VAMPIRES VS. ZOMBIES (2004)

Dir: "Vince D'Amato"

Horror movies don't come any dumber than this.  The saddest part of this very sad project is that the vandals who made it took Sheridan LeFanu's famous vampire tale Carmilla, placed it in a trash compactor, crushed it down to just a few key elements, and adapted its mangled remains into their own brainless road movie that occasionally throws in a few George Romero style zombies to no good purpose.  A vacuous teenage girl has a recurring nightmare in which a vampire woman crawls across a bed toward her.  Her dad is driving her to somewhere or other on the orders of a senile old army general who's looking for Carmilla, the vampire who allegedly killed his daughter.  Occasionally a zombie comes staggering out into the road long enough to be run down.  A dazed-looking Brinke Stevens wanders into the film to burden the idiotic father and daughter with lovely young Carmilla.  Brinke shows up again moments later in a state trooper's uniform but the moronic characters don't recognize her.  Everything that follows is simply a string of arbitrary, random events that never build to anything.  Brinke shows up later on in still another costume to stand outside and tell someone to take a bath.  The way people react to what's going on around them in this pathetic mess never touches upon believable human behavior.  To enumerate all the examples of stupidity herein would fill a book.  Suffice it to say, most of the dialogue is senseless and repetitive and the acting is consistently at amateur level.  There is confusion regarding who is a vampire and who isn't and who knows what about whom, but the characters are all so remote and irrational that none of it ever matters.  Wooden stakes are poked into several characters' chests, and sometimes it kills them or at least seems to hurt a little.  The only connection between the skimpy zombie footage and anything else is that a few radio reports are heard explaining that the area is infected with a zombie plague.  There are several brief instances of clumsy lesbian fumbling between Carmilla and the brain-damaged heroine, and in one scene a gaggle of Catholic schoolgirl zombies (female extras with some green paint smeared on their faces) get unconvincingly sliced up by a guy wielding a hedge trimmer that I think was supposed to pass for a chainsaw.  There are no scares, no good makeups or effects, no worthwhile preformances, and nothing whatsoever that comes close to fulfilling the promise made by the title (or the FREDDY VS. JASON poster ripoff ad art).   The end tries to excuse the story's incoherent nature by telling us it was all just a delusion in the disordered mind of the heroine, and that nobody (not even Carmilla) was ever really a vampire at all.  And then a few more paint-smudged zombies stumble in front of the camera to kill the surviving bimbos anyway in what was apparently intended to be a surprise ending.  Worthless.   

 

 VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES (1972)

Dir: Leon Klimovsky

This Spanish production isvery much a Hammer Films wannabe, with the British once again being terrorized by supernatural forces from a country they'd colonized (in this case India). Spain's horror superstar Paul Naschy appears in three roles in a story about a frightened Englishwoman whose family is being killed off according to an old Indian curse.  She seeks comfort in the philosophies of a turban-wearing guru/mystic named Krishna (Naschy), who leads a cult and has assorted creepy characters in his employ.  He tries to help her find inner peace, but a series of murders (committed by a black-clad figure who'd be right at home in an Argento or Bava movie) continues.  The shadowy villain uses ancient black magic rituals to resurrect a gang of mute female zombies (with long hair and black shrouds) from the local cemetery.  Unfortunately for fans of zombie makeup, the dead women wear plain old white greasepaint with heavy shading, which might be good enough to wear to your cousin Larry's Halloween party but looks pretty cheesy to be showing up in an otherwise decently-budgeted movie.  Up until Stephen King's MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE,  this was probably the only horror film to feature a Death By Soda Can.  In one of its worst scenes, a zombie woman picks up a morgue attendant's aluminum drink can and presses it to the side of his neck, causing him to bleed a little and then fall over dead.  It has to be one of the least convincing murders in cinema history.  Several other peripheral characters die before the villain's identity is finally revealed, but the outcome of it all feels pretty unlikely and the plotting misses a lot of opportunities for real scares.  Despite the presence of the hard-working Naschy (who looks great as The Devil in a stylish nightmare sequence), the army of ghostly dead girls (who often smile when they attack people) and the mysterious zombie-making killer (who burns little wax dolls in the graveyard), VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES is an uninvolving and forgettable little movie.  The lighting and cinematography are certainly adequate, but the El Cheapo zombies and ill-chosen soundtrack only serve to remind you just how hokey and unbelieveable the plot is. It was directed by Leon Klimovsky, a guy who helmed a number of other (usually dull) Naschy vehicles.  Klimovsky's best movie was probably the following year's THE VAMPIRES' NIGHT ORGY, a genuinely interesting film which showed a lot more style and heavier atmosphere than he displays here.   My favorite scene in the whole movie was a closeup on a large sign that reads "KADOGAN'S COLD MEAT INDUSTRY".  VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES is recommended only to zombie film completists and diehard Paul Naschy fans.

 VERSUS (2000)

Dir: Ryuhei Kitamura

The Forest Of Resurrection, an eerily quiet wooded area in Japan, is Number 444 of the 666 cursed places on earth which serve as portals throughwhich the dead may return to life.  Two escaped convicts and a pack of Yakuza gangsters, all unaware of this important feature of the land, converge there and a massive shootout erupts.  Those who die reawaken as bloody zombies.  In a further stroke of bad luck, this also happens to be the very spot the thugs have been using for some time as a place to secretly bury their murdered rivals.  The central character (I hesitate to call him a "hero") eventually figures out that it's his miserable destiny to fight off various incarnations of the same sullen, belligerent creep throughout eternity.  And you thought your life was pointless?... Packed from start to finish with as much action and extreme violence as anything in the legendary SHOGUN ASSASSIN / LONE WOLF AND CUB series, this overlong movie is basically just an extended fight scene in the woods.  It's yet another film in which ordinary people are somehow able to perform superhuman stunts like jumping out of the way of bullets, leaping into the air and hovering there for several seconds, and so on.  But at least it's a treat to see elaborate fight scenes that were staged, performed and photographed in real time using actual actors instead of the post-MATRIX style of computer-enhanced cartoonery that overwhelms so many American action films.  Unfortunately, many of the violent confrontations consist of extreme closeups shot with hand-held cameras and edited in split-second cuts.  They're effectively exhilarating, but good luck trying to see who is doing exactly what to whom.  Blood sprays and body parts fly blurrily past the camera at such high speed that the only way to be sure what happened in many scenes is to freeze on them and examine them frame by frame.  A surprising aspect of all this is the absurdly calm reactions to the sudden outbursts of supernatural horror.  Characters' reactions are often along the lines of "Hmmm...that guy whose head I just blasted apart is getting back up and coming at me. Something seems not quite right here, I can just feel it..."   Those killed during the course of the movie return to life almost instantly, yet no explanation is given for why all those previously murdered gangland victims waited until now to wake up and attack.  Even though it does involve the living dead, this only barely qualifies as a horror film since the primary emphasis is on the unending non-supernatural shootings and chases.  Nonstop action, even when done with the style and verve shown here, can eventually grow dull through repetition.  Since VERSUS never changes settings and rarely takes a breather between gun battles, it ultimately becomes a little hard to care who is being beaten or blasted at any given moment.  It's light on plot and the zombie activity isn't exploited for full horror effect, but VERSUS is undeniably entertaining in an emptyheaded way.

 

 

 

 VIDEO DEAD, THE (1987)

Dir: Robert Scott

For reasons that are hard to explain, I honestly found myself enjoying this endearingly cheap little cheeseball of a movie.  A mysterious old B & W television set is somehow able to turn itself on and show a horror flick called "ZOMBIE BLOOD NIGHTMARE".  Every so often, the zombies in the movie come right out of the TV into reality and kill people! The main thing that kept me watching this offbeat entry was its unique new zombie mythos that actually wants us to feel sorry for the undead in spite of their murderous behavior.  These creatures, who don't speak but seem to have a limited memory of what it was like to be human, are terrified of mirrors because they're so ugly they can't stand to look at themselves!  They also have very short attention spans and literally keep forgetting they're dead!  They stagger around looking confused and inquisitive, but go nuts whenever thev can tell someone's afraid of them. Then they kill, seemingly out of jealousy of the living!  This innovative idea leads to a great sequence in which the heroine invites the zombies into her home and has to act like nothing is wrong in order to avoid becoming their next meal!   (And I thought Roxanna Augesen was very good in the lead role!)  Unfortunately, writer-producer-director Robert Scott seems to have gone ahead and made his movie with only about two-thirds of a story, since virtually everything--the hows and whys of the TV set, the movie, and the zombies--is left frustratingly unexplained.   We never find out where the evil TV came from or how it works, and in an odd sequence that doesn't fit with the rest of the film, a blond woman comes out of the TV and begins to seduce the teenage hero but suddenly pops back into the set again, where she's killed by a grungy little guy who calls himself "the garbageman".  The garbageman gives the boy a poorly-thought-out explanation of what's happening, but what he says makes no sense. (He states that "they look like us on the outside but inside they're different", but all the other ghouls shown are crusty, rotting corpses.)   The undead woman and the garbageman character are then totally forgotten about and never shown again!   It's possible that the makers of this one were trying for the feel of a gory TWILIGHT ZONE episode by having weird events happen for no reason, but the direction is seldom up to the task and 90 minutes is just too long to stretch such a thin slice of surrealism. The suppIy of ugly background details (a dead goldfish floating in a fishbowl; a sink full of dirty dishes and food scraps, etc ) sustain a suitably disgusting mood, but the script will leave you asking a lot of questions the heroes never seem to think of.   The zombies mostly look like rubber-masked extras but there are some nifty parallels, like when a woman in the movie-within-the-movie is attacked while ironing and then a later victim smashes an iron into a zombie's head (with no effect--he simply walks around with an iron sticking out of his skull for the rest of the film).   Dreary but eerie, it's certainly worth a look.  The ending is left open for a sequel.

 VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, A (1971)

Dir: Jess (Jesus) Franco

If you're a horror fan you're probably already aware of Jess (Jesus) Franco, the eccentric Spanish maker of innumerable Euro-sleaze horror films starting in the '60s.  He's the director about whom no reviewer can ever write without using the words "maverick" and "prolific".  Please note that I have dutifully included both words in the previous sentence and am therefore freed of the obligation to use them again in the remainder of this review.  This film is difficult to judge on its own merits and impossible to make sense of.  It started out as a surrealist horror film (a co-production between France, Italy and Liechtenstein), but somewhere along the line somebody added some crude sex scenes to help sell it as an 'adult' film.  Then the French hired Jean Rollin to shoot some zombie footage to sell it as a straight horror movie.  The two common U.S. video releases (one of which has "ZOMBIE 4" added to the title) are missing over half an hour of Franco's movie and are severely censored (with areas of the screen blacked out to protect us delicate viewers from such shocking sights as blood and female nudity) and incredibly poorly edited, with stock shots of the outside of the house repeatedly spliced in to replace some potentially offensive sights and to give the voice actors sufficient time to get in all of their confused English dialogue.  The so-called 'restored' version circulating on video isn't really so much restored as rebuilt, containing all of the later sex and zombie scenes.  This results in some scenes occuring twice in different cuts and some parts suddenly changing to grainy, hissing alternate footage in which characters speak French before abruptly switching back to English again.  The plot involves a girl who travels to her family mansion (called a castle in some scenes) for the reading of her hanged father's will.  There she meets her cold, creepy uncle (Howard Vernon in an ugly shirt) and other perverse relatives (another of whom dies as soon as she arrives).  Franco himself plays the mute, idiot handyman who's often on the verge of falling asleep.  The heroine has recurring nightmares (or maybe they're really happening) in which zombies (some Frenchmen with blacked-in teeth and torn shirts) rise from their graves (piles of freshly-raked leaves) to attack (wiggle their fingers and make faces into the camera).  Her relatives are all actually undead perverts who serve a mute Death Goddess.  One restored scene is a long embarrassing orgy sequence in which the goddess sits on a throne while people in ridiculous costumes show up and make out on the lawn. Several endings exist, including one in which the heroine wakes up screaming from her umpteetith zombie dream, one in which she wakes up and dies at the hands of a goofy doctor, and one in which she follows the death goddess into a pond and drowns.  There is the occasional striking image but in any form this plays like it was edited with a blender.

 

 WHITE ZOMBIE (1932)

Dir: Victor Halperin

A couple travel to Haiti to be married, invited by a rich plantation owner who secretly covets the young bride-to-be.  When she spurns his advances, he goes to a sinister voodoo sorcerer (Bela Lugosi) who offers to turn the girl into a zombie slave. Lugosi's smirking, crafty character (unnamed in the film but referred to in promotional materials as Legendre) is unforgettable, with a huge widow's peak, strange curled eyebrows and a small two-part goatee. He carves wax dolls of his victims, who end up as silent undead slave labor in his sugar mill. He brags about how they work long hours without being paid and suggests zombie labor as a profitable business option to his wealthy clients. The scenes in the sugar mill are still creepy today, as the wide-eyed zombies emotionlessly struggle with huge, creaking equipment.When one zombie falls into a grinding machine, the others don't even react. The girl (Madge Bellamy, a good actress who wasn't exactly emotionally stable in real life, as she was arrested for shooting her boyfriend in 1943) is zombified, but unlike Bela's workforce she doesn't actually die first; she is simply robbed of any free will after being made to appear dead.  The others are genuine living dead, though, with dark, sunken facial features and invulnerability to bullets. The overacting bereaved husband is helped by a kindly old scholar in the Dr. Van Helsing tradition who constantly asks for matches to light his pipe and fumbles at least one of his lines. The first zombie movie, WHITE ZOMBIE was a low-budget feature rushed into production to capitalize on the success of The Magic Island, a then-popular book about the folklore of Haiti. The movie hasn't withstood the test of time nearly so well as the horror pictures Universal was making at the time (DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN) and is nearly ruined by hammy acting and clumsy action scenes. A few of the odd angles and edits are fairly effective but more often the attempts at style seem ham-fisted and corny, and that's by 1932 ham and corn standards. But it didn't matter. Americans were caught in the awful spirit-crushing despair of the Depression, and it must have seemed like the ideal time for a film in which workers are reduced to nameless, voiceless, hopeless cogs in the machines of the upper class. It's of historic significance as the film that introduced zombies to American audiences and for containing one of Bela Lugosi's most frightening performances. The scary closeups of his hypnotic staring eyes were later reused in REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES, a movie that Lugosi wasn't even in. The sets are great and the zombies are spooky enough, so WHITE ZOMBIE deserves to be seen by zombie fans in spite of its many shortcomings.

 

 

WICKED CARESS OF SATAN, THE (1973)

Dir: Jorge Gigo

This little-known French-Spanish co-production could have been a contender if only more attention had been paid to logic, pacing and photography. The plot, clearly inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, has a decadent Duke hosting a party for his high-society friends at his castle home. Among the evening's entertainment highlights are a long, gawky voodoo dance, an embarrassingly bad 'fashion show' that features a number of sexy models, and (finally) a seance hosted by a medium who obviously has a huge chip on her shoulder. It seems she was once a Countess whose beloved husband was driven to suicide after his wealthy friends (including the Duke) wrote him off for marrying a commoner. A lot of exposition is required to tell us that after her husband's death the woman took up the black arts with the help of Dr. Gruber, a psychic mad scientist with a heart condition. After an attempt to contact the spirit of the Duke's late brother appears at least semi-successful, the pair are invited to take up residence in the castle basement, where they set up a makeshift lab to continue their research into the supernatural. Using the body of a hulking brute who had his head smashed in by a car, they use a combination of an experimental drug solution designed to 're-activate' dead cells plus a pact with Satan (may as well cover all the bases) to create their very own instrument of revenge, namely a bald, ugly, stitched-up zombie who is sent to kill the duke and, apparently just for kicks, a few other unlucky folks. Considering that the medium is clearly still seething with contempt for the Duke over his involvement in her husband's suicide, it seems like awfully poor judgment on his part to invite her and her weird associate to move into his home. As a matter of fact, the whole zombie scheme seems unlikely too. I mean, all this woman wanted to do was kill a few rich jerks for selfish reasons of revenge, right? Wouldn't you think there'd be an easier way to go about it than to devote years of her life to scientific experimentation and devil worship? She even picks up a crazed, evil dwarf to help with the graverobbing chores. Wouldn't it have worked just as well to convince the dwarf to commit the killings? Or just buy a gun and shoot the Duke and his cronies herself? Instead, we have a complicated story of a complicated process devised for a stupidly senseless reason. After a maid is killed and is herself resurrected as a zombie, the mad doctor (predictably) dies when a hospital shock treatment is tried on the she-ghoul and interrupts his telepathic link with her, proving to be too much for his ailing heart to take. Since the doctor's psychic ability was the only thing controlling the ghoul, he goes berserk and decides to throttle the ex-Countess. The slow-moving, carelessly photographed feature offers some twists but is littered with loose plot ends too, which all adds up to pretty routine viewing.

 

 WICKED LITTLE THINGS (2006)

Dir: J.S. Cardone

The director of the cheap but interesting supernatural slasher flick THE SLAYER (1982) and the wretched vampire/road movie THE FORSAKEN (2001) helmed this middle-of-the-road zombie-ghost thriller, which ended up as part of the After Dark Horrorfest series, a collection of eight unrelated movies that were (falsely) promoted as being "too intense for theaters"(?) as a marketing gimmick.  This is one of the least scary of the lot.  A widowed mom and her two daughters move into her late hubby's crumbling old house in the woods.  100 years earlier, some little kids were killed in a nearby mine explosion and now they stroll through the forest every night killing people.  WICKED LITTLE THINGS has superb nighttime photography and excellent camerawork going for it, but it's so painfully slow moving that you'll have plenty of time to think about how ridiculous and lacking in logic the story is.  Apparently the pasty-faced (but otherwise ordinary looking) tots come out and prowl the area every single time the sun goes down and all the local residents know about it, but in a hundred years there's never been a police or FBI investigation (or even any packs of curious documentary filmmakers showing up) despite what you'd think would be a fairly long list of deaths and disappearances.  Ben Cross (in a role that would have been better suited to Lance Henriksen) is an old coot who marks people's doors with blood to keep the kids from breaking in (how did he figure out that would work?) and occasionally leaves pig carcasses out at night for them to feast on.  Most of the time the killer kiddies seem to be ghosts, but the fact that they inexplicably eat human flesh steers the weak plot into zombie territory.  They walk around and behave like normal, living people but they use big sticks, picks, pikes and hammers to knock off the surprisingly large numbers of people who are still dim-witted enough to go out after dark in a known zombie zone.  If they're ghosts who are angry about the way they died, why do they eat people?  And if they're zombies, why haven't they gotten hungry enough to advance beyond the same few miles of turf in 100 years?  What would've happened if the people who live in the area had been bright enough to simply move away?  I'm all for inventing new types of monster mythology, but the way this movie forces familiar traits of film zombies into what is basically a ghost story seems juvenile and contrived.  The script is very traditional in the characterization department, offering stereotypes like the snotty ungrateful teenage daughter, the innocent little girl who naturally befriends a ghost kid, and the mean, arrogant, wealthy land developer who you immediately know is going to die because an ancestor of his was responsible for the century-old tragedy and because the script goes out of its way to make sure you don't like him.  There are no legitimate surprises or interesting plot developments, the zombie kids aren't scary enough, and the characters sometimes have to react and behave pretty stupidly to keep putting themselves in danger.   The acting is fine and the movie has a well-sustained spooky look with a perfectly deathly color pallette and nice professional lighting, but the material is tired and uninspired stuff. 

