HELLBOUND: BOOK OF THE DEAD (2003)
Dir: Steve Sessions
Made as CADAVER BAY, this glum low-budget feature is much better than you'd expect. Obsessed with the gruesome accidental death of her sister, the morose and slightly unbalanced Diane (Elizabeth North) arranges to acquire that classic old zombie movie prop, The Book Of The Dead, so she'll be able to bring poor ol' Sis back from the grave. Interestingly, the book in this tale is presented as two books which have to be used together in order to work their magic. Long before any supernatural activity starts to kick in, things start going horribly wrong with the project, such as Diane's semi-accidental killing of a man, which happens because she doesn't know how to handle a gun and also because, frankly, she's not very bright. Her long-suffering husband Lane (Jeff Dylan Graham, who doesn't even get his surname capitalized in a quote on the DVD cover, making it apparent that the packaging was assembled in haste) tries to hide his loony love's indiscretion by disposing of the body. In a twist that's predictable but still effective in an E.C. Comics sort of way, the scrawny young protagonists find out that the book's evil spell really does work... just not quite in the way they expected. HELLBOUND moves at a slow pace and some of acting and editing leave much to be desired, but on the whole it's very impressive for an independent horror film. Bad luck and unfortunate timing force the characters into some very suspenseful situations and director Steve Sessions handles these passages like a pro. Jon Fuller provided an outstanding, evil-looking mask for the scary murderous zombie that eventually joins (and quickly whittles down) the cast. The various special effects are mostly flawless, although the shooting victim bleeds some of the darkest, chocolatiest blood this side of the 1968 version of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It's a simple story without a lot in the way of complex plotting or intricate story development (back in their heyday, Amicus could've told this tale in about 12 minutes in one of their famed horror anthologies), but it's still quite above average and is interesting, worthwhile viewing for zombie lovers.
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HIDE AND CREEP (2004)
Dir: Chuck Hartsell
If you can imagine Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy rounding up a few of their gun-totin', beer-swillin', good-ole-boy buddies to fight off a zombie invasion in a Southern Alabama whistlestop town, you'll have a pretty good idea of what this fun low-budget, low-tech feature is like. Ed Wood's famed 1956 disaster PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE is knowingly referenced when unseen aliens resurrect the deceased as flesh-eating ghouls. The zombies stick pretty closely to the George Romero mythology (they have to be killed by a blow to the head, anyone who is bitten by a zombie and survives will become a zombie himself, etc.) but a nice thread of humor places the mayhem in a reality in which people are well aware of the details of zombie mythos from the movies they've seen. Characters talk about NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD and others. Co-director Chuck Hartsell plays the main character, a dull-witted video rental shop owner who would be right at home in a Kevin Smith CLERKS movie. You know the genre has come full circle when a zombie has his head bashed in with an old VCR which then ejects a VHS tape of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The local redneck gun club, a stressed-out pastor and various other local yokels try to either help or get away with their bodies intact. There are a lot of good jokes in HIDE AND CREEP, especially those made at the expense of various characters' petty obsessions with minor matters (a lost car, a missed TV ballgame) and how their short-sightedness keeps them from reacting to the horrific danger at hand in any useful way. The zombies are played by extras in pale gray greasepaint and some of the makeup effects look amateurish, but the silly tone and agreeably dopey cast buoy the film along. The major flaw is that there's no proper ending. The film just stops at the 81-minute mark even thouigh everything is left unresolved. This is painfully unsatisfying, particularly since you expect a movie that devotes itself to making fun of zombie movie cliches to be too smart to settle for falling back on one of the genre's most irritating cop-outs itself. The acting and editing are something short of brilliant and the script occasionally gets too gross and vulgar for its own good, but the constant supply of hilarious goofball characters and satiric dialogue make the movie a good bet for zombie fans who think they've seen it all. It's a cheerfully lowbrow, distinctly blue-collar, uniquely American zombie movie made on the cheap by people who tried their best to make their independent feature entertaining and amusing. Most of the time they succeed.
