LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
Dir: George A. Romero
Fans had to wait 20 years for the fourth installment in Romero's historic zombie series that began with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD followed by DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD. This time, zombies have been around for such a long time that pockets of society have been rebuilt by corrupt plutocrats who offer well-guarded mall-like communities as safe havens for those who can afford their pricey memberships while the rest of society is left to fight off the hungry zombie hordes in the squalid, ruined cities beyond the protected perimeters. More and more of the dead seem to be able to think independently like "Bub" in DAY, and the zombies now serve as a metaphor for disenfranchised lower class citizens, written off by the rich as animals who don't own anything and don't know anything and are therefore kept away from the clean, happy environment of the upper crust. America's class struggle is shown with great clarity here, as the zombies gain enough mental awareness to resent their harsh treatment at the hands of the living. Imbuing the dead with some nobility, as opposed to keeping them mindless menaces, does diminish their ability to frighten viewers, but at least it makes for a slightly different slant on the usual zombie mayhem. Accordingly, the dead seem more pitiful than before and a lot less time is spent on graphic depictions of their gory attacks on humans. It's OK that the gore was cut back this time, as we've all seen that sort of thing in so many Romero imitations since the time of DAWN and DAY that scenes of screaming victims having their limbs torn off and their guts unspooled no longer have the shock value they did 20 years before. The gory effects on display are first-rate and there are a generous number of effective shocks and startles in LAND, but the best thing about it is its style. LAND is packed with high-energy action but is directed with great confidence by old pro Romero, who's still one of the smartest horror directors ever. Thanks to his sure hand, the movie never feels the need to talk down to viewers or re-state the obvious, but it completely avoids the contemporary hyperactive jerky style of action movies aimed at video game junkies with no attention spans. For once, here's an action film in which you can always tell what's going on, who is being attacked and who is doing the attacking, and none of the trendy split-second swirling close-up techniques favored by clueless young Hollywood hotshots spoil the fun. (If only Romero had been hired to direct VAN HELSING!) The plot is thin and doesn't really advance the world zombie plauge beyond the events of DAY but this movie is never dull and is populated with a much more well-rounded slate of believable and sympathetic characters than the overwrought DAY. Characterization is excellent throughout, with special praise deserved by Simon Baker as a thoughtful and sincere hero and John Leguizamo as a selfish jerk who, in spite of some serious character flaws, never comes off as a totally bad person. (This performance is outstanding...You can't quite like this guy, but you do understand him and even sympathize with him to some degree.) Asia Argento is also excellent as the female lead, a hard-edged and cynical but basically decent victim of horrific circumstance. On the down side, Dennis Hopper acts like, well, Dennis Hopper as the chief bad guy, and that can't be too convincing. LOTD is never as scary as previous films in this series, nor is it likely to leave the indelible imprint on world cinema that NIGHT and DAWN did, but it's still one of the better zombie invasion flicks and earns high marks for being exactly the film it wants to be instead of trying to please everybody. And, for those who are wondering, the vast array of rotted bloody zombie makeups are excellent. 
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LIVING A ZOMBIE DREAM (1996)
Dir: Todd Reynolds
This backyard feature is a gloomy, inconclusive comment on the quiet insanity and appetite for violence that lurks beneath the placid facade of lower-middle-class America. It tries to mix PHANTASM dream logic and David Lynch surrealism with zombie thrills but is only sporadically successful. (Your first clue that this movie isn't going to be everything it could've been is the fact that the printed label on the videotape manages to misspell the name of the distribution company.) A brooding, emotionally disturbed young man experiences traumatic bloody visions. He lives with his trashy girlfriend who spends her time putting on makeup and watching an always-on TV set that picks up nothing but static. He allows his brother to be killed by a neighbor who's a blood-drinking, baseball bat-wielding, satanic-looking looney who prowls around in a loincloth and murders people in his cellar. The surviving sibling later kills the psycho but is surprised to find that both victims (and a gang of ghouls) haunt his dreams and waking hours in the form of hungry zombies. The bearded zombie-ghost-maniac talks about discovering a way to "live" forever as a supernatural ghoul by consuming human flesh. The sleazy girl sometimes appears dressed up like Marilyn Monroe with styrofoam coffee cups stuck in her hair, while groups of rotted zombies chow down on corpses in broad daylight. Acts of murder and cannibalism take place but people keep reacting like it's no big deal. A "Motel 6" sign is seen but a Quality Inn is thanked in the credits! Numerous freaky events take place but the trouble with this film is that it keeps negating the action by cutting away to shots of the troubled main character waking up from a bad dream. After this has happened a few times you can never believe anything that occurs is happening in 'reality'. Every time things got too weird I just figured the guy was going to sit bolt upright in bed again. I was right way too often. It's impossible to create real shocks in a story where absolutely anything can happen and quickly be tossed aside as a nightmare hallucination. Things can eventually become predictable in their unpredictability! Many shots are repeated but never add up to anything meaningful, and by the end I still had no idea if any of the gruesome events were supposed to have taken place anywhere outside the sick mind of the protaganist. The flippant disregard for plot progression notwithstanding, LIVING A ZOMBIE DREAM has enough originality and atmosphere to make it worth a viewing. The makeup is excellent, the pacing is steady and the nicely scary low, throbbing soundtrack keeps the mood thoroughly dark and demented at all times. It fails to provide any real characterization and to come to grips with exactly what's going on, but at least this artsy, puzzling, sixty-nine-minute-long obscurity gets points for attempting to do something different within the living dead subgenre.