 WILD ZERO (1999)

Dir: Tetsuro Takeuchi

Wild indeed. This horror-science fiction-adventure movie is fun, startling, fast-paced and unique. Unfolding like a live-action anime extravaganza, it tells the contemporary saga of a black leather-jacketed rock poseur who slavishly imitates and tags along after his favorite hard rock band, Wild Zero, and their impossibly cool, over-the-top leader 'Guitar Wolf'. Our fanboy thinks he's pretty hip but his nervous boyish smile and general good nature constantly betray his smalltown nice guy background. He follows the band on a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment via the magic of rock music, a concept that would've still seemed inspired even if it hadn't been worked into a zombie movie. (The presence of Italian-style cannibal zombies in a Japanese movie is in itself quite a rarity.) Along the way he inadvertantly gets involved in a drug deal and a multiple shooting, but even those problems fall by the wayside when unseen aliens in flying saucers arrive and cause a plague of undead flesh-eating zombies in the Romero/Fulci tradition. Philosophical rocker Guitar Wolf appears as an increasingly larger-than-life mythical figure who uses his special guitar to battle the shambling zombies and the aliens while serving as a role model for our hero, his biggest fan. Complicating matters is the violent, laughing drug addict villain who's pursuing the band for revenge. Zombie fans will applaud the many scenes of amazingly well-done exploding heads and other superior special effects, some of which outdo even those in DAWN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIE, two of the genre's best. The optical effects, depicting alien ships and glowing beams of energy, are also top-notch. The young rock fan eventually makes some surprising discoveries about himself and how he must deal with his newfound knowledge of the nature of love, sex, death and self-sacrifice. He also learns just how hard it can be to have the courage of one's convictions. I know I would never have been able to react to some of these shocking situations the way this idealistic young hero does--I don't want to spoil any surprises, so see the movie and you'll know what I mean--but if you're tired of zombie movies that all seem to have been made from the same green and fuzzy graveyard mold, you'll be refreshed by this action-packed, comic bookish Japanese film that sustains something of a life-affirming feel despite being overloaded with threatening and gruesome scenarios. It's sometimes hard to follow and it won't be everyone's cup of tea, especially since the funereal atmosphere present in most 'dead' films is seldom on display, mostly jettisoned in favor of a more magical tone of epic adventure and soul-searching punctuated with slam-bang action. But it's this very refusal to stay within the rules of any pre-established movie genre that makes WIlD ZERO worth looking for. Almost certainly destined to become a cult film.

 

ZOMBI 3 (1988)

Dirs: Bruno Mattei, Lucio Fulci

No, that's not a typo.  The official title of this one is actually spelled ZOMBI 3.  What became of ZOMBIE 2, you ask?  Well, since DAWN OF THE DEAD was called ZOMBIE in Europe, Fulci's ZOMBIE became known as ZOMBIE 2.   This movie remained ZOMBI 3, even in the U.S., evidently because nobody bothered to re-title it.  ZOMBI 3 claims to be directed by Lucio Fulci, but since Fulci became ill and ended up undergoing heart surgery during production, the majority of it was actually directed by Bruno Mattei.   Fulci reportedly handled only a few scenes, and Fulci fans were quick to notice that this just doesn't feel like one of his movies.   It begins at an unspecified government lab where experiments with a new bacteriological weapon brilliantly called "Death 1" are conducted on a corpse.  The lab is lit with a flashing red light which was presumably supposed to create tension but really looks more like there must be a cheap hotel with a flashing neon sign just outside the window.  Of course, things immediately go wrong.  The corpse spits up some goo and starts attacking the doctors, and the deadly chemical is stolen by an ill-fated spy (whose loyalty and mission are never explained).  The thief gets infected with the stuff during a shootout and takes a room in a nearby hotel as his hand starts to rot.  Some of the hotel footage is actually quite creepy, especially after the guy turns violent and starts to infect other people.  But lots of things along the way go amiss.  In one laughable scene, a woman is killed by having her face pushed into a mirror.  I guess they weren't allowed to actually break the mirror, so she has to simply bleed when her face touches the smooth glass.  And this is the first hotel I've seen in which guests have to call room service to have a maid bring up a pitcher of water.   Soon the area is crawling with bloodthirsty lumpy-faced zombies.  Cliche' gun-happy soldiers show up, kill off a bunch of innocent bystanders, and basically get in the way until the zombies have overrun the city.  This incoherent project has nothing to do with ZOMBIE, which used voodoo magic to explain its monsters.  Rather, it takes its "chemical weapon" premise from Mattei's own NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES.  It also copies parts from THE BIRDS (zombie birds attack a bus), RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (the first ghoul is incinerated and the smoke rises into the atmosphere to spread the plague), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (a good guy is mistaken for a zombie and gunned down), DAWN OF THE DEAD (a couple escapes by helicopter at the end), and DAY OF THE DEAD (doctors argue endlessly with army guys).  Even the ad art was a direct steal, copying the poster for NIGHTMARE ON ELM STRET PART 3!  As you may imagine, ZOMBI 3 is so busy imitating other movies that it emerges with no real identity of its own.  It's action-packed though, and honestly delivers a good number of passable "pop-out-and-go-boo" style shocks.  Eerie, mist-shrouded photography helps a lot too, but the makeup and effects are extremely uneven.  Some of the gory shocks work fairly well and there's one genuinely scary attacking zombie at a gas station. The stupidest moment has to be when a guy opens a refrigerator, only to have a severed zombie head literally fly out and attack him. (Now who the heck left that in there?)   The screenplay is by Claudio Fragrasso, who made the Alice Cooper vehicle MONSTER DOG, and as an inside joke a radio DJ is named "Vince Raven" after Cooper's character in that film.  It's all very clumsy and trite but if you don't expect too much you might enjoy this one.  

 

 

ZOMBI HOLOCAUST (1980)

Dir: "Frank Martin" (Marino Girolami)

One of the most successful gore films ever made, this Italian horror story/ jungle adventure issort of a variation on Fulci's ZOMBIE with the major emphasis placed upon killing instead of on the zombies.  An alternate version featuring some (clearly unrelated) American footage of zombies rising in a misty graveyard and several other editing changes was released in the U.S. as DR. BUTCHER, M.D. in 1982.  ZOMBI HOLOCAUST is therefore a somewhat different film from DR. BUTCHER, M.D. and is the better representation of what the filmmakers originally had in mind.  Which is, basically, to show as many scenes of gory violence as possible while still stringing them together into something like a story.  The result has little substance but is an undeniably entertaining "popcorn movie" that's fast-paced, audacious and unpredictable despite the familiar trappings. Body parts are being stolen from corpses at a New York City hospital.  Why this is happening is never made clear, but the crimes are traced to a remote island in the Pacific where a tribe of bloodthirsty, machete-swinging cannibals are helping sadistic mad scientist Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brian, who would later get to play a walking corpse himself in FRANKENSTEIN 2000) in his zombie-making experiments.  The doctor transplants fresh brains into dead bodies, resulting in decaying, heavy-breathing monsters who prowl around the jungle frightening the local tribesmen.  Unfortunately, since the area is already inhabited by primitives who like to slash and slice people to ribbons without provocation, the zombies themselves don't feel like as big of a threat as in most zombie shockers.  They mostly just shuffle around looking spooky.  The monster makeups are sort of crude but definitely hair-raising.  Tired jungle cliches are trotted out at the climax, during which the cannibals decide the blonde heroine is some kind of goddess.  The big stone table on which she's lying naked suddenly tips over, causing the natives to go berserk.  Never having seen a table containing a naked white woman tip over before, they start shouting and waving their machetes around and then (for some reason)  run off to kill the rotting undead and help the hero escape the clutches of the mad doctor.  The zombies aren't very important to the plot, but then the plot itself isn't all that important either.  The main bill of goods being peddled here is the gore. The many splattery effects include stabbings, throat slashings, dismemberments, scalpings and eye-gougings.  Many of them are shocking and very impressively executed and have made this movie (or the DR. BUTCHER version, anyway) an all-time favorite of gorehounds.  Except for the abrupt ending it's actually a surprisingly well-crafted catalog of gruesome sights and sounds in the Grand Guignol tradition, but those with weak stomachs or easily-offended sensibilites are advised to look elsewhere for their monster movie entertainment, as both versions of this movie are quite graphic and brutal.  I give it my recommendation anyway... they truly don't make 'em like this any more.   The title is also sometimes spelled ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, but it has no connection to the unwatchable home-video feature which bears that name.       

