OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (1982)

Dirs: Marius Lesoeur, Jesus Franco

Wow.  This one is such a mess that it's hard to sort it out. Sources conflict, but to the best of my knowledge this Spanish/French co-production was shot simultaneously in both languages, using different actors (much like the way Universal made the Spanish DRACULA during the production of the Bela Lugosi version).  Much of the (rare) Spanish  print was directed by cult horror filmmaker Jesus Franco and started out as TOMBS OF THE LIVING DEAD.  Someone named Marius LeSeour shot most of the French version as ABYSS OF THE LIVING DEAD, but was credited as 'A.M. Frank".  WWII battle footage seen in the early part of the film is left over from a war movie called I GIARDINI DEL DIAVOLO, made ten years earlier by Alfredo Rizzo!  And you thought your life was complicated.  The version that made it to the U.S. is known under the title OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES or sometimes as--try to say this without smirking--BLOODSUCKING NAZI ZOMBIES.  As you may have guessed, the end result is something less than classic.  Two bands of adventurous treasure-seekers show up in the middle of the North African desert in search of a legendary lost treasure hidden at a strange oasis by Field Marshal Rommel's troops during the war.  The treasure's there, all right, but unfortunately it's being guarded by a gang of flesh-eating Nazi zombies who get plenty of close-ups and zooms in on their rotting faces.  Some of the gloppy-faced, slack-jawed, bulging-eyed ghouls are creepy, but you can't help but notice the '80s-style haircuts on 40's-era zombie soldiers.  There are some nicely realized shots of shadowy undead figures shambling across the dunes (scored with an extremely spooky, low, throbbing noise from an old BBC sound effects record called  "Out Of This World"), but that's about it.  Much of the film consists of ugly, dark, blandly-filmed scenes of either sexy women or thick-headed guys being attacked by the walking corpses, and the blood and gore effects are rather skimpy.  The dubbing is pretty poor too, but if you're a big zombie fan you might want to sit through this one-- only once, mind you-- just to check out the makeups (including a model skull on a stick being passed off as a zombie) and the eerie soundtrack.  You might also want to keep a Pepsi or other source of caffeine on hand, though.

 

 

 

OGROFF (1983)

Dir: J. G. Mount

French video rental shop owner Norbert Georges Moutier tried his hand at making an American-style horror film, borrowing from such then-current hits as FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 and THE BURNING. This jaw-droppingly inept feature, the title of which is hand-painted on a pane of glass propped up in front of the camera, also stars the writer-editor-director (credited as J. G. Mount) in the title role of Ogroff, a forest-dwelling cretin in an ineffective mask (with metal studs on the nose) who uses his collection of hatchets and pickaxes to dismember anyone who comes near his notably police-free patch of land. As portrayed by Monsieur Mount, Ogroff acts like one would expect an 8-year-old in a Halloween mask to behave while trying to play a "monster". At least he has a great name for a horror film villain. There are only perhaps a half-dozen spoken lines in the entire film. Most of the time you just get to watch Ogroff stomping around in the woods chopping up various individuals who wander into frame. There's plenty of gore on display, but the astoundingly bad pantomiming and scene blocking and even worse editing makes it difficult not to notice the same few joke shop body parts getting repeated use. There's never enough blood to make any of the hackings and whackings look remotely realistic and the stunt work is as poor as you've seen. At one point, a girl who also enjoys slaughtering random strangers comes along. Just when it seems our silent slasher may have found the girl of his dreams, she kicks aside the wood plank that was covering the nearby pit of zombies. (This is all so incompetently staged that it's hard to believe any filmmaker would use these particular takes.) The heretofore one-note movie takes a slight turn at this point, changing from a slasher film into a zombie invasion picture. The zombies stagger around the woods for a while, after which Ogroff hacks them up. It's a good thing the local road traffic gave him so much practice in lopping off heads and limbs. To be fair, the zombies are sometimes successfully disturbing. They move in a jerky, spastic, creepy-crawly way and look convincingly dead. They also make loud, dry, wheezing breathing sounds like in LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE and are accompanied by some strange music cues. It's a shame a few of them sport cheap plastic skull masks. At the end, things go even further off-base when a guy who's been spending too much time putting fluid in his ugly little European car turns out to be a vampire, played by poor old Howard Vernon, who had appeared as one of cinema's worst Draculas in two Jesus Franco films of the early '70s (DAUGHTER OF DRACULA and DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN). The no-budget feature earns points for the nightmarish quality of its zombie horde but nothing else ever rises above the embarrassingly primitive. It is also known as THE MAD MUTILATOR (not to be confused with the U.S. production THE MUTILATOR). TREPANATOR, a French variation on RE-ANIMATOR, is another of the same ambitious auteur's homemade movies.

 

 

OUTPOST (2007)

Dir: Steve Barker

Nazi zombies are on the march again in this interesting cross between DOG SOLDIERS and THE BUNKER.   In an unspecified region of Eastern Europe, an engineer hires an ex-Marine and his team of mercenaries to lead him safely to and from an old German bunker in the woods.  Inside is a strange machine that was part of a Nazi experiment to create indestructible super-soldiers via some science fiction concepts that don't quite make sense.  When the device is started up, undead troopers materialize to play sadistic cat-and-mouse games as they slaughter the modern-day macho men.   Most of OUTPOST doesn't hold up logically, with the ghostly zombies' powers and abilities left unclear and inconsistent and scads of unanswered questions regarding just what is going on and why the dead (and sometimes the living) behave the way they do.  But it's still a watchable movie thanks to excellent acting, believably human dialogue and a strong sense of helpless claustrophobia that turns into panic once our antiheroes realize just how serious their predicament is.  The character development is above average for this sort of feature and the eerie lighting and photography give the cramped, shadowy sets a real aura of foreboding.  You don't get to see much in the way of makeup, as the ghouls are only shown as menacing shadows and lumbering backlit silhouettes.  The ending is a predictable letdown and it's a shame the writers didn't take a little more time to develop the fantastic elements of the story, but the strong feeling of inescapable doom is well maintained and OUTPOST works quite well as a morbid mood piece.  No classic, perhaps, but not a bad little shocker.  Check it out.

