the plot.  Most of the film consists of would-be tough-guy poseurs pretending to fire their prop guns at people in horrendously poor poster paint zombie makeup.  The extras with the smears of green and blue paint on their faces try to react as if they're being shot, but it's painfully obvious that the guns aren't firing.  There's no recoil or kickback and no blast effect most of the time, so you basically just see people shaking their guns while the only attempt to make it look like they're being fired is the addition of sound effects.  "BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!," insists the noisy soundtrack, but it doesn't help much.  It's like watching little kids play zombie with empty squirt guns.  Throughout the film, the sound quality is so awful as to be completely unacceptable, the muffled hard rock score sounding like it's being played over an old car radio with blown speakers.  The action seems to be taking place in a city in which people go about their daily routines even though they know they might be accosted by zombies at any time.  The undead stumble about here and there but mostly it's business as usual, perhaps as a result of trying to make a zombie invasion film on a typical downtown day with most of the populace not even noticing the small group of guys chasing around with cheap cameras and props.  The overall effect is kind of like a Spanish version of THE DEAD NEXT DOOR, only even worse.  With laughably unconvincing violence, wretched makeup and no remotely interesting characters, this one is sure to test the patience of even the most devoted zombie fanatic.  The same guy made the useless 19-minute-long EVIL DEAD ripoff EVIL NIGHT, so of course a poster for it is seen in a video store.  

 DEATH SMILES AT MURDER (1973)

Dir: "Joe D'Amato" (Aristide Massaccesi)

I seem to be in a very small minority on this one, but I loved this movie. I've forced many of my friends to sit through it at one time or another and they all seem to react with a mixture of indifference and utter bewilderment. Most will admit that it did give them the creeps to some degree, but nobody else seems to have found this early effort  from Aristide Massacessi ( a/k/a Joe D'Amato) as fascinating as I did. I have  to admit, this movie isn't exactly "viewer friendly".  It's put together in a deliberately inside-out manner, telling its dreamlike story with flashbacks, hallucinations, psychic warnings and unexplained events. DEATH SMILES AT MURDER not only invites a second viewing, it absolutely demands that you watch it more than once, if only to sort out just what in the world is going on. A film that improves with repeat viewings, this perverse horror-tragedy depicts the downfall of an idle rich family when a tragic death from three years before triggers a series of bizarre events. A beautiful young amnesiac girl is left at a country estate after a gruesome coach accident and mad doctor Klaus Kinski is called in to evaluate. Kinski has secretly been attempting to bring the dead back to life but gets more than he bargained for when he discovers the mysterious new patient just happens to be wearing a medallion inscribed with the ancient lncan resurrection formula he'd been researching. A string of brutal murders begins, leaving the local police inspector as confused as the audience.  The clairvoyant maid has visions of a creepy character who may be behind the mayhem, the man of the house starts to ignore his disturbed wife in favor of the attentions of his sexy houseguest, and the bodies start to pile up.  The cursed love triangle seems to be over when the jealous wife decides to wall the girl up in the basement, Cast Of Amontillado-style.  But despite the presence of definite villians, a power beyond anything earthly seems to be influencing the fates of the cast.  Odd editing and camerawork combine with a brilliantly morbid soundtrack to give this the feel of an eerie fever dream, taking place in a world where guilt, retribution and insanity are more powerful than the very forces of nature.  A scene in which a young man discovers that the woman in bed with him has suddenly turned into a decayed living corpse is sure to stick in viewers' memories, as is a startling sequence that takes place at a masquerade ball.  Massacessi never quite brings all of his strange story elements together, leaving several plot holes and character reactions that only begin to make sense after giving the movie more thought than most viewers will want to bother with.  The nature of the living dead is vague, as those affected by the re-animation procedure seem to be part ghost and part zombie.  A/k/a DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER, this muddled but haunting and poetic shocker deserves more attention.

