Review: Warm Bodies

Bluray Review

I remember when this came out in cinemas it was being described as Twilight with zombies as if before Twilight there had never been romance in horror films. I suppose we’re meant to have agreed that films aimed at the young adult female market are to be dismissed off-hand by reference to the hugely popular but critically panned film and book series. It’s not the first to tackle the idea of a relationship between a living human and a zombie but that was certainly the opinion of the mainstream reviewers who snickered at the concept. This is more of a comedy than horror film and though comedy tastes my vary I liked its take on the zombie genre.

R (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie in a world long after the plague hit and as he wanders around an airport we hear his thoughts in narration. I know narration can be annoying but it gets over the fact the protagonist of the film barely talks, communicating with his best friend M (Rob Corddry) by grunts. These zombies still remember being alive and their daily routines are like a ritual repeat of those memories. Eventually those memories are lost and zombies become bonies; fast, savage skinless creatures who feast on anything with a heartbeat.

Eventually a zombie has to eat so R and M go out on a hunt with a group of other zombies because there’s safety in numbers. In a hospital they come across a group of humans who are scavenging medical supplies. R kills the leader of the group Perry (Dave Franco) and as he eats his brain he gets Perry’s memories which are full of his love for Julie (Teresa Palmer) and his desire to protect her. R fights off the zombies trying to attack her but Julie gets knocked unconscious during the attack.

R decides to take Julie back to the airport to protect her until she recovers and the other zombies stop looking for her. This is the first time Julia has ever met a zombie with any sense of compassion for others and she learns that R at least seems to have an inner life with his large record collection on the plane he calls home.

By the time R gets Julie back the walled human enclosure her feelings for R have grown and she realises that he may well be the first sign that the zombie condition is curable. There are problems to overcome such as convincing the humans, particularly Julie’s father Grigio (John Malkovich) that a cure is possible and tackling the bonies that are gathering to invade the human stronghold.

I liked the characters in this film and I was not bothered that the zombies in his film followed their own rules. The two stage zombie thing was probably necessary to allow the zombies to be somewhat sympathetic by having the uber zombie bonies as the main threat. This was also done in the vampire film Daybreakers where the normal populations are vampires who become bestial uber vampires through lack of blood.

The film plays about with the relationship between R and Julie and even has a balcony scene but it never gets too icky. There were nice touches like the scenes of R smearing with smelly goo and teaching her to walk like a zombie to blend in at the airport are mirrored later when Julie puts make-up on R and coaches him to seem more human to blend in at the enclosure. For a zombie film there is not much gore which probably explains the 12A rating. I thought it was a decent fun film with a few laughs. It has the cheesy old theme of the power of love makes us human but why not?

Rating 7.0/10

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Review: Zombie Flesheaters

October Horror Month

This is also known as Zombi 2 in Italy and called Zombie in the US. This one of the earliest films I saw on VHS and it really was a sign of what was ahead as all sorts of films featuring graphic gore hit the shelves in the thousands of video rental places that sprung up in the early 80s. Since I wasn’t 18 yet the graphic gore and gratuitous nudity of films like Zombie Flesheaters was something I hadn’t had a chance to see before. I was disgusted, I was excited. I couldn’t get a better introduction to exploitation horror than this film from Italian Director Lucio Fulci who created many of the exploitation films I watched in those times before the Thatcher government caught up and over-reacted to the a wave of moral panic whipped up by the media about what they called video nasties. This was an era that ushered in a whole new attitude in horror and for better or worse the genre would never be the same

A doctor shoots a corpse in the head then sends a yacht away. The yacht is found later adrift in New York harbour and no-one is responding radio calls from the coast guard. Two members of the coastguard board the yacht to see what’s happening and they don’t find anyone one the boat. Suddenly a large zombie appears from inside the boat and he rips out the throat of one of the men, killing him. The second fires several rounds into the zombie and it falls into the water.

The police find out who owns the yacht and they bring his daughter Anna Bowles (Tisa Farrow) down to the boat to see if she knows what happened to her father or where the boat was before it came to New York. All Anna knows is that he went the Antilles to stay with a friend. This isn’t much help to the police but Anna is very worried. That night she sneaks back on the yacht and discovers someone else has snuck on board too, a reporter called Peter West (Ian McCulloch). West also wants to know what happened to Anna’s father. He has found letter on the yacht addressed to her from her father. He writes that he was helping a Dr Menard on the island of Matul who is trying to figure out the cause of a terrible disease that has hit the island and now he has become sick too and fears he will die soon.

