Posts Tagged Zombies
SOZ Review #9: The Dead Pit
In the 80′s when Mom and Pop video stores were king(before Blockbuster conquered and long before Netflix dethroned Blockbuster) renting a movie consisted of wandering the aisles gazing at the now seemingly Cinder-block-sized VHS cases and their cover art. A few covers from that era always stuck in mind: Ghoulies with that ridiculous creature emerging from a toilet, Bad Dreams with that rotting hand clasped over that girls mouth, Sleepaway Camp for its simple knife through the sneaker approach, and The Dead Pit with that zombie rising from a green glowing hole and a horde of his friends in toe. With that image stuck in my mind and being such a die hard Zombie fan I’m surprised I didn’t view this one sooner, but somehow The Dead Pit (1989) always slipped through the cracks.
Since The Dead Pit is in the last year of the 80s and thus at the tail end of the first rise of Zombie popularity, the movie carries a lot of negatives because of the influences of the time. On a basic visual level, by 89′ most of the grainy feel, which prompted me to start this series in the first place, is gone. Also, The cover art is misleading as the zombie segment only occurs in the last one-fourth of the film and the majority of the movie follows more of a slasher format.
Dead Pit’s slasher is mostly referred to as “The Surgeon,” who was once a brilliant neuron-surgeon that turned to performing dark occult experiments on the asylum’s patients . Of course, one of his colleagues, Dr. Swan (Jeremy Slate), discovers his plot and shoots him in head then seals him up in the basement where his dark experiments went down. From here, we fast-forward 20 years to when a young women with amnesia, Jane-Doe (Cheryl Lawson), is emitted to the hospital. Upon her arrival an earth quake occurs and breaks the seal that was holding the demon. Apparently, Spackle and a new paint job can imprison demons.
Regardless, the next hour follows Jane as she tries to piece her past together and deal with her chronic nightmares of “The Surgeon” as even her waking life is haunted by glimpses of him wandering the grounds. While Dr. Swan tries to help Jane remember her real identity, the demon surgeon stalks the ward at night with his Lee-Press-on nails claws and Rudolph red glowing eyes, picking off the staff one by one and resuming his work by submitting them to his brain scrambling experiments.
This formula goes on long enough for zombies fans to start looking at their watch and wondering if the box art had lied to them, but eventually, after kidnapping Jane, the surgeon lets loose his zombie horde on the hospital. The zombie unleash typical attacks on hapless staff and inmates, but their function is cryptic. Instead of eating brains the creatures pull them from their victims and just tend to stare at them.
With Zombies running around staring at brains, Swan comes to terms with the fact that he has to try to defeat his old colleague once again, and Jane teams up with another patient trying to find a means of destroying the evil. Long-Story-short: Swan fail, but one of the loonies is a Nun whose creation of holy water seems to have an instant-melt effect–wicked Witch of the West style– (yeah they’re going that route), and Jane’s fellow inmate, Chris, happens to be an ex-military demolitions expert that notices the facility has a giant water tower on site. I’m sure you can add up the clues to the end game from here.
Nurse, is this really the standard Asylum issue clothing?
The rest of the movie relies on the twist about who Jane Doe really is, which is fairly obvious to anyone whose brain hasn’t been ripped out and stared at by zombies. Overall, it’s not a zombie movie, and pretty hokey slasher. While the Slasher/Zombie movie blend is an interesting marketing technique the true selling point of the flick seems to be about Cheryl Lawson running around in a skin-tight cropped t-shirt and high cut white panties. If you don’t believe it then you will after a dream sequence where the Nurse Ratchet want-to-be ties her up with leather straps and shoots her with a fire host that eventually strips her clothes off. Even though this scene has absolutely nothing to due with the plot it’s actually portrayed on a few of the marketing posters. Needless to say this film covered its bases when trying to market to several different types of horror movie going fans.
S.O.Z RATING 14 of 30—Average. Too multi-genre. Too far separated from the height of the Zombie Craze. Too much damn red glow on the eyes.
This is a deep symbolic methaphor, Right?
Grainy Value- 1 of 5
Scary – 2 of 5
Atmosphere- 3 of 5
Gore- 4 of 5* Lots of Brain imagery.