 

 

 DEATHDREAM (1972)

Dir: Bob Clark

This highly recommended allegorical zombie story brings the horrors of war home to smalltown America in a big way. An uneasy, mournful mood is sustained throughout, thanks to believable dialogue and a sincere cast. An average middle-class family is informed that their soldier son Andy has been killed in combat (presumably in Viet Nam). Most of the family deals with their grief in a rational manner but Mom seems to be driven semi-mad by the news. She refuses to believe Andy is really dead and is sure he'll be arriving home at any moment. Late that night he does indeed show up at the front door, where he's met with confused delight from his grateful but puzzled family. Slowly, it becomes apparent that there's something very wrong with Andy. He behaves coldly, speaks only when it's absolutely necessary, and somehow seems vaguely disgusted by the cheerful facade of life in the suburbs. He sits in his rocking chair, blankly staring out a window for hours on end, and at night he sneaks out in search of human blood. Friends and relatives continue to act as if nothing is wrong, assuming the boy is acting so differently from the way they remember him because of traumatic experiences overseas, but it's clear to the viewer that Andy is a living corpse whose body has returned home from the battlefield minus a human soul. He has no pulse, is prone to violent outbursts and even starts to physically decay toward the end. The various family members' eventual reactions when they're finally forced to acknowledge the horrible truth seem perfectly logical and lead to a finale that may seem a little anticlimactic but is still powerful and memorable. We're never given any explanation for how Andy came to be in his undead condition---no voodoo, no black magic, no radiation, nor anything else that typically makes the dead stand up and walk in horror fiction are blamed. In this strange metaphoric context though, no real explanation is needed: Andy is simply the product of the horrors of war and of his mother's well-meaning but tunnel-visioned determination to keep her family together at all costs. This is dark and troubling material, presented as an unflinching look at the breakdown of the American family, an examination of our tendency to trivialize the insanity of war, and an eerie tale of terror. It succeeds on all counts and emerges as one of the best "dead" movies of the 1970s. Makeup effects (the work of a young Tom Savini) are used sparingly and Andy's subtly decaying features hit just the right visual note. The same team (notably Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby) also made the similarly disturbing but rather more lighthearted CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. This is one to look for, and you might not have to look too hard because it was also released under a slew of alternate titles: DEAD OF NIGHT; THE NIGHT WALK; THE VETERAN; and THE NIGHT ANDY CAME HOME.

 

 

 DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (1993)

Dir: Michele Soavi

Unquestionably one of the best horror films of the 1990s, this beautifully shot and wonderfully acted Italian masterpiece of fantasy-horror might have gotten the recognition it deserves if it hadn't been for the way it was introduced into the U.S.  An awkwardly cut and cropped version, retitled CEMETERY MAN in an attempt to make it appear more accessible to the average Joe Schlub, was released on video with almost no fanfare.  A complete print bearing the original title can be found through various mail-order sources. Just when you thought zombie movies had nothing left to offer beyond the usual gut-munching and slow-moving walking corpses, along comes this fascinating and poetic glimpse into the stagnant, dead-end life of Dellamore (Rupert Everett), the lonely, alienated, impotent caretaker of Buffalora Cemetery a large graveyard where, for unexplained reasons, the dead have a habit of returning to life as flesh-eating maniacal zombies within a week of burial. Everett's job includes shooting or bashing in the ghouls' undead brains (the only way to kill them once and for all) and then making sure they get re-buried before word of the strange epidemic spreads to the public. Aided by his likeable, sympathetic mute sidekick Gnaghi (sort of a horror film equivalent of Curly Joe De Rita), Dellamore keeps encountering the woman of his dreams in the persons of a widow, a secretary and a hooker (all played by the same actress and all named Laura), but each love affair ends in ironic tragedy. In a beautifully wrought scene, a burning pile of old phone books (the last records of people who have died) transforms into an angel-winged grim reaper figure who speaks to Dellamore personally, planting a truly horrible idea in his mind. Among the many things I liked about this movie was the clever use of the living dead theme, which explores a surprising number of situations that could arise from the small-scale zombie plague and the impact they might have on a young man who's just trying to do his job despite already being far more detatched from reality than most of the self-absorbed, "hope-you-noticed-we're brooding" young people of the '90s. Although tragedy piles upon tragedy, this film maintains a sense of humor that s fresh and sometimes hysterically funny, making it stand out as a rare example of a skillful blend of horror and comedy that's rarely been seen in the genre outside of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)  or THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971). Likewise, visual references to other genre films abound but always avoid getting in the way of the story.  The whacked-out metaphysical ending defies logic but still wraps up the film with the feeling that things have somehow come full circle, at least on an emotional level. If more horror films were as filled with real thought, artisty and poetry as this one, the genre would have a better reputation among the masses.