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HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES (1974)
Dir: Amando DeOssorio
This third official entry in the Spanish 'Blind Dead' film series is perhaps the weakest of the lot, although it does contain some great ideas and a few suspenseful scenes. This time the setting has been changed to the open seas, where an ancient "ghost galleon" (the film's alternate title) drifts along in a cloud of overworldly fog (an idea notion that the blind dead exist just slightly outside the realm of real time, hinted at in the first two movies, is made a pivotal part of the story here. Two fashion models, supposedly lost at sea is part of a publicity stunt, end up lost within the fog (which exists in a different time dimension), board the seemingly abandoned ship and fall victim to the evil Templar zombies, who have been resting in their cratelike coffins (or is it coffinlike crates?) below deck. The rescue party that comes looking for the girls is pulled into the ghostly fog bank too, and the bulk of the film is spent with the heroes trapped aboard the rotting, creaking vessel trying to escape and/or eliminate the threat of the blind dead and their unquenchable thirst for blood. The ancient galleon provides a very claustrophobic and authentically eerie setting for this neat little movie which, like the earlier entries in this series, has the feel of an old-fashioned ghost story despite its displays of bloody violence and scantily-clad women. The gore is quite restrained but the look of the dark, decrepit ship and of course the skeletal zombies themeselves provide plenty of chills. One unlikely aspect of the plot is that a professor who's along for the ride confidently announces, early on and with very little evidence, that the group is now in another dimension contained within the fog. One really gets the feeling his character is on hand just to explain things to the audience. Sadly, this otherwise solid horror film is all but sunk by unexcusably poor miniature effects work, which has resulted in its unfairly bad reputation with critics. The Templars' coffins are at one point thrown overboard but the shots used unfortunately tend to make them resemble small wooden matchboxes being tossed into an aquarium. Likewise, a shot of a burning ship at sea looks more like a burning toy afloat in someone's bathtub. It's a shame that these effects were handled so poorly, because HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES could have been a minor classic if the jarring and laughable miniatures hadn't been present. As it stands, though, this is still recommended viewing for any fan of zombie or ghost stories. The undead knights, surely among the most visually striking and scariest monsters ever dreamed up for the screen, are as frightening as ever (although I missed those great shots of them riding their ghost horses in slo-mo) and the oceanic setting makes this film markedly different from the previous two in the series. NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS was next.
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HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE (1981)
Dir: Lucio Fulci
Bitter and depressing even by Lucio Fulci's standards, this extremely dark haunted house tale is sort of an angry variation on THE SHINING with less emphasis on ghostly visions and more on the failure of married couples to communicate and with the addition of a specific villain. A husband and wife and their little boy move into an old mansion where mad scientist Dr. Freudstein discovered a way to prolong his life indefinitely by constantly replacing his own limbs and organs with those of living, unwilling donors. We're told that he slaughtered his own wife and daughter for their needed body parts and now, over 100 years later, he's an insane, wheezing, hideous living corpse who haunts the basement of his old house awaiting fresh victims. Visitors to the place meet with gruesome deaths while the father researches the house's grim history and the mother slowly loses her grip on reality. Speaking of reality, this movie utilizes a very odd combination of medical horror and metaphysical fantasy, as Freudstein's very presence seems to be the epicenter of (admittedly far-fetched and sometimes dumb) supernatural events and his murdered daughter appears as a ghost to try to warn the boy to get away before her undead dad catches up with him. The zombie mad doctor is a great idea for an evil character but disappointingly is kept at quite an emotional distance from the audience. A metaphoric monster, Freudstein doesn't mind literally taking what he needs from people while destroying them in the process. Ironically, his only goal seems to be to keep himself alive, even though he's become a slimy, worm-eaten walking corpse whose existence, which consists of hiding in the shadows of his dusty basement lair and performing surgery on himself, must surely be devoid of any real pleasure. (An only slightly less drastic form of his "survival of the body at all costs" philosophy is shared by a lot of doctors in the real world, who struggle to keep patients alive for years even after their quality of life has diminished to sheer wretchedness.) Slow but intense, the film is aided by a memorably nerve-jangling soundtrack and gruesome, inventive makeup effects. Like many of Fulci's films, watching it is sort of like being a child and having a demented old uncle tell you a scary story (making it up as he goes) in front of a crackling fire on Halloween night. It may not make a lot of sense, but afterward you have to admit it gave you the creeps. Also like many another Fulci flick, it contains graphic violence and often seems to be taking place in a gloomy fantasy realm balanced precariously on a line between reality and nightmare, between logic and irrationality. On the surface it may look like a mere gore film about a zombie hiding in the cellar, but there's so much madness and morbidity swirling just beneath the surface of this twisted little story that somebody could write an entire thesis on it. 