Camp Value- 2 of 5
Zombies Kills- 2 of 5 * Only the damn holy water, but melting is kinda cool…I guess
SOZ Review #8: The Grapes of Death
No, John Steinbeck didn’t write a Zombie movie after he won the Pulitzer, and no this isn’t another Pride, Prejudice and Zombies deal. Instead, Grapes of Death (1978) is a rare entry coming from France instead of its usual Zombie prolific neighbor Italy, which begs the questions if there’s going to be a zombie plague in France what’s going to cause it? Well, Wine, of course.
The foreshadowing rich opening of Grapes portrays laborers at a vineyard spraying a new pesticide on the grapes that will be used for this year’s Wine Tasting Festival. One of the workers starts to complain about a mysterious fever and headache coming over him, and the dark clouds are already gathering on the horizon. Then we cut to our Protagonist, Elisabeth, who is riding across the wine country on an empty train with her friend Bridgette in an attempt to reach her fiance who is a foreman at the vineyards. 
All is peachy, until the train stops at a station, and a lone man infected by the sour grapes boards. Bridgette leaves Elisabeth to go to the bathroom and the newcomer sits across from Elisabeth even though the entire train is empty. Elisabeth tries to ignore his strange behavior, but then notices that this man is itching a bit. Then an open wound appears on his neck. Then most of his face starts to melt off. Elisabeth high-tails out of there just in time to avoid being grabbed and flees down the hallway to discover Bridgette dead on the floor. She pulls one of the Train’s emergency brakes and flees off into the country.
The plot becomes pretty episodic from here. First, Elisabeth discovers a father and daughter that are acting strangely, not responding to her accounts of the murder on the train, and eventually she is coaxed to rest upstairs where she finds the wife and mother of the household with her throat slit. Before Elisabeth can scream the daughter covers her mouth and explains that her father is infected and they both need to escape. Of course, that plan goes south quickly, but Elisabeth makes it out okay. The daughter…Well not so much.
Elisabeth drives on and discovers a blind woman, Lucy, wondering about the countryside and agrees to lead her back to her village only to discover that the place has been ravaged by violence. She tries to convince Lucy that they need to stay inside, but Lucy breaks off in search of her lost love, instead she runs into the arms of the zombie horde. Her lost love shows up just in time, but he’s infected also, bummer. 
By the time Elisabeth arrives on the scene, Lucy’s ex-lover has crucified her on the back of door and proceeds to decapitate her. Elisabeth decides that when heads starts to roll so should she and attempts to escape, but is grabbed by someone. When she realizes what has occurred she finds she has been dragged into a home by a strange woman in a white dress that shows no sign of infection, but is clearly nuts. Of course, the woman is with the insane outside and eventually tricks Elisabeth and turns her over to the zombie horde.
The woman in the white dress segment ends as abruptly as it begins when two new survivors, Paul and Lucien, ride in with shotguns and dynamite to rescue Elisabeth, but the incident sticks out like a sore thumb against an otherwise straight-forward The Crazies type plot. Since the rest of Grapes features people made homicidal from a chemical, a witchy woman in a white gown walking around with two dogs in front of her like a queen of the undead figure doesn’t really fit, especially since no one ever give us a reasonable explanation why she is immune to the rotting and why she seems more sound of mind, wily than the others.
Aside from that odd curve, the movie tends to follow the typical arch of a person traveling through a post-apocalyptic zombie setting. While the incident seems pretty containable and not all that contagious, (Just don’t drink the damn wine) Elisabeth’s struggles for survival are identifiable and the violent hordes are creepy in their own way. Even though the climax is little hard to buy, the rest of the film is enjoyable, but definitely not highly recommended for the fast paced zombie movie watcher as this piece has more wandering through open country than Fellowship of the Ring. Still, you can’t beat a good old fashion Crucifixion once in a while.
S.O.Z RATING 21 of 30— More an “Infected” movie than walking dead, slowed paced, but not terrible either.
What do you mean my Character is Tonally awkward?
Grainy Value- 5 of 5
Scary – 2 of 5
Atmosphere- 5 of 5
Gore- 5 of 5* What’s better than a Crucifixion
Camp Value- 2 of 5* bonus point for hokey white dress woman, otherwise not campy at all.
Zombies Kills- 2 of 5 *a few bite it but nothing special
SOZ Review #7: Oasis of the Living Dead
As we begin August, I like to delude myself and try to believe that there can’t be worse zombies than the soulless garbage I’ve watched thus far, but just as there’s always a more disgusting corpse waiting around the corner to bite your ass, there’s always a worse zombie film. Oasis of the Living Dead, or BLOODSUCKING NAZI ZOMBIES, or OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES or, TREASURE OF THE LIVING DEAD or, GRAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD or, THE WALKING NAZI DEAD (maybe they thought more names would help) made me realize two things: one, you can pretty much add zombies to any storyline, and two, there is an entire sub-genre of zombie Nazi films, but for the sake of this review we’ll focus on Oasis.
