SHADOWS OF THE DEAD (2004)

Dir: Carl Lindbergh

This is basically a remake of the British I, ZOMBIE but with two characters slowly rotting away after a zombie bite instead of only one.  It proves that two isn't always better than one.  A young couple finds a corpse in the woods, it sits up and bites the guy, and he starts to physically deteriorate while developing a taste for human flesh.  He bites the girl, she turns zombie too, and so it goes. They hide in a cabin in the woods, steal drugs from a nearby hospital (even though they have no clue what any of the drugs are actually for), and petulantly argue for an interminably long time before the big finish, in which somebody comes along and puts an end to both their and the audience's suffering by shooting them.  And there you have it.  This is such dark, grim subject matter that SHADOWS OF THE DEAD had the potential to be nightmarish and disturbing.  But the mood is spoiled by the rambling, repetitive nature of the dialogue, a total failure to explain why any of this is happening, and weak performances by the leads. Since it's a given from five minutes in that they're going to turn into decaying zombies, there's nothing much to hold viewer interest up to the inevitable conclusion.  Neither of the stars behaves sensibly or realistically, there isn't any cool zombie makeup to watch for, and the movie seems to just stagger along forever as the zombiefied guy and zombiefied girl have the same tedious arguments over and over again, restating the obvious while absolutely nothing else happens.  I, ZOMBIE was less than brilliant, but at least it did a good job of capturing the desperation, sheer horror and hopeless isolation a person might feel if they really did start to literally decay both physically and mentally. SHADOWS OF THE DEAD adds no new insight or anything in the way of scares.  It's relentlessly downbeat, but beyond that it can't think of a thing to say. See I, ZOMBIE instead.

 

 

 

 SHATTER DEAD (1993)

Dir: Scooter McCrae

This fascinating low-budget shocker was reportedly shot in 11 days for under $4,000.  It overcomes its lack of funds to emerge as one of the most relentlessly bleak releases ever.  It never comes to grips with exactly what is going on but the nihilistic attitude is extreme even for a zomvie movie.  In the near future, death as we know it no longer exists.  The dead have returned to life as pathetic outcasts who dig up their friends and families after hearing them calling from their graves.  Mankind is without hope, the dead outnumber the living and society exists in a horrible limbo in which everyone will inevitably end up as a living corpse.  The dead seen here are unique.  They're aware of their plight and they don't eat or sleep.  They loiter in public places like rotted derelicts.  The film follows a weary girl making her way across a blood-drenched town to get to her boyfriend.  When she finally reaches him, she finds out that he's killed himself and joined the ranks of the undead.  Now he wants her to do the same so that she'll never grow old and they can spend eternity together as sentient corpses, a fate which eventually awaits everyone anyway.  All this misery came about after an angel had sex with a human woman (?).  Seventeen months later (??), God Himself abandoned the earth and turned His back on man.  So dying is no longer an option for the exhausted people of a fallen world.  Tension between the living, who are going mad, and the dead, who are waiting for the rest of the human race to join them, is tangible.  The script offers original and insightful notions about what it might be like to go on living in a body with no biological processes, giving an unusual amount of serious thought to the concept of living death.  There are some contradictions (if the dead can look young forever because they stop decomposing, then why do they smell bad?), and the acting and makeup effects are mostly weak,  but this is still one of the most deeply disturbing films I've ever seen.  It's a pageant of despair in which people are smashed and blasted into bloody messes but continue to live, with broken bones and horrible wounds they know will never heal.  It's a rare horror film indeed that argues in favor of death instead of against it, persuasively asserting that life's pleasures would be gone if there was no end to life in sight.  The film lacks an ending and is marred by undisciplined editing and an adolescent preoccupation with trashy sexploitation elements that waste time, diminish the philosophical content and push intriguing ideas into the background.   Slow pacing enhances the mood but the juxtaposition of arthouse pretense and sleazy, near-pornographic scenes never quite works.   Director McCrae, who worked on other genre projects like the video restoration of BASKET CASE, the wonderful TV series REEL WILD CINEMA, and the unwatchably awful amateur relase ORIGINAL SINS, won't make up his mind here.  He veers from gory violence to artsy symbolism to raunchy sex, and the movie suffers for it.  Its many shortcomings aside, this is unsettling stuff.  Any zombie fan should view it once, if only to see a truly creative, if truly sick, exploration of the theme.