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HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES, THE (1974)
Dir: Paul Harrison
Here's one that brings back fond memories of my misspent youth. I was a kid when Mom bought me Drake Publishing's 1977 Monster Calendar, which featured a still from REVENGE OF THE CREATURE on the cover. Inside, among large photos of familiar fiends like Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Glenn Strange as Frankenstein and Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man, was an intriguing shot of a very creepy zombie from something I'd never heard of called HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES. Years later, I finally saw the much-anticipated film on TV and was disappointed by how cheap, grainy and boring it seemed. More recently I found it on World Video's tape and made several surprising discoveries. Turns out the original picture quality was excellent, with stylish clear photography full of deep shadows and rich reds and blues. So apparently it's only the TV prints that look scratchy and bland. Seeing it without commercial interruptions made me aware that the pacing isn't nearly so slow as I'd thought, so seeing it on video was largely a new viewing experience. However, it still doesn't make a lick of sense. John Ireland is a crabby director making a spook film in a house where members of the Beal family met violent deaths (it's actually the Utah Governor's mansion, one of the best existing locations ever used in a haunted house movie). His star is Faith Domergue (THIS ISLAND EARTH), an uncooperative ham. The always-welcome John Carradine is the caretaker who tries to explain the muddled plot. We're told that six Beals died here (which would seem to make it a House Of Six Corpses). In addition to six huge portraits of the victims there are two empty portrait frames on the wall (which would seem to make it a potential House Of Eight Corpses). There are eight graves in the family cemetery but only seven have headstones, so nobody knows who's buried in the grave number eight. I've seen the film four times and I don't know either. The crew finds one of those pesky Books Of The Dead in the house and Ireland decides to quote from it in his movie. When Domergue reads the incantation, a corpse crawls up out of its grave and goes on a killing spree. Later, another corpse arises too. So maybe it's only a House Of Two Corpses. I loved the scene in which a murder is being acted out in the film-within-the-film while a similar (real) one takes place outside, and it was a great idea to have the current deaths parallel those of the past, but eight victims are racked up, not seven. It's revealed that there was a name on the mystery grave all along. It turns out to have the same first name as a young crew member (so what?). The soundtrack is a distinctive, classy mix of eerie choral work (which should be released on CD!) and music from THE OUTER LIMITS. The ending makes no sense but at least it's creepy. If you liked the feel of the NIGHT GALLERY series, I know you'll enjoy this sloppy but unsettling oddity. Did I mention that the Tibetan Book Of The Dead is inexplicably printed in Latin? Or that the director also helmed the H.R. PUFNSTUF movie?