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LIVING DEAD GIRL (1980)
Dir: Jean Rollin
Along with its important role in providing a nifty title for a cool Rob Zombie song, this French film from the always interesting Jean Rollin is a must-see for any serious horror fan. Like much of Rollin's work, the movie establishes its own unique, fragile boundary between morbid horror and romantic poetry and manages to stay balanced thereon from beginning to end. In an opening borrowed from FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943), graverobbers disturb a tomb and only briefly live to regret it. An earth tremor causes some barrels of illegally-disposed-of toxic waste to spill their contents, contaminating the corpse of a beautiful blonde woman. She's re-awakened as a blank-faced, quiet, ghostly figure with a hunger for human flesh and blood. An air of nostalgic sadness prevails as she wanders back to an old house where she used to live, encountering objects (a piano, a music box, etc.) that trigger memories of her former life. An American photographer traveling in the area with her husband happens to snap a photo of the undead girl and, told that the person in the picture has been dead for some time, disastrously decides to investigate further. The confused living corpse meets up with the childhood friend with whom she'd made a suicide pact which the friend (now a somewhat unbalanced lesbian real estate agent), obviously, failed to keep. The obsessive woman soon realizes what her best friend has become and offers to help by luring victims to the house for the girl to devour. As she spends more time in her old stomping grounds, however, her unfortunate undead companion gradually develops not only a fairly complete set of memories but also a full awareness of the true nature of the unnatural, evil thing she's become. LIVING DEAD GIRL is packed with emotional conflicts of every sort and has a lot to say about the nature of love, guilt and sacrifice. The chilling ending is downbeat but is logically the only way this sad set of circumstances could have ended. There are some bloody gore effects along the way but they're all presented in a sudden and matter-of-fact way that's very different from the 'Grand Guignol show-stopper' style of Lucio Fulci's living dead epics. My only real complaint is the unneeded toxic waste bit at the beginning. Not only does it add a touch of cheap sci-fi/horror cliche to the proceedings but it has no further importance to the plot. The idea has the feel of having been forced into the story to satisfy the literalists in the audience who need a "rational" explanation of how a corpse could be revived, but in this context it feels so rooted in movie logic as to be out of place (why couldn't the girl have come back supernaturally solely because her friend failed to live up to her end of their childhood pact?) Still, being saddled with a bit of unnecessary claptrap at the opening doesn't detract from LIVING DEAD GIRL's haunting power. If you like 'em creepy, this is a movie to look for.
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MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1973)
Dir: Christopher Speeth
Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey, who had played Prof. Van Helsing on the stage opposite Frank Langella's Dracula), an aging carnival manager who looks like an undertaker, shows new staff members around the grounds. Everyone talks as though the carnival is open for business but no customers are ever seen except those few specific ones who are needed as victims. The clueless people being hired to run various rides and games are all there to be killed too. A guy named "Lucky" gets decapitated on the roller coaster, a family with a horrible bratty daughter disappears in a tunnel ride, a man is stabbed on the ferris wheel, and so on. The victims are eaten by an army of gray-skinned zombie ghouls who hang around the periphery and have their own screening room in which they watch silent era horror films including THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Clips from the Lon Chaney PHANTOM and HUNCHBACK movies are shown, but I doubt the makers of this movie had Universal's permission to use them. The gypsy fortune teller is played by an obvious man in drag. Another skulking weirdo is named Mr. Bean (after the real life deranged 14th-century cannibal Sawney Bean) and sports the worst excuse for a hook hand you've ever seen. The most memorable character is Sticker, a smiling zombie janitor with seriously misaligned eyes who looks like he walked right out of someone's nightmare. Nothing that anyone says or does ever makes any sense and there's no story, only a series of violent macabre incidents surrounding a dim-witted girl named Vena, who makes for a whiny, unappealing heroine. The scene in which zombies sing while a bloody guy dies quivering on a table has to rank among the weirdest scenarios ever committed to film. A lot of creative camerawork keeps MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL watchable, as when the camera is fixed to various moving objects to create some great off-kilter shots. The carnival, which seems to exist in some sort of alternate reality, has many rooms and props made of clear plastic sheeting and bubble wrap and lots of creepy looking papier-mache' dolls. Blood is shown bubbling up in glass jars as part of some never-explained apparatus. Malatesta, the owner, lurks in the shadows. He wears a cape and reminded me of Zandor Vorkov in DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN. Sometimes he instructs Mr. Blood to hurry up and get more people killed, and sometimes he howls like a wolf in the manner of Count Floyd. At one point he turns into a scarecrow with a wad of bubble wrap for a head. This angry, downbeat, nonsensical regional wonder filmed in a Pennsylvania amusement park was shown in some southern drive-ins in the mid-seventies but then suddenly dropped off the radar when the few prints somehow disappeared. It was considered a "lost" film for around 25 years, until one single surviving print was discovered in the director's attic. That print, released onto DVD, turned out to be in remarkably good shape for an almost 30-year-old low-budget movie. The director's brother, a scientist specializing in acoustics who had spent years designing weapons and gadgets that utilized sound waves, created the strange metallic humming background score for the film, getting a credit for "psychoacoustics". He designed the sounds to induce fear psychologically and they're pretty effective in maintaining a nightmarish, uneasy atmosphere. Herve Villechaize, who would soon go on to play Tattoo on FANTASY ISLAND, shows up briefly as Bobo the evil dawrf. The director went on to a successful career in documentary style shooting for TV shows like NIGHTLINE and AMERICA'S MOST WANTED. If you like surreal dreamlike horror movies with lots of gore, you won't want to pass this one up. It's certainly not good in any conventional sense, but it's creepy and unpredictable and has a unique nightmarish feel. It feels distinctly unfinished but evidently this is all there ever was of it. You'll have to admit you've never seen anything else quite like it.
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MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD (1982)
Dir: Jess (Jesus) Franco
I realize that many sane, rational movie fans can't sit through the films of Spanish director Jess Franco. I have to admit that much of Franco's work is marred by crude camerawork, dull pacing and severe overuse of zoom lenses. But I still find many of his peculiarly murky, dreamlike horror/exploitation movies entertaining and refreshingly unpredictable. I liked THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF, THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z., SUCCUBUS, and heck, even THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN was, if nothing else, wholly original. MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD, though, has to be one of his all-time worst. Pointless and appallingly misogynistic even by Franco standards, it's a slow-moving imitation of Amando DeOssorio's atmospheric "Blind Dead" movies, made with a budget of next to nothing. Four (usually naked or near naked) young lesbian and/or bisexual barmaids arrive at a large Mediterranean resort hotel for a vacation. The place is practically deserted (guess their ads failed to appeal strongly enough to the naked lesbian barmaid demographic) and the caretaker is a creepy suspicious character. At night, ancient bells toll at the nearby abandoned monastery and the girls wander over to the place one by one, where they're brutally raped and murdered in sadistically prolonged scenes by undead satanic monks. Hard to watch much of the time, this mean-spirited time-waster lingers on lengthy shots of nude women screaming and dying in crude, ugly footage. The zombie makeups mostly look like layers of dried Elmer's glue haphazardly applied to the faces of a few bored Spaniards. A few are even plain (very clean) skeletons draped with white hooded monk robes. Back at the hotel, another woman, naked except for stockings, is kept chained to a bed (by means of a dog leash) by the desk clerk and after lots of footage of her thrashing around in a truly deranged manner, she dies after being fed a meal covered with rat poison! About the only thing this dull movie has going for it is some effectively cold-looking, dark, outdoor night scenes that pack something of a chill thanks to the loud, howling wind noise and the mournful clanging coming from the decrepit haunted bell tower. These elements succeed in making parts of MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD rather spooky to listen to even if it doesn't offer much else from a visual standpoint. I know there will be male readers wondering how I can say a film full of naked women isn't fun to look at, but trust me, most of the girl-ogling footage here--like the characters themselves--is presented in a way that feels more vulgar and unpleasant than sexy. The best, most surprising scene is one in which a hand unexpectedly reaches out of a top-story hotel window and hurls a large knife into the air. lt lands sticking in the ground right next to the heroines. To get through the rest of this one, though, you'd better reach for the nearest pack of No-Doze. 
