Contains spoilers.
I've got
to begin this review with a confession. You see, I really enjoyed FleshEater,
though I know, deep down I shouldn't have. It's amateurish lazy film making,
badly edited with campy b-movie acting and dialogue. It's embarrassingly
exploitative, delighting in baring the young titties of every girl on cast at
every opportunity. It's also painfully derivative with director / producer /
writer and chief ghoul Bill Hinzman happy to brazenly steal narrative and genre
staples from all and sundry but mainly the film that gained him his notoriety
in the first place. It's a bad film with little to objectively praise it
except… and here it is; it's a hoot from start to finish. It's constantly
entertaining, there's plenty of gore and blood and seeing cute young things
bare themselves is never dull however uncomfortable one feels it should be.
FleshEater is another of these zombie bad-good
film that you can't but help smile along to.
Bill
Hinzman is the eponymous zombie that depending on how you look at it kind of
started the whole thing off. His macabre shuffling towards Barbra in 1968
devoid of the influence of voodoo, master or divine power marked a change in
direction that came to have not only a profound influence on the genre, but
possibly the whole modern zeitgeist. Now one could argue that Romero's creation was
inevitable with society hurtling from religion and superstition towards a world
of science and objectivism, and Matheson amongst others with I Am Legend had
already challenged the entwined notion that undead should be linked with
mysticism, but it was Bill Hinzman, flesheater with his autonomous hunger and
primal drive that firmly planted the flag.
It was
with all this in mind, that an eyebrow was raised when his black suited
ghoulish frame was introduced to the screen with the breaking of an ancient
magical seal and a warning not to. Still, with the cast of young amateur and
extremely unlikable misfit kids out on a Halloween hayride to drink, cavort and
obviously die it was obvious I really wasn't supposed to be taking it all that
seriously. The film almost plays out as one would expect. Teenagers do what
teenagers do, Flesheater does what a flesheater would and before you know it
half the kids are dead and back up staggering about and the few little brats
that survived are running about and screaming for their lives. It's lively, the
blood and gore is gratuitous and if you're not over critical, the acting and
dialogue, whilst hokey is quite agreeable. 
It almost plays out as one would expect but Hinzman obviously has ambition, or at least delusions of.
Thinking I was watching a zombie Friday The 13th wannabe it soon turns into
Night of the Living Dead with the group holding out in a nearby deserted farm house complete with nails, hammer and wooden boards (ridiculously close to hand) and all the same interpersonal conflict and fisticuffs. The transition wasn't smooth if I'm
honest but it's low budget and Hinzman is at least trying. There's also another
scene with more miscreant kids having a Halloween party in a barn, and a totally gratuitous and unnecessary
(though this could be debated) urban house shower sequence. It jumps around and
there's no real rhyme or reason to any of it, as if each scene was penned before
they had any idea how they would stitch it together; but it's lively and fun,
and as a series of camp entertaining gory death rooms it achieves its goal with aplomb.
Never
really able to shake the tall gangly non-descript role he only received for
being a camera man in the right place, at the right time, with the right old
suit, Hinzman died in 2012 with Night of the Living Dead, a few other b-movie
parts and this plus one other feature film as director to his name. Here,
aged 52 he struts about chasing and chomping with vigour and panache; like a
man who understands how to play a zombie, yet while he's never dull to watch, I couldn't help but feel a little sorrow, that after all this time here he still was staggering about snarling with his arms out stretched in a rough b-movie as if he could never escape the undead road Romero started him on. Still, in some ways I'm glad he is, as sure, the film is a bit of a confusing mess throwing ideas around, and baring boobs,
like an angry teenager, but it's light, lively and trashy, in an enthralling and hilarious way, and it's all down to Bill. A masterfully bad great zombie film, 6/10.
Steven@WTD.
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