Anna wants to go to Matul to find out what happened to her father and West’s newspaper agrees to send him with her. They fly to an island called St Thomas in the Virgin Islands and try to hire a boat to take them to Matul. A local cab driver tells them locals won’t go near the place because it’s cursed but there an American couple called Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay) with a boat that are on an island hopping holiday and they agree to take them.

On Matul Dr Menard (Richard Johnson) has lost another patient to the plague and has the body removed to the chapel. He goes home and tries to raise Guadeloupe on the radio but he can’t get response. Menard’s wife Paola (Olga Karlatos) is very unhappy to hear that they are cut off from any hope of rescue. The zombie plague is isolated to opposite side of island for now but she fears it could spread and just wants to leave. Before he return to the hospital Menard tells his gardener Miguel to guard the house and keep an eye for anyone going near it.

On the boat Brian and Co. are having trouble finding Matul which is apparently uncharted. Susan wants to go diving so Brian drops anchor and she puts on her scuba gear and a tiny pair of panties and West makes sure he cops an eyeful before she dives in topless. She spends some time photographing the wildlife when a small shark approaches. She manages to hide and get to surface but it’s coming for her so she goes underwater to hide in the coral. Then a hand grabs her from behind and she turns to see a zombie. It attacks her but she breaks off some branches of coral and rubs into the zombie’s face making it let go so she can escape. Now she is stuck between the zombie and the shark, both wanting to eat her. Fortunately the two fight each other giving her the chance to get to surface and onto the boat. The shark and the zombie manage to take a chunk out of each other before giving up. This scene has really fantastic underwater photography as well giving us a classic zombie vs shark fight. It makes me wonder what happened to the shark. Is there a zombie shark wandering the oceans now? And did anyone ever make film about it? I also love the idea of underwater zombie wandering around on the bottom of the sea and this idea has been used in a few other films since.

On Matul Menard has been putting bullet through head of the dead patient. There is constant sound of the drums of voodoo rituals from inland. The hospital orderly Lucas tells Menard that the locals have run away inland out of fear of the zombies and the village is nearly empty. Back at the house Paola is having a shower and Miguel is sitting outside when he hears a noise and goes to investigate and is never seen or heard from again. Meanwhile we get a zombie POV shot as it looks at Paola through the window. Paola finishes in the shower and hears a noise outside. A zombie starts trying to come in the door but she forces the door closed chopping off several of the zombie’s fingers. The zombie starts hammering on the door so Paola pushes a large lump of furniture against the door but she gets too close and the zombie smashes its arm through the door and grabs her head. As she gets pulled through the door a large splinter of wood goes right into her eye in graphic close-up detail. It’s an effect that still makes me cringe as I watch it.

Eventually the boat gets to Matul, but it was damaged by the shark and it needs a boatyard to get it fixed. Brian fires off flares which are spotted by Lucas who tells Menard. Menard picks up the four of them a drives them to the hospital. While driving Menard tells them about to Anna’s father. At the hospital Lucas tells Menard another patient is growing sicker so Menard asks them to go on to his house to check on his wife while he takes care of his patient. The patient called Felix tells him that he got bitten by zombie in the village and the plague has spread.

At Menard’s house they find Paola’s body being picked apart and eaten by a bunch of zombies. The zombies spot them and come after them but they manage to fight their way out and back into Menard’s truck They speed away heading back to the hospital but the truck goes off the road after it hits a zombie and this wrecks the radiator. It also wrecks West’s ankle. They have no choice but to walk back to the hospital. They stop to give West a rest and Susan and Brian have a look around. They find out they are in a conquistador graveyard. Hands grab at Anna and West from beneath the ground and Brian runs back to help them. Susan watches a zombie emerge right from the grave in front of her then it lunges at her and bites a big chunk out of her throat. Brian, Anna, West return to find her dead. Brian is in shock but Wests insists they have to keep going.

Back at the hospital all the patients are dead and Menard is still no closer to a cause than when it started. He asks Lucas if it really is Voodoo and Lucas say “When the Earth spits out the dead they will feed on the blood of the living.” Brian, Anna and West get to the hospital with zombies right on their tail. Once inside everyone gets ready to defend the place with shovels, petrol bombs and guns. In the battle Menard, Lucas and the nurse all get killed and Brian, Anna, and West burn as many as they can with petrol bombs then get out of the place. They are heading for the boat when Brian sees Susan coming towards him but of course she’s a zombie and she bites him.