Oasis of the Living Dead (1981) seems to be the product of a mind that thought Lawrence of Arabia (1962) would have been better with zombies. The story centers around a WWII veteran that ambushed a Nazi caravan at an oasis in the deserts of Turkey, but after the battle nearly claimed his life he has to be nursed back to health by a wealthy local whose daughter he ultimately falls in love with and fathers her child. Flash forward to the present: the movie begins with two dippy tourist girls wandering into the remains of this “Oasis” where evil has taken hold and the slain Nazis are a tad on the restless side. What do two young women wandering around the Oasis have to do with the plot? Nothing, but the opening cinematography needs shameless T&A (I’m talking the camera focuses on their shorty-shorts for a count of twelve seconds without making the effort to pretend its pointing at anything else) and an early body count. Their nice young flesh that we’ve wasted several minutes on is ripped off and we return to the long back story.
Our hero of the Middle-Eastern sands receives a visit from an his old colonel who after doing some research has realized that the caravan, which his old friend defeated during the war, was carrying a few million in gold. Of course, after the colonel coaxes his friend to give him the location of the Oasis, which I guess is secret to anyone that doesn’t look good in shorty-shorts, he kills him and heads off to claim the gold all for himself. Wasn’t that guy the protagonist? Nope, I guess not.
Enter Robert, the newly betrayed and deceased guy’s son. Learning of his father’s death, Robert get his hands on his father’s diary and learns of the past, which plays out in typical old war flick fashion to the point we forget that there’s zombies or shameless T&A in this film. After learning of his father’s past, Robert also decides that it might behoove him to head out to the desert and take his shot at those piles of Nazi gold. With his girlfriend, a school buddy and his professor, Roberts sets off for Turkey in search of untold wealth.
From here on, a lot of typical stuff happens: the dude that offed Robert’s father gets his come-upings at the hands of the undead, Robert’s buddy meets a girl that he gets to bang repeatedly in order to keep the T&A quota filled and hide the fact that the movie is horrible, and of course Robert meets his grandfather in the stereotypical it-was-his-destiny kinda way.
Unfortunately, Grandpa,who knows the dangers that the Oasis holds, is still willing to give his newly met next of kin the directions to the Oasis full of zombies. Either Dharma or Karma or a weak plot deems it so, and with that the group is off to the climax.
The final showdown of Robert’s peeps versus the zombies is a mess of awful cinematography that dilutes logic and baffles the mind. Maybe it was a way to hide the fact that they couldn’t afford special effects, but when you’re defensive scheme was to make a ring of fire out of gasoline you would think that your entire party would stand inside that ring where it was remotely safe. Instead, Robert’s buddy’s bang-toy runs around in idiotic circle while the camera man (who must be drunk) makes it confusing to tell where the hell she thought she going other than down a zombie’s throat in bite sized pieces.
While this mess is going on, Robert tosses molotov cocktails at his attackers (which hilariously make the same noise that the grenades made in the WWII flashbacks. Couldn’t afford a second sound F/X huh?) and tries to drag his half fainting girlfriend to safety. Someone yells that they only have to hold their lines until dawn because the zombies vanish in the sun. I guess they expect us to forget that the two shorty-short girls were killed in the DAY TIME! Regardless, the sun rises and the zombies fade off into nothingness.
Grandpa rides in on his camel the next morning to discover that his grandson is alright and has even managed to keep his pretty much worthless girlfriend alive. He asks him “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes, myself.” Robert replies and they ride off. Wow! This movie must be deep to end on such a profound quote. Oh good! Good for you, jerk. You got your best friend killed, your professor killed, your girlfriend is going need therapy for the rest of her life, but you found yourself. Wasn’t the whole idea of this little adventure, money? Did you not notice when you got to Grandpa’s house that he lived in a God damn palace? Maybe, you should have stopped there, especially when gramps told you the place you were going was full of freaking flesh eating undead Nazis!