 

 

 SHOCK WAVES (1977)

Dir: Ken Wiederhorn

 With all the unwanted hack sequels being ground out like so much sausage meat these days, it's amazing that nobody has done any kind of a follow-up to this unnerving but ultimately unsatisfying zombie tale.  Shipwreck survivors (their captain was a grouchy John Carradine!) find themselves stranded on a bizarre island where former Nazi commander Peter Cushing hides out, awaiting the return of "The Death Corps", a battalion of unstoppable walking corpses created by the Germans during WWII.  It seems that the Nazis never got a chance to put their undead soldiers to use, and after the war nobody knew what to do with them, so they were simply orderd to walk into the sea.  They've been marching along the ocean floor ever since, and it's just about time for them to reach the island, creep up onto dry land, and continue to carry out their old orders to kill everybody they can get their waterlogged hands on.  This ingenious concept is well played during the early portions of the film, with the scene in which Cushing relates the terrible tale to the castaways being especially effective, establishing a sense of dread much more real than in most bigger-budgeted Hollywood horror movies.  Scenes of the shriveled, yellow-complexioned Aryan zombies rising out of the water in their German Army uniforms and dark goggles are beautifully realized and look like images right out of a nightmare.  Unfortunately, after a marvelous first half, SHOCK WAVES runs out of ideas and settles down to the same old routine zombie movie situation in which dull characters engage in lots of tedious bickering amongst themselves while the zombies slowly go about killing them off.  It's learned at one point that pulling the creatures' goggles off will kill them (the sunlight evidently fries their brains) but surprisingly little is done with this idea.  Peter Cushing's cold-hearted, paranoid Nazi (a wonderful character) is killed off in an appallingly offhand, meaningless way, and much too early in the film to boot.  There's nothing much in the way of a climax either, although a slight surprise twist at the very end is somewhat effective.  The ghoulish makeups (some of the zombies even have small swastikas carved into their foreheads!) were done by none other than Alan Ormsby, the man behind the unforgettable CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS.  Director Ken Wiederhorn returned to the zombie theme with the ill-conceived RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD PART 2 in 1987, but nothing in that silly movie approaches the entertainment level of SHOCK WAVES.  Twenty years later, sculptor Jeff Wehenkel created a great collector mask of one of the zombie Nazis based on the film's effective poster art, and there's even a collectible resin model kit of one of the Nazi ghouls.  I'm normally opposed to remakes, but SHOCK WAVES is just too full of great ideas and missed potential to stay dead forever!  (Come on, Ken...how about a sequel, at least??)

 SINYSTER (1997)

Dir: Ronnie Sortor

This was also advertised as SINISTRE, which made me wonder if they couldn't make up their minds on the best way to misspell 'sinister' or if they just couldn't get their hands on a dictionary when the time came to put together the opening titles. I know that some readers will disagree, but I found this independent feature to be a highly involving and entertaining effort. Some of it is too dark and the sound quality leaves much to be desired, but it's a truly creative, refreshingly serious attempt to generate real tension without wasting zillions of Hollywood dollars on the visually impressive but seldom frightening morphing effects that keep so many current mainstream horror films from really scaring anybody. The writing and acting are uneven but consistently earnest in this simple tale of the nasty consequences of a robbery gone wrong. The very dark "violence begets violence" plot has three crooks (two of whom were wounded during their escape) make the mistake of hiding out at a secluded old house that's haunted by the ghost of a scary long-haired axe murderer and his living dead victims. The woods surrounding the house are crawling with hungry zombies referred to as "the guilty", people who were too weak to resist their own evil impulses during their mortal lives. The leader of the crooks, who committed his first kill during the robbery, finds himself caught up in a web of horror as the axe-swinging ghost takes a liking to him and encourages him to kill again just for fun. It seems that gunning down an innocent man not only permanently opened the thief up to paranoia and violent nightmares but also made him easy prey for senseless, mind-warping evil that STAR WARS fans might liken to the Dark Side of The Force. The axe murderer makes the poor confused slob watch while he re-kills his original victims all over again and the ending addresses the contagious nature of violence and the cycle of stupidity it encourages. There are numerous gore highlights and unique hallucinatory visuals on display too, as the undead murder victims crawl in and out of the shadows of the house in puddles of blood and various dead characters reappear as ghosts or zombies. A dead thug is buried in the yard but the zombies dig him up. In one scene, a one-armed zombie goes through a pile of chopped-off body parts in search of his lost limb. The ghouls in the woods are memorable, original makeup creations with long Nosferatu-style fingernails and weird, misshapen faces.  The actor who plays the ghostly psycho gives an authentically deranged and intimidating performance and definitely deserves more horror film work.  The only real sour note is struck by the head crook's scheming girlfriend, who never reacts believeably to anything.  A fine example of how creativity can overcome budget limitations, SINYSTER is one for fans of zombie movies (and independent films in general) to look for.