Brian, Anna and West get to the boat and leave. Brian is getting sicker and eventually he dies so they lock him up below decks then try the radio They hear that New York is being overrun by zombies but traffic is running normally on the large bridge that the zombies are crossing.

Watching this nowadays it has many flaws. The dubbing is often terrible as is some of the acting and the pacing drags a bit in the middle. On the plus side the gore is great and the make-up on the zombies is just horribly brilliant. I’ve hear this is coming out on Bluray in November so if you haven’t seen it yet now’s your chance but beware if you have a weak stomach an soft squishy eyeballs.

Rating 8.0/10

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Review: Outpost II – Black Sun

This is a straight to DVD sequel to the fairly forgettable Nazi zombie film Outpost. This film expands on the original and increases the threat but it really comes across as a low-budget SyFy channel special with its vague sense of geography, shallow characters and comic book plot.

The first film had a squad of mercenaries discovering zombie Nazis in a bunker re-animated with top secret Nazi technology. These zombies are not mindless hungry beasts like the zombies in Romero’s films but every bit as smart and devoted to the cause of world conquest as when they were alive only now they are unstoppable animated corpses.

This film focuses on a young Nazi hunter Lena (Catherine Steadman) who is carrying on her parents’ mission and has tracked down a Nazi officer Neurath (Michael Byrne) to a hospital in Paraguay. She breaks his fingers to try to force him to tell where Nazi scientist Klausener is but despite his age and frail state Neurath doesn’t tell her anything. Lena reckons that he must have kept a few mementos and finds a map indicating a location in Europe and of course it turns out to be where the bunker is. She also finds a ring that opens up into a key and I wonder if that will come in handy later.

Klausener (David Gant) is not at the bunker but is watching what’s going there on a live link. He has sent a scientist Hunt (Julian Wadham) in with an armed escort to reactivate the secret Nazi machine that everyone seems to know about because the UN have sent troops in to the area but the Nazi zombies powered by the machine kill them all off. This is seen in poor light with confusing cuts so it was difficult to really see what went on. At the UN camp outside of the zombie zone they are examining a map that shows a field around the bunker that is expanding. Inside it zombies can’t be killed and electronics don’t work.

Lena gets to Europe not far from the bunker and stops at a small settlement. Armed men stop her and search her belongings but she gets rescued by a café owner Marius (Clive Russell) who stops the thugs with a shout and a dirty look. Inside the café Lena meets Wallace (Richard Coyle) who she already knows. Wallace is a scientist (with a poor American accent) and knows about Klausener’s device and says he wants to shut it down permanently. Lena just wants Klausener and thinks he’s at the bunker.

Lena drives Wallace towards the bunker. Wallace know a militia group who can provide an armed escort to the bunker but the car cuts out before they get there and Wallace realises that the field has expanded further than he thought. They make their way on foot to the camp but when they get there it’s under attack from zombie Nazis and their contact is dead.

They carry until they reach a town that is empty because all the locals have either fled or been killed. They take shelter in house but have to move on when the Nazi zombies turn up and are about to be killed too when they get rescued by a squad of British soldiers. The zombies keep attacking and there are several soldiers killed in struggle to rescue these two. This squad are on a mission to get an EMP device as close to the bunker as they can so they can blow the secret Nazi device destroy the field and kill all the zombies and they have a physicist with them to operate the EMP. Unfortunately they are forced to blow their wad prematurely when they come under an overwhelming force of zombies and they lose not just the EMP device but their physicist. Fortunately they discover Wallace is a physicist and so take him along but Lena gets left behind with a gun and has to make her own way to the bunker for the big showdown with the Nazi zombies.

Since I wasn’t a fan of the first I wasn’t expecting much from this sequel. If anyone could take the idea of Nazi zombies and make them a bit meh then it is the producers of this franchise. The acting wasn’t bad but it was a bit flat. The characters were pretty shallow creatures of the plot with little sense of any them being real people. The plot itself was like something from a comic book and that sense got even stronger during an entirely silly climax in the bunker. The zombies seemed almost unstoppable except with explosives but then I never saw anyone try a head shot or failing that blasting off their knees. There’s no contagion element to these zombies so no real sense that the threat is anything but limited. This isn’t a bad film but it’s also not a very interesting film.