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HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN, THE (1974)
Dir: Ron Honthaner
It might not be a classic, but this mid-'70s haunted house chiller is much better than its bad reputation would have you believe. If for no other reason, THE HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN at least deserves to be remembered as the film that cleverly staged a re-creation of Charles Allan Gilbert's brilliant Victorian illustration All Is Vanity. It's an effect that could perhaps be achieved more accurately today with computer manipulation of the imagery, but the fact that director Ron Honthaner did this good a job of it and was ambitious enough to tackle it with his limited effects budget is quite impressive. In addition to that remarkable visual highlight, the cast is good, the mood is suitably creepy and there's actually something like a story being told. It isn't all peaches and screams, however, as slow pacing and too many repeated shots eventually take their toll on viewer patience. (There are so many pointless closeups of the house's gold skull door knocker that it soon becomes annoying and later on downright funny.) The spooky old house of the title is represented in long shots by a wonderful matte painting, but we get too many looks at it. Other effects include a hooded grim reaper figure that appears and disappears, double-exposed red-eyed skulls, and a tombstone that catches fire. The plot is one of those standard "relatives gathered for the reading of the will" things, as an old lady's four surviving heirs arrive at her gothic mansion, unaware that her supposedly faithful butler is actually a voodoo priest who wants to wipe out her family because they've spent the last century oppressing his family. Or something like that. This was the movie debut of Mike Evans, known to TV viewers as Lionel, the Jeffersons' son on both ALL IN THE FAMILY and THE JEFFERSONS. He proves he's a talented performer here, playing an obnoxious selfish jerk who's nothing like his TV persona. Most of the cast is black, with the token white guy played by Victor French (Michael Landon's buddy on the HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN series). The climactic voodoo ceremony is well choreographed but drags on for too long, with the supposedly heroic French standing and watching from the sidelines for an absurdly long time. (He watches calmly while a middle-aged, average looking actress is tormented and killed, but when a young and pretty girl is endangered, he is finally moved to action.) Jean Durand is great as Tomas the villainous butler, and the solicitor is played by an actual Georgia senator. Eventually the old woman rises from her grave as a vengeful zombie, offering some nicely atmospheric shots of her tattered burial shroud dragging along the leafy ground as she makes her way back to the house. The movie's body count is relatively low and not all of the effects work is successful, but this oddball voodoo tale that has the feel of an extended NIGHT GALLERY episode is worth a look for any fan of 1970s-era gothic horror.
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HOUSE ON TOMBSTONE HILL, THE (1988)
Dir: Jim Riffel
There's no rhyme or reason to this little-known EVIL DEAD imitation, but despite its many flaws it's actually a spooky little slice of gory junk food that delivers a solid number of chills. After an unintentionally goofy, pointless flashback, a group of people with interchangeable personalities and no background shows up at an old, crumbling mansion to fix the place up. Rather than spend time on such details as who these people are and why they've come to renovate the house, this movie immediately gets right down to business. It's quickly established that they're trapped inside by supernatural means, which, to the film's credit, smoothly gets around the typical haunted house movie problem of "Why don't they just leave?" The place is haunted by an evil little old lady who died there forty years earlier and now has the behavioral habits of Jason or Michael Myers, delighting in slashing and chopping people to bits (possibly because they broke her tombstone, although this, like every other action in the movie, is left unclear). Also unexplained is why her victims come back to life as pale, bloody, sarcastic zombies who prattle on doing hokey Jack Nicholson impersonations and otherwise practically talking their victims to death. The characters who die come back feeling an unexplained need to slaughter their friends, and since no attempts at characterization have been made, this is the only zombie movie on record in which people actually display MORE personality after they come back from the dead than they did when they were alive. The idea of a bent, gray haired old lady with a cane who's a deranged undead monster is a potentially good one, and if they'd put a little more effort into the appearance and character of the crone they might have had a money-making franchise character for a whole series here. Unfortunately, though, the old hag is obviously played by a man in a dress and a cheap wig and his/her dialogue is meaningless. Halfway through, the action abruptly cuts away to a pair of previously unseen dorks who, through an outrageous coincidence, pick the very same night on which to sneak into the house. I got the impression that the filmmakers realized they were running out of characters to kill off and so hastily threw in a couple more to help the movie reach a decent running time. Folks who get dismembered show up reassembled in zombie form. When the hag is finallv attacked with an axe just out of camera range, blood spurts up from a spot that looks about a foot away from where she's supposedly getting chopped. Most of the effects are way above average, though, and the whole mess does have a peculiarly eerie and uncomfortable feel to it, like a nightmare you might have right after watching EVIL DEAD. This was made as THE DEAD COME HOME and was released in some areas with the moronic title DEAD DUDES IN THE HOUSE.