 SPOOKIES (1985)

Dirs: Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran, Eugenie Joseph

One of the strangest (and stupidest) movies ever released, this one nearly defies description. But what the heck, I'll try. A 13-year-old runs away from home on his birthday and sneaks into a haunted mansion in the middle of a graveyard. Inside he finds a dark, eerie, deserted surprise party set up in his honor. A cake's candles light by themselves, a toy robot walks around, a creepy baby doll whimpers, and a living head is found in a box. The boy runs but is quickly killed by a werewolf who meows like a cat, dresses like a pirate and has a hook hand. This plotline is then completely dropped and never mentioned again. (They should have flashed a caption onscreen reading "NOTICE: THAT STORY HAS BEEN ABANDONED.") Then two carloads of idiots arrive in search of a place to get drunk. They sneak into the mansion and trade insults for a while, but one woman gets possessed by an Ouija board and turns into one of The Evil Dead. One guy tries to run away but is pulled down into the graveyard as his own tombstone pops up. Hiding in the attic is a wicked old sorcerer named Kreon, who talks with a German accent and looks like a poor man's version of the "Tall Man" from PHANTASM. His son is a little boy vampire who looks like one of the dwarves from PHANTASM.   With the help of the cat/wolf/pirate and the possessed girl, he conjures up lots of "spookies" to kill off the partiers, knowing their life essence will somehow cause his comatose, beautiful bride to awaken. The dopes split up and are killed by an incredible parade of monsters including an Asian Spider-Woman, a stylish Grim Reaper statue that comes to life (but soon explodes), some very cool iguana-like lizards with humanoid faces, an alien with electrified tentacles, a cackling puppet witch, and some fat (and apparently flatulent) mummies. When the bride wakes up we learn that she'd poisoned herself just to get away from the old creep!  Although she's been dead for 70 years, she turns out to be just another victim and flees through the cemetery, where she's chased and pawed at by an army of impressively made-up rotting zombies, Kreon's many previous victims. The film opens with a shot of a tomb that's shuddering as though something is about to burst out, and ends with the sorcerer himself popping up out of it, even though he's been in the house the whole time (and was also killed). As you can guess, SPOOKIES is a totally confused mishmash of meaningless effects footage stuck together with no rhyme or reason. Still, it gives you a wider array of unique monsters and effects per reel than ANY other movie I've seen. The dialogue, editing and direction are all poor but the lighting is excellent, the monsters are well-done (most of 'em, anyway), and the whole thing is so chaotic that it certainly never gets boring. It's also a chance to see the work of a lot of lesser-known FX artists like John Pods, Arnold Gargiulo, and Gabe Bartalos (whose tombstone is shown).  The reason it's such a mess is because a finished low-budget film called TWISTED SOULS got into legal troubles and was re-structured into the disaster that is SPOOKIES with new footage by a different director with different actors. About half of TWISTED SOULS remains and the rest is the newer stuff.  The perfect party tape. I want one of those lizards!  And, oh yeah, the zombies never actually do anything.