Rating 5.5/10

Related articles

• IMDb
• http://www.sfx.co.uk/2012/08/24/outpost-ii-black-sun-review/
• German Film OUTPOST: BLACK SUN Has Zombies, Nazis, and Awesome (geektyrant.com)

 

Review: Kentucky Fried Zombies

The alternative title is Die-ner (Get It?) which is really not much of an improvement but it does seem to indicate the level of humour in this zombie comedy horror film. I can’t fault the acting and for the budget the special effects were pretty good but the story just never seemed to gel for me and I think that is because the story never really seemed to have much point to it.

At a quiet diner off the main road the waitress Rose (Maria Olsen) is telling her life story to a customer Ken (Joshua Grote) who listens sympathetically before he kills her and the cook. Ken is a serial killer and psychopath. He puts both the bodies into the freezer and cleans up the blood. Just then a car draws up with a bickering married couple Rob (Parker Quinn) and Kathy (Liesel Kopp). Ken puts on an apron and pretends to work in the place. He takes their orders and tries to get chatting to them but they want to carry on arguing. Ken is just about to kill them when the local sheriff arrives.

Sheriff Dukes (Larry Purtell) comes in and asks where Rose is so Ken makes up a story about her having a family emergency. Ken has an excuse about where the cook has gone but he’s a bit surprised when Dukes greets the cook who is wandering around mindlessly in the kitchen. Rob and Kathy complain about their food taking so long which gives Ken the perfect excuse to go check up on the cook. He’s a zombie and keeps trying to bite Ken. Dukes keeps calling to the cook thinking the man isn’t talking back because he’s got the hump over being given speeding ticket. Dukes comes into the kitchen and is shocked by the sight of the zombie cook he gets his throat bitten open.

Rob and Kathy help Ken restrain the zombie cook and he uses duct tape from his murder kit bag to secure the zombie to the floor. Everyone figures that there’s something not right about Ken before he tells them and by that time he’s got Dukes’ gun. He lets Kathy put duct tape on Dukes’ wound and forces Rob and Kathy to help him investigate the zombie. These are not the Romero-type but turn out to more like Trioxin zombies. Headshots don’t kill them and when they are cut-up the parts remain animated. There’s really not much not more to the story other than Ron and Kathy do try to get away but they are too stupid to just kill Ken and he gets the upper hand each time they try.

I can’t figure out why but this film just didn’t entertain me. The zombie kills were pretty good and there was one that seemed to be a pastiche of Rhode’s death in Romero’s Day of the Dead. I just think that not enough happened and although the film avoided the zombie film cliché of the characters trapped by zombie hordes this was at the expense of the film actually doing anything else. For a comedy it had very few jokes that made me laugh and the set-up just wasn’t very funny.

Rating 5/10

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Review: Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies

This is not the first zombie film I’ve seen recently set during the civil war period but this is one is definitely a lot more fun. This is mockbuster masters The Asylum cashing in on Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter but they go all out to give us exactly what it says on the tin: Abraham Lincoln knocking the heads off zombies. It’s cheap, badly acted, full of terrible fake beards and moustaches and is so silly I had to keep watching.

When Abe was a kid he lost both his parents in a zombie outbreak so you can put away your history books. Years later and President Lincoln (Bill Oberst Jr.) is in the Whitehouse and his Chief of Staff Edwin Stanton tells him that their plan to capture an important fort in Georgia is not going well. Out of the men sent only one returned, Eckert and he’s being held restrained in a bunker because he’s sick and raving and getting more violent. Abe goes to see the man and recognises the signs of a zombie infection. He tells Stanton to prepare a squad of twelve secret service agents to go the fort and find out what happened. Eckert dies and turns into a yellow-eyed zombie and breaks free with that famous superhuman zombie strength? He attacks and bites the officer that was going to lead the squad of secret service men. Abe leaps into action and grabs a sword and fights off zombie-Eckert before an aide brings him his special zombie-killing flick-scythe and he cuts off its head.

Since the officer was killed (by Abe with a shot through the head) Abe insists on leading the mission to the fort himself because clearly he’s the only one who knows what’s going on. They travel most of the way by train but a few miles from their destination the train stops and they walk the rest of the way. This involves a lot of walking slowly while Abe speechifies but strangely never mentions what he knows they are going to be up against. The twelve secret service agent are dressed in a uniform of long black coat and waist coat with a whit shirt so they all look really obvious. There’s an Irish one, a black one (called Brown), a blonde one, a cowardly one, a gruff scary looking one and a whiny weasel with a moustache called John Wilkinson (Jason Vail) and the other six are more or less anonymous cannon fodder (or zombie food in this case).

