Evil (To kako)

Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

Greek horror is not something I am particularly familiar with, but when such a situation presents itself you can – more often than not – count on Zombie Cinema to fill that gap. Undead movies can be found on almost all continents of the globe (i’m still waiting for those lazy penguins to get their act together and knock up a scary movie or two) with Europe a decidedly proficient area.

The makers of this gorefest have obviously seen many of them, as it’s cliche ridden from start to finish. Not that this is a bad thing however, as when would anyone complain about bodies ripped in half Capt Rhodes style, or too many eye gouges?! However, there is one thing that is lacking here, and that is the plot.

Some cavers have are exploring an uncharted grotto somewhere near Athens and uncover a mysterious ’something’ which apparently causes memory loss and delayed zombism, although we have no idea what this something is. These adventurers manage to get themselves out the cave and back home with no knowledge of how they got there.

The 3 of them then about their regular lives – going to a soccer match, going clubbing and eating dinner with their family. This is where the outbreak occurs as these 3 guys transform into flesh-eaters and devour those around them. We get to see a great scene where the soccer attendee turns to his neighbour and bites him, then turns around to the guy on his other side to do the same, while the first victim then turns to his neighbour to start feasting – it would have been a fantastic sight to have stuck with this view as the whole crowd turn on each other, but we are quickly and unsatisfactorily transferred to another outbreak elsewhere.

We are now at the stage of full outbreak, as a few survivors around the city try to escape and hide from the oncoming horde, while fighting off whichever zombie comes their way. Basically, this is what happens for the rest of the film. Survivors hide, do a bit of arguing, run away and beat up some zombies. There’s no character exploration, no real tension, but oh, is there plenty of gore! Heads explode, limbs rip off, and eyes are punctured with pure Peter Jackson glee.

This goes on until the final climactic scene – which was certainly a highlight – as we are treated to a overhead shot of zombies engulfing the city. This is not the only interesting directorial choice, as the film is riddled with 24-style split screens and picture-in-picture effects. It’s all good fun to watch, plenty of gore, but due to the lack of any real point it is ultimately a fun, if unsatisfying ride.

Gore Score A
Norks Score F
Originality Score D
Overall Score C-

 

RetarDEAD

When I heard of this film I pretty much knew instantly what sort of film it would be. I could practically hear the genre reviewers writing out the phrase ‘if you like the title you’re pretty much guaranteed to like the film’ And oh, how true that is. Appealing to the Troma fan in everyone (although it can take a bit of effort to bring it out of some people), RetarDEAD is a trash classic excelling in script, gore, offensiveness and utter, utter nonsense.

A mad scientist, fresh from resurrecting a turd monster in the previous film (MonsTURD) escapes the clutches of the boozy cops and sets up a new science lab in some abandoned factory. From there he sets out to find some test subjects for his (well meaning, but misguided) intelligence boosting experiments. He naturally selects the local mental hospital, and volunteers his services as a teacher.

While conducting his experiments the town police are hunting down both this escaped loon as well as the local pervert affectionately know as ‘the Weenie Waggler’. After being tracked down, this pervy nutjob points the cops to the new special needs teacher who has started working at the Special School in which he is the caretaker, so the cops rock on up to investigate. Unfortunately this is the point where the doc’s magic intelligence serum starts to backfire, causing the recipients to turn into flesh eating blue-grey Dawn of the Dead-style zombies.

This is the point of the film where the originality goes out the window, and the gore and slaughter kick off. The zombies start spreading, and the ridiculously cheap yet awesome entrails flow, more-or-less until the end of the film.

There are some excellent scenes in this movie : The cops tooling up ‘Here’s a handgun, another handgun, a sword, another handgun…..’), the mad scientist and his assistants dissecting a corpse for bait (involving A LOT of puking), plus the gore-gore girls surrounding and attacking their prey in the doc’s laboratory and dancing them to death.

Sure, we’ve seen a lot of this before, but such a great script and budget spent almost totally on latex gore effects and cameos (Jello Biafra!) this is something I love to see in my low budget B-movies. Hell, if there was some Nudity then it would’ve been perfect!

Gore Score A
Norks Score F
Originality Score C
Overall Score B+

 

City of the Living Dead

AKA Gates of Hell

I guess it must have been about 3 months since I last watched a Zombie film with the Girlfriend (Night of the Living Dead) so that means I get to inflict another one on her. Apparently I am allowed 1 every quarter, so that’s 4 a year. I’ve pretty much given up choosing ones that I think she’ll like and have decided to go with one I know that I like. I’ve been getting the itch to watch ‘The Beyond’ for a while, but realised that I’ve not seen the 1st in Fulci’s pseudo-series ‘City of the Living Dead’ in even longer, so why not start at the beginning then?