 

 

 STACY (2003)

Dir: Naoyuki Tomomatsu

In this high-concept zombie adventure from Japan, girls between the ages of 15 and 17 suddenly start dying for no known reason, after first experiencing "NDH", "Near Death Happiness", a state of giddy bliss that has them flitting about giggling with such glee that you'd want to shoot them in the heads even if they weren't about to become zombies. The tiresome teens drop dead and then re-animate as flesh eating zombies called "Stacies" for no clear reason.  The government advises families to kill their teen daughters by chopping them into 165 pieces!  (Any fewer than that and the dismembered bits twitch and wiggle around for a while.)  A new Stacy-zombie disposal squad is organized, adopting the name of the "Romero" unit.  In an EVIL DEAD joke, TV ads promote a handy new small-sized chainsaw designed especially for the dismemberment of teenage girls, but a translation gaffe springing from the famed problem with converting "l's" and "r's" into Japanese results in the item being labelled the "Blues Campbell's Right Hand 2"!  STACY is watchable and features some delirious new twists on zombie lore, but unfortunately none of it ever makes any sense, a sizeable chunk of the story is lifted directly from Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD, and the last reel deteriorates into a lot of lyrical poetic gobbledegook that tries to push the viewer's emotional buttons but which I found mostly frustrating.  So we get a movie that's half Romero imitation and half pretentious drivel, but the fact that it's a Japanese production does at least mean we get much better camerawork, acting, pacing and direction than the same concept would've gotten in the US.  The zombie phenomenon is never adequately explained beyond its having to do with "love", but at least the bloody FX including spastic twitching limbs and active severed heads in the RE-ANIMATOR tradition are excellent.  The high-caliber gore effects and crazed, often hysterical performances keep things entertaining while the movie rushes toward its confused final portion, in which anything can happen and so nothing that does happen seems to carry any relevance.  Worth a one-time look for any zombie fan, but too obtuse and artsy for its own good.

 

 

 

STINK OF FLESH, THE (2004)

Dir: Scott Phillips

The stink of flesh I can tolerate, but the much worse stink that arises as people make a movie when they have absolutely no new ideas or any concept of storytelling is unbearable. This aimless cheapie takes place in one of those unspecified near-future settings in which Romero-style zombies have made life rough for the handful of bitter, tough-talking survivors. Nobody talks about the particulars of the zombie invasion, so we never find out how or why or even when the problem began. (Hey, come on, it would take real creativity and hard work to write that kind of stuff.) Instead it's simply a given that the few characters we see are stuck in the same basic zombie-plagued landscape from DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD. Maybe this is happening concurrently with the events of those films. In any case, the main character is a cynical macho zombie fighter unimaginatively named "Matool" after the island on which Fulci's ZOMBIE took place, presumably to let fans know the filmmakers saw that movie too. He's kidnapped by Nathan, an apparently impotent loser who regularly goes out to abduct men and take them home so his chunky wife Dexy can have sex with them.  Forced sex with Dexy might be more fun if it weren't for her mentally handicapped sister who likes to stand by the bed and spank the guys with a stick while they're doing it with her. The sister has a conjoined twin of the BASKET CASE variety, represented by a lumpy rubber face glued to one side of her stomach. (Wisely, the crude creation is given very little screen time.)  Nothing much ever happens with this offbeat potentially interesting character, leaving viewers to wonder what she and her stomach-face were doing in the movie in the first place. A few more guys show up, but all of them are one-dimensional jerks, so there's nobody to root for. Nathan eventually gets tired of making Dexy's midnight runs for sex partners and sitting back watching her make out with one strange man after another,  but when he finally gets in the mood to have sex himself, he inexplicably chooses to ignore his lust-crazed wife and instead rapes a shapely female zombie he's been keeping chained up in his padlocked barn of the naked dead. None of this is as interesting as it sounds. The best thing about STINK is its impressive stunt work, as the numerous brawls, fistfights and zombie attacks are well-staged, convincingly performed and carefully shot. They have a very professional, realistic feel that's missing from the rest of the movie. The zombie makeups are limited to gray greasepaint and some dribbling blood, so there aren't any interesting looking monsters, but at least the low-tech ghouls look as effective as the similar ones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN.  Nothing of any real interest ever happens after the first few minutes, and the ending is one of the worst ever. Two guys get into one of the most pointless, unmotivated slugfests imaginable, but their little punchup is interrupted by a handful of zombies and left unresolved. The film concludes with a couple of survivors running off toward the horizon just like old Three Stooges and Benny Hill skits used to end, only here it isn't supposed to be funny. At least I don't think it is. The tired shenanigans, shot in New Mexico with limited resources and an even more limited imagination, last only 82 minutes.