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I EAT YOUR SKIN (1964)
Dir: Del Tenney
Fans of trash movies already know the story behind this legendary disaster, but for the benefit of the uninitiated, here's the scoop: Del Tenney made this tawdry Caribbean island zombie adventure in 1964 under the title VOODOO BLOOD BATH. It turned out so badly that nobody wanted to release it, so it sat on a dusty shelf until 1971. That was when distributor Jerry Gross needed a co-feature to complete a drive-in double bill with David Durston's 1971 shocker I DRINK YOUR BLOOD. The older film was given a meaningless new title to make it look like an appropriate co-feature for something called I DRINK YOUR BLOOD, and the infamous double bill was promoted with the immortal tagline, "Two Great Blood-Horrors To Rip Out Your Guts!" You have to love it that the man behind this scheme was named Gross. I EAT YOUR SKIN has been a favorite laughing stock since the 1980s, when it was released on tape as part of a "world's worst movies" series. Seen today with an open mind, it's pretty terrible but it's certainly not so bad it's hilarious. It's simply not a very good movie, really no worse than many other cheap films made around the same time. A playboy writer travels to the aptly named Voodoo Island at the behest of his publisher, who goes along for the ride and even brings his bouffant wearing, shrill nasal-voiced wife along, presumably so the two men will have someone to entertain them during the trip with constant complaining. The island is haunted by a dozen or so popeyed killer zombies that look like guys who just got hit in the face with bowls of lumpy oatmeal. Of course there's an innocent young girl on the island, and the zombies (who are NOT cannibals but who do swing a mean machete) are the product of her mad scientist father's experiments. In his secluded clinic, the bipolar doc collects snake venom, bombards it with huge doses of raditaion, and injects the irradiated stuff into native men in an attempt to cure cancer. I know it's hard to believe anything could go wrong with a perfectly logical, medically sound plan like that, but instead of killing cancerous cells, the injections promptly turn the natives into mute zombies with rotted faces and silly google eyes that apparently grow right over their closed eyelids thanks to some embarrassing lap-dissolve effetcs. It's all poorly done but it isn't really any worse than the same director's better known HORROR OF PARTY BEACH, another film that didn't have a proper understanding of the word "zombie". Watch out for the voodoo ceremonies with their interminable dance sequences and the mysterious masked bad guy who wants to conquer the world with an army of the glop-faced murderers. The mad doctor never finds a cure for cancer, but I thought the fact that his formula makes people impervious to bullets was pretty impressive. Nobody in the script is the least bit impressed by this accomplishment, however. I guess they're all too distracted by the shapely girls dancing around bonfires nearby. Some prints of the film bear the title ZOMBIES, and there are minor soundtrack differences, notably in the foley work, between some prints.