City of the Living Dead is without a doubt a classic of the genre. Featuring several highly memorable scenes that only Fulci could imagine, we start off with a daft seance where we see a vision of a priest hanging himself. This is so traumatic it causes the young lass who has seen it to have a spectacular heart attack and die. Actually she was only ‘mostly-dead’ as during her unattended burial she comes back to life. Sadly it’s a bit too late as she’s already 6 feet under, although a passing journalist hears her screams and decides to bust her out of her coffin. Stupidly of all the tools to use to open a coffin I would have thought that a pick-axe would be the most dangerous option, particularly when you’re whacking it into the coffin lid directly over the body’s head, luckily this doesn’t cause any problems aside from adding to the already immense stress the buried alive lass is suffering. (I wonder, had he speared her in the face and killed her, what would he have been charged with?)

Anyway, this journalist and lady decide to head off to the village from her vision to try to stop the dead from taking over the world, which has already started in earnest. People are dying all over the place in bizarre fashion, and the locals aren’t dealing with it too well. One of the obvious highlights of the whole film is the death of a young lady who it hypnotised by the zombie-priest and promptly vomits up her whole internal organs. Yes, hell unleashed on earth is apparently pretty gruesome.

There are several awesome scenes here, (a drill to the head anyone?) and coupled with the fact this film actually has some semblance of plot it’s overall a highly enjoyable movie. Even my Girlfriend quite enjoyed it, which was perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the film, (although the drill scene where the villagers turn on the local nutjob didn’t meet with her approval, but seeing as that’s my favourite part I guess we even out nicely.)

Gore Score B
Norks Score F
Originality Score B
Overall Score A-

 

Enter…Zombie King

Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

I recently saw the multi-award winning ‘The Wrestler’ on the big screen, and loved all the OTT wrestling action, but I felt that there was just something missing from all the serious self-destructive character story-lines.  True, it had plenty of strippers but where were all the dudes in stupid wrestling masks taking on a trained army of the undead?  I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that this is the reason it missed out at Oscars.

Thankfully I discovered a movie that fills in all the blanks from The Wrestler, and removes all the boring plot.  “Enter…Zombie King.”

Featuring a cast of Mexican-wrestling-mask wearing heroes, (who wear their masks constantly, even when chilling out drinking beers on the veranda) who travel the country for some reason on another.  Ulysses is the main hero here, who rocks on up at an old mates house – who is also a wrestler – to stay for a few days.  He hears that there is a rival wrestler in town who is planning on wrestling a bunch of ‘live’ zombies in the ring.  Obviously thinking these zombies can’t be trusted he pops along with his crew to witness this event.

Unfortunately for all concerned, while inside watching the match a couple of chicks are attacked outside and one gets killed by some feral Zombies, and it’s the zombie wrestler Tiki who gets the blame.  However, Tiki’s zombies have been neutered so it must be another sort of undead that killed off the young lady, so the whole team of masked heroes set off to discover what’s been happening with these killer zombies.

Featuring copious amounts of nudity, loads of fantastic wrestling-action and a bad guy with possibly the greatest villain name in history ‘Murderliser’, “Enter… Zombie King” is outstanding from start to finish.  OK, the acting is pretty sub-par and the gore effects are mostly of the Plastic-Jokeshop-Limb variety but it all works so superbly together none of that matters, and in-fact it just adds to the enjoyment.  Why do they never take off their masks?  Who cares.  How come nobody seems bothered that zombies have roamed the forest for years?  So what.  Why would anyone sunbathe in the snow wearing a wrestling mask?  Pah!  Just go with the flow and enjoy the action.  Heck, if actual Wrestling was this exciting I’d start watching that instead of the UFC!

Gore Score C
Norks Score B
Originality Score A
Overall Score B+

 

Zombie Chronicles

Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

An old friend of mine warned me off this film a long time ago telling me that it was utter horse-turd.  I was also well aware that it was released on the ‘Hard Gore’ label, which (from numerous personal experiences) almost always means ‘avoid this DVD as if it had smallpox’.  