 SUGAR HILL (1974)

Dir: Paul Maslansky

Not to be  confused with the 1993 Wesley Snipes crime thriller of the same title, this black exploitation horror entry was made as VOODOO GIRL and turned up on TV as THE ZOMBIES OF SUGAR HILL.  Many reviewers sneer and look down their noses at films that belong to the early 1970s cycle of monster movies aimed at black audiences, but I liked this one a lot.  Heartless crime syndicate boss Robert Quarry (Count Yorga himself) goes too far when he orders his gang of sadistic thugs to kill the boyfriend of sexy black Sugar Hill (Marki Bey), who makes a deal with legendary Haitian voodoo god Baron Samedi to take revenge on the gangsters. The Baron resurrects a group of long-dead blacks (pre-Civil War era slaves killed by cruel whites) as powerful, cobweb-covered zombies with blank silver eyes and mud-encrusted skin. The scene in which the zombies emerge from their graves, still in shackles, is excellent (especially when two of them knowingly smile an evil smile at each other). The members of Quarry's mob soon begin to meet their deaths one by one at the willing (and moldy) hands of the living dead blacks who finally get their chance to avenge themselves against oppresive white society. I suppose this kind of scenario would be considered politically incorrect today, but the added 'sins of the fathers' theme gives the movie more of a background in the past guilt of real history than most zombie movies and the reviving of the dead by voodoo adds a note of folkloric authenticity to their ghostly presence.  Zombies who are smart enough to quietly creep around a busy city in search of specific victims are highly unusual in films. The best thing about SUGAR HILL, though, is Don Pedro Colley's larger-than-life (or death) performance as Baron Samedi. Although he doesn't look exactly like most voodoo legends describe the supernatural Baron, Colley (a great actor who deserved more recognition) gives the character a confident manner and a wicked sense of humor, stealing one scene after another with demented intensity. And it if you don't go for that, there's a cool zombie massage parlor scene too. The twist at the end, though minor, strikes just the right note. It's funny, creepy and isn't at all how you'd expect a simple revenge story to end, making it a perfect capper to an offbeat movie. "The mob didn't expect Sugar Hill and her zombie hitmen " said the ads.  The movie does have its weaknesses. Some of the acting and background music could be better, and there's not much in the way of subtlety in the progression of the bare-bones, kill-the-bad-guys-off-one-at-a--time plot. I would have liked to see Quarry's smirking gangland kingpin have a more prominent role in the proceedings, too. It isn't complex, high-tech or expensive looking but SUGAR HILL is a fun, largely bloodless, almost old -fashioned way for any horror fan to kill ninety minutes.

 SUPERNATURALS, THE (1986)

Dir: Armand Mastroianni

This is probably the best Civil War-themed zombie movie, but that's not saying much when you consider that the competition includes CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD.   A well-produced and decently put together film, THE SUPERNATURALS has a lot going for it but manages to be deadly dull most of the way through.  Nichelle Nichols (Uhura from the original STAR TREK) and LeVar Burton (Geordi LaForge on Next Generation STAR TREK) are among a group of crabby, unpleasant National Guard trainees who exchange constant tiresome mean-spirited dialogue as they make their way through a dense wooded area in Alabama as part of a training exercise.  Little do they know, they're near a site where Confederate prisoners were cruelly forced to cross a minefield and blow themselves to bits during the war.  Of course, the surrounding forest is haunted by the vengeful living dead victims.  A little kid who survived the massacre and a ghostly old witch provide the link to the modern-day attack by scary rotted zombies, but you have to endure a LOT of ugly talk and boring footage of people walking through the woods before the very brief scare scenes finally happen.  Mark Shostrom's imaginative zombie masks and makeups are absolutely excellent, but I only know that because I was lucky enough to get to see some of them in person.  In the film, they're never shown except in quick cuts that are too misty and backlit to enable a viewer to make anything out clearly. It's a shame, because these were some highly detailed, beautifully realized corpse faces that deserved to be better seen by fans.  For all the use they got out of them in this movie, they might as well have picked up a few cheap masks from the local costume shop and the results would have been just as good.  The fog-shrouded look of the dark, shadowy zombie figures actually works okay in the finished film but a few closeups on their angry cadaverous faces would have been welcome and would't have spoiled what little suspense there is.  TREK fans may be disappointed to see Nichols playing such a nasty and unlikeable character in her role of the platoon's tough-talking commanding officer, and (as in many zombie films) not much is made of the unusual setting or circumstances; the plot is just an excuse to get some people into an isolated area so we can watch them slowly (very slowly) get killed off.  That said, at least the supernatural portion of the storyline is a little better thought-out than in many low-budget productions and the clever use of light and shadow makes this visually interesting during the night scenes. Impatient viewers may need to fast forward through a lot of the talky early and middle parts, however.  Like a number of cheap '50s horror and sci-fi movies, this reportedly got produced on the strength of a good, exploitable piece of poster art rather than on a solid story idea.  It shows.