I guess if you took a gander at these zombies though, you might be more amused than scared as they are only paper mache heads with blow up dolls mouth and painted ping-pong balls for eyes. However, if the appearance of the zombies was my biggest compliant then this movie would be an instant cult classic. Either way, its good for a laugh and disgraceful to both zombie movies and war movies everywhere. It takes real talent to put on a nasty stain on more than one genre with just one film.
S.O.Z RATING 10 of 30— Barely worth double digits. Don’t be like me and Robert – stay away from the damn Oasis!
Grainy Value- 4 of 5
Scary – 1 of 5
Atmosphere- 1 of 5
Gore- 1 of 5
Camp Value- 2 of 5 *Funny bad, but takes itself too seriously
Zombies Kills- 1 of 5 *nothing but Molotovs
It’s ‘Bout Freaking Time
Posted by Chris in Television, Zombies on August 1st, 2010
Cable Television has had the ability to support about about five thousand and one vampire dramas over the years, from Forever Knight to True Blood, it has been fine to squeeze blood out of overplayed stereotypes to pander to an audience. If blood suckers and sex can carry a supernatural night time soap opera than why have us zombie people never got a flesh covered bone thrown our way? Well at this year’s Comic-Con, AMC said “Why Not?”
AMC unveiled their plan to premiere a drama, The Walking Dead, that will follow survivors in a world with too many corpses with the munchies. From what the trailer and the website have to offer, it looks like its going to deliver the goods, but we’ll all have to wait until October to find out.
Check out the bootlegged trailer straight from Comic-Con here.
SOZ Review #5: Night of the Comet
Posted by Chris in Reviews, Uncategorized, Zombies on July 17th, 2010
If The Breakfast Club had zombies then each of the eighties stereotyped characters would probably have been armed with Uzis instead of wise cracks, and the final cut of the film would have been pretty close to Night of the Comet (1984). Being born in 80′, I’ve heard the title tossed around hundreds of times, but somehow I never sat down and watched it. Doing so twenty-six years separated made this film more hilarious than it ever was intended to be. 80s culture is hard to believe as a reality even after having lived through them.
NOTC has the quality of Laser Tag: fun but clearly entertainment from another age much like the graphically challenged Tempest arcade game that our typical 80s tom-boy heroine protagonist “Reggie” is trying to land the high score on when the film begins. Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) is an employee at the local movie theater where she often has romps in the attic of the theater with her projectionist boyfriend. The movie begins on one such evening where instead of going to see the passing the comet she stays at work and sleeps with her boyfriend. Before doing so, she calls her little sister to provide her “evil step mother” with an excuse.
Her big-haired blond ditsy cheerleader sister, clad in leg warmers and workout spandex, has a big altercation with their evil step mom over the issue and ends up on the losing the end of a slap boxing match, which encourages her to sleep outside in the tool shed. Everyone else in town stays out to party and watch the comet fly past. Morning comes and all seems well until Reggie ventures out side and finds that everyone is either been turned to dust or zombified. Reggie hurries home to find her sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) has also somehow survived and they use their superior valley girl intellects to figure out some crazy plot point about both sleeping the night in structures made of steel being the factor that saved their lives…it really doesn’t matter.
From here on out, a mix of post-apocalyptic fun unfolds, but other than the initial scene outside here Reggie discovers her boyfriend being eaten by a zombie–and a talking zombie at that– this isn’t really a zombie film. Well to be fair, Sam is attacked by three cop zombies but only in back to back “false scare” dream sequences and those three zombies inhabiting the nightmare make up half of the whopping grand total of six zombies in this film. However, the creatures are talked about as if they are everywhere. When Reggie and Sam discover another survivor, Hector (Robert Beltran), at the radio station, he tells the girls a group of zombies ate the girl that he drove into the city with.
Don't Worry Its only a Dream... Again
With mostly Zombies being only talked about, the remainder of the film is basically filled with the usual post apocalyptic conventions, evil government organizations with dark plots, strange cults that hide in malls, public target practice with automatic weapons, and even an 80′s verison of the Dawn of the Dead 78‘ shopping Montague, but this one is set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Did I mention this movie was made in the 80s?
After the Montague ends, the girls lose a gun battle to the weird mall cult and end up chained up in the basement and forced to play Russian Roulette only to be saved by the evil government group that also wishes them harm. Hector, before the montage, headed home to find out the fate of his family. Instead, he encounters “ONE” zombie child who he escapes from by getting back in his truck and heading back to LA to reunite with the girls.