They get to the fort and as they break in zombies attack them. Confederate soldiers also shoot at them from the other side of the fort so they have to fight off the zombies while under fire. When one man gets bitten Abe puts a bullet in his head which shocks Wilkinson. Abe also take out a few zombies with his scythe and once he tells the agents to go for head shots they manage to take care of the zombies and get the door closed again. They search the fort and find a handful of Confederate soldiers including one Pat Garrett (Christopher Marrone) and General Stonewall Jackson (Don McGraw). Well he claims to be Jackson but he’s clearly a 16-year-old boy with a fake beard and absolutely no acting ability at all and he plays Jackson as if he’s incredibly dumb or a bit mentally ill. Jackson claims that the zombies are just sick and in need of medical treatment, and many of them are Confederate soldiers. Abe appeals to him to put their differences to deal with the zombie threat but he acts like a pompous ass and refuses.

Abe takes several of the men in to the nearby town to see what the situation is there and to try to use the telegraph to send for help. The zombies are very slow and lethargic and unless they hear a sound they just stand still so they don’t have too much trouble evading them and most of their kills are by Abe with his scythe to avoid noisy gunfire. Brown mentions that they are like zombies his granny told him about but these are different so despite that from then on they call them zombies. The town is almost completely overrun but they find the brothel locked up. Of course they smash their way in and get shot at from the basement. Down there they find three prostitutes holed up with a 12-year-old boy called Theodore Roosevelt (Canon Kuipers). Mary Owens (Baby Norman) is a former girlfriend of Abe’s and one of the other women is her daughter Sophia (Hannah Bryan). Everyone goes back to the fort where Pat Garret defies Jackson and joins them in trying to take on the zombies.

This film is fully aware of how silly it is and for the most part, within its own limitations, it does okay. I felt that the portrayal of General Jackson was taking things a bit too far into just being crap, however Bill Oberst Jr. does pretty good job as Lincoln. Everyone else is okay enough. The CGI looks cheap but it worked. I think this is going to mainly appeal to people who can enjoy the cheesy cheap and cheerful output of The Asylum and fans of zombie films but lovers of historical drama should look elsewhere.

Rating 6/10

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Review: The Dead Matter

This was a blind buy at a supermarket and it’s a weird low-budget piece of vampire hokum and it prominently features its two big star names on the cover Andrew Divoff and Tom Savini as two rival vampire lords hamming it up in a film so ridiculous that I cannot believe it was not a comedy.

Two vampire hunters McCallister (Jason Carter) and Mark Pym (Brian Van Camp) are fighting off zombies to steal a magic pendant that the evil vampire lord Vellich (Andrew Divoff in distractingIy long grey wig) is using in a ritual.They escape and split up with Mark taking the pendant to be destroyed and McCallister fighting off hordes of vampires or zombies or probably both. The bearer of the pendant can control the dead and that’s why Vellich wants it. Mark manages to get to some sort of altar surrounded by four standing stones. Vellich catches up with him and kills him but some sort of spirits stop him and drive him away from the altar and he leaves empty-handed.

Next day the main character Gretchen (Sean Serino) is standing over her brother’s grave so we know she’s grieving over him. Gretchen has a boyfriend Mike (Tom Nagel) who is incredibly boring. They also have two friends Frank (Christopher Robichaud) who is scientist working for a drug company and Jill (C.B. Spencer) who is a wiccan/pagan/new age whatever and it really feels forced having these mismatched characters as a couple. It is such tired old sexist cliché having the emotional spiritual woman and the sceptical rationalist man. Anyway for whatever stupid reason the writer managed to come up with, they go to the cemetery that night to have a séance at the very same altar from before so that Gretchen can try to talk to her brother. Gretchen finds the pendant and puts it on. They have the séance with Jill chanting some sort of spell out of her grimoire (!) to raise the dead and purple glowy special effects appear to enter them which seem to give them all confusing visions. It also makes the pendant glow.

The next night Gretchen and Mike are having sex when they hear a noise and find a zombie standing in Gretchen’s room. It is the re-animated corpse of Mark Pym but they don’t know that. They freak out and Mike attacks the zombie. Then Gretchen screams at it to go away which makes the pendant glow again and the zombie turns round and leaves. Gretchen quickly realises she can control the zombie with the pendant and wants to keep it around because of something stupid to do with her brother (because she’s grieving and all that) Mike is not at all happy about but since he only has a pout instead of balls he does nothing about it, not even when Gretchen decides to take the zombie to the bar to show to their friends. At the bar Jill takes on look at it and freaks out before going to puke her guts out while Frank takes a bit of convincing before getting very excited about a real zombie. So I guess Jill’s the rational one now.