 TEENAGE ZOMBIE HOUSE MASSACRE (2000)

Dir: Jared Bullis

Not so much a movie as an excuse for a group of drinking buddies to hang out for a weekend at an empty old house, playing with a camcorder and a couple of bottles of fake blood.   This dreadful cost-free 35-minute short has a bunch of inarticulate, bickering, foul-mouthed losers (they're supposed to be teenagers but they look about 10 years too old for that) sneak into an allegedly haunted house so they can get even more drunk than they are to begin with and have sex with their girlfriends, who clearly have low standards.  It's supposed to be set in 1988 so people say "totally rad" and talk about Whitesnake, Axl Rose and New Kids On The Block.  Nobody has any discernable personality other than being perpetually angry and confrontational for no reason and nobody does any acting beyond barking out the F-word 300 times per sentence fragment.  The "kids" walk around the house briefly before some extras with black panda bear circles painted around their eyes and blood on their clothes show up to kill them.  There's no characterization, no clever dialogue, no real plot and no ending worth talking about, but at least the hacks who belched this one out managed to do in half an hour what many other low-end zombie flicks take 90 minutes to accomplish.   There are also a few nicely set up shots of the house and grounds but that's about all the project has going for it.  The supposedly abandoned house not only has working electricity but a porch light that's already on when the "kids" arrive!  There aren't any good scares nor any interesting makeup effects, and the lack of ambitious gore trickery will be a deal-breaker for even the most desperate zombie-gorehounds.  The big "twist" at the end is simply that some other kids' cars start to pull into the driveway.  Yawn.  It was mostly shot with a camcorder on night vision setting and then copied in black-and-white in a failed attempt to conceal it.  I like to be supportive of independent filmmakers, but the folks who slapped this one together weren't even trying. 

THEY CAME BACK (2005)

Dir: Robin Campillo

This glum, rather pretentious French film (but wait, I repeat myself) starts out with a thoroughly fascinating and original take on the zombie theme. When thousands of people who have died in the last decade suddenly appear in cemeteries alive and (mostly) well again, French government officials must make a lot of decisions in a hurry. The dead here aren't flesh-eating ghouls or vampires. They are in good health, have retained almost all of their memory and identities from life, and simply want to re-enter society. Understandably bewildered relatives and friends try to cope with the sudden reappearance of  departed loved ones. Places of employment are seen re-hiring their deceased workers, familial relationships broken by death are seemingly given a second chance, and chemists work to develop a special drug to help keep the ghostly insomniacs sedated at night, when they're prone to wandering about aimlessly and spooking people. The first half of this unusual and thought-provoking movie is fascinating and sometimes brilliant in its exploration of how such a phenomena would be dealt with and how, on a more personal level, conflicted individuals might react to such an upheaval in their routines and a challenge to their beliefs. The returned dead have most of their mental faculties but suffer from a sort of post-traumatic aphasia that makes verbal communication difficult. They're restless but slow, with decent motor skills but no capacity for innovative thought. Unfortunately, the latter half of the movie suffers from much the same condition. It's artfully shot and well-crafted, but as the story progresses you begin to realize that the filmmakers had no idea where to take the situation. They had a marvelous concept for the first half of a movie, but once the living dead start plotting to sneak into an old sewer tunnel, this movie searches desperately for some note on which to end.  After an engrossing first half, it's a crushing disappointment when the film concludes with the dead simply disappearing as mysteriously as they had arrived, with no coherent point having been made and none of the characters shown to have learned anything or been significantly changed by their exposure to such a strange event. The American distributors try to sell this as a comedy in the tradition of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but don't believe them: there's nothing funny going on here and no action, gore, or fight scenes.  This was shot as LES REVENANTS, but titled THEY CAME BACK for the U.S., presumably because it was felt that Americans wouldn't know the meaning of (or be able to pronounce) "revenants" and would only take a chance on a DVD rental if the title consisted of nice easy one-syllable words. Sadly, this was probably a wise move.  By any title, this is a disappointment. What begins as a thoughtful, intelligent and dreamlike study of the effect of death and possible re-birth on human society falters and turns into a real Yawn Of The Dead by the end.   

