Hell of the Living Dead (Zombie Creeping Flesh / Virus / Night of the Zombies) - review

1980 (Italy / Spain)

2002 Starz / Anchor Bay DVD R(1)

Contains mild spoilers.

I've sat in front of the computer for ten minutes now trying to work out not only how to start the review, but actually how I actually feel about what I've just watched. I mean, I can't hide from the obvious; it's a woefully low budget 80s euro-trash zomploitation video nasty with b-movie acting, a poor English dub (there was no original soundtrack with subtitles option on my DVD), a meandering derivative story devoid of any real content or meaning, and an obsession with the ridiculous misuse of externally sourced stock footage. Yet, I somehow enjoyed my hour and forty minutes with Lia (Margit Evelyn Newton) quite the enthusiastic front line reporter and Lt. Mike London (José Gras) and his blue boiler-suit wearing commando goon squad.

There's a rather superfluous and unexplained back story about a global conspiracy to euthanize the third world and it all going wrong with some giant clouds of degenerative toxins leaking out into the atmosphere. There's also a radioactive zombie rat. All that's really important to know is Lt. London is in New Guinea with his crack force of three totally unconvincing exaggerated 80s bad boy throwbacks, he can't get hold of his superiors, his crew have stumbled into Lia, her camera man Vincent (Selan Karay) and decided to let them tag along, and the normally quiet jungle landscape is teeming with blue skinned undead flesh-eaters.

There's not much else to the story. The gang of six travel to the nearest village, Mia takes her top off to communicate with natives who she was alleged to have stayed with for a year, the village is overrun, then they travel to an abandoned plantation, it gets overrun, then they travel to Hope #1, a sprawling industrial complex and the source of the zombie death cloud, and it gets overrun. Each location starts with the same promise of respite, only for some shadowy figure sitting in a chair with their backs to them to reveal themselves as a macabre flesh eating zombie and the place to come under siege.

I've seen director Bruno Mattei described as a total hack unable to fashion anything original, but I've also seen him described as the man to turn to, to get the job done with as little fuss and money as possible, and both are undoubtedly true. Hell of the Living Dead is a veritable pastiche of everything Zombie Flesh Eaters and Romero. It's formulaic, it's derivative, scenes are stolen, music is literally stolen (Goblin's Dawn of the Dead soundtrack) but if the remit was for a by-the-numbers repeat of the two success stories above, to be filmed in four weeks with no money, credit however begrudgingly, has to be given. What story there is never really comes together and it does drag out, but it doesn't actually fall apart, the characters are cheesy and obnoxious, and played poorly, but at least they're all entertaining each in their own special way, and each action sequence is contrived and poorly choreographed but the way the so called professional soldiers throw themselves about is always amusing to watch. There's also the fact there's an abundant and near constant flow of gratuitous and shocking gore on offer, almost as if Mattei knew this alone would sell a few copies regardless of all films other short-falls.

The zombies are, funny enough, a Dawn of the Dead / Zombie Flesh Eaters fusion. They're blue, they shuffle and groan, they arrive on mass and they like eating people. I've that usual complaint, that for quite the desolate unpopulated area there's an awful lot of zombies and even with a Jeep and boat the gang can't find five minutes respite. Also the zombies do seem to know when to hold off that fatal bite, even with people literally in their grasp, yet on other occasions, for instance when the village is over-run, a native must merely flash a bit of ankle for the teeth to get sunk in. It's almost like the zombies knew when each main character was to be bit and all the action was contrived to ensure it happened as planned. Other than this, it's head shots, with the guys going through the early rigmarole of shooting the body repeatedly first before having the hallelujah head-shot moment, fire being the zombie-no-no and lots of staggering around slowly with arms outstretched. There's nothing new on show but at least Mattei has taken what works and not embellished it unnecessarily, other than allowing their innate cannibalism to get a fair bit more screen time than Romero would have.

I'm not going to pretend that this is a good film; it's one of those that somehow transcends all that it does wrong to become worth watching for the sheer exaggerated stupidity on display. Mia's tribal undress entwined with all the obvious third party tribal stock footage is worth watching if only for the audacity Mattei had in thinking he could get away with it. Wise cracking Zantoro (Franco Garofalo) is worth following if only to witness a truly great maniacal goofy performance, and there's a good game of guess the next jungle animal in stock footage forced in to allegedly make the film as long as Dawn of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead it isn't though; and for all I say go watch it, be prepared for a bit of a genre stinker that you must remember even Mattei was ashamed to have his name attached at launch (he went as Vincent Dawn). Still recommended for that 80s euro-trash no-story maggot-crusted, flesh-munching zombie itch, but don't say you've not been warned, 6/10.

Steven@WTD.

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3) - review

1988 (Italy)

2004 Vipco DVD R(2)

Contains mild spoilers.