ZOMBIE (1979)

Dir: Lucio Fulci

Also known as ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS and sometimes as ZOMBIE 2 (since DAWN OF THE DEAD was released as ZOMBIE in Europe), this brutal, immensely entertaining effort from late great Italian splattermeister Lucio Fulci has developed a huge cult following despite a lot of negative press at the time of its release.  Although it's often written off by reviewers as a DAWN OF THE DEAD copy, the two films actually have almost nothing in common other than the basic premise that flesh-eating living corpses are on the attack and must be destroyed by a blow to the head.  Fulci's take on the subject is far darker and more emotionally detached than Romero's, and wisely shifts the action to a remote Caribbean island called Matool, where more traditional voodoo superstitions explain the existence of the walking dead, placing ZOMBIE in the same subgenre as DAWN but also closely tying it to earlier zombie pictures like I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.  The island setting proves to be frighteningly claustrophobic once the hungry cadavers start rising en masse at the film's long and ambitious climax, and there are plenty of real shocks, crowd-pleasing gross-outs and tons of eerie atmosphere along the way, all helped immeasurably by the now-classic "Zombie March" score by Fabio Frizzi.  The main drawbacks here are uneven photography (some scenes look very hurried and poorly shot while others are perfectly composed nightmares of sight and sound) and a rather slow stretch midway through as the heroes search the island for a missing doctor who, we're told, had been looking for answers to the superstitions surrounding black magic rituals via dissecting the island's dead.  Apparently his blasphemous actions ticked off the local voodoo practitioners (who, strangely, remain unseen in the film!), resulting in the horrifying curse being called down upon the entire island. (And anybody who doesn't believe that outraged people can be angered into doing things that will ruin their own living area wasn't in L.A. during the 1992 riots.)  ZOMBIE offers one outrageous, stomach-churningly gruesome makeup effect after another, including the now-famous "splinter-in-the-eyeball" scene (although I'm not sure this scene deserves its reputation as an all-time high point in gore effects... It will definitely make you flinch, but watch it and ask yourself: Where the heck were the victim's hands during the time her head was being pulled toward the splinter, and why didn't se just reach up and break it off, or at least swivel her head to one side a little bit, before the splinter could puncture her eye, for crying out loud?).  Also featured is what has to be the most disturbing throat-biting scene ever filmed (yeah, I mean that in a good way), not to mention plenty of impressive pyrotechnics and (best of all) an incredible array of shuffling, crusty, wormy, mudcaked, VERY creepy zombies that might well be the scariest and most persuasive realizations of living corpses ever seen onscreen.  Fulci had been making movies for decades, including comedies and westerns, but ZOMBIE was the one that put him on the map, cinematically speaking, and he would follow it with a series of other (often equally gory) horror films with varying degrees of success.  A fright fan's must-see.          

ZOMBIE '90: EXTREME PESTILENCE (1990)

Dir: Andreas Schnaas

If you thought PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and THE CREEPING TERROR were bad, brace yourself.  There's no other movie quite like this one (at least I hope not).  ZOMBIE '90 EXTREME PESTILENCE (which could've been called ZOMBIE 90 MINUTES OF EXTREME INEPTITUDE if it had run about sixteen minutes longer) is an amateur gore film from Germany.  It contains absolutely no plot, characterization, suspense, or originality.  An offscreen plane crash causes an offscreen chemical spill, which serves as an excuse for people in crude monster makeup to stagger around in the woods and pull handfuls of wet sausage, liver and leftover spare ribs out of the abdomens of poorly-made dummies for the remainder of the film.  Nearly every scene ends with a prolonged display of disembowelment or dismemberment as people keep showing up just long enough to be devoured. The white-faced living dead (whose makeup rarely covers their ears, necks or hands) use knives, axes and sledgehammers to kill.  One zombie wears a GHOSTBUSTERS sweatshirt and several seem to be having a tough time keeping a straight face.  There's an amazing quantity of blood squirting, oozing and pouring everywhere, but unfortunately most of it looks more like fruit punch than blood. Even more amazing, however, is the atrocious English dubbing job.  Whoever translated this into English obviously had no idea (and no interest in) what the actors were originally saying. Clearly contemptuous of both the film and its potential audience, they decided to amuse themselves by 'joking it up' with silly accents, inappropriate voices and lots of foolish grumbling. The main (non-)character is a doctor, played by a too-young white German guy who seems capable of only one or two facial expressions. The voiceover has him speaking English like a caricatured black man with a slight southern accent who mumbles "Damn" a lot.  The only other person who gets any more screen time than an extended cameo is his assistant, who has been given a whiny, high-pitched effeminate voice.  It's apparent that the same two clowns who did their awful voiceover work provided some of the victims' voices too.  But wait!  It gets worse. Throughout this whole witless film you can hear all sorts of mic noise, tape hiss, recording that abruptly (and loudly) starts and stops, and every other kind of unwanted audio effect imaginable. Many of the wet. squishy gut-ripping  sounds were made orally, just like the supposedly funny loud kissing noises made by a couple of victims-to-be.  In lieu of an ending, the doctor gets knocked unconscious, dreams he's chased by zombies in an old abandoned house for a while and then wakes up and gets killed.  ZOMBIE '90 EXTREME PESTILENCE is a strong argument In favor of passing legislation that would legally forbid certain people to get within two hundred yards of any filmmaking equipment.  Go ahead, watch this...I dare you!

 

 

ZOMBIE ARMY, THE (1991)

Dir: Betty Stapleford

Army "camp" is the order of the day in this silly forgotten video feature.  When the Army decides to renovate a former mental asylum for use as a new base, two pot-smoking slacker soldiers discover a looney (who thinks he's a doctor and knows how to perform lobotomies) who had been left locked in the hospital's fallout shelter for the last nine years with an equally demented young woman.  The two psychos immediately set about turning soldiers into obedient, flesh-eating green zombies.  Just how they accomplish this is something that nobody felt was worth explaining, but it has something to do with zappng them full of electricity.  More and more soldiers are dragged to the duo by their formerly living peers and swiftly zombified. Soon there's an entire battalion of zombies and the still-human soldiers (helped by a squadron of female recruits) have to fight them off.  The energetic zombies differ from many movie ghouls in that they talk, laugh, and follow their creators' orders (for some reason).  They can be killed by spraying them with battery acid, which melts them into puddles of bubbling glop.  The idea that soldiers would make ideal zombie slaves is a potentially good one, since they're already conditioned to follow orders unthinkingly and trained to kill.   Oddly, though, very little in the way of military satire is made of the situation.  Instead, most of the humor comes from the zombies' weird behavior and the occasional wisecrack.  Unlike many shot-on-video features, a sincere attempt to entertain was made here.  The numerous makeups are above average for a low-budget production and pacing actually seems to have been a consideration.  The chief liabilities, common among video projects, are the terrible sound quality (it's sometimes impossible to understand what people are saying) and the fact that the whole thing is shot with bright white head-on lighting that often washes out the image.  This is at least addressed when one character mentions that the asylum gets its power from the nuke plant next door and explains that its lights are always on, but it also prevents director Betty Stapleford from achieving anything like style or atmosphere.  Accordingly, she doesn't try for any, settling for standard, straightforward camerawork that pays no real attention to the mood of the situation.  An ill-advised attempt to recapture the flavor of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985) is made by playing some extremely loud rock music with a late-'80s garage band sound during much of the action.  The 'military rock' main theme is fun to listen to, but some of the songs are pretty embarrassing.  The female psycho character was unnecessary to the plot and the nature of the whole zombie-making scheme is never discussed, but if you're ever in the mood for a simple, completely mindless, fairly gory, ingraiatingly enthusiastic low-budget romp, you could do much worse.     