 

 

 

TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1971)

Dir: Amando DeOssorio

Seventies-style exploitation elements were added to a good old-fashioned "don't go near the haunted cemetery" ghost story plot to create this moody, well-photographed Spanish shocker that was director Amando DeOssorio's biggest money-making hit.  It spawned three legitimate sequels, several pseudo-seqels and a slew of imitations.  Remember learning about the real-life order of the Knights Templar in history class?  According to this movie, the Templars learned the secret of eternal life via black magic rituals and were executed in medieval times for practicing human sacrifice.  In modern days, a girl jumps from a moving train after an argument with her friends and wanders into the Templars' desolate, long-abandoned burial grounds.  Her presence (or was it the jazz music playing on her transistor radio?) reawakens the evil knights, but their magic proves to have been only partially successful: they're alive all right, but in their present-day condition as moldy, decayed human skeletons!  Since their eyes were pecked out by crows after their deaths, the Templars (who need human blood to survive) can only track their victims by sound.  Intense situations develop as "the blind dead" shuffle stiffly around, swords drawn, listening for any movements or terrified cries of their intended victims.  Their ghostly horses are restored to life as well, leading to some unforgettable footage of the robed, hooded living corpses riding their ancient steeds along the beaches at dusk.  Their creepy deep-voiced chanting adds immeasurably to the prevailing air of doom as the knights attack anyone who dares to invade their turf.  Eventually they decide to spread their reign of terror beyond their own graveyard, though, and at the climax they're seen boarding the train and slaughtering the passengers in a series of scenes that are missing from many U.S. prints.  TOMBS ranks high in style and atmosphere but is marred by its total lack of an ending (a problem common in zombie genre and among early 70's horror films in general).  I've personally seen four different cuts of this film and while they all conclude with slightly different shots, none of them offer anything really satisfactory by way of an ending.  Some viewers saw this movie as sexist, but since the men involved are all depicted as ineffectual lunkheads and the women are at least plucky and determined, I can't agree.  A character who survives to the end is a lesbian, further clarifying the point that men aren't needed in the reality of this story.  A sequence in which a resurrected victim stalks the dark corridors of a mannequin factory is especially eerie.  (Interestingly, this is the series' only entry in which a victim of the blind dead returns to life as a zombie/vampire; in the rest, those who are bitten or otherwise attacked simply stay dead.)  Arguably the best of the series, TOMBS is a winner that's definitely worth every horror fan's time. 

 

 

 

 TOXIC ZOMBIES (1979)