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I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE (1986)
Dir: John Elias Michalakis
This goofy comedy spoofs both teenage romance and zombie films, with moderate success. An unlikely group of high school buddies buys some bad pot (which one guy calls "mari-ja-hoovie") from a sleazy drug dealer who seems to have escaped from a Cheech and Chong movie. When they confront him, a fight breaks out that leaves the 'weed man' dead. Panicking, the guys decide to toss his body into the river, only to discover at the last moment that he's still alive. Then they go ahead and kill him for real. Up to this point you'd swear this was a deliberate parody of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, except for the fact that it wasn't made until 11 years later. A toxic waste leak from the town nuke plant contaminates the river and revives the enraged crook as a super-strong zombie with a score to settle. Zany comedy awkwardly gives way to attempts at pathos and teen angst melodrama after one of the boys is killed. His pals steal his body from the funeral parlor and toss it into the river too, in the hopes of creating a second zombie to protect them from the first one. The poor undead jock, now feeling like even more of a misunderstood outcast than the average teen, has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that he's a living corpse but his worst fear is that his hideous condition will make the girl of his dreams turn down his invitation to the spring dance. There are some enjoyably funny ideas and lines and the writers try to think things through in a clever manner, but the project is crippled almost to the point of unwatchability by terrible sound and picture quality and awful monster makeup. Even in a satire, some things have to be done properly and the cheap green greasepaint used here, shot with no regard for continuity, is too distractingly shabby to allow for real interest in the plot. (Watch the dark rings under the zombies' eyes and the little rotted patches on his skin change from shot to shot.) There are a few gory deaths but they're played for laughs and look too silly to be offensive (with one exception, anyway). This is just speculation, but since the production company is called "Periclean" and a "Pete Lewnes" receives more than one technical credit, I'm guessing that the director of the later zombie comedy REDNECK ZOMBIES, credited as 'Pericles Lewnes', was involved with this project too. The tragic aspects of the "doomed lovers" subplot are severely compromised by the 'Monkees'-style buffoonery that has come before, but the actor playing the zombie drug dealer succeeds at being simultaneously scary and funny and the score includes a variety of mid-' 80s music from some pretty good overlooked or forgotten rock bands. (Remember "I Know What Boys Like" by The Waitresses?) Some of the characters and sets seem to come from a '50s or '60s movie, and a radio announcer states that a 'Lloyd Kaufman' (the name of the head of Troma Films) has suffered radiation poisoning. Very silly stuff.
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I, ZOMBIE (1998)
Dir: Andrew Parkinson
Don't be put off by the jokey sounding title. This low-budget British film, released on home video by Fangoria magazine, is a surprisingly grim and sometimes disturbing slice of gloom about the hopeless situation in which an average young guy finds himself after he's bitten by a zombie and begins turning into a fesh-hungry walking corpse himself. There really isn't any story at all, and in spite of I, ZOMBIE's merits it probably would have worked better as one segment of an anthology than as it stands, stretched out to feature length. We only learn a little about the luckless protagonist, his girlfriend and his life before we see him encounter a (totally unexplained) female zombie in the woods. Nobody else ever sees the zombie woman and she's never even mentioned again. It's all downhill for the guy after that, however, as he finds he can no longer survive without the occasional meal of warm human flesh. His body and mind both deteriorate, and there are some authentically nightmarish moments as he realizes he's literally begun to rot and no amount of cosmetic attention is going to reverse it. Ashamed to be seen by friends because of his ever-worsening appearance, he holes up in a cheesy little apartment and, for the benefit of the audience, explains the horrible transformation he's undergoing into a portable tape recorder. He also has nightmares and hallucinations as he slowly loses his grip on the reality he once knew. This gets pretty emotionally intense and extremely downbeat as we hear this literal lost soul describe the painful and gruesome decay he's experiencing. Adding some realism are frequent cutaways to documentary-style interviews with his puzzled girlfriend and other parties who wonder what beame of their absent chum. The acting in these segments is very relaxed and natural and captures the feel of a taped 'missing person' report perfectly. The actor playing the doomed young man gives an excellent performance in a complex and difficult role, and I'd have to give I, ZOMBIE a high recommendation if it wasn't for the fact that it has one of the least satisfying (and least imaginative) endings you're ever likely to see. To sum it up, absolutely nothing happens at the end. Our zombiefied hero is simply left to rot away in his room while his friends finally give up the search and get on with their lives. There's never any indicaton of who is conducting all those interviews with the concerned friends, or for what purpose. The abrupt jumps back and forth between the victim's life of loneliness and the pseudorealistic interview footage is intriguing at first but the friends' monologues start to feel intrusive and monotonous after a while. I, ZOMBIE started out with an ingenious premise and provides good acting and gore effects, but with no real plot and no real point to make it feels unfinished and frustratingly inconclusive. It's merely a mildly interesting experiment in trying to depict a zombie's point of view. It is a/k/a I, ZOMBIE: A CHRONICLE OF PAIN.
