Devouring the flesh of the living

(In the highly unlikely event that you don’t agree with this review, see my amazing full report on this awesome movie over at our friends Blog of the Living Dead – Zombie Flesh Eaters Review)

AKA Zombie, Zombi 2

There was an England football match on TV last night so the plan was to watch that instead of our usual Wednesday movie.  However, come the 2nd half we all figured we’d seen enough so I suggested sticking in a Zombie film, just for a change.  I had first dibs here as over the weekend a decision was made to watch Star Wars Episode 1-3 end-to-end, so in order to get my own back I chose to watch ‘The Best zombie Film Ever Made’ aka Zombie Flesh Eaters!

Although I don’t think i’ve seen it since starting this blog it is good to know that having seen so many new Zombie flicks in the last year, (well new to me anyway) my favourite film still holds its own against them all.  It is a full blown classic.

Forget adding Romance, Comedy, Social Commentary, or Satire etc into the plot, this film is just straight forward Zombie goodness.  The music is amazing, the set pieces are great (Zombie Vs Shark?  Get In There!), there is some quality norkage, and lets not forget the most famous Eye Gouging scene ever put to film.  Zombie Flesh Eaters is the ultimate in zombie filmdom.

It is the perfect mix of traditional Zombie legend, 70’s Italian gore and exploitation, with quality music and not a single dodgy CGI effect to be seen.

Perfect from start to finish (and that final shot of the zombies invading NY, with the great radio commentary over the top is the perfect way to finish a film).  Fulci went onto make other classic Zombie films, but none as fantastic as this.  It is just a pity that everyone in my flat fell asleep during it.  Oh well, that means i’ll have to watch it again just for them!

Gore Score B
Norks Score B
Overall Score A+

I don’t mind watching cheapo SOV zombie films because usually the people who make them have some interesting ideas to bring to the zombie movie table.  (Shatter Dead, Automaton Transfusion…) They are made by zombie fans who feel that the films they want to see just aren’t being produced by the mainstream movie industry, and so it is often the case with these films that you have to look past the crappy acting, directing and special effects and just appreciate the original story idea that the film makers had to offer.

However, this particular film seems to break with this tradition, as they have just cobbled together a rather crappy remake of Night Of The Living Dead, but included dozens more human characters, and have the film take place in an abandoned warehouse instead.

Perhaps the angle here is that we should be interested in how real people deal with a zombie outbreak crisis, but if this were the case then surely at least one of these 20 odd characters would have a shred of personality, rather than just be a bunch of nameless nobodies who have no reason to be here and no discernible talent of any form.  All that happens here is that a bunch of people end up in an empty building and discuss how to keep the zombies away.  Then they move on to another building, meet more boring characters and shack up together so that there are more people to ponder the best way to baracade themselves into the building.

OK, there is one other character who is just a cliche crazy dude, who for some reason or another thinks he’s better off by himself and proves this by randomly killing a few survivors and then leaves the group, only to return every 10 minutes or so when the film is getting boring just to kill a few more characters for no reason.  Then he gets strung up to die himself.

This film is pointless.  I have dozens of decent ideas for a zombie film that haven’t been seen before, but even if I didn’t I still wouldn’t think it was a good idea to get my life savings together and make a crappy film that just rips off a Romero classic.  What’s the point?  What a waste of money and time (theirs and mine).

Gore Score D
Norks Score C
Overall Score E

Being on holiday without a single real plan is great. Two Zombie films in one day! This particular gem was easily the best of the two, and one of the better ones i’ve actually seen recently.

Stacy is one of the strangest Zombie films i’ve seen in a long time, and probably the best Asian zombie film from my collection even though I don’t really have a faintest idea what is going on.

Schoolgirls are all dying off when they hit their late teens and are somehow resurrected as flesh eating zombies (called Stacies for some reason). Before they die these girls become maniacally happy, suffering from “Near Death Happiness” which seems to cause them to dance around and giggle as only Japanese schoolgirls can. There are some government zombie killing squads (The Romero Repeat Kill Squad), who get called in to dismember (into 165 pieces) the zombie girls. They can be killed off with Shopping Channel bought chainsaws (Branded – “Blues Campbell Right Arm #2″), but you gotta chop ‘em up good, or the parts keep on a’wrigglin. Oh yes, and these zombie girls glow blue and telepathise with each other. Toss in some scientist blokes, and a puppeteer who falls in love with a Near Death Happiness schoolgirl and you got a bizarre little zombie number.

But oh, The Gore. Oh my, this one is one of the gories films i’ve seen in a long long time, and will probably creep into my Top 3 Gore list (see right panel). Heads are blown apart, eyeballs shot out, disembowlings’, gut eatings’ and many many decapitations’ (leaving the spinal cord attached no less). Despite being so gory it never really seems to be that gross, as the film is so bizarre that all the gore just seems comedic.

There is probably some meaning behind all this nonsense, but I’ll just assume it is because dozens of 18 year old schoolgirls prancing around is a great concept for a film. Heck, replace the Zombies with Geography teachers or something and i’d still watch it.

Gore Score B
Norks Score F
Overall Score B

Well it’s day one of my full week off work, and so far my plans stretch as far as ‘pick up the crisp packets that have blown into the garden and…..’ well, that’s it. After all that exertion I felt I needed to relax, so I opened a bag of Haribo and picked out a trash zombie film from my stack.