ZOMBIE BLOODBATH (1993)

Dir: Todd Sheets

Reviewing a cheap amateur gore film like this one without sounding either condescending or unnecessarily cruel is next to impossible.  Although there is no aspect of ZOMBIE BLOODBATH that can be called well-done, it was clearly the product of pure horror fan enthusiasm and the fact that it made it to a video release at all is sort of impressive.  I think most viewers would agree that its worst shortcoming is its almost superhumanly bad acting.  As a fan of independent films, I think I've become adept at seeing past bad acting to appreciate the good intentions that often lie beneath.  The performances in ZB, however, are so incredibly awful that they feel like deliberate parodies of bad performances.  The acting troubles afflict the living dead, too.  To repeat what's been said about Lon Chaney Jr.'s Kharis the Mummy, if you can' get away from these zombies, you deserve to die.   Plodding slowly around, they unconvincingly paw at people they're supposed to be grabbing for, behaving too lethargically to ever appear menacing.  Another problem is that the cut-rate heavy metal soundtrack is often turned up too loud (but maybe that was done deliberately to drown out the actors).  The situation (it can't honestly be called a story) deals with a middle-class Kansas City neighborhood that was built on the ruins of a nuke plant that was built on the ruins of an Indian burial site.  If you think that's confusing on paper, wait 'til you sit through the movie.  The spatial relationships in ZB are a mess, making it seem like all the locations (few of which match up with anything described in the script) are located within a few yards of each other. An obviously man-made corridor is referred to as a cave, and people running through underground tunnels beneath the former nuke plant suddenly appear inside a church.  An early, meaningless, thrown away subplot has knife-wielding girl gang members battling it out in what must be some of the least energetic fight scenes ever filmed.  Some of the main stars are kids who look like they're 17 but whose dialogue sounds like it was written for 12-year-olds.  The closest thing to a real character is a tough old ex-marine who gets the only good line of dialogue when asked why he carries a rifle around everywhere but never uses it on the zombies.  My other favorite snippet of dialogue was a radio report announcing that "a man was killed while eating a jelly donut at Winchell's..."   It's too bad this comic tone wasn't used more often, but what little humor there is always takes a back seat to the endless footage of zombies indifferently pulling wads of meat out of the abdomens of equally indifferent victims.  The makeups on the zombies (supposedly 735 of them in all) are mostly of the "pale greasepaint and stage blood" variety.  This very ambitious but very stupid project actually made enough money for a sequel to be produced.  What a sad waste of effort.

ZOMBIE BLOODBATH II: RAGE OF THE UNDEAD (1994)

Dir: Todd Sheets

Yet another journey into unimaginative mayhem from the director who gave you other interchangeable Romero ripoffs like ZOMBIE RAMPAGE and of course the first ZOMBIE BLOODBATH.   I've watched taped interviews with Sheets in which he comes off as a likeable, articulate and fiercely dedicated independent filmmaker.  That makes it a little hard to knock his attempts at moviemaking but makes it even harder to understand why a guy who seems to pride himself on his creativity would want to just keep making the same thing over and over again without ever giving a thought to real storytelling, plot progression or anything remotely original.  Like all Sheets films, this one is loaded with psychotic crooks and other stock characters like loud macho jerks and whimpering, useless women.  Though the acting, direction and camera setups are better than in Part 1, this movie refuses to give viewers a single interesting character or a single genuine scare.  Instead it settles for the usual boring shots of extras in zombie makeup stumbling around in search of direction and long, long scenes in which people pull what looks like half the contents of a supermarket meat department out from each other's shirts.  Once again there's no story or ending of any kind, just generic, practically random footage of foul-mouthed creeps who sadistically torture and kill their generic screaming victims before getting eaten by generic zombies. The only new elements are some muddled nonsense at the beginning about a satanic cult, which never even comes close to explaining the reason for the latest zombie invasion, and the occasional insertion of computer-generated shots of familiar devil-worship imagery.  These shots are stuck in at random here and there throughout the film and add up to absolutely nothing.  Equally silly are the pitiful stabs at style that consist of having about every third or fourth shot filmed in black and white for no logical reason.  It's impossible to synopsize the plot since there isn't one, but I can tell you that most of it takes place in an old house and a small deli, both of which are invaded by unrealistic, homicidal idiot criminals and personality-free teens just before being surrounded by armies of zombies who come out of nowhere wearing normal street clothes and makeup that never extends to their frequently visible necks, arms and legs.  Since the movie fails utterly to establish any point of view other than an overall dim view of mankind, the end credits sequence tries to give the whole thing a point by including (along with numerous misspellings and poor punctuation) an embarrassingly childish rant about how humanity is ruining the world.  This concern for the environment is noted and appreciated, but half the population of India could have been fed with all the meat that gets pulled out of people's shirts in this movie.  A lot of hard work undoubtedly went into this dumb and dismal feature, but I'm afraid it was all wasted. 

 ZOMBIE CHRONICLES, THE (2002)

Dir: Brad Sykes

In a low-budget splatterama that's more inventive than most, a cynical female writer looking for a small town picks up a strange old man played by a miscast actor who looks neither especially strange nor old (although he does at least have some pretty off-the-wall dialogue).  He proceeds to tell her the revenge-themed zombie tales that make up this rather ambitious little anthology.  In the first story, a heartless former army drill sergeant is tormented by an unseen antagonist in the woods where he once drove an innocent young recruit a little too hard.  The second tale is about two stupid jerk college buddies and an alcoholic white trash girlfriend who get lost in a forest. They find the simple grave of a legendary local outlaw who once gunned down all the men in the local church one Sunday and was subsequently put to death.  Since the movie is called THE ZOMBIE CHRONICLES, you know it's only a matter of time before the living dead make an appearance in each story to make things difficult for the human characters.  Disappointingly, the two tales summarized above are the only stories we get.  After that the film returns to the modern-day framing device for an ending that is predictably violent but doesn't make any sense at all.  Although the material is thin, most of the acting is weak, and the fact that it all takes place in the woods gives the film a cheap look, this is still notably better than the average low-budget independent zombie flick. Smooth editing and some creative camerawork help a lot.  Unlike others of its kind, ZOMBIE CHRONICLES doesn't ask viewers to settle for zombies that look like drunk college students smeared with pale greasepaint.  No indeed; this movie boasts a selection of scary, imaginatively ugly and severely rotted walking corpses with a dusty, authentically dead look that's sure to please fans.  They're often accompanied by a low, deep, unearthly breathing sound effect that adds considerably to their scare quotient.  The shot in which you can see an actor's teeth back inside the mouth of his skull-faced mask which has teeth of its own is a problem, however.  The plentiful gory makeup effects are also above average and were obviously executed (pun intended) with some attention to detail and anatomy.  One ripped-away human face effect in particular is memorably shocking and effectively pulled off (pun once again intended).  This production is also happily free of the sophomoric sense of humor that ruins so many low-budget horror projects.  The addition of a third story and an explanation for what happens at the end would have made the whole enterprise feel more complete, but at least you get some great-looking creepy zombies, decent editing, competent photography, and the occasional plot twist.   If you're in the mood for some simple, spooky, EC Comcis-style zombie horror set in the woods, you could do much worse.  Released in both 2-D and 3-D versions.

 

 ZOMBIE COP (1991)

Dir: J.R. Bookwalter

You've got to love that title.  One of the more enjoyable "shot-with-a-camcorder-for-the-price-of-a-video-rental" productions, this deliberately ridiculous home-movie is always watchable.  It has bad acting, ruinously awful sound quality, and a disappointing lack of effects, but there's a fun sense of absurdism about the whole enterprise that keeps ZOMBIE COP from wearing out its welcome.  Especially since it's only an our long.  The concept is exactly what you'd expect: a dedicated plainclothes cop is killed and comes back to lifeas an unstoppable ghoul who goes after his city's criminal lowlifes, becoming sort of a mythic vigilante with superhuman strength.  Poor Officer Gill is shot by cackling, stereotypical voodoo sorcerer "Dr. Death", but manages to blast Death to death before expiring.  Gill quickly rises from his low-budget grave (he was evidently buried under about five inches of earth, without a coffin) and heads straight for the home of his understandably startled ex-partner.  They learn that Dr. Death has brought himself back to life too, using the same cheesy magic potion he had thrown into Gill's face.  There's something inherently funny in the notion of two indestructible, unkillable enemies tirelessly trying to snuff each other with no success, but the comic potential of the situation is mostly lost amid the cliched dialogue and self-conscious performances. The title character spends almost the entire movie with his head covered in bandages, making him look more like the Invisible Man or the Mummy than a zombie.  Maybe they couldn't come up with a good zombie makeup.  Anyway, in between joke TV news reports and crimes committed by goofy local thugs, Officer Gill and Doc Death chase each other around the Mogadore, Ohio suburbs until, in a scene I didn't quite understand, the evil Jamaican falls onto a sharp stick and dies from impalement even though fifty rounds of bullets didn't faze him.  As you can tell from this description, nobody was taking the plot very seriously.  There's a ludicrous car chase that seems to be taking place at a speed of about 25 miles per hour, but it is at least nicely edited and and is an unusually ambitious (and probably truly dangerous) scene to be tackled by such an amateur production.  It's too bad the makers of ZOMBIE COP permanently marred their project, and their own reputations, by being unable to resist using their end credits as a forum to hurl a petulant, unfunny insult at Fangoria magazine critic "Dr. Cyclops".   (He probably gave an honest account of one of these guys' previous releases.)  Strangely, the living dead in this tale are completely self-aware, retaining all of their personality and memories from life.  They show none of the stiff movements, wheezy breathing, hunger for flesh or any other characteristics typically associated with zombies.  They're just like the living, only much more difficult to kill.  This is definitely some very low-I.Q. stuff but patient viewers with a soft spot for indy features might get a kick out of it.  