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IDLE HANDS (1999)
Dir: Rodman Flender
A gleefully dumb spoof of real-life lazy teenage losers and of 'living hand' movies like THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS, THE CRAWLING HAND, etc., this colossal inside joke had the misfortune to be released theatrically right after the Columbine High murders. Media panic-makers predictably responded by trying once again to claim a connection between teen violence and that in real life. Countless studies have shown that no such link really exists, but irresponsible parents, living in a society that's conditioned to unfailingly find a scapegoat on which to conveniently blame every problem, are always comforted by news articles that help them stay convinced that their own short-sightedness and stupidity can't possibly have anything to do with the younger generation's alienated emotional state. To be sure, this is a stupid movie, but it should be clear to anyone who pays attention that it's supposed to be stupid. Crammed full of hip pop culture horror references, it tells of a stoned, useless teenage slacker (expertly played by Devon Sawa, who went to star in the more serious FINAL DESTINATION) whose lack of purpose and ambition becomes his undoing. He realizes too late that his own hand has been possessed by demons and has been dragging the rest of him around and killing people while he sleeps. His two equally ignorant dope-smoking pals are killed but in one of cinema's most pointed explanations for zombiehood, they come back as rotted living corpses simply because they were too lazy to "go toward the light" after death. ("It looked like a pretty long walk," explains one slack-jawed slob.) The effects are outstanding as the deteriorating undead goofs keep sticking themselves back together in makeshift ways. The nature of the "hand curse" is so poorly thought-out that it doesn't offer enough internal logic to invite serious discussion. That doesn't matter much though, since IDLE HANDS rarely gives the audience enough time to think about exactly what's going on. It just plows into one loopy subplot after another, bringing in a girl-next-door love interest who may become the hand's next victim, a female monster hunter who wants to end the curse by simply killing Sawa, and plenty of grotesque sight gags. Local cops are presented as dim-witted bullies but in this context, this seems less a statement against out-of-control law enorcement than a simple inclusion of one more old exploitation film staple, the Mean Cop. An emphasis on pot smoking upset some parents, but I would remind viewers that the kids depicted here are supposed to be hopeless rejects, not shining role models, and as such should be viewed as objects of parody and not "real" people. The opening sequence makes it clear that the main kid's prents are the kind of self-absorbed dolts who probably really wouldn't notice if their son became possessed. All in all, IDLE HANDS offers a good time for those who are willing to be in on the joke and not take its goony horrors too seriously. How cool is this movie? At a school dance, The Offspring (appearing as themselves) play a song by The Ramones. What could be cooler than that?
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INVASION OF THE DEAD (1972)
Dir: Rene Cardona Sr.