 DEMON WIND (1990)

Dir: Charles Philip Moore

Director Charles Philip Moore doesn't seem to have given his cast any instructions on how they were supposed to react to anything in this confused EVIL DEAD wannabe. The acting is terrible anyway, but it sometimes hits especially embarrassing lows when people watch bizarre, horrible things happen and don't even manage to look surprised. Much of the dialogue is spoken as if the actors were reading their lines for the first time and weren't sure which words to place emphasis on. One brilliantly surreal concept is squandered in this low-intellect pastiche of elements filched from THE OMEN and THE EXORCIST as well as the Sam Raimi hit that provided most of the inspiration (and imitation) here. That concept is that an old isolated farmhouse has been destroyed by "demon wind" and for the last 40 years only one wall has been left standing. You can walk all the way around that remaining section of wall, but if you go through its door you're inside the house!  This other-dimensional impossibility is very clever and creates opportunites for some nice visual weirdness. Implausibly (to say the least) the characters instantly take this in stride, acting as if it's kind of cool but not really particularly interesting.  They're so stupid they even try to hide in the house-that-isn't-there, as though they'd be safe from evil forces inside such a supernatural structure. A guy whose grandparents owned the property (before they were killed by demons) goes there followed by several carloads of his disposable idiot friends. One guy is a stage magician who pulls flowers, scarves, live doves, etc., out of his clothes. He throws away his tux jacket when he changes clothes (?) and he's soon killed off, the fact that he's a magician never having any relevance to anything. A fog bank produces scary little girls who turn one teenage bimbo into a 12-inch plastic baby doll which promptly explodes, and none of the other characters react to this in the slightest. Zombies with lumpy wet-looking faces show up. Some of them die when they're shot, but others have to be stabbed with one of seven magic daggers, two of which are handy while the other five...uh...well, we never learn what became of the other five.  I don't know why they didn't just say there were two magic daggers. (Oh wait, that's right, there were seven in THE OMEN.) The drooling, stiff-legged zombies talk a lot but they have electronically distorted voices to make them sound like THE EVIL DEAD and to make it next to impossible to understand what they're saying. Eventually a gas station attendant who's a high priest of Satan (like in VOODOO MAN!) shows up and calls the zombies "my children". A cruddy cartoon optical effect that would have looked outdated in a 1970 flick melds all the ghouls together into a single demon monster with hooves, fangs and wet lumpy skin. The grandson inexplicably turns into what looks like a space alien and a half-hearted monster battle ensues.  Finally, after all the deaths and mayhem, it turns out that all one has to do to send the demon back to hell is to read aloud one very brief generic prayer from an old book. Some of the makeup is top-notch, including the rubber monster suit and a number of gory shredded faces and body parts. The alien-look creature the protagonist turns into looks inappropriate to this movie and the subject matter, but I have to admit it's an excellent makeup job. It's just a shame all this work was wasted on a salad of random horror movie content and arbitrary action. Even the dates given in the story's sloppy time frame don't jibe with the characters' ages. Horror fans deserve better than this meaningless encounter with demon zombies and zombie demons. My, that DEMON WIND blows all right.

 DEVIL HUNTER (1980)

Dir: Jesus Franco

This slow jungle adventure finds Spanish director Jesus Franco (credited as "Clifford Brown") stuck in the slump of disinterest his work had been slipping into during the late '70s. Not much of his usual obsessive atmospheric style can be seen in this film which is directed with an over-enthusiasm for the zoom lens and a near-indifference for everything else. A quartet of crooks kidnaps a beautiful actress and holds her for  ransom on a mysterious isolated island where, unbeknownst to them, a lost tribe  of movie-style cannibal savages dwells. The unconvincing, mostly naked natives (one of whom is clearly wearing a gold wedding band) are in the habit of leaving tied-up women near a cliff every so often as a sacrifice to a hungry zombie they believe is an evil god. Al Cliver is adventurer-for-hire Peter Weston (a year earlier he'd appeared in ZOMBIE, the hero of which was named Peter West), who is hired to accompany a neurotic Nam vet helicopter pilot to the island to bring the girl back alive. The thugs try to ambush our dull hero, but he escapes just as the zombie conveniently starts killing off the hoods one by one. This movie (which was also released in a number of varying cuts as MAN HUNTER, MANDINGO MANHUNTER and SEXO CANIBALE) has some of the most pitiful gore effects ever. Try to keep a straight face when an actor tries to stand in for his own decapitated head by lying on the ground  with a few leaves covering his neck. It's even funnier later on, when another character finds the supposed cut-off head and you see the guy's pulse throbbing in his neck. The zombie rips up victims and eats their hearts, allowing the viewer to see some V8 juice that's supposed to be blood. Franco uses a Vaseline-smeared lens to represent the zombie's point of view plus jungle drums and loud, hollow breathing noise on the soundtrack in an attempt to keep things from getting silly but the cards are stacked against him because of his monster, the hardest zombie to take seriously since I EAT YOUR SKIN (1961). The "Devil" zombie is a naked black man who shows no signs of decay or deformity anywhere but his face, on which be wears an upper-half prosthetic resembling a pair of safety goggles covered with layers of lumpy latex. He has big, bulgy, unrealistically-placed eyes (which accounts for his blurred vision) and he hisses and wheezes asthmatically as he creeps through the jungle in search of people who are either too slow or too stupid to get out of his way.  He's also one of those monsters who instintively knows who The Main Girl is, since he immediately slaughters everyone he meets except for The Main Girl, whom he decides to carry away instead so the hero will have time to catch up. His presence is unexplained, leaving us to wonder how he came to be a heart-eating zombie in the first place and why there don't seem to be any more on the island like him. Only for diehard Franco fans.

 DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007)

Dir: George A. Romero

It's unthinkable that this trite, boring, plotless home movie could have come from the father of the modern zombie genre.  With the release of the slapdash DIARY OF THE DEAD, it can no longer be said that Romero never made a movie that wasn't interesting.  Taking the overused BLAIR WITCH route and offering a dork's-eye view of a zombie invasion as seen by an obsessive video geek who can't pass up the opportunity to tape his own impromptu running documentary of the chaos, DIARY plunks the viewer into a group of University of Pittsburgh film students at work on their homemade mummy movie when the mass resurrection of the dead begins.  Maybe Romero thught he needed to take this approach in order to engage jaded teen viewers accustomed to crappy-looking "real life" ghost hunting TV series and amateurish video projects made to look like "found footage". The movie gets off to a good start as a televised news report from the site of a murder-suicide suddenly turns into a bloodbath when the victims reawaken as hungry flesheaters, but the rest of the project is a waste of Romero's resources.  The mummy theme to the movie-within-the-documentary-within-the movie gives George a chance to make jokes about the implausibility of the fast-moving, energetic corpses of other recent efforts in the genre.  Other gags, including an actress who falls while trying to run away and gets her dress torn apart by a ghoul after complaining about such horror film cliches, seem like something from a spoof.  Other than that, DIARY is pretty humorless, presenting one of the most uninvolving movie road trips yet as our small band of stereotypes embark on a surprise-free odyssey across Pennsylvania (actually Canada), occasionally running into a few extras with blue-green greasepaint and stage blood smeared on their faces.  The lack of any interesting zombies or visually memorable zombie makeups will be one of many disappointments to Romero's legions of fans.  The fact that the script is constructed entirely from cliches from other zombie movies will be another.  Every last character, situation and dialogue exchange has been done before, usually with greater success. Embarrassingly, the worn-out genre chestnut about "us vs. them and they're us", which already seemed heavy-handed back when Tom Savini used it in his 1990 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake, is pulled out of mothballs and thrown into this stew of cinematic fatigue along with the rest of the dimestore moralizing and one-dimensional characters. The story contains too many implausibilities to enumerate, but being confronted with this many unrealistic reactions, flawed edits and visual cheats puts a real strain on one's suspension of disbelief.  In one of many ludicrous scenes, a guy smashes a glass jar of acid into a zombie's head using his bare hand and doesn't get even a single drop on himself.  Now that's skill.  Even the smattering of gore effects (the occasional exploding or bisected head) feel like leftovers and don't provide much excitement since the presentation is so flavorless and the people witnessing them are mere cyphers. There aren't any scary moments after the first five minutes and there's no ending either, so we never find out how or when some of the major characters (and I use the term loosely) die.  Romero envisions a world in which hospitals and major urban areas are abandoned but YouTube and the internet are still up and going strong.  He tries to make some garbled statements about the influence of online communication and the unreliability of the media, but it's barely coherent and certainly nothing the least bit original.   I never thought I'd say this about the once-fascinating horror director, but Romero (at age 68) might simply have been too old and out of touch to continue his legendary zombie saga.  This desparate rehash makes me wish he had ended the series with the previous installment, LAND OF THE DEAD, which at least had some interesting ideas, real characterization and show-stopping gore effects, all of which are absent from DIARY.  Bland as lukewarm dishwater and immediately forgettable, this feels more like a half-finished Sci-Fi Channel Movie-Of-The-Week Original thrown together by fanboys than a serious part of a film series made by a man of Romero's talents.  Even if you're a diehard Romeroholic, this fast-buck chunk of sleep-inducing processed cheese isn't worth even a single viewing.