 ZOMBIE DOOM (1999)

Dir: Andreas Schnaas

Three foul-mouthed sailors find themselves marooned on an island on which a disfigured megalomaniacal idiot has an army of goons in metal masks trained to slaughter each other (including each other) in brutal ways.  He reports his progress to his dad, an ancient rotted corpse.  He also employs a mad doctor who creates rotting zombies, a trio of killers called The Black Demons (or The Black Ninjas, depending upon who's saying it), a guy sporting Jason's hockey mask and one of those toy robot hands with flexible hinged fingers, and a thug who wields The Flying Guillotine, a Chinese weapon seen in some Hong Kong martial arts actioners.  The film never decides who the main characters are, as halfway through the dumb proceedings the sailors are slaughtered and a trio of Asian rebels shows up to put a stop to the madman's plans.  Watch in astonishment as three guys wipe out an entire community of 200 trained assassins in a climactic battle that lasts a good (make that bad) twenty minutes.  There's a flashback in which chained women (the only females in the cast) are bitten and trounced upon by a 10-inch plastic action figure.  Apparently that was the incident that convinced our trio of freedom fighters that the infantry of murderers they'd joined might be a bad idea.  Made as the last installment in a loosely-connected German 'extreme gore' trilogy concerning extremely dull killer "Karl The Butcher", this mindless mess is the only entry to receive a wide release in the U.S. thanks to the DVD boom and the renewed stateside interest in Euro-horror.  It's also the only one that feautres zombies.  Shot partly on cheap videotape and partly on even cheaper film, it's all an excuse for some semi-professional German special effects and makeup men to strut their stuff. More ambitious than most low-budget gore bores,  this sick and stupid little adolescent male fantasy devotes most of its running time to fight scenes, macho posturing and bodily dismemberment.  The effects run the gamut of gore and include zombie makeups, severed limbs, mutilations and decapitations.  Some of the bloody hackings and whackings look silly and homemade, but an equal number appear quite convincing and were clearly staged with real creativity and enthusiasm.  Many harken back to the pre-CGI '80s, when Tom Savini was at his creative peak in devising clever ways to simulate violent deaths for latex-&-spirit gum-driven slasher fare.  Of course, there's no story.  But if you want to view as many cut-price gore effects as one could possibly squeeze into a single movie, this is for you.  One warning: Beware the horrid English dubbing.  Much of it sounds ad-libbed and the only way the Americans who dubbed this could have done a noticeably worse job is if they had simply taped over the German soundtrack with the sound from another movie.  Like, say, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT.  That would have sounded worse.  Slightly. 

 

 ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST (1995)

Dir: Gary Whitson

Bringing new depth to the word 'disappointing', this juvenile clunker shouldn't be confused with the original-titled version of the Italian film commonly known in the U.S. as DR. BUTCHER, M.D.  It also shouldn't be confused with a serious attempt at filmmaking. A long, incompetent chunk of cheese that was shot with a camcorder in someone's basement (complete with homely old sofa and drop-ceiling) and in the woods, it's set in the near future. Meteors have wiped out ninety per cent of Earth's population and the surviving tenth of humanity consists of young women in really short white bathrobes and a few droopy guys in camo gear. A female mad scientist has imprisoned and assumed the identity of another female mad scientist so that she can transplant the brains of aged military leaders into younger bodies. We're told she plants devices in their brains that will turn them into cannibal zombies if they disobey her orders. Although a couple of guys complain of their need to eat human flesh, only one actual monster-style zombie ever shows up.  Keep in mind, they called this ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST. The lone, mellow zombie wears a plaid shirt and has a skull-faced head and straggly hair. Most of the time all you get is blandly shot footage of girls walking around or being shot at. The laboratory set wouldn't cut it at your local Jaycees' Haunted House, the story seems to have been made up as they were going, and the acting is strictly amateur night stuff. Dead girls are cooked (clothed) over open fires by hungry cannibals in some laughable scenes. The fire is clearly not directly under the bodies and the "cooked" makeup consists of a few red latex burn scars glued onto the arms and legs, with most of the body remaining perfectly normal looking.   A few of the gore effects, like an exposed wired-up brain, look good but the real reason for this pitiful little home video to be made was to show silly, leering, mild cheesecake footage of girls prancing around, mud-wrestling, talking tough, looking helpless, and doing some extremely unconvincing fighting. Much of the action takes place offscreen and any events or equipment that would've taken more than half an hour to set up are just talked about and not shown. When people are gunned down at close range, there's a sound effect and nothing more.  When they're shot with laser weapons, a split second of a black screen with a colored smudge on it is the closest thing to an effect the hacks behind this mess could be bothered to provide. The folks who threw this together are responsible for a whole slew of shot-on-video "girls getting killed" junk.  I usually try to encourage independent and low-budget filmmaking and I always enjoy a look at any project made outside the usual money-wasting, cookie-cutter methodology of Hollywood, but please, guys, at least try to show a smidgen of artistry.  Recommended only to those who appeared in it... and even they would have to be pretty hard up for entertainment to sit through this childish nonsense.  It was also released as  FEMALE MERCENARIES ON ZOMBIE ISLAND.

 

 

 

 ZOMBIE HONEYMOON (2004)

Dir: David Gebroe

The title might suggest a gross-out comedy, but this is actually another unrelentingly depressing body-rot tragedy in the same vein as I ZOMBIE, SHADOWS OF THE DEAD, DEATHDREAM and to a lesser extent SHATTER DEAD and NEITHER THE SEA NOR THE SAND.  Neither as clinical as I ZOMBIE, as eerie as DEATHDREAM nor as sick as SHATTER DEAD, this competently produced low-budget feature has already written itself into a corner as soon as it gets going.  A newlywed couple's visit to the beach becomes a nightmare when a zombie staggers out of the ocean and slobbers some bloody disgusting goop into the husband's mouth.  The rest of the movie emphasizes the traumatized bride's attempts to deal with the inevitability of her new husband's horrible degeneration into a flesh-eating walking corpse.  Not so much scary as just plain sad, this is a zombie tearjerker with absolutely nothing new to say.  Lead actress Tracy Coogan is surprisingly good and her talent carries the picture in spite of the way the start of the film makes her seem like an icky, scrawny, oversexed skank.  It takes a mighty strong performance to overcome the character's introduction and win back viewer sympathy.  Her gradual emotional breakdown, seasoned as it is with moments of false hope as she repeatedly tries to make the best of a hopeless situation, is quite believably presented and you really feel for this poor girl whose life dreams have been altogether ruined.  But, like in every movie about someone turning into a zombie, things merely move along the expected downward path to total despair with nothing surprising, clever or ironic at the end.  Sure, it's well made and all, but why bother?  The only areas in which this strays from formula are in that the zombie husband's bite victims don't return as zombies themselves (they just die) and that, instead of having him shot in the head or else wasting away to nothing, the end sees the poor guy simply die a second time after some sort of unexplained fit of coughing and convulsing.  Just what caused this "re-death" is never addressed, nor is the presence of the first zombie (just like in both I ZOMBIE and SHADOWS OF THE DEAD, he's simply there to serve as the plot device that gets the important character infected).  The notion of living corpses is not nearly as much of a strain on credibility as the way this guy manages to walk around public places in broad daylight during a local murder investigation with his face, hands and shirt drenched in blood while nobody seems to notice.  The bloody effects are well done, and the movie only errs on the side of silliness once, when the zombie comes home casually chewing on a severed arm.  Zombie fan filmmakers need to realize that what worked as a brief vignette in DAWN OF THE DEAD--- a likeable character's tragic deterioration into irreversible living death --- simply doesn't provide enough meat upon which to base an entire feature. Watch ZOMBIE HONEYMOON only if the idea of being horribly depressed appeals to you.

 

 ZOMBIE LAKE (1980)

Dir: Jean Rollin

This utter disaster, which has been in practically every video store in America since the mid-'80s, is basically just an excuse to film lots of naked women swimming, running, walking, bathing, etc.  Director Jean Rollin has made numerous atmospheric, haunting, poetic horror movies, but it's clear that he couldn't have cared less about this project.  Supposedly Jesus Franco was slated to direct but didn't show up (can't say I blame him), so Rollin was hurried in at the last minute to helm this wretched wreck.  I generally try to find something good to say about any movie, but with ZOMBIE LAKE that's a real challenge.  The best that can be said of it is that the potential was there to make a good little horror story with a unique and emotional plot.  Too bad that just about every aspect of the execution misses the mark by a mile.  European horror star Howard Vernon is the mayor of a village where a band of Nazi troopers were killed during WWII. The soldiers' bodies were dumped into the local lake, one of the ugliest locations you'll ever see in a motion picture.  Years later they come back to life as waterlogged zombies who grope lots of nude chicks.  The only good idea here is that a little girl in the town is actually the daughter of one of the zombies (who'd had an affair with a local woman when he was still alive), and the monster actually seems to recognize her.  The child is used as bait to lure the creatures into an old building, where the townsfolk set them on fire.  The idea of a zombie retaining a slight trace of human memory was handled far better in DAY OF THE DEAD, and the technical aspects of filmmaking were handled better in nearly everything.  The photography and production values give ZOMBIE LAKE all the glamour and big-budget look of the Super 8mm home-movie horror films teenagers used to make in their backyards in the 1970s.  The soundtrack is unintentionally funny, particularly the awful "tra-la-la" music used in a segment where girls undress and frolic in the water.  The sound effects for the splashing, sloshing water in the lake sounds more like a guy swishing his hand around in a kitchen sink, and the English dubbing is terrible.  As for the monster makeups, always a crucial aspect of any zombie film, they're mostly pathetic rush jobs done with the same kind of green greasepaint you can buy at your local discount store at Halloween.  In some scenes you can even see the green makeup coming off onto the zombies' squirming victims!  There are also continuity errors, a confused time frame, and seemingly endless stretches devoted to poorly-shot footage of giggling, skinny-dipping women who have all the acting talent of the average mosquito.  If all you care about in a movie is how many naked women are in it, then ZOMBIES' LAKE (the title that's actually on the print) might be for you.  If, however, you're looking for anything else in the way of entertainment, keep looking, because ZOMBIE LAKE is dead in the water.