Despite all this I took the plunge and paid actual money for this film when I found it for better-than-cheap on eBay.  I remember the trailer as having some rather impressive gore, and I figured that ‘hey, even if the movie is awful at least the gore looks impressive’.  And I was right.  To an extent.

As I expected, all the best gore in the film is present during the trailer itself, without any of the guff plot and acting to sift through.  However apart from this standard cardinal sin the movie makes an even more inexplicable error right from the start : The opening credits are interspersed with upcoming scenes from the film, showing the actual deaths of the characters before we’ve even been introduced to them!  Yes, after the credits you will recognise that ‘this dude gets his ear bitten off’ and ‘this guy gets his head ripped away’, as well as ‘oh, that’s the girl who gets her eyes pulled out’.  It takes even the slightest possibility of enjoyment from this movie out of the equation as soon as the film starts. I spent the whole 70-odd minutes waiting for the gore effect i’d seen in the opening to happen to the current character on screen that I knew was due.

It is all unbelievably boring, and the filmmakers must have know this because they split the movie into two different parts.  The first follows an army veteran who is out driving in some forest with his girlfriend.  Some un-noteworthy nonsense happens resulting in his girlfriend being tied to a tree by some dude, and the veteran is forced to exercise himself to death .  Yes, he is killed by press-ups and star-jumps. NOT EVEN BY A ZOMBIE!

The 2nd equally unexciting episode follows a couple and their random friend who are out camping in (what looks like) the same forest, when they uncover a grave of an old pirate looking family who come back to life and kill everyone.  Surprisingly.

If it hadn’t lost enough points from just being eyebleedingly boring, the film also loses points by committing the ultimate no-no.  A really really awful sex scene in which the young lady spends the entire (1 minute or so) still wearing her bra.  Seriously film-makers ; If your actress doesn’t want to show her norks on film then don’t bother including a ’sexy’ romp in a tent.  It looks daft, is just as boring as the rest of the nonsense.

So there you go.  The zombie screen time in the whole film is about 3 minutes, and the trailer lasts for 4. Utterly worthless.  I’d probably prefer to leave wine stains on my tables than even take this disk out the box to use as a coaster in-case it reminds me of the film.

Gore Score C
Norks Score F-
Orginality Score D
Overall Score D-

 

Poultrygeist

Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)If there were ever a zombie film that was crying out to be made it is this zombie-chicken-lesbian-musical-romantic-horror-comedy movie, also known as Poultrygeist.  Yes, Troma come up trumps again with possibly the greatest Zombie movie of the decade.  Everything that you could ever want in a movie is present here.  Gore, Nudity, Horror, Comedy, Music, Dancing and Zombie Chickens.  Hell, even fat dudes pebble-dashing restaurant toilets in disgusting brown slurry.  This film has everything.  Sheesh, there is even a plot occurring here somewhere, if that’s what you’re into.

A new fast-food chicken restaurant is opening that happens to have been built on an ancient Indian burial ground, and the displaced Indian spirits are none too pleased.  To teach the owners a lesson the spirits decide to take over the carcasses of the dead chickens and cause havoc and murder towards both employees and customers alike within the new establishment.

Not everyone is overjoyed at the prospect of a new chicken snackery, in particular the local lesbian protest group; the College Lesbians Against Multiconglomorates (C.L.A.M).  One such lesbian happens to be the ex-girlfriend of local loser Arbie, who decides to teach his ex a lesson by getting a job in the chicken establishment and serving the dead birds to all who come along.

However, mearly minutes after beginning his shift on opening day the possessed chickens kick off their plan, killing off several staff members and splattering guts all over the walls.  This is just the beginning.

What follows are musical numbers, dances, naked lesbian romps, gore, satire, explosions, blood and even a truly disgusting toilet scene involving Troma favourite ‘Lardass’ which needs to be seen to be believed (or never EVER seen if you have a remotely sensitive stomach).

This is without doubt the greatest Troma film ever made, the greatest zombie musical ever made, one of the goriest zombie movies ever made, and the best undead chicken film that has ever seen the light of day.  Even to take a remotely serious note for a second (which is is almost heresy for a troma movie) this film hits every catagory any Zombie lover could ever wish for.  Social satire that is up there with Romero.  Gore easily on par with Savini.  Enough nudity to please even the harshest of 12 year old critics, and even a musical score that is genuinely inventive and impressive.

To put it simply, Poultrygeist is possibly the one film that could transform a Troma-hater into a Troma-fanatic, and that is quite an impressive achievement.