Meanwhile in the other plot Vellich confronts another vampire lord Sebed (Tom Savini) because Sebed has vampires addicted to some new drug that he has sole supply of. This story meanders around the film before being fully revealed later as having very little to do with them main story. Oh yeah and that McCallister dude is still hunting for the pendant that he knows has not been destroyed.

This film plays this silly story straight for the most part but there’s a montage of Gretchen and the zombie filmed just like this a romance: Gretchen taking the zombie clothes shopping, going on a carousel and eating ice cream together. It’s just totally weird parody and after it’s over the film keeps going and no-one ever mentions it again. I don’t know who I would recommend this film to because it is not very gory, the story is daft and the acting is a bit rubbish. It’s tolerable nonsense that will probably turn up on cable TV.

Rating 5/10

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Review: The Undead

The alternative title is Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood and it gives a better sense of the tone of this low-budget film than the nondescript title of the UK release. I had bought this a while ago and it got lost and forgotten until today. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill zombie film with the only difference being that the protagonists are LA gang members and their zombies are a bit different. It’s okay and has few good scenes but it doesn’t really stand out.

Two gangs meet in pharmaceutical warehouse to sort out a dispute involving kidnapping and drugs. One gang is led by G-Dog (Tyshawn Bryant) and his girlfriend Latiffa (Rachel Montez Collins) has been kidnapped by Dragon (Robert Wu) the leader of the other gang who wants drugs in exchange for Latiffa. This is being watched by two cops David (C. Thomas Howell) and Jack (Jeremiah Birkett) who are getting ready to bust them all. Two cops taking on two armed gangs is clearly reckless beyond belief and of course one get shot and both get captured when the two gangs start a shootout. Then a wave of radiation from the sun engulfs the earth and changes the sky. Everyone in the warehouse in knocked unconscious.

Next morning G-Dog and his gang get control of the situation and try to figure out what happened. G-Dog and his favourite idiot Larson (KB Holland) go out to look for Darnell another friend. They find Darnell dying with his throat ripped open begging to be killed. Then they see the attacker, a zombie and the pumps round after round in to it but it still keeps coming until someone else blasts it through the skull. This was from an old man Jorge Gonzales (Maxie J. Santillan Jr.) who tells them what’s going on. When the sky changed the radiation from the sun affected everyone but they were protected inside the warehouse and Jorge was in his basement. Everyone else has tuned turned into bloodthirsty zombies, most of them mindless but some still have their intelligence.

G-Dog, Larson and Jorge return to warehouse in time to shoot the zombies attacking the cops Jack and David but they aren’t in time to save Jack who gets his throat ripped open. They go watch a TV which has only one channel still working, a scientist Dr. Reginald Monte (Gregory Alan Williams) who tells them what has happened, which is how Jorge found out. Monte invites them to his house asking them to bring plenty of guns. They seemed unsure until Monte’s daughter Lisa (Johanna Watts) appears on camera and she’s slim and attractive so that settles it, they decide to walk across the city.

Most of the film is just like typical zombie film but they have an encounter with a group of intelligent zombies who want to rape and eat them all. Yeah rape. These zombies are not only hungry for blood they are also very horny.

This film is okay and I thought the solar flare angle was not bad. I wonder what the point of setting up the rival gangs was when they didn’t really use that to set up any tension between the characters after the initial scenes before the flare. Once they know what’s going on all differences are pretty much forgotten. I liked the idea of the intelligent zombies and the scene in their nightclub started out promising but apart from killing off one main character it didn’t really lead to anything and the potential threat posed by them was unrealised.

Rating 6/10

Relate Articles

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Review: Juan of the Dead

Zombie comedies are very common and this sub-genre has examples from right across the globe but this is the first Cuban zombie comedy I have heard about. I wondered if this would be any good and even though it wasn’t up to standard of Return of the Living Dead it is an amusing effort that has enough laughs to justify being called a comedy and enough tension and gore to justify being a called horror

Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) is a chancer who lives day-to-day in the poor end of Havana. He spends his days trying to con, steal or scavenge a living, womanizing or hanging about with his sleazy loser friend Lazaro (Jorge Molina) on the roof of his apartment block drinking rum. Juan is content with his aimless life as a bottom feeder and is very proud of his status as a survivor. It’s this attitude which drove his ex-wife away and is now driving away his daughter Camila (Andrea Duro) too.