The climax involves a big show down at a shady HQ military base where hopefully Hector will arrive in time to save the day…yada yada…and there’s a couple more zombies on screen for a few seconds. In typical 80s fashions, the good guys win with a boom and the audience is treated with a witty light-hearted epilogue that delivers a punchline to a joke started in the first five minutes of the flick. Hooray-8os!
Being a child of 1980 and growing up with films like Mannequin, FootLoose, Gremlins, Big Trouble in Little China, and, of course, The Goonies, it is difficult for me not to enjoy an 80s movie that I haven’t seen yet because the nostalgic atmosphere is very overpowering. NOTC is overflowing with eighties conventions and enjoyable for nostalgic value but fails as miserably as a zombie film. Far from the 80′s Shaun of the Dead, NOTC should just be an 80′s post-apocalyptic spoof movie, but since we we live in a digitally sub-divided film rental world this one is always going to find its way into Zombie horror. Thus, allow me to educate: its a far stretch to be called a zombie film, but if you like 80s foolishness and zombies than it should please.
S.O.Z RATING 12 of 30— Low score because its classified wrong, but still fun for those who understand and appreciate the 80s
Grainy Value- 3 of 5
Scary – 1 of 5
Atmosphere- 1 of 5
Gore- 1 of 5
Camp Value- 5 of 5
Zombies Kills- 1 of 5
SOZ Review #4: Zombie Holocaust AKA Zombie 3
Connoisseurs of the zombie genre might scratch their head to see another movie with the title Zombie 3 as most fans of the Zombie movies know that they are a production of Luci Fulci. Well there’s a long web of confusion involving Romero’s Dawn (1978) being called Zombie in Europe so Fulci’s Zombie (79) had to be called Zombie 2 in Europe from which he eventually launched his own sequel, Zombi 3(1988), and the missing “e” is not a typo. So what the hell is this Zombie Holocaust: Zombie 3 (1980) with the “e”?
Well, After Romero and Fulci’s success. The dude that bank rolled Fulci’s Zombie in 79′ ,Fabrizio De Angelis, decided he was going to whip up another Zombie film in an exotic location to try and squeeze a little bit more moolah out of the Zombie fan base. Can you telling by watching this film that it was just a sad attempt to tug the cash cow’s utters? Ab-so-freakin-lutely!
Holocaust is the most half-assed excuse for writing that I’ve seen in a long time. Basically, we start off in New York where a police investigation of body parts being stolen from NY hospitals leads to an island of cannibals and one evil doctor. The protagonist Lori Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) is a pretty, blond anthropologist that is dragged along on this expedition because one scene of her getting naked in New York is clearly not enough, and there will be endless ways to have her prance around nude once we get her to an exotic island.
Once the team lands on the island, People start to vanish, turning up dead in typical zombie fan feeding scenes, but oddly enough the zombies are not the ones doing the feeding. Instead, the tribal cannibal locals are the ones cutting open flesh with primitive knives and chowing down on human organs. So where are the zombies in this Zombie Holocaust? Wait for it….
Eventually, Lori and her team are ambushed by cannibals; leaving some ripped to shreds and others struggling for their lives, but, when all hope seems to be lost, humanoid figures with bad make-up jobs and worse dental plans stumble into the frame and scare the cannibals away with robotic moans. The team member most likely to be Lori’s love interest, Dr. Peter Chandler, says something along the line of “wow the natives must be scared of them.” A greater no shit-Sherlock award has never been given. He continues to surmise that something mysterious is going on with the island, and I stand corrected once more.
The plot winds on to reveal the doctor that was their contact on the island is really an evil mad scientist creating the seven “zombies,” – I use the word loosely – actually featured in this film as an attempt to extend the human life span one hundred years..yada yada. Really, Fabi-De-Angelis just spun the cliche wheel and it landed on “mad scientist,” so this is the plot he decided would house his pointless feeding scenes and as much of Alexandra Delli Colli naked as his contrived story line could handle.
Not much more I can say about this piece. It is very typical of Want-to-be Fucli Italian Zombie horror: lots of nudity, lots of gore, but no substance.
S.O.Z RATING 14 of 30— If you can watch buckets of gore and Alexandra Delli Colli take off her underwear and unhook her garter belt all day long then this is your movie! Look elsewhere if you want a plot to follow a shred of logic or any shadow of a thought to echo in you head while watching.
Grainy Value- 3 of 5
Scary – 1 of 5
Atmosphere- 1 of 5
Gore- 5 of 5 * only cause there’s lots of it
Camp Value- 2 of 5
Zombies Kills- 2 of 5 * should be a one but 1+ bonus point for boat motor to the head.