 

 

 PLEASE DON'T EAT THE BABIES (1983/ 87)

Dirs: Henri Charr, Marcus Robertson

To be honest, I have no idea what the makers of this one had in mind.  Part of the time it seems to be either a psychokiller movie or a "nature's revenge" tale, but on some occasions it decides it wants to be a devil movie.  Or a zombie movie.  On the whole it's an incredible, incompetent mess cluttered with ideas and subplots that are mentioned briefly and then discarded.  A boatload of generic young victims travels to a mysterious small island, ignoring the warnings of two drunken old seadogs who insist that the place is not only cursed and haunted but inhabited by a crazy old coot (Hank Worden, who is terrible) who apparently blasts people with his shotgun for no reason at all on a regular basis but never gets arrested.  The kids talk a lot about going scuba diving and the need to fill their air tanks but there's not a single scene of anybody actually going scuba diving in the entire movie.  Instead, the group falls prey to (A) a family of brain-damaged rednecks reminiscent of the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE family; (B) flesh-eating cockroaches the size of large dogs; (C) a trapdoor that leads to what I think was supposed to be hell; (D) an unidentified evil guy who was perhaps supposed to be the devil, or at least a devil;  and (E) two or maybe three pasty-faced flesh-eating zombies.  We're told that a fortune in Spanish treasure is buried somewhere on the island but nobody ever looks for it, much less finds it.  One girl gets bitten on the stomach by a zombie who's let into the hell room in the cellar by the possible devil guy, and later on a smiling black zombie and a zombie girl with dark circles around her eyes show up to stand around in a few shots and look spooky.  Some fishermen are eaten by the giant roaches, two horrible whiny 14-year-old girls are terorized by a big mentally retarded farm boy, and everybody is lied to and threatened by old Hank and his insane wife (who serves poisoned tea).  Most of the actors deliver their lines like they're breaking in a new set of lips, the most annoying characters keep getting away when you wish they'd get killed, and the dead body of a full-grown man is represented with a prop that looks like it weighs about twenty pounds.  The giant roaches are represented by shots of regular roaches shown in extreme closeup like you'd see in a nature documentary.  The mean old geezer finally gets his comeuppance, but none of the plot threads are ever tied together in any intelligent way.  Most of the time people just wander around until they eventually get attacked by someone.  If that's all you ask of a horror film, then you might be entertained by this one.  The assorted supernatural elements are left unexplained, with vague references to hell substituting for real story development.  You'll love the credit for editing.  This movie apparently never did find a legal U.S. distributor, but lucky Japanese viewers had to opportunity to pay to see it.  In 2009 it finally made its way onto DVD under the title ISLAND FURY. Which is probably just as well, since no babies are eaten.         

 PREMUTOS: LORD OF THE LIVING DEAD (1997)

Dir: Olaf Ittenbach

More German-made lowbrow splatter from Olaf Ittenbach, a filmmaker who appears to be on a mission to earn his homeland some sort of official recognition as 'Home of the World's Worst Cheap Gore Movies'.   Like the oafish Olaf's other splatteramas, this low-budget zombie movie is confusing, sloppily made and obsessed with mangling the human body.  It's about a guy (named Matthias in the German language version, although the Americans who dubbed this into English didn't bother to learn how to pronounce the name) who suffers from intrusive, sparsely populated visions of past lives that all ended with him being torn to pieces by various angry (but small) mobs during several historical periods.  Like the viewer, the young man is never sure whether he's experiencing nightmares, hallucinations or flashbacks.  In between the supposedly funny segments about marital infidelity and groin injuries, it emerges that Matthias is the reincarnation of (or the son of, or maybe is possessed by) an ancient evil entity with the unlikely name of Premutos.  Premutos, possibly angry about having a name that sounds more like an allergy medication than a demon, supposedly was the very first fallen angel, even before Lucifer.  Now he's sort of a poor man's anti-Christ who wants to destroy the world of humans.  Unlike the better-known and more ambitious Lucifer, Premutos evidently hasn't done much with himself in the last 2,000 years, although he does have the power to bring dead folks back to life as violent, flesh-hungry zombies.  After some childish character interaction between a number of grossly stupid, entirely unconvincing characters, a gang of living corpses invades the sets and turns the film into a variation on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with trapped survivors fighting off the stiff-legged ghouls.  The story is poorly conceived and makes no sense.  The English dubbing makes matters worse by being inexcusably careless (it fails to catch about half of the screams and loud noises the onscreen action needed, giving some scenes a surreal quality that's likely to evoke giggles).  This ridiculous gorefest with a bad attitude and a moronic sense of humor thinks it's on a par with Peter Jackson's outrageous BRAINDEAD/ DEAD ALIVE but it's actually much closer to the homemade amateur horror movies made by kids with borrowed camcorders.  Some of the zombie makeups and plentiful gore effects look very convincing, making this another genre project that has no point and no intelligent ideas but an impressive array of horror makeup/ effects work by artists who were obviously a lot more ambitious and creative than the writer-director.  The kid ultimately turns into a pretty scary looking glop-faced toothy monster at the climax, after which the actual Premutos, a being so wicked and powerful that he can return to life after thousands of years to destroy all mankind, materializes just long enough to slip and fall on a conveniently positioned skateboard.  See this hopelessly bungled feature only if you feel you have to watch every single zombie movie ever made.     

 PRISON OF THE DEAD (2000)

Dir: Victoria Sloane

This is a typical entry from Charles Band's Full Moon Productions. That means it looks great, has decent acting, nice locations, and a story that seems to have been an afterthought. An arrogant rich jerk invites a few "friends" (they all act like they can't stand each other) to an ancient castle in Romania that we're supposed to believe is a funeral parlor in New England. The coke-addled bickering gang thinks they've been brought to a funeral, but the spoiled wiseguy's real purpose was to have them help him locate a valuable artifact.  We are told that these college-age snots are experts in the occult and paranormal studies, but they're afraid to even touch a Ouija board.  Below the castle--er, sorry, mortuary-- is a medieval-style dungeon that's supposed to be a prison where witches were executed during the Salem witch trials.  In between trading unfunny wisecracks and lame insults, the dorks get possessed by the spirits of the dead witches, but wait!-- Their possession only lasts a few moments, thanks to three zombie executioners who awaken and slit their throats to prevent the witches from leaving the prison in the characters' bodies. The slow-moving hooded zombies with their big scowling mouths and red glowing eyes are terrific looking effective ghouls in the tradition of the Spanish BLIND DEAD movies, but apparently they're not very good at their job because the dead possessees get back up again after the zombies whack them anyway. Director Victoria Sloane puts the fog machines and blue lights into overtime to brew up atmosphere, but any chances for suspense are ruined by the fact that the characters aren't even really themselves when they die. Most of them experience an optically blurred face for a few seconds, start talking in Latin (?), and then immediately get sliced across the neck by the understandably frustrated zombies.  An inane subplot about three other (equally unpleasant) intruders who are planning a senseless, pointless practical joke robbery for no good reason clutters the already awful script up that much more but does at least provide three more victims for the hard-working ghouls to kill.  A scream from the old Disneyland Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House sound effects album is worked into the background score many times.

 RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Dir: Samuel M. Sherman, Brett Piper

Remember lndependent-International, the outfit that produced and released a slew of sleazy, cheesy (but often fun) drive-in fare (including most of Al Adamson's movies) in the late '60s and early '70s?  It's hard to believe the company was still around as late as the mid-'80s, but here's the proof.  I-I  boss Sam Sherman bought an unfinished zombie film from Brett Piper, who went on to other projects like the enjoyable THEY BITE (1989).  The end result contained a lot of new material shot and directed by Sherman and edited together with Piper's footage to make this confused feature. After a time-wasting opening about a hostage situation at a nuke plant we meet a reporter who snoops around where he shouldn't and discovers he's now being persued by some very well made up, scary looking blue-gray zombies with loud heartbeats. Meanwhile, in one of the most unlikely sci-fi ideas ever dreamed up, an annoying kid discovers how easy it is to make a deadly laser gun by simply rewiring a few parts from a laserdisc player. Aided by his doctor grandfather and a girfriend the boy ends up at a closed-down prison where he helps the reporter fight off the walking corpses and capture the mad scientist behind the zombie scheme. This movie really isn't as bad as you might have heard, with lots of nice camerawork, good location photography, great zombie makeups and a nicely done dream sequence.  It's too bad they screwed it up with an embarrassing soundtrack, dull pacing, weak day-for-night shooting and a strangely nonchalant ending in which the evil scientist is very easily subdued and taken off to the cops with no explanation given for how he was able to revive the dead or what his goal was in doing so. The entire climactic sequence, which consists of staggering zombies being zapped with homemade lasers (a woefully inadequate special effect that's nothing more than scratches on the film) is oddly lacking in drama, and several of the undead simply collapse as though whoever scratched the 'laser beams' onto the negative missed a few places. These  zombies are impervious to bullets unless hit in the head , but a couple of good laser zaps will rekill them, as will an ordinary arrow fired through their chests(?)! A lot of  the cornball dialogue and arnateur acting may make you wince but among the points of interest here are a rare (and sad) cameo appearance by Zita Johann, the female lead from the original 1932 THE MUMMY, as a helpful Iibrarian, and a gunsmith named "William Pratt" as an inside relerence for Boris Karloff fans.  (Karloff's real name was William Henry Pratt, in case you didn't know.)  Hey, what about that title?  Wouldn't RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD have been a better, more truthful name for 1999's big-budget Hollywood film THE MUMMY?  While RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD tries hard to thrill, it's a movie that's just too slow, flat and hokey to recommend.

 

 

 

 RAISINS DE LA MORT (1978)

Dir: Jean Rollin

A/k/a PESTICIDE, this moody zombie tale from France's top horror director Jean Rollin, stands as one of the more atmospheric and artsy examples of the genre. It's full of frightening images and great sequences, although viewers who demand a constant flow of slam-bang action may find parts of this one to be slow going. One of its best scenes takes place at the beginning, when a young woman aboard a nearly empty train notices that the guy sitting in the passenger seat opposite her is slowly beginning to darken and bleed from the face!  When she flees she finds the nightmare is just beginning, though, since the normally peaceful surrounding countryside is suddenly under siege by diseased, insane human zombies who have been transformed into mad killers from drinking wine from a vineyard where a new high-powered insecticide was tried out. During her panicked flight she meets a variety of tragic, doomed characters and witnesses several gruesome senseless murders. Scenes of a confused blind girl wandering around the landscape and various innocent locals, their faces dripping and decomposing, violently killing their own family members are surprising and hard to forget. A pair of gun-toting hunters who try to help are immune to the zombie disease because they drink beer instead of wine!  RAISINS DE LA MORT is a good example of how eerie imagery can be created without a budget and how intense acting and stylish direction can concoct a more gripping tale of terror than overblown computer-animated monsters and effects. The overall feel is quite different from Romero's or Fulci's zombie thrillers since the living dead here seem to retain at least part of their original minds and memories.  This makes the murders they commit seem all the more tragic, since it's clear that these zombies are aware of the terrible things they're doing but just can't help themselves.  One poor deranged ghoul even screams "I love you!" as he chops a woman's head off and holds it triumphantly in the air! The final shot, in which the heroine stands blankly staring upward as blood from an upstairs killing drips through the floor onto her face, is one of the most poetically eerie conclusions to a horror movie I've seen and demonstrates that madness can come from within as well as from outside forces.  In case I'm making this sound like an out-and-out gore film, let me state for the record that it honestly isn't. There are a few shocking deaths and some blood on display but the bloodletting is (for the most part) fairly restrained, leaving the movie to rely more upon an overall sense of dread and a growing feeling of dreamlike insanity than simple buckets of blood.  As far as I know RAISINS DE LA MORT (yeah, it means "grapes of death") has never been dubbed entirely into English, but mail-order video sources offer partially dubbed or English subtitled versions.  Check it out, Euro-horror fans.

 

 

REDNECK ZOMBIES (1988)

Dir: Pericles Lewnes

There's something to offend just about anyone in this crude would-be comedy gore item.  Resembling a particularly raunchy TV horror host skit drawn out to feature length, it's about some gap-toothed inbred hillbillies who make a still out of one of the all-purpose monster-making props favored by unimaginative writers: a barrel of "toxic nuclear waste".  As usual for this kind of thing, the specific contents and origin of the goop is never dealt with; it's simply an easy way to get some zombie flesh-eaters onscreen.  The contaminated moonshine is sold to a number of other local yokels, all of whom turn into zombies faster than you can holler YEEE-HAW.  Along comes the standard group of boring hikers to serve as victims, and the body parts start to fly.  The main problem with REDNECK ZOMBIES isn't the cheapness or even the strained humor.  It's the peculiar lack of any sort of contrast between the characters. The hillbillies are already so inclined to violent behavior that they're slapping each other around and pointing loaded shotguns at strangers when the film begins.  When they later become crusty-faced bloodthirsty monsters, it only seems like a slight change for the worse.  Likewise, the city slickers are such a hateful, vulgar, bad-tempered lot that they don't provide enough contrast to the backwoods rednecks to open up many comic possibilites.  (Why is it that cheap movies always feel a need to feature characters who travel around together but act like they can't stand each other?)  Some of the characters are actually funny, but the script misses almost every opportunity to create funny situations around them.  I especially liked the guy called "Ferd Mertz" and the confused young man named Billy Bob who prefers to be called Ellie Mae.  This role is played by the director himself (who resembles Brazil's Jose Mojica Marins).  The most original character is the odd "Tobacco Man", a guy with a deep audio-enhanced voice and a bag over his head to hide the disfigurement he's suffered from so many years of chewing tobacco.  Most of the time this video movie takes the easy route and goes for stupid, low-common-denominator humor, very little of which is new or clever.   The zombies here don't exactly die--- they just take a sip of the radioactive shine, start acting goonier than before, hallucinate some cheap video effects, and suddenly acquire rotting skin and a taste for human flesh.  One scene has a guy performing an autopsy while tripping on LSD.  He imagines that he's pulling a beer can, a shoe and an ear of corn out of the body.  The many effects are uneven but a few of them--- most notably an excellent exploding head--- are highly impressive, especially for a backyard production like this.  There are some awful continuity errors: two victims have shirts that abruptly change as they're dying!  It's possible these obvious glitches were intended to be funny, but given the overall quality and crudity of REDNECK ZOMBIES, well, I doubt it.