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MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)
Dir: Willard Huyck
This seldom-seen very dark fantasy is one of the most unfairly overlooked American horror movies of all time. Written and shot in a uniquely out-of-whack style that captures the lonely feel of an inescapable bad dream far more authentically than most of the later MTV-style attempts at teen-accessible surrealism, this eerie, low-budget wonder is (incredibly) often written off by critics as a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ripoff even though the two films have almost nothing in common in terms of either content or approach. Most of the thoughtless disrespect aimed at MESSIAH OF EVIL is undoubtedly due to its having been released by clueless distributors who reissued it under about 4,673 different titles during the '70s, always accompanied by tacky promotional materials that did their best to pass it off as a sequel to NOTLD. One poster featured arms reaching through a boarded-up window and a lettering style that looked identical to NOTLD's, and in 1980 somebody even stole the ad line "When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth" from DAWN OF THE DEAD and released it again. I suspect the resulting (completely justified) lawsuit from Romero's people helped to keep the movie obscure. Younger viewers may have a hard time getting past the central characters' very '70s 'mod' style of dress and language, but if you're able to relate to a movie that's set in, say, the Middle Ages or in the 18th century, then a story that happens to be taking place in early-1970s America shouldn't be a hard pill to swallow either. The story has a young woman searching for her missing father (a surrealist painter) in the eerilv quiet, isolated coastal town of Point Dune. She meets up with three selfish undesirables who are also looking for the man, and gradually they learn that most of the locals are forlorn living dead who weep tears of blood and stand silently on the shore at night awaiting the return of a mysterious Dark Stranger who came to town 100 years before and cursed the place with a horrible state of living death and the ominous promise to come back when the world is "tired" and the full moon appears blood-red. MESSIAH OF EVIL is loaded with poetically sad emotion, clever camerawork and real scares. A woman being persued by zombies in a brightly-lit supermarket at night is not easily forgotten, and the same is true of sequences in which a theater audience takes on a gradually threatening tone as expressionless strangers in dark '40s-style suits silently file in, a young woman begs for help even as a drop of blood trickles from her eye, ghostly figures drop through a skylight, and the father (whose eventual return coincides with that of the unseen Stranger) finally shows up in his disturbingly-decorated apartment and can't control his urge to attack his own flesh and blood. The unforgettable opening gas station sequence alone conjures more authentic dread than most big-budget zombie films ever manage, yet some fans and critics continue to dismiss this fascinating chiller (which is a/k/a DEAD PEOPLE), largely because it doesn't play by the well-established rules of the zombie invasion genre and because some of the actors aren't exactly Oscar caliber. A forgotten oddity that's highly recommended.
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MONSTER HUNTER (1981)
Dir: "Joe D'Amato" (Aristide Massacessi)
There's a lot of confusion surrounding this gory Italian film. Although the quality of the production is probably too low for the finished product to deserve much serious consideration, I may as well try to set the record straight. Shot as ANTHROPOPHAGUS 2 and released in some foreign markets as ABSURD, it's best known in the U.S. by the video release title ZOMBIE 6: MONSTER HUNTER. First, forget the "ZOMBIE 6" that was tacked on by a video distributor. This movie has nothing to do with any zombie film that came before it. Many sources call it a direct sequel to ANTHROPOPHAGUS (known in the U.S. as THE GRIM REAPER) because it's by the same director (calling himself Peter Newton here) and stars the same actor (George Eastman, real name Luigi Montefiori) in the part of its murderous monster. Despite the original title and what you might have read elsewhere, this is not a true sequel. GRIM REAPER starred Eastman as a goop-faced cannibal ghoul named Klaus Weltmann haunting an island. The brute here looks human (well, as human as Eastman looks, anyway) and is a deranged killer named Mikos Stanopolous who escaped from a medical research project with the ability to quickly regenerate damaged cells and tissues, making him all but unstoppable. Technically I wouldn't call him a zombie, but since he keeps geting back up after "fatal" injuries, I guess he qualifies as living dead of a sort. In a tale that's more like the Chuck Norris vehicle SILENT RAGE than any zombie film, he's chased around a small American town by Edmond Purdom playing a priest who serves the role Donald Pleasance had in HALLOWEEN, a movie that was an obvious inspiration. The only part of the ghoul's anatomy that can't properly repair itself is his brain, and he grows more insane with each injury he suffers. This is sort of hard to tell, though, since he's already an unreasoning, homicidal sadist from the start. He never speaks but he must have some awareness because he clearly feels pain and even fear as he flees from Purdom, the only man around who knows how to kill him. He looks really angry when he kills and instead of knocking his victims off in quick, simple ways a la Jason Voorhees, he apparently enjoys seeing people suffer, since many of his kills are of a slow, painful nature. His brain, along with being mostly dead, is also painfully swollen, which may partially expain his tendency to go for his victims' heads. He shoves a drill through a nurse's head, splits a guy's head apart with a power saw, and cooks one woman's head in an oven. Despite it all, you almost feel sorry for him by the end since he takes so much abuse himself and is finally done in, rather embarrassingly, by a teenage girl in traction and a half-dead babysitter. In his otherwise outstanding and highly recommended book The Biology Of Science Fiction Cinema, Mark C.Glassy makes a number of errors about the spoken dialogue in this film, which makes me suspect he watched a fuzzy, multi-generation bootleg tape that had poor sound quality.