Gore Score A
Norks Score A
Originality Score A
Overall Score A

 

Dance of the Dead

Crossposted at Blog of the Living Dead

“You get the machete”
“But I don’t know how to shoot a machete.”

Ah another day another zombie comedy.  Dance of the Dead has been on my radar for months having heard all the praise lavished on it following its showing at the South By Southwest festival earlier in the year.  So how does it actually stand up against all the hype?

More-or-less set during a single day (which is surprisingly common for zombie films, unlike most mainstream movies) Dance of the Dead follows a bunch of highly cliche schoolkids as they try to survive the unoriginal zombie attack on their school.  Having been raised from the dead (presumably due to the nearby nuclear power-station) on the evening of the high-school prom, the zombie plague ravages the little town, finally converging on the school.  The Sci-fi club were naturally too nerdy to get dates to this event, but were unfortunately stupid enough to be spending their evening playing Ghostbusters in the nearby cemetery during the zombie uprising.  They have to group together to find all their fellow dateless losers and formulate a plan to come to the rescue of the prom guests.

Pure wish-fulfilment fantasy from start to finish, Dance of the Dead might well have been a script John Hughes accidentally misplaced in the 80’s and rediscovered in 2008.  Losers talking back to teachers, Nerds rescuing cheerleaders, schools exploding, kids saving the day… all this harks back to the glory-days of teen cinema.  The actors here actually are the age they’re playing, the jokes are brilliant and not just tacked on, and the horror is played straight giving the perfect example of how to pitch a horror-comedy.

There are some great scenes here, in particular the grave-rising which reminded me of the motorcycle zombie scene from Dellamorte Dellamore (as did the gravekeeper).  Also we have zombies who actually call for “braaaiiins!” (which is strangely a stereotype that is almost never seen in zombie films), and a cheerleader who turns undead at a particularly unfortunate moment for the geek she is about to ‘romance’.

I found this a great addition to the zombie genre.  Sure, it’s ludicrously unoriginal as everything in this whole film has been done over-and-over elsewhere, but who cares?  It was genuinely funny and brilliantly acted, and the whole package was top class.  I hope that one day people look back on this movie with the same fondness we give to Return of the Living Dead.

Gore Score B-
Norks Score F
Originality Score D
Overall Score A-

 

28 Weeks Later

(Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)One of the classic discussions regarding the 28 days\weeks films is of their legitimacy as Zombie films.  There are numerous pseudo-zombie flicks that I love but would not include in this Blog as they don’t meet the criteria.  Cronenbergs ‘Shivers’ & ‘Rabid’ or the recent ‘I Am Legend’ are such examples, and don’t get me started on The Evil Dead series.  (Why people think of these as Zombie films is beyond me.  They’re people possessed by evil demonic spirits, Sheesh!).  With 28 days\weeks later the decision is tougher.  Yes, they’re still officially alive and yes, they run and don’t shamble.  Also, they apparently die of malnutrition which I don’t recall happening in any other zombie flick.

However, plenty of zombies in movie history have been created by a virus gone wrong, and plenty of zombies race around instead of shuffling like walking corpses.  And besides, if they were bona fide zombies how would either film be any different?  They attack people without prejudice, they can infect the living to become one of them, and the survivors have to hide out, fight or try to escape.  Pretty standard Zombie film methodology if you ask me.  Dead or undead the same would happen.

So, Zombie film credentials met, what about the quality of the film itself?  Well, it starts out with a siege in a boarded up house, people get chased and eaten and a lone survivor flees to safety.  It is then established that the whole zombie plague had encompassed the entire UK, and once the infected bodies have died from hunger the American army are called in to oversee the re-population of the country.  However, predictably this doesn’t go too well.

The whole film is basically a thinly veiled critique of American army politics.  They treat the remaining humans as little more than cattle, part of an assignment that they have no real belief in.  But hey, what else are Zombie films for if not a little satire here and there?

The gore is pretty good for such a mainstream movie – particularly the gruesome helicopter mutilation scene.  The opening siege is also amazing, and the transformation scene from human-to-zombie is probably the best I’ve ever seen.  Coupled with some quality action and decent direction this is a pretty impressive entry into the market.  Whether or not it beats the first film is debatable, and personally I tend to change my mind depending on which one I’ve seen the most recently.  This sequel is a more cohesive movie and certainly doesn’t rip off as much from Day Of The Dead as the first.  But heck, they are both decent movies. – They’re certainly zombie films, just lacking in actual ‘proper’ zombies.