 

 RESIDENT EVIL (2002)

Dir: Paul W.S. Anderson

People who sat through noisy, pointless video game-inspired junk movies like the LARA CROFT snoozefests might be reluctant to pay to see one more big-budget action film based on yet another video game.  But RESIDENT EVIL is a surprise.  It is above all a throwback to the environmentally-aware Italian zombie movies of the 1980s like CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES and ZOMBI 3 as well as George Romero's DAWN and DAY OF THE DEAD.  Equally surprising is the fact that, unlike most of what was passing for horror in 2002, which generally felt more like showreels for CGI effects teams, RESIDENT EVIL actually makes a serious attempt to be scary.  After a harrowing opening sequence set in a high-security chemical research lab in which a deadly new virus has been unleashed, the movie wades through some very dull SWAT team action before getting to the meat of the story.  Once the main characters make their way into the computer-controlled underground lab and are attacked by flesh-eating zombies, the action rarely lets up.  Milla Jovovich is excellent in the lead role of a girl who has lost her memory and has some unknown connection to the disaster.  A man who may be her husband and a cop who's looking for his sister find themselves fighting for their lives alongside a team of tough-talking military stereotypes, who rapidly get cut down to size (sometimes literally) by either the walking dead or the building's high-tech death traps.  Adding to the tension are a pack of zombie dogs and a mutating computer-animated monster who prowls the darkened corridors waiting to finish off those who survive their encounters with the zombies.  The scenario is bleak and the sets are a flawless blend of sterile medical technology and grimy, threatening machinery.  This teen-oriented action movie marked a bigscreen return of wheezing, shambling corpses in the finest Romero/ Fulci tradition.  Like most movie zombies, the undead here can be "killed" once and for all by a blow to the head.  The message, that chemical warfare is a bad idea, may seem trite but since this came out when Americans were worried about the deliberate spread of anthrax and other perils from deranged terrorists, the warning may have been more timely in 2002 than it was back when NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES and ZOMBI 3 were making essentially the same statement.  Too much material is swiped from other zombie films and there's the usual, overly familiar non-ending in which the zombie plague is shown to have ravaged a big city, but it seems more forgivable here since the whole film can be taken as merely one round of a violent humans-vs.-monsters game.  It occasionally suffers from the same malady that weakens many thrillers made around this time, namely an attempt to juice up the action and give more urgnecy to the fight scenes by presenting them in split-second extreme closeups shot with a shaky hand-held camera.  More often than not, the trendy hyperactive technique just makes things hard to see instead of pumping up the drama as director Anderson intended.  Flaws notwithstanding, this is a well-made horror tale with a decent script and so many shocks and plot twists that it should satisfy fans of either the action-adventure or zombie genre, as well as fans of the game.  Forgettable sequels followed.     

RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD (1972)

Dir: Amando DeOssorio

No, this doesn't have anything to do with the American EVIL DEAD films.  It's the first sequel to the popular TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and thus is also known as  RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD.  Which means the Blind Dead were the Evil Dead before the Evil Dead were the Evil Dead.  Got that?  Anyway, Amando DeOssorio's follow-up to his hit of the previous year takes place just as the village in which the Templars were caught and executed is preparing to celebrate the 500th anniversary of their victory over the evil knights.  The hero is a fireworks salesman who comes to town to set up a display for the festival.  He predictably meets up with an old flame and soon gets into trouble with the corrupt mayor's violent thugs, but everyone's personal differences begin to seem a lot less important once the Blind Dead rise from the nearby cemetery during the celebration, mount their zombie horses and crash the party with revenge on their minds and deadly swords in their bony hands.  An unavoidable problem in making a sequel to any monster movie is that the audiences has seen and become familiar with the monsters, and that great initial shock can never be captured a second time.  DeOssorio wisely compensates for this built-in shortcoming by offering more footage of the wonderfully creepy ghouls than in the first entry as well as a stronger plot, more action and a more satisfying ending.  Like many a U.S. horror sequel, RETURN never manages to build up the original's quietly chilling mood but chooses instead to go for faster pace and more (though less graphic) mayhem.  The oddest thing about this movie is that DeOssorio seems to have changed his mind about why the Templars are blind.  The first film explained that their eyes were plucked out by birds, but this time we're told that superstitious villagers burned their eyes out with torches to prevent them from finding their way back to the world of the living.  (Note to would-be zombie fighters: the film clearly demonstrates that this procedure doesn't work.)  The later portion of the movie is similar to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in that a small group of survivors barricades themselves inside an old church and tries to keep the decaying spoilsports out.  A nicely sustained mood of tension keeps the story involving and the climactic scene in which the heroes have to walk past a macabre lineup of motionless, blind zombies while trying not to make a sound (a small child is blindfolded to keep her from screaming at the sight of the monsters) is particularly effective and really gives the viewer the feeling that if one of the characters should sneeze or step on a twig he or she will instantly end up as breakfast for the angry undead.  Just like its now-classic predecessor, RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD is unquestionably one of the seventies' scariest zombie tales and one of Spain's best contributions to the genre.

 

 

 

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Dir: Dan O'Bannon

This wonderfully sick flick ranks with ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN as one of the best horror comedies ever.  It starts out by telling us that the events in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD were based on a true story, only with a few changes made for legal reasons.  Next thing you know, a pair of knucklehead medical supply workers discovers the awful truth about a strange chemical that revives the dead and gives them an insatiable hunger for human brains!  Living, breathing humans who are contaminated by the stuff become undead too.  Since a zombie could be stopped by a blow to the head in the original 1968 film, the heroes of this pseudo-sequel are horrified to find that in "reality" there's NO known way to re-kill the dead!  A nearby graveyard is accidentally affected after the ashes of a burned zombie float up and mix with the clouds, creating a kind of zombie-producing acid rain, and within minutes the whole neighborhood is crawling with corpses!  Things get gradually worse as other local characters (including a mortician and a gang of young punks) become involved with the gruesome goings-on, and the film climaxes with a nuclear attack on Louisville, KY!  RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is full of funny lines, inventively morbid ideas, and a fun, rowdy hard rock soundtrack (an idea which, inevitably, was copied by countless horror films that followed).  Its main asset, though, is the outstanding performances by its believeably hysterical, panicky cast.  There's plenty of great zombie makeup and bloody effects work on display, but the acting of James Karen, Tom Matthews, Clu Gulager and Don Calfa drives RETURN, actually succeeding in making both the slapstick humor and the tragic death scenes work equally well.  The feisty rotting ghouls in this film think, talk and enthusiastically shout "Brains!" when they spy a potential victim.  A sequence in which hapless paramedics try to diagnose the illness of two characters who are, in fact, already dead is actually disturbing and was copied in DEATH BECOMES HER in '93.  This is also the film that put scream queen Linnea Quigley on the horror movie map, and she's a real delight as "Trash", a morbid, cynical punker who does a striptease in a cemetery.  (Say, that reminds me: for years I've heard horror fans debate the logic of what happens to Linnea's character, since she turns into a ghoul who walks around totally nude and yet shows no sign of bite marks from the zombies who'd surrounded and supposedly killed her.  Here's my theory... "Trash" was naked when the chemical-soaked rain drenched her, right?  Well, I figure the monsters who closed in on her sensed that she was already becoming one of them and went away without biting her after all.  Thus, she shows up a short time later as a brain-hungry ghoul but without any wounds.  Thank God you have me here to worry about these things.)  Quigley is especially good and is one more reason this stew of sick humor and nervous laughter from director Dan O'Bannon is a winner.

 RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 4: NECROPOLIS (2005)

Dir: Ellory Elkayem

Fans of the series had to wait 12 years for this creatively bankrupt rehash of PART 3 that borrows too much from RESIDENT EVIL. A useless prologue takes place at Chernobyl because somebody got clearance to shoot there, but it doesn't add anything to the plot and doesn't even offer anything that's particularly interesting from a visual standpoint. A corporate bad guy (Peter Coyote, who spends the whole movie with a strange grimacing, squinting, teeth-baring expression) goes to Chernobyl to get the canned zombies that were sent there by the U.S. government. He brings 'em back to the States and the movie can claim it was partially filmed at the location of a real-life nuke plant disaster.  Big deal. Grimacing Pete runs Hybra-Tech, a powerful company that manufactures everything from pesticides to cheese dip and that was obviously patterened after RESIDENT EVIL's Umbrella Corporation. Once again, the plan is to resurrect zombies for use as uber-soldiers. Once again, a group of teens stumble onto the plan. Once again, zombies stagger around the halls of a big building while alarms go off. Once again, the military rolls in at the end with a few tanks. Once again, the movie ends on a note that Italian zombie shockers were already beginning to tire of 25 years earlier. This is one of those movies that could have been written by a computer and cranked out of a machine. Like many films made around this time, it has impressive technical work including efficient direction, editing, lighting, scene blocking, stunt coordination and FX but it's completely derivative and doesn't tell a good story. It's surprising just how many dumb things we're expected to believe here. A facility that houses zombies in locked cells is controlled by an electronic system so that the first time the power goes out, the doors slide open and release the dangerous creatures. The security staff there hasn't been given the slightest instruction on how to stop the monsters or save themselves. An injured teen is falsely pronounced dead at a hospital and spirited away to the evil corporate plant without anybody asking any questions. (Who okayed this, and why? How were they going to explain his body's disappearance? Didn't the kid have any parents or family? If Hybra-Tech normally digs up corpses out of their graves to zombify, what's the point of risking everything to abduct a living teen subject?)  The handsome main kid's parents, who died a year earlier, have been exhumed and turned into likenesses of Michael Ironside's Overdog from SPACEHUNTER and Alice Krige's Borg Queen from STAR TREK.  The opportunity for pathos and a horrifying sense of loss at finding out that one's mum and dad have been turned into subhuman ghouls is missed by the script, which simply trots them out as growling monsters and then quickly does away with them without any emotional impact. The zombies look good, but they mostly don't show up until the film's final third, with the earlier portions wasting a lot of time showing teens zooming around on their motorcycles and indulging in pointless, childish, middle-of-the-road martial arts fights.  There are a couple of good jokes and some OK zombie makeups, but it's typical of the script's carelessness that the mythology established in the first three films in the series is ignored. In those movies the creatures were virtually unstoppable except for a vulnerability to electrocution or specially-developed chemical freeze cartridges designed to stop them. Here we see zombies re-killed by regular gunshot wounds. Some of them have to be hit in the head but many others drop after being shot in the chest or stomach, and at least one even keeps on going after being shot in the head.  The way the Trioxin zombie chemical works is inconsistent now too, as some characters don't even have to die and be re-animated but simply turn into brain-eating monsters in an instant after exposure to the stuff.  If you stick around through the end credits, you get to hear a (pretty good) hard rock song while the general insincerity of the movie is underscored by shots of zombie extras laughing, eating, using urinals, and so forth.  All in all it's kind of embarrassing and a far cry from Dan O'Bannon's great 1984 original.

 RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III (1993)

Dir: Brian Yuzna

Just when we all thought  this series had been done to--er, death,--along came this surprisingly sober and imaginative entry which put a fresh spin on the zombie mayhem of the first two films while staying true to their concepts and logic.  The parodic feel of the 1985 movie and the teen-comedy flavor of the 1987 sequel are absent from this sad and serious horror story that's infused with a sense of real tragedy seldom found in a genre that should logically be filled with it.  A teen learns that his army father is involved with gruesome experiments to turn the dead into controllable "bio-unit" soldiers.  When his girlfriend (Mindy Clarke, who is excellent) is killed in a motorcycle crash, the heartbroken kid sneaks into the military compound and uses the zombie gas to bring her back to life.  She's now a brain-eating undead thing and her slow, painful realization that she can never be a real person again makes her a growingly pitiful character.  As her brain capacity dwindles, she ends up a confused, pathetic creature with bits of broken glass and metal sticking out of her face and body (she finds that pain makes her craving for human brains temporarily subside).  They're chased through the L.A. sewer system by a vicious street gang and a squad of panic-stricken military men who are depicted in a much less caricatured way than you'd expect.  Unlike many horror films of the period, which saw death as only an excuse for gore or even as a source of amusement, this movie attaches a genuine sense of loss to its characters' demises, and the hero's determination to stick with his lady love even as she degenerates into a crazed monster makes this a tragic and even romantic tale.  An impressive gang of angry, screaming ghouls is ultimately freed and goes on the attack at the climax.  The downbeat conclusion is a logical result of the story and is far more satisfying than the endings of most zombie movies.  If you're especially squeamish, though, look out...RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III features outrageous gore effects, ugly gooey-looking zombies and numerous painful atrocities, all presented in a brutally realistic way.  Fine acting, fast pacing, a strong script and direction (by Brian Yuzna) that's always confident but never too stylized make this an extremely watchable and refreshingly involving movie.  Some fans of the original disliked this one, but I think there was a tendency to unfairly prejudge RETURN III because it had a title ending in a number (which is almost always a guarantee of mediocrity) and because advance publicity photos tended to overemphasize images of Clarke's bloodied-up, S & M-look ghoul in sexy poses, making it look like the movie was going to be a stupid teen gore comedy, which it certainly isn't.  If you're willing to forget the comic elements of the 1985 original and judge this much more somber film solely on its own merits, I think you'll find RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III to be one of the better 'walking dead' movies.  Nine out of ten zombies would agree.

 RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD PART II (1987)

Dir: Ken Weiderhorn

In this follow-up to the surprise horror hit of 1985, a canister containing a corpse soaked in that nasty old zombie-making chemical falls off a truck and is found by some bratty kids.  Sure enough, the creature is released and soon the local cemetery is bursting with an army of brain-eating walking dead people.  A handful of characters from a nearby housing project tries to escape with their gray matter intact.  Apart from a few good zombie jokes and strong performances by Philip Bruns and Marsha Dietlein, there's not much to recommend in this bland, uninvolving imitation of the first film. Thom Matthews and James Karen are back from the original (as different characters) but the spark that made them so enjoyable the first time around is missing here, where they're cast as bumbling grave robbers.  From start to finish, PART 2 strains to recapture the satiric style of its model but never seems to quite understand what made the first film work.  Occasional attempts at zany humor in the style of the NAKED GUN  movies are made, but this film would have needed twice as many jokes to work as a comedy.  The zombies look more elaborate and expensive this time, but somehow come off as less believeable, their cable-controlled faces twitching so much that many of them look more like puppets than actual human corpses.  The first movie never really revealed any way to stop the creatures, but this time it turns out that they can be destroyed by electricity (and the U.S. Army scientists who developed the zombie gas in the first place didn't know that. Yeah, right.)  A truckload of beef brains is used to lure the ghouls to their doom on a bridge.  Some of the comic possibilities of the living dead are played out in truly funny ways, but there's not a single scare that works and some of the humor is so smug and self-conscious that you'll feel embarressed for the actors.  There's another loud rock soundtrack blaring in the background but, unlike in the first film, this time the music never works with the images, making it sound like somebody's stereo was left on during the movie.  The overall lack of originality is typified by the use of a new rendition of the old song "The Monster Mash", which plays during the climax.  With its good cast and big effects budget this sequel had a lot of possibilities, but unfortunately its makers decided to simply copy the first movie instead of coming up with any really fresh material.  Whereas Part One managed to poke fun at the establishment, the military and even other zombie movie while still delivering chills, this movie seems to have been made under the misapprehension that if people liked the jokes in the original, then adding MORE jokes would make for an even better film, even if the gags don't relate to any particular aspect of society or behavior and no matter if they don't fit in with the plot of the movie.  Although this was a disappointment to fans and critics alike, a Part Three, which was quite different, came out a few years later.

 RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: RAVE TO THE GRAVE (2005)

Dir: Ellory Elkayem

In a movie that could give Ray Dennis Steckler's THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES a run for its money in the long title sweepstakes, the zombies are on the loose again.  This series entry (officially Part 5) is a noticable improvement over Part 4, although it's still nothing to write to the funeral home about.  Two comic relief Interpol agents with strange accents are on the trail of a missing barrel of the infamous zombie chemical, which has been found by a college kid and his dopey pals.  A science nerd friend and his stoner buddy find out that the stuff works as a great recreational drug in small doses, giving its users an intense rush accompanied by blurry but colorful optical effects for a few moments.   It later causes them to turn into brain-hungry living dead ghouls but nobody figures that out until it's too late.  The campus Halloween party becomes a bloodbath as all the morons who've used the stuff develop a sudden urge to bite big bloody chunks out of their classmates' skulls. The action, gory violence and even the character-driven humor are well handled here but there are problems with the plot.  A big shortcoming is the assumption that most college students are so stupid, shortsighted and desperate to get high that they'd automatically swallow large amounts of a new unknown drug without being given the slightest idea what's in it or where it came from.  The ones who are already hopeless addicts and losers maybe, but surely not this many clean-cut looking college kids would be that reckless with their lives.  Another nagging question is just how the science nerd got any of the stuff out of the barrel in the first place.  Nobody seems to know how to even open the canister and nobody knows there's a human corpse (this sequel's version of the "tar-man" zombie from the 1984 original) hunkered down inside it.  By the time the lid is popped open, the Trioxin zombie chemical has already been converted to capsule form (coincidentally dubbed "Z" even though nobody's supposed to know about its zombie-making properties yet) and circulated all over the campus by the local pusher.  So where did the kids get their sample?  Did they drill a hole in the barrel or something?  Search me.  There's also an absurdly illogical sequence in which the chemical is tested on a bunch of cadavers in a morgue.  The guys pumping the corpses with the stuff fully expect it to awaken them as killer ghouls but they clearly have no plan in mind for dealing with the possibility and don't even think to tie the bodies down first.  So you basically have a scene in which people try to create zombies on purpose and then are totally surprised and bewildered when it works.  Right.  And as in Part 4, the writers of this one got their zombie lore wrong.  The first three movies in this series made it clear that these particular creatures were immune to the head injuries that traditionally re-kill zombies in other movies, but here the old "shoot 'em in the head" trick works, even though we're never given any reason to think the Trioxin in this movie isn't exactly the same formula as in the original films.  In one scene, the Interpol agents wildly fire away at the tar-man zombie, filling his abdomen with dozens of bullets and never aiming for his skull even though they've already explained to the kids that the only way to kill a zombie is by hitting it in the head.  Then they look surprised when the creature gets up and walks away, unharmed by all the hits to his chest and stomach. This kind of sloppy writing plauges the whole production, but at least you get some decent comic dialogue, okay acting and good monster makeup to take your mind off the script's general stupidity.  The new version of the first film's signature zombie looks great and the movie ends by using him for a nonsensical sight gag that doesn't make sense for several reasons.  It's all very formulaic but it's fast paced and watchable enough to be worth a look for zombie fans. 

 RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES (1972)

Dir: Jose' Luis Merino

The title on the print is spelled "zombis", omitting the "e",and this entertaining Spanish import is also available (in cut form) under the titles THE HANGING WOMAN and BEYOND THE LIVING DEAD.  Actually , even some prints that bear the RETURN OF THE ZOMBIS title are shortened!  The most complete version I'm aware of is available via mail order from Midnight Video.  What's that you say?  You want to know what it's actually about?  Okay.  A jumpy, short-tempered young hero (Stan Cooper, a/k/a Stelvio Rosi) arrives at his late uncle's ancient castle to claim his inheritance.  (Specific locations are never given, but it looks like the story is taking place in Ireland or possibly Scotland.)  He soon discovers a dead woman hanging from a tree in the nearby cemetery, but that's only the start of his macabre problems.  The dead uncle's sexy wife is a practicioner of black magic, his surviving partner is an eccentric doctor working out of the world's skimpiest laboratory in the castle basement, his butler is a violent blackmailing creep, the town police captian suspects the hero in connection with the hanged woman, and the local gravedigger is a lurking, perverted voyeur named--yup, you guessed it--"Igor", played by Spain's leading horror star, Paul Naschy.  Some mysterious deaths and disappearances occur in the vicinity and a shadowy black-cloaked figure creeps around the grounds before it's finally revealed that corpses are being revived as blind, mute, scary-looking zombies who kill.  There aren't a lot of zombies in this movie, but the ones that do show up onscreen (fairly late in the action, I might add) are very well made-up and look quite convincing.  They're introduced in a pretty surprising scene too.  The creatures can be killed by setting them on fire and are controlled by small metal capsules implanted in their dead brains.  Several characters who die or vanish reappear later on as white-eyed walking cadavers.  The blood and gore aspects of the story are fairly restrained in this somewhat old-fashioned horror mystery that has a nice nineteenth century 'period' look that would almost compare to a Hammer film if it weren't for the noticeably barren lab set.  Naschy is good in a rare background role, and there's a weird twist at the end that may seem like a dumb cheap shock at first glance but which actually fits with everything that's gone before, just putting a very different spin on the female lead character and her actions and motivations.  (Think about it after the film ends...Just what was she up to and how much did she know all along?)  The promotional materials for the 1986 zombie compilation feature ZOMBIETHON all promised clips from this movie, but no footage from RETURN OF THE ZOMBIS was actually used.  This is no classic, but it's well-crafted, moody and unpredictable enough to make it worth a viewing for any horror fan.

