Deadgirl

How best to discuss this unusual little number then? Shall I talk about the theme of unhealthy obsessions, and how such neuroses affects you and those around you? Should I approach it as a commentary on male teenagers and their dehumanisation of the female? Or shall I just take my standard approach and chat about this film as it really is : 3 kids finding a zombie tied up in a basement and using her as their own sex toy?

Yes, who hasn’t dreamt of finding a naked and rotting undead corpse tied up in an abandoned hospital and what you could do with such a Discovery? Obviously the last thing to cross your mind would be to report such a unreal scene the police. No, you’d decide to keep hold of it and visit ‘her’ every evening with your mates to play an elaborate game of hide the sausage. Heck, if you did find yourself in such a situation not only would you not be ashamed of your actions, you’d positively revel in it, so much so that you’d want your mates to stand around and watch while you violently defile the trussed up zombie.

It’s a strange situation our characters find themselves in for sure. Rickie and J.T. nip out of school to go boozing in an abandoned hospital. After getting smashed on one 6 pack of transparent beer between them they wander off exploring the building. Among all the smashed windows they discover a much more unusual sight : an unexplained bound naked zombie female on an operating table. Sure, they’re not the luckiest lads when it comes to love, and for our star who has pined over some ginger lass for his whole childhood it even crosses his mind that romancing the undead could be a valid lifestyle choice. Not so for J.T. – he doesn’t even need to think about it, this is the opportunity he’s been waiting for! His own sex slave, albeit slightly rotting and disgusting. Hell, there are worse lookers out there I suppose.

It all goes pretty gross as you’d imagine. People start to hear about this bizarre situation and want some of it for themselves. Dogs get eaten, teenagers lose their intestines, and our ‘heroes’ get beaten up by a tough lady after whacking her over the head with a tire iron on one of their rare excursions away from the freaky zombie.

Depending on how you look at it it’s either a very brave and unique zombie film with numerous fascinating underlying themes, or it’s a sick film of teenager-zombie rape. Either way it’s a great original movie that will certainly stay with you forever. Hmm, maybe that’s not such a good thing after all…

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

 

Zombiegeddon

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

At last, a decent Zombie Movie! After a few weeks of boring unoriginal zombie flicks I felt I needed a reboot so turned to Troma to help me out of the lull. Thankfully Zombiegeddon delivers the trash I have been craving, and more.

The plot of Zombiegeddon is just some insane nonsense about the Devil summoning up a bunch of zombies to wipe out the whole population, but it is basically just an excuse to get from set-piece to set-piece, with a bunch of b-movie celebrity cameos thrown in for good measure. We have Jesus Christ (Tom Savini) in bed with Brinke Stevens, Lloyd Kaufman as a cowardly caretaker and Linnea Quigley as a school principal. There is a zombie hunter who takes his son and his pet zombie-eating tiger out on patrol with him, some incredibly corrupt cops who just murder innocent people for kicks and a cop vs zombie kung-fu fight!

The highlights for me were Lloyd Kaufman’s homophobic janitor who mistakes the zombies for some homosexuals, and runs off to hide in a closet for the remainder of the film, as well as a scene where the 2 cops pull over a carload of boys using some very suspect interrogation techniques.

If it were to be judged on technical merit then it would fail abysmally. The quality of the filming here is pretty dire, with some bottom-drawer acting, terrible sound recording and laughably bad gore (seriously, I swear I saw the bucket come into view when a load of blood was spurted\thrown onto a wall), but none of this matters when you’re watching a who’s who of trashy horror complete with a zombie-eating tiger in it.

For extra laughs I highly recommend reading some of the user reviews on the IMDB site for this film. Seriously, some people just don’t get it.

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

 

Exhumed

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

So there I was, sat in a crummy hotel room in London on my own on the ‘lavish’ single bed with the TV’s On-Screen Program Guide covering up the whole picture so I can only hear the sound in the background. Oh well, why not get some wine in and watch the only DVD I have with me on my laptop. ‘Exhumed’. It turns out that I should have chosen to watch the static program guide instead, to be honest.