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MORBUS (1982)
Dir: Ignasi P. Ferre'
A distinctive but mostly unsuccessful mix of traditional zombie horror, sappy sexploitation and wacky humor, this odd Spanish import features broad comic acting, incongruously serious scare sequences, a small army of zombies, and more naked people than you could possibly imagine. After a reasonably atmospheric pre-credit sequence in which a guy is attacked by an unseen something in a graveyard, MORBUS focuses on a hard-working, hard-drinking writer who turns down an invitation to a party in order to stay home and catch up on his work. Meanwhile, the friendly neighborhood Mad Pharmacist has invented a formula that brings the cadavers at the local hospital back to life as pasty-faced, stiff-legged, wide-eyed, heavy-breathing, slow-moving cannibal zombies who are impervious to bullets. The writer's ex-girlfriend (now a hooker) ends up seeking shelter in his house after a zombie attack in the woods, and before long the living dead crash a satanic ceremony at the nearby digs of a cult of red-robed, devil-worshipping weirdos. A lot more footage is devoted to scenes of nude women (and sometimes men) than to the dark, brief zombie attacks. The only memorable character is a dirty old man who giggles insanely as he sneaks around scaring people and playing pranks. The cackling old pervert ties one girl up and then leaves her to the zombies. At the climax, after the ghouls have surrounded the house and the heroes have gone on the run, it looks like the writer is about to get bitten by his now-zombiefied lover--But wait! The movie then jumps to a shot of him waking up at his desk, so it turns out the whole thing was just a bad dream! Ha ha!--No, wait again! He answers the front door and his home is invaded by a real slew of monsters! Ha ha ha! Err, no, no, wait again! They turn out to be a group of his friends wearing rubber masks as a practical joke! Ha ha ha ha! And guess who the last guy to pull off his mask is?... That's right, it's the old looney, who laughs his great, silly high-pitched giggle right into the camera one more time. Out of that many endings, there ought to be at least one that you like, right? Pretty bloodless by zombie movie standards, MORBUS is naive, over-the-top and preposterous, so that even its obsession with naked women in jeopardy seems more childish and laughable than offensive. (Try to imagine an R-rated episode of THE BENNY HILL SHOW with zombies, satanists and spooky music added.) The snickering schoolboy sexual attitude clashes with the serious nature of the horror scenes, giving this movie a schizophrenic feel that makes it hard to take seriously on any level. Not that you should take it seriously. It's a simple-minded, fairly painless piece of exploitative escapism and nothing more. You don't need to bother with it unless you really feel you have to see every zombie film ever made.
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MORTUARY (2005)
Dir: Tobe Hooper
Here's a zombie movie directed by Tobe Hooper. Widowed mom Denise Crosby and her two kids move to a new town to take over a long-closed, dusty old mortuary. A strange computer-animated black fungus turns the dead into zombies who behave more like victims of senile dementia than living death. This efficient, passably entertaining hokum often feels like a Stephen King tale, what with the local youths being hostile jerks and several supporting characters acting like lunatics. The story seems half-baked and sloppy, lacking in useful exposition and never making any sort of point. No explanation for the existence of the zombie fungus is ever given, and a famous couplet from the writings of H.P.Lovecraft is strangely misquoted, taken out of context and shoved into the movie in a way that adds nothing. Along for the ride is Bobby, a big deformed maniac who looks like Jason from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, but he is used so little and contributes so little to the plot that the movie could easily have done without him. It is vaguely implied that he provides the fungus with its victims, but when it attacks him at the climax I wasn't sure if he was being deliberately punished by the fungus for betraying it or if maybe it will eat anybody and Bobby just never got that close to it before. The scene wherein Crosby prepares to perform her first embalming job, on the cadaver of an old man who already looks like a mummified monster even before anything supernatural happens, is particularly strange. She needs to read each and every step aloud to herself from a textbook and fumbles with the tools of the trade in a clumsy way that resembles what you would expect if Shemp Howard tried his hand at embalming. One nice touch, loosely based on authentic zombie folklore, is that the living dead can be destroyed by salt. A writer's convenience finds a stockroom full of cans of salt, which someone speculates must be there because the people who lived there before liked making homemade ice cream, but I guess the real reason for all that salt is that the previous owners, who apparently never thought of contacting the state health department, the government or any other authorities for assistance in dealing with the hazards of killer fungus and walking corpses, kept plenty of it around to throw on any attacking zombies they might meet. The rousing finale provides some genuinely tense and scary moments as the panicked survivors rush through the building throwing salt on the angry zombies, causing them to instantly dry up and disintegrate. There's a fair amount of good work in the action sequences, but the movie foolishly throws it all away to supply a cheap shock ending of the sort that's had horror viewers groaning and rolling their eyes ever since the '70s. Even after we see the menacing mass of monster mold destroyed and blown to bits and all the zombies bite the (or more accurately turn into) dust, the film ends on a by-rote mean, cynical "grabber" as the evil force is somehow still alive in a puddle and a zombie who got salted in an earlier scene reappears inexplicably intact. This ending is so bad it almost makes you sorry you watched the whole film, but at least there are some adequate scares here and there. I still don't know why the real estate agent was laughing hysterically in every one of his scenes, unless perhaps someone was drawing a parallel to the crazed character of Renfield, who served Dracula just as the agent (I assume, although this is never stated) works for the fungus. Don't expect much of a plot and you might find MORTUARY suitably diverting, even though there's not much here to suggest the guidance of the man who turned cinema horror on its bloody ear with the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE back in 1974. Not to be confused with the identically titled 1980s slasher flick.
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NEITHER THE SEA NOR THE SAND (1971)
Dir: Fred Burnley
This forgotten British horror-tragedy deserves more recognition. General masses might find it too slow-paced and too light on violence for their tastes, but more thoughtful viewers will be engaged by its unique storyline, shuddery sense of despair and oppresive morbidity. Susan Hampshire (from MALPERTUIS) stars as a woman stuck in a loveless marriage who has an ill-advised affair with Hugh, an odd young man she meets during a trip to the Cornish coast. Against the gloomy, bleak seaside backdrop, the two seem to be developing a genuine love for each other when tragedy strikes. Hugh suddenly drops dead while romping on the beach, and Hampshire's intense traumatized performance is pretty heart-rending stuff as her whole world shatters with the shock of her lover's death. She might have been a bit flighty before, but Hugh's death leaves her seriously unhinged and mentally unable to accept the loss. That night Hugh shows up again, and you might assume he's a figment of her imagination...except that other characters can see him too! The implication is that Hampshire's literally undying love and steadfast refusal to accept his death has somehow brought Hugh back from the grave. Now a cold, quiet, expressionless living corpse, he hovers about much to Hampshire's initial delight. But he really is dead, after all, and despite Hampshire's determination to keep their relationship going, we know their situation is hopeless and that it's only a matter of time before she sees they're both doomed. This is extremely dark and disturbing material, presented in a naturalistic matter-of-fact way that only makes it seem all the more chilling, a nightmarish impossibility that inexplicably intrudes into the 'real' world. It's a case of a movie actually benefitting from a lack of traditional horror film trappings. The film is based on a novel by Gordon Honeycombe, a BBC newsreader. Critics of the time didn't seem to have much good to say about it, but those who like thoughtful, literate horror would do well to seek out this eerie, dreamlike, downbeat zombie-themed romantic tearjerker.