 

 

REVENGE OF THE DEAD (1982)

Dir: Pupi Avati

Although championed by many critics, this glum Italian horror tale (a/k/a ZEDER) with conspiritorial overtones left most U.S. fans disappointed. It's easy to understand why, though. The misleading American poster art showed rotted zombies bursting up through city streets, implying that a big-scale zombie invasion would be depicted. The new title (done in a style that copied DAWN OF THE DEAD's logo) also implied something other than what the film is really about. This attempt by U.S. distributors to shovel the film into the early '8Os zombie flesheater craze might have lured horror fans into the theaters, but it had the regrettable side effect of making them feel let down in the gore department, causing viewers to come away thinking they'd been cheated. It's a shame this movie never got a fair chance with U.S. audiences, because people might have appreciated it for what it is if they'd known what they were going to see. Instead, audiences ready for a rip-roaring gorefest were bored. An eerie and well-made mystery, it's about an unsuccessful writer who's given an antique typewriter by his wife. He notices the old ribbon contains odd writings about an elaborate set of secret tests to prove the existence of "K-Zones", geographical areas where the laws of time and space as scientists understand them are warped or absent, making it theoretically possible to revive the dead there. He becomes obsessed with finding the truth about the experiment, and his secret investigation leads him to a weird, isolated facility where a girl was clawed by a dead man's hand years earlier (in the very scary prologue) and where a group of fanatics are now hiding out while they conduct one of the most morbid and voyeuristic experiments in movie history, with a TV camera buried in a coffin, trained on the face of the corpse, waiting for signs of movement. A room full of TV monitors all showing close-ups of the dead man (who had been a powerful oracle) provides one of the most unforgettable images in the annals of screen horror. The late madman does indeed revive, but the terror of the story doesn't come from seeing him go on a bloody rampage. It's simply the idea of what has happened here that makes parts of this movie so frightening. The zombie gets little screen time but his appearances are authentically spine-chilling. The main flaw in this movie is its predictable ending, which is often cited as the inspiration for the finale of Mary Lambert's film version of Stephen King's novel PET SEMATARY. To be fair, King's novel was published before this movie came out, so whether anyone was copying anyone else is anyone's guess. The ending worked better to cap off King's intimate, one-man's-nightmare tale than it does here in a story that takes place on a much grander scale. Despite the cop-out final note, this movie still deserves attention as an intelligent, effectively gloomy work of dark fantasy. I'd like to see a sequel.

 REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Dir: "Peter Harsone" (Pierre B. Reinhard)

Several other films have been re-issued under this same title (most notably 1966's THE MURDER CLINIC), but the one I'm referring to has to the best of my knowledge never been known by any other name, unless you count the slghtly different 2006 DVD release title of REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRLS.  Whether or not to actually recommend this movie is a tough call, since some people will hate it because it's sick, weird and perverted. Others will love it because it's sick, weird and perverted. Curiously absent from most reference books, this confused mix of mausoleums and misogyny is most notable for its excellent zombie makeups and its unbelieveably convoluted and meandering plotline. Some sort of industrial terrorist poisons a city's milk supply, causing several young women who drink the milk to instantly fall over dead. They show up later as scary-looking, white-gowned zombie women who commit some extremely brutal gore murders while accompanied by loud, spooky music. Various industrialists, secretaries, crooks, investigators and other interested parties work to cover up the truth, scheme against each other, and ultimately find themselves haunted by guilt and/or zombies. This movie is weighed down by way too many subplots, characters and ideas, and the result is a fast-moving but  incomprehensible mess with only the eerie, well-shot zombie footage and decent gore effects to keep the audience interested. It's often difficult to tell who is on whose side and who is double-crossing whom, but with all the blood-drenched murders and bad acting on display it won't be long before you'll lose interest in the screwy plotting anyway. And if you think horror films tend to be too hard on women, you won't believe this one. REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD features a large number of major female characters, and all of them are shown to be objects of fear, loathing, disgust, or all of the above. Not only are the living dead significantly all female, but the rest of the women in the cast are constantly being depicted as sluts, deceivers, manipulators. or simple-minded victims. The director (who shows some real visual flair during the horror sequences, although I've never seen his name attached to any other scary movie) was Pierre B. Reinhard using the name Peter Harsone, and one can only wonder what his mother must have done to him when he was a child. The absolutely insane ending is so out of left field that no matter how many lowbrow horror films you've sat through, you'll never see the finale of this one coming. The final plot twist seems illogical because it's at odds with a lot of what's come before and also because it feels like a misguided attempt to stick a last-minute moral message onto the end of what's been one heck of a sleazy and exploitative film up until that point . If you're in the mood for good-looking, effectively unpredictable but utterly empty-headed atmospherics, check this oddity out. But if you're easily offended, be warned: this is a real sick one.

 REVENGE OF THE LIVING ZOMBIES (1988)

Dir: Bill Hinzmann

As opposed to what, the "revenge of the dead zombies"? They should've left this one's original title (FLESHEATER) alone, but then it wouldn't have sounded as much like a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD copy.  Fans of that movie will surely remember Bill Hinzman, the actor who played the first zombie in the famous opening sequence and thereby probably sent more Americans to bed with nightmares than any other actor of the late 1960s. Hinzman's lurching, flailing movements and slack-jawed expression went a long way toward defining how audiences would expect the living dead to behave, and to this day his image remains an unforgettable icon of horror cinema.  But did you know that twenty years later, Bill Hinzman (apparently realizing we never actually saw his character killed in the original) made his own sequel in which he portrayed the same famous "graveyard ghoul" zombie?  Even his makeup and costume look the same as in the 1968 film, and he still looks just as imposing and scary as he did back then.  Without any explanation, he simply turns up buried in a wooden casket in some farmer's field on Halloween. The farmer digs him up, he bites the farmer, and then goes around biting other people and turning them into zombies too.  Unfortunately, that's it. There's no story progression, no real characterizations, no point, and no resolution.  People simply walk on, get either bitten (mostly in the neck) or otherwise mangled, and then stagger off in pasty makeup to bite others.  This goes on until enough film has been exposed to allow a feature-length movie to be assembled, at which point the Hinzman zombie bites one last guy before the credits roll.  The autumnal photography looks nice but the Halloween setting isn't used to much advantage, even when zombies attack a costume party.  There are no heroes to root for since most of the actors barely get a chance to say or do much of anything before getting killed off.  There are lots of bloody makeup effects on view as Hinzman and his fellow ghouls chomp on screaming teenagers and whack them with axes, pitchforks and other makeshift weapons, but none of the carnage is able to elicit any real emotion because the people never seem like people--they're just extras, onscreen long enough to look surprised, say a few dumb lines and then get all bloodied-up for the camera.  The best gore effect comes in the most unwholesome scene, in which Hinzman gets to manhandle a nude girl and then stick his arm right through her chest.  The soundtrack sounds really cool at first but since it consists of the same few brief phrases of music played over and over and over, no matter what's happening in the movie, it may start to drive you crazy after a while.  With a little imagination this could've been a cult hit, but the total lack of style and originality condemns it to the status of a mildly interesting curiosity for Romero fans and Halloween partygoers. In Europe it was called ZOMBIE NOSH in spite of its humorless tone.

 REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES (1981)

Dir: Ho Meng-Hua

Not to be confused with the 1943 John Carradine vehicle of the same name.  This typically sick and demented Hong Kong production (presentedby Run Run Shaw) was made as BLACK MAGIC II, as a followup (but not a true sequel) to BLACK MAGIC.  That film has since slipped into obscurity, but millions of Americans have seen REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES, which became one of the most popular exploitation films of the '80s.  It's a delirious fast-paced battle between good and evil, filled with rotting corpse effects, snakes, worms, blood and other assorted gross-outs.  At a hospital in modern-day China, a young doctor suspects that black magic spells may be the cause of several cases of a bizarre incurable illness that causes patients to develop patches of rotting skin and to grow live snakes inside their bellies.  He sends for an out-of-town colleague and his wife to assist in his studies of the supernatural.  The friends initially scoff at the idea of ancient black magic being used in modern times, but after the local evil sorcerer casts weird spells on them and the people around them, they are forced to rethink their beliefs.  The bad guy magician in this movie is so evil that he even has his own little sting of Bad Guy Music that's heard whenever he appears on camera (usually to obtain a sample of blood or sweat from someone he plans to zombify).  He's opposed by an elderly white-haired good guy magician who first shows up during a prologue in which a girl is eaten by a crocodile (this entire scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie).  The movie's most memorable aspect is the outrageous and often disgusting nature of the magic rituals.  The wicked sorcerer drinks human milk, pounds spikes through his own hands, slices his tongue so he can spit blood onto wax dolls of his intended victims, causes his enemies to instantly decay into putrescent piles of slimy bones, and has at his disposal a small army of revived corpses which he keeps in his basement.  In order to acquire the magic power needed to combat the forces of evil, one has to eat human eyeballs.  The zombies are brought to life by means of a large nail driven into their heads, which not only awakens them but also reverses their current state of decay and makes them look like normal living humans. When the nail is pulled out, they revert to lifeless rotted corpses.  Much of the plotting, which involves major players becoming possessed or dying, is, to put it mildly, very non-Hollywood in ts attitude toward its characters.  Good triumphs over evil at the end, but not before a gang of hooded screaming semi-decayed zombies arises to do battle with the good guys.  Most of the special effects look phony by today's standards, but this wild, insane fantasy (which also finds time for numerous martial arts fights and a zombie who works as an exotic dancer) should provide a good time for adventurous fans with strong stomachs.   

 

 

 RISE OF THE UNDEAD (2005)

Dirs: Jason Horton, Shannon Hubbell

Despite some nice optical work offering memorable shots of a burning, fiery red city, this Canadian effort, or lack of effort, is about as dull and uninvolving as zombie movies get. It has no new ideas as it copies DAWN OF THE DEAD while also borrowing freely from RESIDENT EVIL and CUBE too. After a violent unknown explosion decimates a unnamed city, a handful of the usual argumentative young people hole up in some kind of big building to swear at each other while the smoke outside clears. Occasionally you get to see small groups of zombies (people with blood smeared on their faces who stagger about as if drunk), and every now and then the lights go out and somebody gets clawed and shredded by a big ill-explained smoke monster that looks like the thing from the old OUTER LIMITS episode "It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork" but less scary.  No one was trying very hard to make this project make any sense, but we do get all the standard dialogue about government work with germ warfare, the evils of the corporate system, macho tough-guy posturing and other tripe you've heard a million times before in other low-budget productions. A huge portion of the film turns out to have been somebody's dream, and the closing credits have to last a painful 9 minutes to help this uninspired, undistinguished throwaway movie reach feature length. You've been warned: bring along the No-Doze.

 ROT (1999)

Dir: Marcus Koch

ROT is in obscure low-budget attempt to turn out something like SID & NANCY by way of THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN.  I loved the opening credits, printed on toe tags in a morgue, but unfortunately the creativity pretty much begins and ends right there. The aimless punk lifestyles and goofy haircuts already looked dated when this was made and there's no story, but for an amateur production ROT is oddly watchable most of the time.  A pair of disillusioned drug-addled punks (the female is played by a woman calling herself Tiffany Stinky) catch a flesh-melting virus from a corpse. They spenthe rest of the film stomping around, swearing, breaking things, swearing, threatening people, swearing, whining and swearinmg, while bloody goop drips from their faces.  That's about it.  Whereas films like SHATTER DEAD and I, ZOMBIE tried to deal realistically with the emotional reactions people might have to witnessing their own actual decay, this unambitious movie is content to simply have the rot victims kick props around and swear a lot, which is the same way they acted before they were infected.  Everybody ends up dead but since there are only villains and no good guys, it's hard to care.  Other elements are introduced and sometimes start out looking like they're going to be real plot threads but these turn out to be nothing more than filler.  An FBI agent shows up for a while but then rips his own face off before he can make any impact on the proceedings.  There's talk about how the rot is spreading all over town but we're never shown much evidence of this epidemic.  Granted the unstructured nature of ROT was probably meant to reflect the uncertain, directionless lives of its anarchist characters but it still makes for a dull movie.  The guy behind the disease is played by Joel Wynkoop, a specialist in cheap video horror.  He spends half the film staggering around a small, dark room giggling like an idiot and repeating the same words and phrases over and over until you just can't stand him any more.  His long repetitive monologues just have to have been improvised.  It seems as if every bit of footage they had of him ranting was left in, including flubs like mispronouncing "germ warfare" as "German warfare".   There's some cool grinding, throbbing, techno-punk background music on the soundtrack but beware of several terrible songs by bands you'll never hear of again.  The video I watched included some behind-the-scenes footage.  In these shots you can see that the makeup work on the rotting faces and hands was expertly done, displaying a variety of melted-looking textures and gruesome splits and holes in the participants' skin.  It's a good thing they threw in their "Behind Da Scenes" segment because you'd never be able to tell how good the makeup really is from watching the dark, grainy, out-of-focus movie.  The 'making of' footage makes the actors and filmmakers seem way too much like the characters in the movie: they mostly just swear, complain, swear, argue, whine around and swear.  ROT was shot in Florida.