SOZ Review #3: Nightmare City AKA City of Walking Dead
Ever wonder what would happen if you combine The Toxic Avenger with The Crazies? Well, of course not, nobody should have, but I guess somebody did when they designed the plot and foot soldiers of Nightmare City. Another film from 1980, NC is another one of those movies that stretches zombie horror into that sub-category of hordes of infected individuals who kill, but aren’t undead. While these movies tend to produce the same sort of post-apocalyptic atmosphere, it always puts me off when zombies start using firearms. (The exception being Land of the Dead, because Romero can do no wrong). Either way, I watched it, so the everyone else I may as well review it.
Much like Romerian zombie fiction, NC preoccupies itself with criticizing the government and media, even including arguments over a television studio mixing board alla -Dawn, as journalist Dean Miller tries to report the carnage he just witnessed after an unidentified plane landed at the airport and infected poured out, overwhelming the security forces on site. The military issues a gag order on the media and Dean’s boss complies cutting his broadcast leaving the world without his warning and unprepared for what is about to occur.
Dean decides that if he can’t warn the public he at least can save his wife, Anna, who is a doctor at the hospital, but before he can escape the studio, the infected pour in and start tearing apart the scantily clad dancers whose performance replaced Dean’s warning on the network’s broadcast. A Fulci-esque scene follows: every knife ramming into fleshy throats on-screen, blood fountains spurting to life, and even an infected carving a woman’s breast like a jack-o-lantern. NC uses just about any excuse to include topless women in a scene. Despite the havoc, Dean is able to do his best Frank West impression and toss a TV monitor at the on coming horde of infected and slip out.
NC is another film that follows a redundant formula. Dean’s experience at the hospital rescuing his wife is near identical to that at the studio and the only thing that changes is that the women are having nurse’s uniforms ripped off to expose their breasts instead of dancing leotards. While the plot tries to look complex by introducing other characters around the military men like the Major’s artist wife, Shelia, whose macabre work seems prophetic, or the Colonel’s daughter and son-in-law, they’re mostly just body-count-cannon fodder to mix up the narrative. Really, the only two characters we almost care about are Dean and Anna.
Their escape takes us across the infected country where the viewer settles into the ruined country road and genre convention swarm worse than the zombies, including the ever popular refueling scene. Stopping at the gas station might have worked out for Dean and Anna, but they decide to hit up the cafe for tea and crumpets, forgetting the old adage: “he who hesitates is fallen upon by hordes of infected,” or something like that. The rest of the narrative is merely run and gun set to the typical over dramatic Italian horror- Goblin style music.
Then the big twist hits… which I’m going to *SPOILER ALERT* ruin in a second.
You probably didn’t read the title literally, but you should have as the narrative of the movie is one long nightmare. Dean wakes up in bed screaming, with Anna safe by his side, but the story continues to wind forward until we reach familiar events like stuff we just watched ninety minutes ago: the airport tower hails an unresponsive plane, the craft lands, Dean and his camera man wait as the door slowly lowers. Instead of bedlam raging again, the credit roll.
The reality becomes a nightmare and then nightmare becomes a reality is a common twist these days, but for some reason I always find it an annoying one. While the dreamer is omnipotent, the dreamer’s knowledge of reality’s characters on intimate levels always introduces far too many plot holes once the dream becomes reality. The audience is also held hostage by the idea that the chips will fall exactly the same way, probably made most famous by Invaders From Mars this ending leaves little room for interpretation.
But, I digress, as a zombie movie Nightmare City was very watchable if you enjoy the old Italian style horror films then the gore of NC should tickle you right. The biggest downside is the appearance of the infected that either look like they have a minor head wound or that their whole head is a burnt marsh mellow in that Toxic Avenger sort of way. If you can get past how ridiculous they look, their use of weapons, and need to strip off womens’ shirts then it is enjoyable. However, at the end of the day its more an ‘infected’ movie than a traditional living dead flick.
S.O.Z RATING 21 of 30—Enjoyable Gore-fest with a countryside infested with Toxies.