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NIGHT LIFE (1989)
Dir: David Acomba
Not to be confused with an identically-titled vampire movie made around the same time. This NIGHT LIFE, produced during a time when (mostly awful) teen-horror comedies were being cranked out in Hollywood left and right, is an unusually light-hearted look at the walking dead that may not be scary or fast-paced enough to satisfy every horror fan but still provides plenty of entertainment as long as you're prepared for a teen comedy movie with zombie activity instead of a straight-out shocker. It's well acted, slickly photographed and has some well-thought-out, believeable (if slightly spoofy) characterizations. John Astin (the original Gomez Addams) displays none of his usual warmth in his role as a small town's scheming, two-faced, bad-tempered undertaker. He gets stuck taking care of his well-meaning teenaged nephew (Scott Grimes) and impatiently teaches the kid the ins and outs of embalming, scamming the bereaved, and other finer points of the funeral business. Grimes' character seems like a Stephen King protagonist, a good-natured innocent who is constantly harassed and threatened by a pair of stupid macho high school jocks and their conceited girlfriends. The movie spends a lot of time (maybe too much) establishing all these various characters and their relationships with each other before the actual horror part of the story gets going. The bullies and their chicks are all killed in a freak car crash and it's the job of the young mortician-in-training to prepare their bodies for burial. His old enemies aren't through tormenting the kid yet, though, and soon spring back to life as gruesome-looking zombies. The bloody zombie makeups are great but the explanation behind thier resurrection struck me as being too stupid even for a comedy film: they're simply hit by lightning and revived, and little more is said of the matter. Much of the character-driven humor is clever but some of the supposedly funny stuff involving the quartet of zombies (especially when a decaying dead guy hops into bed to have sex with his decaying dead girl-friend) is pretty lame. The only really unsuccessful special effect comes during the overdone scene in which Astin is attacked by the undead. Can the likeable teen hero and his tomboyish girlfriend escape the clutches of both the bloodthirsty living dead and the mean old uncle? NIGHT LIFE didn't exactly make waves or explore any new territory but it's still an enjoyable horror-comedy that offers a number of chuckles, a number of creepy moments, and a knowingly parodic mood that puts it in league with the (more nihilistic) 1985 hit RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. It probably won't be anybody's favorite horror movie because of its slow-to-get-to-the-point nature, but it should certainly be seen by fans of eighties-era zombie mayhem. A scary wide-eyed female zombie head from this film made the cover of FANGORIA back in '89.
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NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
Dir: George A. Romero
George Romero and John Russo's 1968 shocker NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was more than just a trend-setting horror film. More ground-breaking than a dozen gravediggers, it's among the very few American films that not only started a whole new subgenre but also firmly established a new set of monster mythology that would quickly become a permanent part of the way movie audiences (and the rest of the horror world) would percieve its chosen subject. Just as the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN forever established the high-voltage electrical origin of The Monster in moviegoers' minds, and THE WOLF MAN (1941) cemented its own mythos (silver bullets, pentagrams, etc.) into our culture's understanding of werewolves, so did NOTLD declare once and for all that zombies--that is, re-animated corpses--could return to a semblance of life without any particular master to serve. Prior to NOTLD, the walking dead (not counting vampires, of course) were almost invariably shown to be under the control of a zombie master (like Bela Lugosi in the 1932 classic WHITE ZOMBIE) who would create the creatures either through hypnotism, mind-altering drugs or voodoo, in order to use them as mindless, obedient slaves. (Just think of the advantages!...You wouldn't have to deal with labor unions, pay them a fair minimum wage, give them paid holidays, provide them with medical insurance or other benefits--Geez, maybe I'd better not say any more about zombie workers. There may be some big-money corporation's CEO reading this and getting ideas.)
NOTLD, however, told us that the walking dead could get up and move around on their own. One of the movie's most clever devices is its almost total avoidance of any rational explanation for just why the dead are rising (although a returning space probe is mentioned, this is only speculation in the film, leaving us with no real reason behind the movie's bizarre events). By leaving the monsters' origins hazy, NOTLD not only maintained a nightmarish hopeless mood but also opened the bloodgates for scores of other, later writers and directors to provide their own rationales for their hordes of living corpses. The new zombie-ology introduced in NOTLD also determined that the living dead were flesh-eaters, eager to walk right up to normal humans and bite big bloody hunks out of them without so much as a dinner invitation, making them much more dangerous and unpredictable than their slow-moving, robotic forerunners from the zombie films of the 1930s and '40s. Making NOTLD's zombies even more frightening was the fact (borrowed from vampire and werewolf folklore and used in most of the zombie movies that followed) that anyone who survived a zombie's bite was doomed to become a zombie himself. This resulted in a rapidly-spreading plague of the zombie virus, so that the countryside (and the movie screen) was overrun with the deadly creatures by the film's final reel. Helpfully, though, Romero and Russo also provided in their set of Movie Zombie Rules an official method that would become the definitive way to kill (or 're-kill') a zombie--a bullet (or a blow) to the head! Just as vampires were susceptible to the trusty stake-through-the heart means of disposal, zombies now needed to be shot, decapitated or just plain clobbered in the cranium, which would effectively destroy their undead brains. Of course, not every single zombie movie that followed would adhere strictly to these guidelines, but an amazing number of them did just that.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has been written about countless times since 1968, by those who saw the film as an angry statement about the tumultuous year of its release (when many foresaw the breakdown of American society), by those who sought to hold it up as an example of cinema reflecting its audiences' loss of their sense of security and faith in authority figures, and by those reviewers who simply saw it as a triumph of inventive low-budget filmmaking that delivered chills and shocks with the simplest of special effects and plotting. The movie has been reviewed, criticized, dissected and analyzed (occasionally to the point of pretentious absurdity) so many times that it seems rather pointless to expound on it, its filmic techniques, its hidden meanings, or its relationship to the nation's psyche circa 1968, one more time. Let's just say it's an American classic that's still scary today.