Remember Blue Demon, the masked Mexican wrestling hero who sometimes battled monsters and supervillains? He never got as popular as the all-time Numero Uno Mexican wrestling hero, Santo, but Blue Demon did his share of cinematic monster fighting too, sometimes even in the same movies with El Santo. This time, though, he is aided (sort of) by yet another superhero character, the flamboyant escape artist "Professor Zovek". This zombie movie pits them both against an army of angry living corpses who are somehow re-animated when a bowling ball....er, I mean, a meteor.... from outer space crashes to earth, landing next to a power station and, evidently, a rented fog machine. The living dead in this outing are pale, stiff-legged cadavers who retain more of their human memories than in most zombie flicks. They're shown operating machinery and driving motor vehicles, but since they don't talk I was never sure what they were so ticked off about. In any case, they stagger around strangling people and kicking the sets apart but since they don't appear to be flesh-eaters, no real reason for their antisocial behavior is apparent. Strange events abound. A guy in a tent throws a transistor radio at one of the zombies and it inexplicably explodes on contact, killing the zombie. In an equally odd scene, a pair of hairy-faced werewolf-type monsters briefly stroll into the film to give our heroes a hard time. What, like a legion of mad zombies wasn't enough for them to worry about in one day? Before the heroic and determined Blue Demon (Alejandro Munoz) can get around to actually defeating the ghouls (a task he doesn't seem cut out for since his skills in wrestling and throwing punches don't even faze the dead most of the time), he must discover the source of the zombie invasion with the questionable help of a comic relief sidekick. This is one of many Blue Demon movies that were big hits in Mexico but the film's other hero, Zovek, had a much sadder history. The actor who played him, Francisco Javier Chapa del Bosque, was working on his second feature, following the previous year's THE INCREDIBLE PROFESSOR ZOVEK, when he was killed in a tragic accident. His scenes in INVASION OF THE DEAD, including a sequence in which he performs his stage act in a nightclub, were incorporated into this film in a manner similar to Bela Lugosi's famous posthumous appearance in PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE, although del Bosque at least gets a lot more screen time here than Lugosi did in PLAN NINE. Unfortunately, the Zovek footage is never very well integrated into Blue Demon's scenes. All in all, though, it's still a fairly entertaining feature, if a little mild by zombie standards. If you've never seen any Mexican wrestlers-vs.-monsters pictures, this is probably as good a place as any to start. If you're a devoted fan of this stuff, you've probably already seen this one plus a couple dozen others.
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JUNK (1998)
Dir: Atsushi Muroga
Scary, crusty-faced hungry zombies and several effective shocks are about the only reasons to watch this by-the-numbers zombie tale that's distinguished only by the fact that it is, along with WILD ZERO, one of very few Japanese horror movies to feature the kind of zombies usually found in American and European productions. The usual mad scientist, who works for the usual bull-headed U.S. government organization, injects a bright green serum which he apparently found on the set of RE-ANIMATOR into the corpse of a young woman. "This DNX will be the invention of all time," he awkwardly announces. It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one when she sits up and bites him. Meanwhile, a quartet of the usual small-time crooks in silly masks commit a jewelry store robbery which, as usual, results in somebody being killed and one of the thieves getting wounded. They meet up with the usual gangland crime bosses at the site of the zombie incident (my, what a coincidence), which is the usual remote research facility that looks like an abandoned factory, and are naturally double-crossed and attacked. When one trigger-happy Yakuza bad guy shoots up the lab, his bullets shatter some jars of the zombie serum, splattering it all over the pile of sheet-wrapped corpses that just happened to be lying on the lab floor two feet away. Quicker than you can say, "Hey, haven't I seen all this before in ZOMBI 3, NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES, RE-ANIMATOR and even FROM DUSK TO DAWN'?", the dead are rising up and taking big bloody bites out of the bewildered crooks. Japanese characters speak Japanese, American characters speak English, and one sympathetic Japanese scientist who tries to help is obviously reading his English-language lines phonetically, making him so hard to understand that I had to back up the video a few times and listen to his lines a second time to figure out what he was saying. It reminded me of Spanish actress Lina Romay's pathetic, undecipherable attempts to speak English in various late-'90s shot-on-video Jess Franco fiascos. (Author's note: how come the word "phonetically" is spelled with a "ph-" instead of an f-"?) Anyway, it's always gratifying to see criminals taken out by monsters, and thankfully we do get to witness quite a number of murderous hoods get shredded by the walking dead in JUNK, but there aren't any real surprises to be found here, not even when it's revealed that the zombie girl from the beginning is the former wife of the well-meaning Japanese scientist. Corpses that were awakened simply by getting the formula spilled onto them behave like mindless automatons but the girl who had the stuff actually injected into her bloodstream comes back as a laughing, hard-to-kill super-zombie villainess who knows what she's doing. Photography, pacing and editing are good but the cliched ending is a real groaner. Does anybody understand the title?
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