Dir: Charles McCrann

This minor Pennsylvania-made outing played drive-ins through the early 1980s as BLOODEATERS, an awkward title that might lead you to wonder if they're "fleshdrinkers" too.  An overzealous government agent hires a burned-out drunk to spray a suspected marijuana farming area with "Dromax", a new (and of course untested) herbicide.  The good news is, it kills the pot plants all right.  The bad news is that it also kills the pot-growing hippies hiding in the forest and turns them into growling, blood-drinking zombies.  Like many another low-budget zombie movie, this one seemingly expends every last drop of its creative energy in finding a new and original way to bring the dead back to life and then has no idea what to do next.  The setup here is fresh and creepy enough to lend a suitably ominous feel to the early portions of the film, so naturally it comes as a disappointment that the remainder of the running time is devoted to a handful of the dead stalking a handful of the living.  The dead hippies stagger along in the woods brandishing axes and machetes and occasionally biting someone.  To the script's credit, some real efforts at characterization are made.  And I've got to hand it to them, at least one major character's sudden senseless death came as a complete surprise to me (horror fans will know what I mean, since in most movies of this ilk it's pretty easy to predict who will live and who will get whacked).  Too much time is spent getting a group of innocent campers into the infected area.  In one strangely empty sequence, our heroes bed down for the night in a clearing, unaware that the "bloodeaters" are lurking nearby.  The sun sets, things get officially Dark And Spooky, and then.... all of a sudden it's morning, and absolutely nothing has happened overnight.  Then the zombies show up and attack, presumably because shooting in natural daylight was cheaper than renting movie lights and working at night.  Makeup is minimal, consisting mainly of a few pasty complexions and a little blood dribbling down the zombie hippies' faces.  There are a few okay blood-and-gore effects scattered throughout this homegrown cross between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and I DRINK YOUR BLOOD, but not much in the way of scares other than the overall queasy mood.   A government coverup plot is thrown in to give the movie more of a point of view, but it's on such a small scale (a total of two agents is involved) that it doesn't add much to the plot.  Fans of George Romero's MARTIN will be interested to see that film's star, John Amplas, show up here as what must be the world's youngest federal agent.  Although the film gives it a good try in some departments and even comes with a proper ending (a claim that can't be made by most zombie movies), any movie that devotes most of its length to shots of pale expressionless hippies stumbling out from behind trees to chase campers around isn't likely to be remembered as anything other than plain and simple drive-in fodder.  In addition to the TOXIC ZOMBIES and BLOODEATERS monikers, some prints also bear the title FOREST OF FEAR.

UNA DE ZOMBIS (2003)

Dir: Miguel Angel Lamata

What could have been an ingenious exploration of the nature of reality as opposed to the nature of scripted movies takes too many wrong turns and tries way too hard to look clever to retain much efficacy.  There are some very funny moments here, but most of the time the movie is too busy keeping everybody running around and shouting to bother with giving the impression of actually being about anything.  A rude, lazy, stupid radio shock jock teams up with a sweaty overweight nerd to make "a film about zombies" (the rough English translation of the title).  The fat guy does all the writing while the other loser gets into and out of various fights with over-the-top crooks and other camp characters.  The idea is that everything the writer concocts spills over into the reality of the film we're watching, a concept that should have allowed for a lot more jokes and surprises than we get.  Despite the title and the main characters' professed love of zombie movies, the finished product has next to nothing to do with the undead.  There are no zombies in the traditional filmic sense, only a few street thugs who have been brought back to life by a farcical middle school science teacher-turned-crime boss.  These alleged zombies move and behave normally, think for themselves and even crack jokes, and since they don't look or act any worse than anyone else in the film, there's nothing to identify them as members of the living dead apart from the fact that they bleed green when shot.  There are several twists but none of them add up to much, including the recurring appearances of the writer's violently insane mother, some arrogant film producers, and a super-tough, super-cliched fightin' chick nicknamed Miss Fists.  The bulk of UNA DE ZOMBIS' running time is devoted to low-rent action movie stuff, with hammy actors repeatedly assaulting each other either physically or verbally.   There's plenty of swearing, shooting and fistfighting but nothing scary and, surprisingly, nothing that seems to be specifically saying anything about zombie movies.  Most of the content is the sort of thing you could make up as you're shooting it, so the potentially clever it's-all-just-a-story hook doesn't yield as much worthwhile material as you'd think.  All of the characters in UNA DE ZOMBIS are despicable, scurrilous, hateful lowlifes, which means that big fans of films by Quentin Tarantino or Rob Zombie might like it in spite of the lack of a followable plot.  As for me, I found it to be too monotonous and self-conscious (every frame practically begs for cult status) to work.  There are some good gags but on the whole it's not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.