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NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990)
Dir: Tom Savini
Before being too hard on this movie, stop and take a couple of things into account. In the first place, consider that it would be utterly impossible to duplicate the far-reaching impact of the 1968 original in any societal setting other than that of 1968. And although I think remakes are in general a terrible idea and should be discouraged, I'm willing to forgive the makers of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD for getting behind a remake because they never made the money they deserved from the original due to its many years of disputed public domain status and subsequent misunderstandings. That said, even though I was mentally prepared for this film to join the vast majority of Remakes That Stink, I have to come right out and risk offending a lot of LIVING DEAD fans by admitting that I actually LIKED this movie. No, it's not an exact Xerox copy of the '68 film, but if you try to recreate a popular film shot-by-shot you'll usually end up with something artless that audiences will look down their noses and laugh at (like the 1999 PSYCHO remake). Makeup artist Tom Savini directed this updating of the old story with an eye toward character development rather than placing the main emphasis on gory effects, and the results are very entertaining if somewhat predictable. Characterizations that worked in '68 have wisely been altered to more convincingly reflect the America of the '90s, and even though the people in this version are all based on the characters from the older film, the slightly reworked personalities seem much more believable than if they'd just copied everything as it was written over twenty years earlier. As in the historic original, a group of desperate strangers holes up in an old farmhouse and tries to survive a night during which the dead have inexplicably reawakened with a hunger for human flesh. Although the familiarity of the material reduces the possibilities for real suspense, there are enough good scares and tense moments here to make this worth any horror fan's time. The ghoul makeups are wonderfully done--so well, in fact, that I was a little disappointed by how little we actually see of them! My only other complaint with this movie is the oddly stagey and phony-looking lighting. Where the heck is all that bright white light on the porch after sundown coming from? And if it's supposed to be lighted electrically, why doesn't anybody inside think to turn those 5000-watt porch Iights OFF to avoid the attention of more ghouls? Check out the cellar scenes, too...have you EVER seen such a brightly-lit basement? Oh well, I guess you can't have everything. In what must be a nod to Italian director Lucio Fulci, a prominent featured ghoul in the house looks nearly identical to the first zombie seen on the boat at the beginning of Fulci's ZOMBIE. I know it's popular to scorn this film, but I'll say it again: I was impressed with it. Bloody good job, Tom!
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NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (1999)
Dirs: George A. Romero, John Russo
An interesting failure. This cut-and-paste attempt to make a new film out of an old one deserves a viewing by every zombie devotee in spite of its flaws (the first of which is that since the original came out in 1968 this is technically a 31st annversary edition). Primarily an attempt by John Russo and Bill Hinzmann to cash in on George Romero's original while exaggerating their own influence on it, this revised cut includes most of the '68 film with 16 minutes of amateurish new scenes by Russo and Hinzmann edited in. Oddly, the newer stuff would seem to indicate that the pair never quite understood what made the '68 film scary in the first place. They begin by setting up a fatuous backstory for the famous Hinzmann ghoul, staging a cheesy funeral at which we learn he was a rapist and murderer during his natural life. The same silly assumption, that a criminal who becomes a zombie is somehow scarier or more interesting than an ordinary citizen who becomes a zombie, was repeated in the 2001 semi-sequel CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD. A new prologue shows the graveyard ghoul as a corpse who awakens, destroying the impact of Romero's original opening, in which viewers were supposed to think the man was only a drunken bum and were shocked out of their seats when he suddenly attacked. Other fumbles abound, including the late-1990s clothes, objects and hairstyles showing up and looking distractingly out-of-place next to the 1968 scenes into which they are crudely intercut. New gore footage, while competently done, dilutes suspense and diminishes Romero's flesh-eating scenes, originally withheld until late in the film to strengthen their shock value. The most interesting idea introduced is the addition of the only zombie bite victim in the series to be cured, instead of becoming a zombie himself. The victim is a priest (unfortunately played by a miscast goth- rock musician whose trendy shaved head and little beard make him look very 1999 and comically inappropriate to play an American clergyman from 1968) who is miraculously healed by the power of prayer after several weeks of care and prayer vigils by members of his church. The idea that this strain of zombiehood can be warded off with religious faith is a new one, hinting that the cause of the plague theorized in the original script (radiation from space) was wrong after all and that maybe the devil himself is responsible, which ties in with DAWN OF THE DEAD's tagline "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth". It was a great idea to have the doctors provide the infected priest with companionship in the form of a dog, so that in case he did go zombie, he would at least attack an animal rather than a person first. To give credit where it's due, it should be noted that this new twist is a more daring and thought-provoking concept than anything in Romero's own sequel DAY OF THE DEAD. But on the whole this "special edition" stumbles and bumbles its way through Romero's earlier work and is only likely to be remembered as another shameless attempt by Hinzmann and Russo to sell themselves as important horror celebrities by virtue of their original working relationship with Romero.
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NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS (1975)
Dir: Amando DeOssorio
Released in the U.S. as NIGHT OF THE DEATH CULT because it was assumed that nobody here would pay to see a movie called NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, this fourth and (to date) final official entry in the Blind Dead series has many of the same strengths and weaknesses of the first three. Wisely, DeOssorio gives us stronger characterizations this time plus plenty of fine footage of his famous undead skull-faced knights, including shots of them riding ghostly horses along the Spanish shores (a crowd-pleasing visual highlight that was omitted from the previous film in the series). The same shivery soundtrack featuring the ghouls' well-known pseudo-Gregorian chant was used once again to good effect. But the main point of interest in the first film (1971's TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD) was the shocking appearance and eerie movements of the zombies themselves, and, three movies later, the old ghosts just don't have the same impact they did the first time we saw them. As in the other sequels, a number of new ideas are introduced into the plot, but just like in the previous entry (HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES) the most haunting, poetic and potentially interesting concepts are frustratingly pushed to the periphery, serving to add a few lines of dramatic dialogue but having no significant impact on the action. This time the Templars reside in a castle by a small coastal village, from which they demand virgin human sacrifices from the townspeople at regular intervals. A doctor and his beautiful wife settle in the town and eventually learn not only the place's dark secret but also that the frightened, sometimes hostile villagers are willing to freely give seven of their daughters to the blind dead every so often rather than risk angering the sword-wielding living corpses. On those nights when the ghouls are about to arise, strange black seagulls appear in the skies over the town, their chilling cries signalling the blind dead's coming. The spooky birds are supposedly reincarnations of the zombies' sacrificial victims, a great idea that's never fully exploited. We never see one more gull added to the flock following a sacrifice nor anything else that literal. Instead the movie settles for the usual business of a handful of trapped people fighting off the attacking undead. The scenes of the terrified humans desperately trying to escape the angry dead are suitably scary and suspenseful but I would have preferred to see a little less NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD-inspired material and more about the mythology of those mysterious birds. The doctor discovers a way to destroy the blind dead (once and for all, as it turned out), but the method is so simple and obvious that it's hard to believe nobody in the village would have thought of trying it a few centuries sooner. As they die, all the blood they've drunk pours from their empty eye sockets. The movie is no masterpiece, but there are enough good scenes and moments to make it worth a look for fans of this uniquely atmospheric, sadly missed and inarguably creepy gothic horror film series.