 

 ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE (1987)

Dir: Jack Bravman

In aschizophrenic unspecified city that has a friendly Mayberry RFD-style innocence even though the local teenagers are violent knife-wielding scumbags, musclebound hunk and all-around good guy Tony (rocker John MikI-Thor) bravely foils a convenience store robbery and is promptly run down by a carload of hoodlums led by a guy with a silly, fluffy mid-'80s hairstyle. Instead of calling the police, the hospital or the morgue, witnesses elect to take the victim's body home to his mother. Grieving but determined Mom calls friendly neighborhood voodoo priestess Molly Mokembie (played by Manuska Rigaud, who seems to have attended acting school on the planet Mars), who easily resurrects Tony with a magic spell and a makeshift coffin-and-candles setup that looks like maybe a good job of Halloween decorating in her backyard. Zombie Tony (who has inexplicably been given a haircut) deteriorates very quickly, arising as a scary-faced ghoul with deepset eyes, shriveled and pulled tendons and dark hollows in his pale green face. He never seems to decompose any further than that, however. Armed with his trusty baseball bat, he staggers around town snapping the necks or bashing in the heads of his killers. The baseball bat is of the aluminum variety, so Adam West was hired to provide the film with woodenness in the role of a police captain with a dark secret in his past. The young idealistic cop investigating the murders is played by none other than Frank Dietz, who's now an accomplished artist famous for his wonderful dead-on caricatures of famous actors and monsters in his Things Are A Bit Sketchy art book series. He's actually quite good and highly likeable as the only real sympathetic character in this cynical rush job from Canada. The aggressive post-RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD soundtrack, courtesy of assorted headbangin' metal bands who never made it big, is surprisingly good too but way too much time is wasted on boring filler footage of people driving or walking around when more monster action would've kept things a lot more entertaining. A kindly shopkeeper who talks with the most outlandish Italian accent since Father Guido Sarducci is curiously named "Hank Peters". When they're not out starting fights or committing rapes and robberies, the hoods hang out at an ice cream stand. At the end, a second (scarier) zombie sporting a terrific makeup job with big blank eyes, a mean expression and stringy white hair, crawls up out of his grave. Though only onscreen very briefly, this vengeful ghoul is a real triumph of imaginative low-budget makeup artistry. I'd like to have a mask of him. Too bad the unimaginative script, thin story and uneven acting result in a movie that's too predictable, slow and suspenseless to hold viewer interest. The makers of the obscure feature also did EDGE OF HELL (a/k/a ROCK-'N'-ROLL NIGHTMARE) around the same time.

 

 ZOMBIE RAMPAGE (1991)

Dir: Todd Sheets

The makers of ZOMBIE BLOODBATH were also responsible for this similar shot-on-video travesty.  Besides being another slavish copyof the zombie films of Romero and Fulci, this shares other common elements with ZOMBIE BLOODBATH.  Both productions are primarily concerned with re-creating the gory splatter effects from those directors' movies but have no clue how to make them work in any kind of dramatic context.  Both also feature inadvertently funny suicide scenes, usually out-of-place hard rock music, and a peculiar obsession with hateful, psychotic street punks who have no friends and no purpose.  In ZOMBIE BLOODBATH it was girl gangs knifing each other over their (worthless) turf; in this one the focus is mostly on two equally belligerent gangs of hoods who never display any human qualities-- they're all just presented as loudmouthed losers whose reaction to anything and everything is to shout obscenities at one another.  In a setup that's remarkably similar to advance scripts for FREDDY VS. JASON,  the leaders of the rival factions both decide to go to a cemetery and read from a Book Of The Dead (paperback, in English) in order to summon armies of zombies they inexplicably think will kill the members of the opposing gang.  Zombies (most of whom were buried in T-shirts and other standard street clothes) immediately appear all over town and start ripping people into bloody hunks of Spam.  In a scene that would be sure to offend just about everyone if it weren't so laughably poorly executed, the ghouls tear a crying baby (an obvious toy) to shreds.  At one point a guy who isn't a zombie suddenly decides to stab a girl to death for no reason.  A prop butcher knife with its end cut off gets more screen time than many of the actors.  Radio reports from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and ZOMBIE are heard.  Most of the time is spent with foul-mouthed wretches who barricade themselves in nondescript rooms and get killed.  Things carry on thusly until the ending, at which time nothing happens.  This all makes for such one-note viewing that I doubt most people will end up watching it all the way through.  The worst problem isn't even the absence of real heroes or even the lack of a plot.  It's the awful sound quality.  Instead of background music, this has what can only be described as foreground music: scoring that's constantly played at a higher volume than the dialogue, making it a nonstop struggle to try and hear just what swear words the participants are yelling.  Many zombies are shown, with visages ranging from storebought Distortions Unlimited masks to oozing cornflake-&-latex faces (which sometimes honestly look scary) to smudgy fingerpaint rush jobs.  Projects like this are truly depressing when you consider how much work it must have taken to come up with so little, when trying a bit harder and showing just a little imagination could have yielded a final product of at least some value.   

 

ZOMBIE TOXIN (1996)

Dir: Tom J. Moose

"Monty Python meets Dawn Of The Dead", says the video box.  Never trust video boxes.  This incoherent amateur gore film from England does contain a number of Python references, but that's not enough to even make it watchable, much less funny.  Pathetic and boring, it starts at a big old barn where people pay to be tortured and mutilated.  Someone kills a (noticeably incomplete) fake horse, the leftover remains of which contaminate a nearby river.  People who drink the water turn into gloppy-faced zombies with such severe diarrhea that they instantly expel all of their internal organs, an idea that would only amuse teen aged boys with double-digit IQs. A descendant of Hitler (called "Adolf") and his sidekick ("Gerbils") try to market contaminated wine that will turn everybody into zombies, but the wine bottles themselves come to life and fly around on strings and attack.  There isn't any story structure, and since there wasn't any money or ingenuity available either, much of what happens is shown in split-second closeups or happens offscreen.  Every fifteen or twenty minutes (which pass like hours) something resembling a joke occurs, which indicates that the people behind this thought they were making a comedy.  Too bad there aren't any laughs, scares, or signs of anything else real filmmakers try to achieve.  There's only bad acting, guys in drag, long idiotic gross-outs, and cardboard gore effects that are so lame even Herschel Gordon Lewis would be ashamed to show them.  Remember the homemade horror films kids used to make with 8mm movie cameras in their parents' backyards in the 1970s?  Well, ZOMBIE TOXIN certainly can't hope to reach that high level of sophistication, but that's what it most closely resembles.  People wear big obvious pillows in their shirts and pants to make themselves look fat, everyone runs around making silly noises, and once in a while a bit of stop-motion animation (slightly less advanced than that seen on SOUTH PARK) is used.  The sound and dialogue looping are sloppy too, but the fact that every aspect of this stinker (which was made as HOMEBREW) is crude and amateurish can be excused by its makers as "parody".  I won't go so far as to declare that everyone responsible for this ugly, excruciating descent into tedium is a hopelessly talent-free idiot, but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that if anybody involved does have any sort of talent or is not an idiot, there's no evidence of it in the film.  Although bodies frequently get mangled and shredded, don't expect much zombie activity.  Instead of copying DAWN OF THE DEAD, this is really more of a knockoff of STREET TRASH, another mean-spirited gross-out comedy about winos who drink poisoned booze and promptly melt into colorful puddles of latex paint.  The running time is listed as 75 minutes, but a pleasant surprise for viewers is that it's actually only an hour long.  Flush it.

 

 ZOMBIE VS. NINJA (1988)

Dir: "Charles Lee" (Godfey Ho Jeung Keung)

I was unable to discover the original title of this Chinese import, but since the above title is abruptly cut in with all the subtlety of having somebody thrust a piece of paper with the words "ZOMBIE VS. NINJA" printed on it in front of your face while you're watching the opening, it's a pretty safe bet that it was originally known by another name. Some sources suggest it might have been made as ZOMBIE REVIVAL: NINJA MASTER, but it's difficult to confirm. By any name, it's a repetitive chopsocky adventure with too many characters, too few zombies, and far too little conerence or continuity. A young man who acts nervous and cowardly even though he's clearly able to defend himself is orphaned after his kindly father is murdered by bandits. He's given a home and a job by the repulsive, rat-faced local undertaker, a ridicuious-looking, stuck-up old coot who also happens to be a master of kung fu as well as a powerful magician who apparently likes to bring dead bodies back to life just so he can practice his fighting skills against them when they attack. (And you thought YOUR schedule was full.) The old geezer might seem cruel and selfish, but he's a good man at heart and agrees to train his new assistant to become a martial arts expert who will one day be able to avenge his father's death. This training seems to consist mostly of being regularly abused and humiliated by the old creep plus occasionaly having to fight off sneak attacks carried out by teams of expressionless, white-faced, karate-fighting zombies. The brightly colored sets, costumes and lighting give the film a dreamy fairy-tale look but the flimsy plot is (as with many Chinese movies) really just an excuse to string together one long, noisy karate fight sequence after another. The many battles are expertly shot and choreographed and the participants are suitably agile and energetic in their attacks, but the more interesting funeral business setting and the whole concept surrounding the magically-summoned undead are peripheral to the routine revenge story. Most of ZOMBIE VS. NINJA is devoted to fast-paced but prolonged fight svenes that ultimately become boring in their repetion. It's hard to stay interested in who wins or loses since many of the battles involve seemingly endless supplies of unimportant  background charaters and cartoonish, laughably one-dimensional villians. Another problem is the ill-advised (but typically Chinese) attempts at slapstick comedy that sometimes intrude on the proceedings. I loved the way the zombies fought with stiff, spastic, almost robotic moves and lifeless, staring faces, but they appear only sporadically and only seem to act under the psychic command of the old undertaker, so they never present much of a threat. Their function here is roughly equivalent to that of the hovering Jedi training spere that briefly flew around buzzing Luke Skywalker in the original STAR WARS. This pointless exercise in kickin' and smackin' might hold the attention of diehard martial arts fans, but it's certainly not much of a horror film.