Grainy Value- 5 of 5
Scary – 2 of 5
Atmosphere- 4 of 5
Gore- 5 of 5
Camp Value- 2 of 5
Zombies Kills- 3 of 5
SOZ Review#2: Hell of the Living Dead
Hell of the Living Dead (1980) is an instant cult classic waiting to happen… A romantic couple of journalists team up with a group of commandos to fight zombies. Wait… IT did happen two years prior, and it was called Dawn of the Dead. Hell, on the other hand, starts off with a large looming industrial plant where we see the zombies unleashed, but after ten minutes of that the film lands itself in the middle of a SWAT team raid. Sound familiar? However, Hell makes no apology for being a complete rip off. In fact thirteen minutes in you’ll hear the Dawn (78) soundtrack blaring through your speakers. I’m not even exaggerating. They literally pilfered the entire soundtrack.
However while the “borrowed” soundtrack plays throughout, the similarities mostly (and do mean mostly) vanish as after the SWAT team wastes some terrorists, save some hostages and move onto a mission in Africa where we also meet our other two protagonists, the love struck journalists, who after some river-side flirting the reunite with their travel companions, a bickering couple whose child is sick from a bite. Wait, bickering couple whose child has been bitten by a zombie….that sounds familiar. Well, since its not even worth trying to figure out their names, we’ll just call them the Coopers. Needless to say the Coopers aren’t long for this world, but at least the four SWAT guys roll into town in time to save the less annoying couple, which we we’ll call Fran and Inigo Montoya, cause he looks likes Mandy Patinkin’s character from Princess Bride.
Anyway, Fran and Inigo hook up with the four pretty much interchangeable obnoxious guys in blue, and hop over to the local village to try and discern just why that Mr. Cooper’s kid ate him. Fran comes up with the ingenious idea that she can pass as a native if she takes her top off and smears some paint on her face because nobody is going to notice a naked white chick whose breasts aren’t touching her knees like deflated balloons walking into the village. Regardless, they accept her and inform her that a disease is plaguing their village, but instead of burying or burning the bodies they attempt to imprison or bind the infected.
Tired of waiting for Fran and Inigo, the “B-Team” roll into the village and decide that the best course of action is to party with the natives and ignore the fact that zombies are trolling the country side. Big surprise, disaster follows and they have to flee. This formula of finding “a safe place” that becomes swarmed with hordes of zombies and having to flee pretty much repeats itself over and over again, until we discover that the not-so-elite commandos are essentially heading over to the industrial plant to destroy the evidence of what occurred there so we can cue the big finale. So wait a big faceless chemical corp infected African villagers with a zombie virus? Guess I know what inspired Resident Evil 5′s stupid plot.
At the end of the day, I stand up and applaud Hell of the Living Dead for it shameless attitude about everything. Firstly, The Romerian rip off factor just keeps coming back to bite, as the film cuts to government officials arguing over what to do WHILE playing music from the Dawn soundtrack. I guess it’s not too bad. How often does Romero really portray the government as a disordered entity… maybe we should move onto something else, like the fact that the movie actually uses what appears to be nature show stock footage of animals between cuts to try and re-enforce the African setting. It’s glaringly obvious that these cuts are filmed with different cameras, but maybe not as bad as the dubbing that is about a second and a half off. Old Godzilla movies do a better job of dubbing American voices.
Despite the train wreck that this film is, I can’t say I hated it. While it will hardly end my quest for the lost classic zombie film, it still was funny-bad in a very a enjoyable sort of way, and, unlike Clark’s yawn-fest, the screen is always overflowing with zombies, exploding heads, and gory feedings. What zombie fan could complain even if it is a blatant rip-off?
S.O.Z RATING 22 out of 30———Limbs aren’t the only things that get brutally ripped off but at least it placated to a genre fan base.
Grainy Value- 5 of 5
Scary – 2 of 5
Atmosphere- 3 of 5
Gore- 4 of 5
Camp Value- 5 of 5
Zombies Kills- 3 of 5
S.O.Z Review #1: No One Should “Watch” Let Alone “Play” With Dead Things
For years Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things has haunted my Google searches with people calling it: “a lost horror classic,” or “The It’s a Wonderful Life of zombie movies.” However, most of the reviews had the word “misunderstood” in their banter, which usually means the person typing this passage is doing so on a Mac product, or wearing a T-shirt written in L33t, or thinks Waking Life is the best movie ever, or hates any film with a budget over 37 dollars. Either way, I was afraid to give “Dead Things” a chance. Well, after ten years of closed mindedness and not discovering another Fulci’s Zombie or Romero’s Dawn I finally moved Bob Clark “Classic” to the top of my Netflix list and bit the bullet.