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NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS (1973)
Dir: Amando De Ossorio
In recent years this politically incorrect lesser effort from Amando DeOssorio, director of the Blind Dead series, has garnered a cult following. It's easy to see why. For all its flaws (including a far-fetched plot), it's always watchable and plays like a live-action version of a story that might've come from the pages of old pulp horror comics like EERIE or CREEPY. In 1910, in the African jungles of Bumbasa, a tribe of sorcerers sacrifices a white woman to the evil Leopard God in a nasty execution scene that's a virtual restaging of the infamous human sacrifice sequence that was cut from some prints of TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD. The victim's fellow explorers arrive too late to save her from ritual decapitation but decide to shoot all the natives anyway for good measure. Her severed head suddenly rolls around and screams (a great scene), letting us know the horror isn't over. 63 years later, a small expedition to the area finds the cursed clearing and soon wishes they hadn't. The sacrificial victims now haunt the jungle in the form of leopards by day but turn into sexy vampire women in skimpy leopard-skin outfits at night. As if that wasn't enough to ruin the area's tourist trade, those pesky witch doctors reappear as slow-moving scary zombies during every full moon, rising up from the piles of rocks under which they were buried in search of more sacrifices. (I'm no geologist, but I'd have to say that the piles of rocks in this movie were considerably scarier to me than the piles of rocks in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, so if vou're a big fan of piles of rocks, look out.) Curious females who wander off alone are captured by the zombies and subjected to the same brutal decapitation ritual, after which they eagerly run off, heads somehow neatly reattached, to join the other undead women. The wide-eyed, whispering, smiling vamps are both frightening and strangely appealing as they scamper through the jungle at night in expertly shot, wonderfully atmospheric slow-motion scenes. One plot point that's never explained is just whv the natives would want bloodthirsty, predatory women prowling their land in the first place. The whole ritual sacrifice-resurrection thing may have been a hit underplanned on their part. As with many jungle adventures, this is all a somewhat racist fantasy since the African natives are depicted as unreasoning, demon-worshipping savages, but since the explorers are petty, spoiled, uppity, disrespectful whites, I guess it all evens out when they get their gruesome comeuppance. Don't expect meaningful content, but you can't really go wrong with any movie that offers oodles of eerie atmosphere, gorgeous women and screaming severed heads. V/iewers beware: many prints were shorn of the (brief) nudity and gore FX. As of this writing complete prints are hard to find but I fully expect a first-class restoration of this title in the near future.
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NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES (1981)
Dir: Joel M. Reed
Not to be confused with the identically-titled Italian film, this one was released on video with a "II" added to the title to fool renters into thinking it was a sequel. The Italian NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES was no great shakes, which makes it seem odd that anybody would want to fake a connection. This dull U.S. movie is actually an entry in the cycle of 'Nazi-Zombie' films initiated by the flawed but interesting SHOCK WAVES (1977). It's strangely light on bloodshed, which will disappoint gorehounds. It's also light on entertainment value, which will disappoint everybody. The Pentagon sends a special agent and a susipicously young-looking scientist (along with an annoying screaming blonde who was stuck into the plot for no purpose) to Europe to investigate reports of ghostly soldiers and mysterious deaths. After a lot of boring discussions and episodic traveling around, our personality-free heroes end up in the snowy Swiss Alps, where an experimental nerve gas called "Gamma 693" (the film's shooting title) has kept dead soldiers alive ever since WWII. The living dead eat mostly regular food but inexplicably need to supplement their diet with warm human flesh every so often and also require periodic doses of the gas to reverse the effects of decay. So, those who haven't had their Gamma 693 ration in a while have pasty blue skin, dark circles under their eyes and ugly cracks and holes in their rotting faces, while other "zombies" appear normal and haven't aged a day in over thirty years. One of them rants that "zombies will rule the universe". Fire extinguisher foam sprayed at the undead causes them to melt down into obvious plastic lab skeletons. At one point traces of "vegetable juice" are found and the zombies are referred to as "part vegetable", but none of this makes any sense. The creepy zombie makeups are decently done but the script is a virtual catalogue of loose ends, unexplained character reactions and irritating lapses in logic. There's never any sensible reason given for why the zombie soldiers are still fighting the war all these years later and at the end the hero, who is confronted by a trio of ghouls, has a large sprayer-equipped backpack filled with the zombie-killing foam but doesn't use it! I wasn't even sure whether the dumb blonde ended up as an eternally-young zombie-girl or simply got eaten offscreen. There's surprisingly little zombie activity or violence shown, with most of the movie devoted to routine spy capers that seem inconsequential when we already know that the nearby mountains are crawling with deadly zombies. The same director, Joel M. Reed, made the surprisingly entertaining low-budget anthology BLOOD BATH (1975) as well as the utterly reprehensible BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1975). He makes a brief appearance here as one of the modern-day Nazis planning to take over the world with an unkillable zombie army.