 ZOMBIE! VS. MARDI GRAS (1996)

Dirs: Mike Lyddon, Will Frank, Karl DeMolay

If you can imagine a movie that's equal parts Andy Milligan, Maya Deren, Monty Python, BLAIR WTCH PROJECT, and your auntie Grizelda's grainy home-movie footage of her trip to New Orlenas during Mardi Gras.... you probably still can't quite dream up the flavor of this sloppy amateur feature.  Made on a nothing budget, it's an example of that rare genre, the horror-science fiction-pseudo-documentray-surrealist-satire.  During Mardi Gras, Dale Ashmun (who used to write the fun "Spare Parts" column for PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO magazine) and two dopey chums interview people on the street for their video study of voodoo and the undead in New Orleans.  They get answers primarily from drunks, fanatics and women who just want to show off their breasts for the camera.  Meanwhile, seeking revenge for an incident in which a child was trampled by a crowd twenty-three years earlier, a satanist who looks like an out-of-work stage magician conjures up a frizzy-haired mean-looking zombie who shambles through the crowded streets biting bloody hunks out of various partiers.  Nobody seems to care or even notice.  The bite victims become zombies and shuffle around the festival still largely unnoticed as they bite, bleed and steal Mardi Gras beads.  Space aliens (guys in ridiculous hats) observe the proceedings from their spaceship (a dark room) and after the zombie activity gets out of hand, a guy who is some sort of guardian angel allows Galileo -- yes, the 16th-century Italian astronomer -- to return to earth to destroy the first zombie with a weird looking device.  The evil magician, who spends most of the movie sleeping, ultimately gets his comeuppance when his nude voodoo dancer assistant turns on him and a bunch of zombies bury him alive in a pile of beads.  Before beying zapped back to the beyond, Galileo complains about how stupid and confusing this movie is.  Some of the nightmare imagery is serious, very well done, and seems to have been inspired by silent movie era surrealism.  The deliberate use of inappropriate sound effects and constant non sequitors is often pretty funny, and editing is used in very creative ways in order to generate laughs from footage that most filmmakers would have classified as unusable.  It's a shame somebody decided to dumb the whole thing down with added bathroom humor and other Troma-level idiocy, because at other times this movie is hilarious in its own chaotic self-mocking way.  Most of it is in black and white, but twice it lapses into color, including a closing sequence that spoofs WUTHERING HEIGHTS while a great zombie song plays on the soundtrack.  A tough film to recommend since I know the average viewer will find it so confused as to be unwatchable, but as a colossal inside joke and an exercise in filmic absudrity, it does succeed on some inexplicable level.

ZOMBIELAND (2009)

Dir: Ruben Fleischer

A Hollywood comedy that tries to be a redneck equivalent to SHAUN OF THE DEAD. It falls far short of that goal due to lazy scripting and a lack of progression but ZOMBIELAND still offers a fair amount of chuckles. Woody Harrelson single-handedly saves the movie with his witty portrayal of a tough-as-nails, gun-totin' macho clod with a sensitive side. In fact, he's enjoyable enough to qualify as one of the better horror heroes of the period. It's just a shame the rest of the movie feels so indifferently hammered together. The filmmakers don't seem to have done their genre homework, so pop culture references are mostly limited to ones everybody would presumably recognize and the term "zombie" is misused. The flesh-eaters in ZOMBIELAND aren't reanimated corpses but insane, homicidal, infected plague victims inspired by 28 DAYS LATER. They are never seen to exhibit any supernatural qualities even though the old "shoot 'em in the head" rule is mentioned in dialogue. There's really no story, just a bleak scenario that finds a couple of contrasting male characters in the tradition of THE ODD COUPLE or any buddy-cop movie traveling across a deserted and devastated America, occasionally having to blast or clobber violent blood-drooling extras. Along the way, they of course pick up a couple of young pretty girls (whose characters are contemptible, selfish criminals and have been since before the plague started) so the script can include some stale relationship humor. One running sight gag that's hysterical at first-- onscreen titles, credits and captions are actually there in the reality of the scene and are affected by onscreen actions-- soon wears out its welcome through overuse and a failure to generate any surprises with it after the first five minutes. There are countless plot holes and continuity errors galore but U.S. viewers didn't seem to care and flocked to theaters to see it. Clearly, the shoot'em-up action and mayhem-based humor were enough to win the moviegoing public over with no need for added frills like a clever plot or original ideas. An attempt to give Harrelson's character some depth by revealing a tragedy from his recent past feels forced, mean-spirited and entirely unnecessary to his persona. It's also much grimmer than the rest of this purposefully goony movie. An embarrassing Hollywood in-joke subplot has poor old Bill Murray appearing as himself. Bill is one of the few survivors of the zombie apocalypse but the script portrays him as a total idiot who gets himself gunned down by deliberately acting like a zombie just to scare a character who is known to be a nervous gun-wielding dork. It probably looked funnier on paper than it does on the screen. There's no legit ending, but the climax atop a working roller coaster (which I guess was being operated by zombies) is nicely directed and mildly exciting, if entirely predictable... just like everything that happens in this movie. I don't think there was a single scene or moment that unfolded any other way than exactly how I expected it to, so it's a good thing they had good actors playing out some decent character-driven humor or it wouldn't have held my attention even for its short hour-and-21 minute running time. Don't expect anything extraordinarily creative or any especially sharp wit and you might get a kick out of ZOMBIELAND's constant supply of efficiently staged action and standard 2009-style sarcasm.

 ZOMBIETHON (1986)

Dir: Ken Dixon

Since I was rude enough to point out Frank Dietz's participation in ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE, I guess it's only fair that I own up and admit the following: I was in ZOMBIETHON. There, I said it.  ZOMBIETHON not only offers a good look at several of my early mask sculptures and my personal zombie mask collection circa 1986, but I'm also in there behind various masks, playing many of the featured zombies. There were so few of us in the cast that we'd simply change masks between shots and come in from other angles to give the impression of more zombies.  As for the end result, it's a shaky production that's constantly shifting gears from funny to spooky to gory to sexy and back again in a manner that's so abrupt and unexplained that it's liable to annoy you.  A zombie film festival is going on at the El Rey theather in L.A., allowing for comic, sometimes dreamlike linking scenes in which young women find themselves watching clips from assorted zombie films while sitting in an audience of zombies. Ken Dixon, director of the framing scenes (who, it should be noted, was a likeable guy and quite a good sport), has a strong visual sense that makes his footage pleasingly artful, summery and often beautiful, with pretty actresses filmed in colorfully romanticized postcard shots that contrast nicely with the shadowy coolness of the scenes in the old movie house. But the absence of a consistent main character or viewpoint makes it all seem random and unfocused. Zombies abduct women as dates to take to the Zombiethon; women running away from zombies inexplicably hide out in a theater that's full of them and settle in to enjoy the show; and in later segments, the zombies in the audience turn rowdy and things get really silly. The films excerpted are ZOMBIE, ZOMBIE LAKE, OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, ASTRO-ZOMBIES, A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, THE INVISIBLE DEAD (which, despite its U.S. title, is about an invisible gorilla and contains no zombies), and FEAR (a film that does feature a few scenes of ghostly creatures in a dungeon who may just barely qualify as zombies. But since those scenes were cut from most prints, including the one ZOMBIETHON's producers had access to, don't expect any zombies other than a quick glimpse of one fright-masked  ghoulie seen in a dream sequence).  I recall suggesting  the zombie films of Paul Naschy for inclusion and being told by Ken: "There's no nudity, there's no gore, there's nothing good in those movies". Still, for everything that went wrong with this hurried production, it became a popular video rental and the title is now a standard term to discribe any zombie movie. Richard Band's score is a deft blend of the eerie and the satiric.  Some of it had been used in TROLL. You'll have a hard time getting the infectiously catchy main theme out of your head. I had fun working on this opportunistic but self-mocking cheapie and I'm still sorry ZOMBIETHON 2 never made it past the planning stage.  And yes, that's my wife Laura sitting up out of a leaf-covered grave in the opening shot.