Exhumed is a turgid anthology of semi-zombie horror. 3 totally random episodes with nothing in common apart from a bizarre cobbled-together ending that pretends to tie the stories together. Firstly there is the dull story about some Japanese dude and a monk wandering in a forest looking for some artifact that can bring the dead back to life. Luckily it’s all in Japanese which masks how bad the acting really is, but it was far from classic – The fight scenes and the looks into camera were pretty dire. There are a few zombies dotted around the forest who get killed off, but there are no scares or even any excitement.

Secondly is a strange black and white noir-style film, which features some of the most appalling acting I have ever seen. It follows the adventure of some private detective lass who joins a seedy club to investigate a missing persons case, I believe. However I spent most of this section of the film with my jaw on the floor amazed at just how terrible the performances actually were while knocking back the wine that I missed out on most of the excitement, if there was any. Seriously, it was like watching a children’s school play rehearsal.

Long after my interest had faded into nothingness came the 3rd in the anthology. It seems to be set in the future with some vampires and werewolves fighting about something-or-other. This is the episode with some actual gore, but it was so amateur in it’s execution and I was so bored at this time that I couldn’t care less about any of it. Even when the chainsaw is brought out to slice up some fake body-parts I was thinking of turning this abomination off. However I stuck it out and was mildly amused when the vampire : werewolf lesbian scene kicked off, but it wasn’t enough keep me entertained and I turned the film off and curled up in the small hotel bed.

I did watch most of the final scene the next day on my train home, but was so embarrased to be seen watching it in public that I switched it off and went surfing for porn instead.

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

 

Undead Or Alive

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

I had to check once or twice that I didn’t already own this movie, as it seems suspiciously similar to one of my previous films ‘The Quick and the Undead‘. It shares a similar looking sleeve design, a Western setting, a terrible pun title and was also a cheapo supermarket-shelf bought DVD, but no, this is a different movie. Whether or not it is any better is debatable though.

I have mentioned before how I loathe the Portmanteau ‘Zombedy’, but at least that was only used by writers as a shorthand description for a zombie-comedy. However, when films start to use that term in their own opening credits then I know that I’m not in for a good thing. It is particularly annoying when the comedy present is about as funny as it would be to wear cowboy-boots with the spurs on the inside. Maybe I can coin my own term of “Painfulny”, or ‘Painfully-Unfunny’, for that is more accurate. Never before have I watched a film that tries with every single word uttered to be amusing, but fails so miserably it almost becomes unbearable after the first 10 minutes.

It’s not just the script that is disgraceful, but the comedy set-pieces too. A guy gets invited into a lake with a young lass, so cue the Benny-Hill sped up footage as he undresses! A zombie gets his foot stuck in a bucket and then stands on a rake which whacks him in the face! The heroes end up in a dark basement so to be able to see they light a match, only to hilariously discover there are loads of Dynamite barrels down here! Wow, it’s like Elmer Fudd humour here.

Anyway, the plot. Well a cowboy has somehow been infected with Geronimo’s white-man curse which caused him to turn zombie and eat his family. He gets locked up by the Sherriff, but managed to bite a few people in the process. The two heroes of the film have just escaped from this jail and the Sherriff and co try to track them down but get infected before even leaving town. The rest of the film follows these zombie sheriffs chasing the two heroes across the plains as they try to get somewhere or other. Oh yes, there’s a private-schooled Native American woman along for the ride too.

Without the painful comedy this would have just been a rubbish zombie movie, but the humour is so bad that it drags the whole film down by several notches. There is some potential here – a zombie sheriff who can track by smell and never slows, never stops until he catches his prey could be a genuinely unnerving movie – but that’s not how it pans out here. It’s just utterly painful from start to finish. The gore is mostly rubbish (when someone does get bitten the camera flashes and cuts so much that you barely see anything), the soundtrack is cheesy beyond belief (and not in a good way – we’re talking heartfelt ballads here) and it’s all just irritating. Maybe we’ll get a good zombie western sometime, but judging by this effort it’s probably a long way off.

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

 

Choking Hazard

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

I can count the number of Czech films I’ve ever seen on the fingers of one stumpy fingerless hand. Well that would equate to zero, whereas actually I mean one. This film to be precise.  Naturally this makes it both the best and the worst Czech film I’ve ever seen, and in the grand scale of zombie movies this rates somewhere… in the middle.