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NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES (1981)
Dir: Bruno Mattei
Now, this one is most definitely a DAWN OF THE DEAD ripoff. Complete, uncut versions are known as either HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD or ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH, but the NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES version is the most common print in the U.S., so that's what I'm calling it. (As always, uncut prints are best, so if you really want to see this one, look for HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, the longest version). Just to make absolutely sure we all know he's copying DAWN OF THE DEAD, not-so-swift Italian director Bruno Mattei even calls himself "Vincent Dawn" in the credits! At a big, dark factory or power plant or something in New Guinea, misguided scientists are working on a mysterious project involving doing not-at-all-nice things with dead bodies and toxic chemicals. You'd think the fact that the soundtrack from DAWN OF THE DEAD was pounding away in the background would've tipped them off that something bad was about to happen, but they don't catch on until some poor worker is bitten by a zombie rat that scurries right up under his radiation helmet in a scene that, I have to admit, delivers quite a jolt. Things go rapidly downhill after the ominous opening sequence, however, as the plant's workforce suddenly turns into poorly-made-up zombie flesh eaters who walk around with the stiff-legged, wobbly gait you'd expect to see at your local Jaycees' Haunted House. A SWAT team is called in to rescue the handful of survivors, and your frustration will reach new levels as you watch these boneheads waste countless rounds of ammunition by firing into the zombies' chests even after it's establisted that only a shot to the head will finish them off. Lots of travelogue-style stock footage later, the survivors make it to the central offices of the building only to learn that the project, called "Operation Sweetdeath", was aimed at solving the world's overpopulation problem by turning impoverished third-world races into cannibals! (huh?) Heavy-handed dialogue drives the ecological message ("it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature") home enough for this movie to pretend it's taking a high moral ground, but of course its real motive is just to show lots of blood-'n'-guts. And the effects? Well, as previously mentioned, most of the zombie makeups are pretty unimaginative, although there is a good visual shock here and there, like when a corpse suddenly sits up and bites off a guy's fingers, and when a human head is mangled at the end, but most of the time NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES is pretty dull stuff. The not-at-all-suprising surprise ending, in which the undead are seen to be invading a big city, is copied from Fulci's ZOMBIE. Oh well, at least you get to hear the excellent background music from DAWN OF THE DEAD again!
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NORLISS TAPES, THE (1973)
Dir: Dan Curtis
Soon after the well-received TV movies THE NIGHT STALKER and THE NIGHT STRANGLER, horror specialist Dan Curtis (creator of DARK SHADOWS) offeredthis third pilot film for a proposed series about an occult investigator solving supernatural crimes. But by the time THE NORLISS TAPES aired, the network had already agreed to turn NIGHT STALKER into a series, and this too-similar project was abandoned. It's a shame, because NORLISS is an example of television terror at its best, with plenty of potential to make an outstanding series. More serious than the NIGHT STALKER films, it stars Roy Thinnes (THE INVADERS) as writer David Norliss, a straight-laced, one-dimensional good guy hero with none of the broad humor, mocking wit or nervous tics that made Darren McGavin's NIGHT STALKER character such a lovable, enjoyable central figure. Presumably we would have gotten a chance to know Norliss better if he series had gotten off the ground. His sole story is told in flashback as Norliss's publisher listens to the macabre tale on cassette tapes left behind by the missing writer. A widow (Angie Dickinson) claims her home was invaded and her dog killed by the resurrected corpse of her recently deceased husband. A successful sculptor, the man had taken an interest in the occult after learning he was dying of an incurable illness. Now, a series of attacks seem to implicate the dead man as the perpetrator. Meanwhile, a chilling new sculpture is gradually taking shape inside the late artist's supposedly sealed-off studio. Norliss discovers the statue is of an ancient demon and the clay being used to create it consists of 40% human blood! The zombie artist, clad in a dusty torn suit and sporting a dead purple complexion and maddened red eyes, just might be one of the most frightening TV monsters of all time, lurking in the shadows and angrily smashing his way through windows and doors with superhuman strength. He never speaks but he does try a few times, coming up with only guttural screams and moans. You have to wonder how many TV-watching American kids were sent to bed with nightmares by this guy in 1973. This being an intended series starter, the end is left frustratingly open. Thinnes puts a stop to the living dead man's evil plan but we never find out why he disappeared afterward. Ending on a teaser for a followup that never followed makes this movie feel decidedly unfinished, which probably accounts for the rareness of subsequent showings and its relative obscurity today. Since the main story is basically complete and only the framing device betrays the film's status as a series pilot, it seems odd that its owners never assembled an alternate cut that could have played better on its own, eliminating the open ending or perhaps even dropping the framing story altogether and shooting extra scenes to pad out the zombie story to a more acceptable TV-movie length. Even with its somewhat remote hero, inconclusive ending and an unfortunate appearance by a weakly designed demon from hell who looks more like a pro wrestler, this is still a strong, unusually dark and exceptionally well-made foray into TV terror. It deserves more recognition.
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NUDIST COLONY OF THE DEAD (1991)
Dir: Mark Pirro
Cheap and hateful, this spectacularly misguided attempt at musical comedy is a sad product of the smug ignorance that erroneously lumps all organized religion in with the handful of obnoxious, self-righteous Bible-thumpers who regularly shout at late-night TV viewers. Displaying an appalling contempt for all of Christianity, this insultingly stupid backyard production also finds time to toss a few insults at blacks, Jews, Asians and the elderly. It was made under the gross misapprehension that all we Christians hate horror movie fans and so horror fans should hate Christians right back. Having made this backward opinion clear during the first two minutes, it then staggers, zombielike, along the same boring path, repeating its wrong-headed, condescending message until feature-length running time is finally reached. When a nudist camp is ordered shut down by a group of religious zealots, the occupants commit mass suicide, vowing to return from the grave. Of course, a busload of one-dimensional stereotyped idiots shows up for a "religious retreat" a few years later and, in between bathroom humor and racial jokes, you get to see the assorted unimaginative characters get chopped up, decapitated and impaled by the blue-gray zombies. To be fair, this movie tries hard in the visual department. It has surprisingly professional-looking photography, well-planned lighting and truly expert editing to help it along. In these areas NUDIST COLONY OF THE DEAD often rivals some of Hollywood's bigger releases (except for the cheesy film stock), which is really a shock when you consider the low-minded script, which plays like it could've been co-authored by MTV's Beavis and Butthead. One strange flaw is that the undead, who are constantly referred to as "naked", never actually are. All the zombies are about half covered with what was probably supposed to be random clumps of leaves and plants. The result is that they don't give the impression of being nude at all, and it's hard to figure why this decision was made (it's not as if the makers of trash like this would worry about offending people). The zombie makeups and gore effects are good (except for a deformed, foul-mouthed old woman, who looks ridiculous) and I have to admit that a few of the gags were clever. The crude musical numbers are mostly annoying and people break into song way too often, but another surprise is that the performers are good singers and actors. Why would so many talented people want to participate in this mean-spirited project? It's a depressing example of the out-of-touch intolerance that continues to give the genre a bad name and, as such, should serve as an embarrassment to fans and a fine piece of fuel for the anti-horror crowd. Forrest J. Ackerman, who had reportedly scolded Vincent Price for appearing in an "offensive" gore film back in 1986, shows up as a judge. Let's hope he didn't know what he was getting into.
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