This film is instantly horrifying, but mostly because of the villain’s 70′s techno-color striped pants and everyone’s inability to deliver a convincing line. Alan, the film’s anti-hero, snappy dresser, and apparently brilliant director has essentially forced his theater troupe into coming to this creepy island with him over the threat of losing their jobs just because he’s sadistic and wants to torment the young actors with jokes involving corpses. The only exception is an aging actress named Val whose only remaining joy in life seems to be to take Alan down a peg whenever she can.
Anyhow, Alan, with no fear of legal retribution, has his goons: beat and kidnap a graveyard caretaker, dig up several corpses, and then break and enter into an old cottage where evil happenings once occurred all just because he wants to. What follows his thuggery is fifty plus minutes of zombie-less banter and power struggle between Alan and Val or Alan and the rest of his actors, which supporters of this film will tell you is brilliant and clever dialogue that builds suspense.
Crap or not, the drama builds around the fact that Alan’s idea of a good time is to drag a corpse to a cocktail party and make everyone talk to it. Anya’s, the film’s seemingly most insane character, rants hysterical about the looming evil and how they need to respect their corpse guest or face the consequences. Ironically, the crazy chick is right and the final act finally has the zombies a-marchin’ around the one hour mark.
The final twenty minutes “borrows” heavily from Romero’s NOTLD with its claustrophobic cabin fever feel and a handful of costly botched escaped plans. Unfortunately, the carnage is much tamer than King George’s classic. Instead of ghouls eating pig sausage with mouths dripping of chocolate syrup, the audiences is shown close up of zombie’s eyes or hordes surrounding victims to hide the big chunks of nothing happening. Ripped shirts and lots of fake blood are as juicy as this “classic” gets.
To recap, Dead Things offers no gore, no zombies kills, no originality, and minimal zombie screen time, so why do people love this film? The 
answer is simple: Bob Clark. If his name sounds familiar it should. The Dead Things writer/director was a virtual cult classic factory, creating fan favorites across the genres. Porky’s (1982) put a young Kim Cattrall on the map as a sex vixen in her infamous “howling” role as Coach “Lassie” Honeywell and some fans give it credit for creating the now done-to-hell Teen-raunch comedy genre. Just two years later, Clark created a family friendly holiday cult classic, A Christmas Story (1983) which I can’t get through a single December without somebody quoting from. “Your going to shoot your eye out,” and that sexy leg lamp bit and pole licking became household references forever after. While he was also responsible for both Baby Geniuses flicks, its takes nothing away from his legend.
Unfortunately in 2007, a drunk driver claimed Clark’s life and that of his 22-year-old son, which makes it hard for me to continue bashing a horror film early in his career. However, the fact remains that zombie fans should look elsewhere for good ol-fashion zombie greatness. This film receives false praise, protected by the long shadow cast by Clark’s legend and fans who want him to have conquered another genre with a cult classic. The truth remains that Clark was an awesome just-under-the-radar writer/director, but Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things doesn’t do his talent much justice. It shouldn’t be watched as a zombie film as much as a comedy and if you’re giving this one a go then do so with a 30-pack of Keystone, a lot of your friends, and two sarcastic robots wouldn’t hurt either.
S.O.Z RATING 14 out of 30——— Not even breaking 50%. Should have shot a zombie’s eye out with a BB gun or something.
Grainy Value- 5 of 5
Scary – 1 of 5
Atmosphere- 2 of 5
Gore- 1 of 5
Camp Value- 5 of 5
Zombies Kills- 0 of 5
Sorry, Bob Your Non Zombie and Non-baby Genius stuff is still great.
The Summer of Zombie
A while ago, I read a quote about Romero’s Dawn of the Dead that basically said after watching it you felt like you had uncovered some well kept secret, which I think describes the emotion of most zombie enthusiasts that were born in the 80′s and scooped a grainy VHS copy out of the local Mom and Pop video store’s horror bin. With the exception of maybe Fulci’s Zombie, I don’t think I’ve had that Easter egg finding joy since.
So since there’s really nothing going on in the world of horror this summer except Predators, I’ll turn to the past, questing for one more 70′s or 80′s grainy zombie flick. If anyone has any suggestions I could use all the help I can get here. My first entry is looking to be Bob Clark’s Children Should Play with Dead Things. So, let the horde of bad zombie movies start lurching my way.
Contact Us
Movie Queue
Awards Mean We’re Famous, Right?
Vote For Us!