A bunch of students shack up in a mostly abandoned hotel to discuss the meaning of life. Bizarrely a Porn Star / Jehovah’s Witness dude rocks on up at the motel by accident and gets wrapped up in all the metaphysical discussions, although I don’t recall him ever discussing how he can be both a Porn star and a Jehovah Witness at the same time. But hey, at least he seems passionate about both lifestyles.

Anyway, the film is not particularly scary, there is not much gore, and the nudity is also below par.  So what’s left?  Well the actual story, direction and plot are actually pretty decent. There are plenty of unusual scenes going on here – such as the electroshock zombie dance – which is as ludicrous as it is entertaining.  In fact the whole film is like that.  It’s pretty bizarre, nothing makes much sense, but it’s quite enjoyable none-the-less.  Nobody involved seems too bothered that Zombies have started attacking everyone, there are no reasons given for this outbreak, and nobody is remotely concerned about what will happen after this whole hotel zombie affair has ended.

Also I seem to have missed out on the philosophical viewpoints in this film, probably because I watched the (Czech language subtitled in English) film late at night and had a fair few glasses of wine inside me, but apparently the point is that the Religious get their heads bashed in while the Nihilists get to copulate with numerous ladies while filming it on portable cameras.  Well, that seems fair enough.  There were other worldviews on offer but I guess they weren’t as memorable.  I did like the zombie with a massive saucepan on his head that had a smiley face drawn on the front, but I don’t know what that means.  Probably something to do with Communism.

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

 

Shadow : Dead Riot

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

Zombies and Prisons have produced some reasonably decent films in the past. Well, I say ‘reasonably decent’ meaning that ‘Zombie Death House’ and ‘Dead Men Walking’ were not as poor as I had expected.  Surely these films could only have been improved by changing the location to a women’s prison?  And how about chucking in a famous horror actor as lead zombie?

Well, the women’s prison angle works just as expected, meaning lots of pointless shower scenes and chicks with obvious stick-on tattoos fighting and moaning.  It’s a pity that none of them are particularly easy on the eye, particularly the butch muscly woman ‘Mondo’ who seems to have modelled herself on Dennis Rodman.  Mmm, Attractive! Still, none of them are particularly modest and have no qualms wandering into camera shot with their norks on display, and so the first hour of the film is a pretty good laugh, although light on the actual horror.

After about an hour we get introduced to the star zombie – Tony Todd of Candyman fame – who is resurrected when one of the prisoners accidently gives birth over the spot where he was buried (although he had died due to spectacular exploding, so I’m not quite sure what was left of him to bury. Anyway…)  Candyman brings back a bunch of his zombie mates and they start to terrorise the prisoners while he hunts down the female ‘Solitare’ for a reason that doesn’t make any sense.  He killed her Mum apparently, and that forged a connection of some sort with the child.  OK then.

One of the great things about undead movies is that the Zombies themselves are never really the stars, they just represent a generic ‘bad’ that the heroes have to overcome.  Introducing a main zombie personality takes the focus away from the struggle against the zombies and focuses it onto a specific character, meaning that it might as well be a standard serial killer type movie, which is all this really is albeit with a dumb supernatural twist.  Chuck in some terrible acting, cheap fight choreography and a nonsense (even by zombie movie standard) plot and what do you get?  Well aside from the copious full frontal nudity, not very much.

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

 

The Serpent And The Rainbow

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

Wow, a zombie movie more-or-less based on a true story?  Made by a famous director?  Featuring a famous and ubiqutious lead star?  Oh yes, there are no toxic-waste spewing, brain-chomping undead rotters in this 1980’s flick.  Hot on the heels of the awesome ‘Spaceballs’, Bill Pulman kicks off his 3-random-films-every-single-year-from-then-until-eternity career with this Haiti set real life voodoo exploration.

Having been attacked, drugged by a creepy voodoo Bokor and then stalked by jaguars in Haiti just after the opening credits, Bill Pulman returns to the US only to be told that he has to head back to the country to root out some mystic death-faking (ie zombie) drug that could be used by the American government for some reason.  (Probably for misguided and unexplained military purposes, as is the way in zombie movies.)

Anyway, old Bill turns up over in Haiti and starts hanging out with some doctor lass who he surprisingly takes a liking too, even going so far as boning her under a waterfall. However, being the only white dude in the country he attracts suspicion from the local government and they take it upon themselves to attack, drug and then provide him a (slightly unwanted) scrotal body piercing service.  Still, at least it was free, eh?