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2, or Zombi 3 for those that maintain we have to keep to the numbering lunacy begun by Dario Argento when he was allowed to muck about with Dawn of the Dead and release it as Zombi to the Italian audience, is a film of three directors; and this point becomes very important. Lucio Fulci may be credited as the one true director, and he did shoot seventy odd minutes of it, but the job was actually handed over to Bruno Mattei and his associate Claudio Fragasso after he fell ill and left the set.  What is very apparent now I've watched it, is all three obviously had quite their own vision and none of them particularly follow or compliment the others. What we're left with is a positive festival of all things zombie; a cornucopia of genres and tropes with cohesiveness and coherence left at the door. On the surface it's all a bit of a mess, nothing flows, the story is baffling, ludicrous and implausible and the zombies change their stripes every chance they get. There's just one thing; in being such a celebration and having Fulci's sultry continental surrealist guide as the foundation it somehow and incredulously manages to actually come together in quite an interesting and enjoyable way. I'm really scratching my head to how it's managed it.

At its heart we've got quite the straightforward zombie survival story with mad scientists, an over zealous, over confident military and a group of disparate survivors. This time it's 'Death One' a bacteriological, radioactive pathogen or agent or something capable of reanimating the dead and as with all top secret, highly dangerous experimental compounds the first chance they can, someone loses control of it, mistakes are made, and giant swaths of the countryside are contaminated and the dead are up and miffed.

I say the dead are up. Death One is more the infect, transform, kill and reanimate sort of pathogen/virus/whateveritis and there's no climbing out of graves or sitting up in coffins. There's no ambiguous voodoo/science mix here with corpses rising from the grave and the infection somehow further spreading through scratches and bites. Here the airborne toxin is fully explained; we have back story and there's an attempt to provide a rational coherent template to all the zombie gubbins. I'm sure Mattei and Fragasso are responsible for the new more western Day of the Dead-esque narrative but in moving too far from the Fulci ambiguity template they're less able to hide the whole host of plot holes and narrative inconsistencies that abide.

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 isn't about strong interesting narrative or coherent deep characters really though, and if you go at it with this in mind you'll be painfully disappointed. Whether it's the cookie-cutter GI's on leave or the pretty flirtatious American girls on the bus, the characters are there to drive the zombie action from one scene to the next. People get killed, people get bitten, barricades are made, barricades fail and the zombies keep coming. There's no big meta narrative or attempt to be clever, just lots of fights and lots of desperate survival. There's no depth or character development either and the actors do a poor wooden job at delivering the trite monosyllabic lines provided, but it doesn't really matter as you're not supposed to be listening to the strange, but of it's time English redub of English lines anyway. What we're all here for is the zombies and watching them dispatch said easily forgettable characters en masse with as much gratuitous well presented typically exploitative Fulci unpleasantness as possible. We're also here to see zombies dispatched en masse on a scale not previously seen in a Fulci film too. It's a win-win really, and I know Romero's influence can be seen but it doesn't detract from the high octane, quite stylishly presented zombie killing shenanigans.

The Fulci Zombie Flesh Eaters zombies are still there. They're foul grotesque, slow and shuffling, it's just this time they've been joined by all their friends, some of whom were quite unexpected. There's a fight with an extremely fast, hatchet wielding resident evil like junior executioner, there's all the fights with leaping, hiding, ninja zombies that fall from the ceiling and flip and climb with the best of them, and there's even quite the hilarious head; actually I won't spoil this one, but it's so out of place I was more shocked by the fact it was included, than it's sudden appearance. It's such a mishmash of styles though once you've accepted it all for what it is (if you can get over), it's all highly entertaining and even enthralling. Each high action scene comes with new surprises and new challenges for the unfortunate heroes to deal with, and you almost start to recognise some consistency in each zombie type encountered. I should say there is still a little trans-genre consistency though. They all die very much as they would if they were alive and there's no head trauma required. It's a moment of strange calm.

Mattei and Fragasso took Fulci's moody little sequel and turned it into a Zombie Flesh Eaters/Return of the Living Dead/The Crazies mash up and I can tell it's going to become a guilty pleasure of mine. Woeful wooden acting, a cliché story with no narrative, character or zombie coherence, a style that's a complete hodgepodge that's frankly ludicrous and bafflingly incoherent, my summation should be unanimously negative yet from start to finish I found myself laughing and cheering along. The action, deaths, blood and gore all flow in abundance and for all its faults it's all presented extremely well and even paced quite nicely, never dawdling. Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 is an accidental festival of everything zombie that approached the right way is implausibly brilliant and a must see spectacle, 7/10.

The ten year old DVD I watched has a terrible picture quality as if someone has smeared the screen with butter. It doesn't deride too much from the lunacy and there's not much choice available but it's not close to the beautiful crisp new HD release of Zombie Flesh Eaters. Here's hoping for the same treatment.

WTD.