Gore Score B
Norks Score C
Originality Score C
Overall Score B

 

Versus

(Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

I love my Asian zombie films.  Junk and Bio-zombie were reasonably decent if rather cliched, while Wild Zero and Stacy were full on classics.  Then there is Versus – a Zombie film I’ve had on my shelf for some time now waiting for an appropriate time-slot for viewing.  Well, that time arrived the other day after our guests had left the house for the night and my housemate and I were sat wondering what to watch that would suit our alcohol content.  (ie lots of wine\cider).

After the standard battle we usually have with foreign language DVDs (spoken language with subtitles or dubbed into English? – we went the subtitle route) we chilled out ready to enjoy some zombie fighting action.  Well, what we got was a whole film of choreographed gun battles and martial arts, with a few token zombie thrown into the mix.  The story is tosh – some nameless gang dudes kidnap another nameless woman and meet an escaped (nameless) prisoner in a forest.  The prisoner and woman escape into the trees just as the living dead (who have been buried there by the aforementioned gang) return to life.  Now we have loads of gunshots, fights and cool slow-mo posing for the entirety of the film.  Sure, the fights are pretty cool and some of the gunfights are well put together, but that is all that goes on for about 2 hours.  It got so repetitive that my housemate fell asleep and started snoring by the end of it. 

Not that this was a bad film, it was just more John Woo than George Romero, with not nearly enough originality or zombie gut munching to satisfy me.  Maybe I was just expecting a different sort of film, an I may enjoy it on a martial arts gunfight action level next time I watch it.  Oh well, I think I’ll just go watch ‘Stacy’ again instead.

Gore Score C
Norks Score F
Originality Score D
Overall Score C

 

Redneck Zombies

(Also posted at http://www.revenantmagazine.com/)

So, from one end of the Zombie Film spectrum to the other. Redneck Zombies, possibly the trashiest zombie film i’ve seen in a long long time, and about as far removed from the Living Dead at Manchester Morgue as My Chemical Romance is from Quality Music.

To even remotely enjoy this movie you have to appreciate the glory that is Troma : independent cinema of the highest quality. Weighing in at about 0\10 on the acting, script, directing and intellect scale, Redneck Zombies isn’t even the slightest bit bothered about aiming for the mainstream, and all the better for it.

A family of Rednecks come into possession of a barrel of toxic waste (ie – they rob an army guy transporting it loosely on the back of his jeep) and proceed to use the contents to brew up their special brand of Moonshine, which they then send their gender-curious sibling off with to sell to the whole population of the surrounding village. Strangely unperturbed at drinking neon-green liquid out of jamjars that was brewed by inbreds, the locals quaff down the liquid and naturally become radioactive zombies. Unknowing of this turn of events the remaining redneck family decide to sample the brew themselves, which leads to a 10 minute zombie transformation scene, more akin to a cheap neon 80’s music video than a quality zombification (see 28 weeks later for possibly the greatest scene of this ilk).

While everyone is indulging in zombie-moonshine a collection of out-of-towners have descended on the area to go camping, unfortunately pitching up about 100 yards from the zombie chemical still. A couple of the ladies of this group get picked off buy the redneck family in fantastic Troma style (ludicrously over-the-top gore flying all over the place, rubber eyeballs sucked out of plastic skulls, blood and guts smeared all over the floor. You know the drill), leaving the remainder or the group to go hunting for them, discovering and attacking any zombie along the way, some successfully, some less so.

There are some amazing scenes here – the delivery boy discovering a gagged girl in a house of rednecks who is forced to watch a documentary on baby chickens being slaughtered – a couple of inbreds sat watching a close-up pair of norks on TV covered in cream and cherries while they chat in Beavis and Butthead style ‘I like knockers’, ‘yeah, I like knockers too’ – a local woman feeding the green zombie alcohol to her 3 year old son who for some reason is sat in a washing machine. Not to forget the ace Autopsy scene where one of the townies attempts an autopsy on a zombie while high on LSD, and proceeds to hallucinate that each of the organs are actually various props such as human shoes or plastic dolls, before realising what he’s doing and promptly vomiting into the corpses open chest.

Yes it’s trash, yes it’s god-awful, but it’s distributed by Troma so you should know what you’re letting yourself in for. Hell, it’s better than Buttcrack at least.

Gore Score B
Norks Score D
Originality Score C
Overall Score C