Thankfully he manages to get up and about the place following this incident, and goes about his task of trying to find this magic zombie anaesthetic while still getting his end away with the doctor chick and hallucinating quite a bit on a daily basis.  He still gets chased around by the evil baddies though, it’d be boring if the just let him go and forgot about him.

The Serpent And The Rainbow was a really enjoyable affair. While a decent thriller in its own right, it’s also good to see a film that truly goes back to the roots of zombie culture, which this film does better than any film I’ve ever seen that’s not in black & white.  Educational, bloody, and a great ‘zombie rising from the grave to grab Bill Pullmans crotch’ scene.  What else could you wish for?  (Well ok yes, there are even Norks in this too).

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

 

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+

 

Vengeance of the Zombies

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

What are the prime ingredients for my favourite Zombie movies?  Made in the 1970’s – Check.  Terrible overdubbing – Check.  Rubbish effects – Check.  Unnecessary nudity – Check.  Yes, everything in Vengeance of the Zombies is present and correct.  Infact there are even more ludicrous elements to this movie, of particular note the daft jazzy score which plays over many of the tenser moments, totally ruining any sense of suspense or horror.

Aside from these novelty moments, Vengeance of the Zombies actually has a reasonably decent story of a particularly old-school living dead nature.  A mysterious voodoo master dressed incredibly similarly to ‘V’ from ‘V for Vendetta’ – mask and all – is murdering a bunch of people using a few zombie ladies he’s resurrected and some wax voodoo dolls for good measure.

Elvira falls victim to these voodoo shenanigans but luckily manages to escape while her father gets killed off instead.  To come to terms with this bereavement she decides to get out of the city and head to a little English village to shack up with her Buddhist teacher, who she also has the hots for.  However it appears that the voodoo trickster has followed her there and the bizarre killings continue.  It probably doesn’t help matters that the house Krishna the Buddhist is living in has an infamous history for debauched Satanic worshiping and murder.  Oh well.

OK, so the story is reasonable enough and the acting is of an acceptable standard, but overall it’s not really that gripping.  Unless some back story was edited out of my really terrible ripped from VHS DVD version there is not a hope that you’ll ever guess who the voodoo master is or what his motivation is until the big reveal at the end.  Not that it matters really, these Eurohorrors are best viewed for the cheesy nonsense, of which this has plenty.  It’s worth watching for the soundtrack alone.

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

 

Hide and Creep

I want to find out who invented the idea of a Zombie Comedy (and more importantly who coined the term “Zomedy”) and punch them in their stupid face.  It’s probably the same person who thought that ‘Vampires’ and ‘Romantic Movie’ would be a great combination.  Oh. My. God.  Zombies are rotting corpses that eat people.  Vampires wear stupid cloaks and chew on peoples necks.  Where’s the comedy or romance in that?

Still I can’t complain too hard because, like everyone, I love Shaun of the Dead.

Anyway, let us depart from the irrelevant, dubious and obviously drunken grammar\punctuation and get back to the film in hand.

Hide and Creep is a comedy zombie movie, but despite all that it is one of the most enjoyable zombie flicks I’ve watched in a good long time, and possibly the most dead-pan zombie comedy I have ever seen.

Sure, there is not one iota of originality in the whole film. Rednecks, government agents, strippers…  They are all present and correct, but it’s all done so well and should be a lesson to all wannabe zombie movie makers out there.

Hey, if a film can open with a chubby ugly naked dude with his wanger on show and yet still keep me interested in the movie then there’s something going for it.  It’s a pity the director had to combine it with his own ego project and cast himself as a wannabe-Tarantino-dialogue-spouting hero, but hey, if it’s your film then do what you want.  At least he made a decent film, even though he was boring and predictable in it.

Oh yeah, the film itself…  Well, the plot from Plan 9 From Outer Space comes true, and a bunch of dead rednecks come back to life as zombies, and the living hicks have to defend themselves and the town from undead invasion.  That’s pretty much it, except that the script, characters, acting and even direction are amazingly good for such a low budget film.  Plus it has lesbian zombies in it, which cannot be a bad thing.

Gore Score C+
Norks Score B-
Originality Store C-
Overall Score B+