Toxic Zombie is a proper tacky Zombie film from 1980. It opens with a shotgun toting Peter Sutcliffe lookalike and his mate searching through some forest for something or other. Turns out they are actually very scruffy FBI agents and they are hunting hippies. One such Hippy happens to be a topless young lass sat in the undergrowth sponging herself down with a bucket and sponge, so naturally these government types shoot her through the neck then her hippy mates stab and strangle these agents to death. Oh yes, these are violent hippies indeed, and soon to get more so.

It turns out these hippies have been growing some Marijuana in this woodland and the government somehow know about this, but don’t actually know where exactly. Their plan to deal with this horror? Send out a drunk crop-duster pilot in a plane full of human-mutating pesticides. Naturally this pesticide covers all the hippies and they go off on a murderous rampage, chasing everybody around the woodland for the remaining 60 minutes of the film.

This film wins bonus points for its totally inept gore, plus there is a Father character who calls his own son a retard, then runs away from the Zombies shoving his wife out of the way and on the floor in the process. Then there is the opening gratuitous nork shot with the lady and her bucket, which is nice.

Gore Score D
Norks Score C
Overall Score C

AKA Zombie Transfusion

I had heard quite a bit about this film on the rumour mill that is “The Internet”, so when it was released in the US on DVD I thought i’d take the plunge and pay the £15 or whatever it was to get it imported. That was quite a risk for me really as I don’t usually like to pay more than a fiver for my DVDs. Luckily it wasn’t a waste, as there was plenty of enjoyment in this bizarrely named Zombie film.
Worryingly it appeared to start off as a standard Teen Horror film, which usually means it’s gonna be crud (see Return of the Living Dead 4 for example!), but I needn’t have worried, as this was so far away from that crapfest it puts it to shame.

There is some plot in here but it’s pretty bog standard stuff – Corpses are somehow reanimated when they die, and try to eat everyone in sight until the film finishes – but that doesn’t really matter. Also, this film uses the often disliked Speedy Zombies which I myself don’t usually go for, but it seems to work pretty well here as this film is much more action based rather than story focused, and slow shambling zombies would slow everything down (which would be a worry as this film is only just around 70 minutes long).

Mixed up in all this action is some surprisingly decent gore, particularly the jaw removal and the pregnant woman having her foetus ripped out (with subsequent devourment). Also there is a nice little eye gouge scene, which I took as an Homage to Zombie Flesh Eaters rather than an original addition.

Apparently this film was shot on a budget of only $30,000 (£15,000), which is pretty incredible considering how much action, gore and effects are in this. However the cost probably didn’t stretch to decent cameras as the framerate is pretty dire, plus the picture is of the non-anamorphic squished up variety.

I don’t mind all these little quirks though, as it’s obviously a film made by real Zombie fans, rather than a quick moneyspinning corporate effort. A sequel is in the works, which I shall certainly be picking up. The story did end rather abruptly though, just like this blog entry.

Gore Score B-
Norks Score D
Overall Score C+

So I did have a copy of this film recorded from the Sci Fi channel, but I figured that i’d rather watch a film without advert breaks and bleeped out swearing so I purchased both this film and the 5th one at the same time.  Man, that was a mistake.  Having no adverts is no real redeeming feature, except that I suppose that no adverts means that this lasts about 10 minutes less, but that still leaves the 90 odd minutes of actual ‘film’ to sit through.  Urgh.

Where to start with this dog turd of a film?  I won’t bore you with any plot details because it is almost as irrelevant as the rest of the film, so I guess i’ll just get the good bits out of the way to fill a sentence or two: There are some pretty girls in this film.  And the actual Zombie makeup itself is kind of cool I suppose.

That’s pretty much it as far as enjoyment goes.  This film is so clearly a corporate zombie film, put together with no actual respect for either the Return of the Living Dead series itself, or even Zombie films as a whole.  Oh, let’s get some sexy and highly cliche teenagers (and terrible actors), group them together and send them off on stupid adventures!  Sounds like a winning plan there.  It is also apparent that the filmmakers invented (ie stole) 3 gore methods and reused each of them over and over and over and over and over.

“Ooh, squibs under some Scrubs makes it look like gunshots so lets do that every 5 minutes!”
“Ooh, a bullet to the forehead where blood squirts out looks cool, lets do that every 6 minutes!”
“Ooh, a Zombie pretending to bite the back of a guys head and coming out with a mouthful of hair looks pretty dumb, but lets do that every 7 minutes anyway!”

AWESOME!

Sure, each of those effects looked okish first time I saw them in the film, but who wants to see them used to dispatch every single Zombie (of which there are hundreds)?

Please.  The Zombies are about as tough as the Fraggles, and seem to be killed just with a bullet wound to the chest or two.  Have the film makers even SEEN the original film?  (Well they may have, as there is a passing quote “Send More Security Guards…” which is just insulting more than anything).

On top of all that there aren’t even any Norks on show.  What is the world coming to eh?

Gore Score C
Norks Score E
Overall Score E

Lets see how Part 5 compares to this one eh?  Well, it can’t be much worse.