While at a street meeting of the local party Juan, Lazaro and Lazaro’s son Vladi (Andros Perugorría) see a zombie attack the crowd but Juan is just happy that it distracted them from discussing a spate of thefts from cars in the neighbourhood and slopes off. On TV the official word is that the violent attacks are by American-sponsored dissidents but this doesn’t make any sense to Juan because he knew the zombie. The following day one of Juan’s neighbours pleads for his help because her husband seems to be dead. He turns into zombie and attacks them. They manage to prevent the zombie attacking and try to figure out what he is. They think he is either a vampire or a demon but whatever he is he is killed permanently when struck on the head.

After Juan rescues Camila he tells the others about his plan to turn the crisis into an opportunity by offering to kill the dead for a price. His heartless opportunism disgusts Camila so he starts holding a zombie defence class to help other survivors. They still haven’t ever called them zombies but in his lesson he raises the inconsistency of zombies, noting that some are slow and shambling while others are very fast. Two gay men at the class La China (Jazz Vilá) and his beefcake boyfriend El Primo (Eliecer Ramírez) wants in on Juan’s scheme and while Juan is reluctant he agrees after La China puts down a zombie before it attacks him. There’s just one drawback El Primo faints at the sight of blood but he solves that by wearing a blindfold and striking out when La China tells him.

The film has a period of the five men fighting zombies until the customers just stop calling and then it turns into a more typical zombie survivor story. I had a good few laughs at the comedy which was often very crude. I really like the characters, who all feel very real. Juan is sleazy and selfish but he steps up to the task when called to because he cares about what his daughter thinks of him. Lazaro is a disgusting human being who really should not be allowed anywhere near a harpoon.

The effects are pretty good and we get a few nice gore scenes. The only drawback is the film did get a bit repetitive and dragged a little in the second act. It’s not an original film in any way except the setting in Cuba and it does probably shine a not very complimentary light on the country. I’m sure that Cubans will get the references to the hard times Juan talks about surviving and the attitudes to sexual depravity of Spaniards but I got the gist enough. If you can take another zombie comedy this film will do the job nicely.

Rating 7/10

Related articles

• IMDb
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• Official Site
• Juan of the Dead: Viva la Deadvolution! (repeatingislands.com)

 

Review: The Dead

This zombie film is mainly shot in Burkina Faso and Ghana in Africa and uses the now commonplace slow  silent shambling reanimated corpse type zombies made famous by George A. Romero but I feel this film, directed by brothers Howard J. Ford and Jonathan Ford, owes just as much of a debt to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesheaters (Zombi 2).

A group of westerners are on the last plane out of the country when an injured passenger turns zombie and the chaos that folows causes the plane to crash off the coast. There’s only one survivor, an army engineer called Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) and when he manages to get to the beach he immediately face zombies attacking him. Fortunately the crate he floated to shore on is full of guns and ammo and he is able to shoot enough of them to get away. Everywhere is full of zombies creeping around slowly.

Murphy gets to a farmhouse where he finds a truck with no fuel and with one wheel off. He starts making sure the engine will work but misses a zombie getting very close. He is saved by a soldier Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia) shooting the zombie before it gets to Murphy. Dembele had been back to his home village after going AWOL from manning roadblocks. He had found everyone dead, including his wife, except for an old woman who tells him that his son got away with the army. Dembele says he will take Murphy to an airfield and then he can take the truck north himself to the army base where his son was taken.

The film follows the men’s journey across the country with the constant threat of zombies everywhere and their fuel, ammunition and water gradually running out. The use of old-fashioned make-up and effects is pretty convincing and it effectively recreates the slow passionless ever-present threat from this type of zombie that I remember from Zombie Flesheaters and Romero’s original films. This is a solid decent zombie film. Rating 7/10 Related Articles

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• Fear.net

 

Review: Return of the Living Dead 3

I am a huge fan of the original Return of the Living Dead and while the second film in this series was okay it is a lesser imitation of the first film. I didn’t know that there were further sequels until a couple of years ago when I saw the DVD on sale and I snapped it right up, especially when I discovered that the director is horror master Brian Yuzna. Unlike the first two films this is not a light-hearted comedy but a tragic romance story with zombies.

Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) is a military brat, having to relocate to wherever his father Colonel John Reynolds (Kent McCord) is assigned. While stationed near Los Angeles he’s fallen in love with a local girl Julie Walker (Melinda Clarke) who is bit of bad girl. She talks Curt into “borrowing” his father’s security pass so they can break into the secure areas of the military base and find out what they are doing in there.And what they are doing is really pretty f’cked up. They are experimenting on ways of militarising trioxin, the chemical that re-animates the dead that featured in the previous two films. Curt and Julie watch in horror as they reanimate a corpse with trioxin vapour from one their zombies in-a-can, to test a method that has been developed to temporarily subdue them with ice bolts into the brain. Unfortunately their experiment is a failure and they end up with a lab full of wild hungry zombies.

Curt and Julie flee before they caught. In the lab another military scientist Colonel Sinclair (Sarah Douglas) was observing the procedure and uses the failure to push her way into replacing Colonel Reynolds on this project and push ahead with her idea of putting the zombies into lockable exoskeletons. Reynolds thinks her idea is cruel and he’s right but remember that bit about ice bolts into the brain?

Reynolds goes home to tell Curt the bad news that he’s being transferred again. Curt tells his father he’s not going with him and he leaves with Julie on his motorbike to start a life together in Seattle. On the road Julie is excited and frisky and she distracts Curt, nearly causing him crash. When he swerves to avoid hitting an oncoming truck Julie goes flying off the back of the bike and smashes into a telegraph pole and breaks her neck.

Curt is devastated and while cradling her lifeless body sobbing he finds his father’s security pass card. Crazed by his grief he thinks he can bring her back to life. He takes Julie’s body back to the military base and after putting on a protective suit he doses her with fumes from a zombie-in-a-can but he doesn’t close the lid properly and the zombie escapes. Fortunately the zombie comes in handy when they get caught by one lab worker who gets attacked by the zombie, giving Curt and Julie the chance to escape.

Julie is not to happy about being resurrected because she is constant pain, some of which is caused by a strange hunger she has no idea how to satisfy. Curt stops at a late night grocery store to get her something to eat. The only other people in the shop are Santos (Mike Moroff) and his friends Filipe (Sal Lopez) and Mogo (Julian Scott Urena) who is playing video games while the others watch and Santos’ girlfriend Alicia (Pía Reyes) complains. Julie really is making a mess trying to eat different things to sate her hunger but nothing works. While Curt tries to clear up the mess he bumps into Santos who angrily confronts him. The store owner (Dana Lee) tries to intervene, brandishing a hand gun but he gets shot in the gut by Santos for his trouble. The gang flee but as he’s leaving Julie takes a bite out of Mogo’s arm .

Julie and Curt have to leave as well since the military are looking for them but Curt agrees to drive the store owner to hospital in his van. The police arrive and chase after them, shooting at them. The store owner tries to call out the police from the back of the van but the police shoot him in the head killing him. Curt manages to shake off the police and he stops in a blind alley. He is horrified to find that Julie has started munching on the brains of the dead store owner. The police find the van but Curt and Julie have escaped down into a storm drain. One of the policemen is killed by the reanimated store owner but the military arrive just in time to save the other one. They are led by Reynolds who is desperate to save Curt.

Curt and Julie make they way down to the river through the drains. Curt realises what a selfish idiot he has been and in his frustration he lashes out at Julie who runs off. He regrets it right away and goes after her but fails to stop her throwing herself from a bridge into the river. Curt searches downstream for Julie and meets Riverman (Basil Wallace, a homeless man who lives in the drainage tunnels by the river. They find Julie but then so does Santos’ gang who are not happy about her biting Mogo who is getting very sick because of it.

Riverman takes them into his secret hideout. Julie has found a way of coping with her hunger – by inflicting pain on herself she can return to feeling normal and forget her hunger for awhile. She pierces her flesh with various sharp things she finds lying around. The gang find Riverman sitting outside his hideout and attack him. Curt goes out to help Riverman  but he’s overpowered quickly. Then the door opens and Julie appears and she really has been busy turning herself into one of the craziest most badass zombies ever, her flesh pierced by chains and nails and glass and spikes embedded in her arm, in short she makes herself  into make-up effects masterpiece shown in picture above from the DVD cover. She seduces Santos into going with her alone into the hideout where things go very badly for Santos. She quickly attacks and kills Felipe, meanwhile Mogo has died and reanimated and then attacked Alicia. Riverman realises they are deep in it and gets Curt and (reluctantly) Julie back into his hideout. The zombie gang attack the door and as it starts giving way Curt tells Riverman to get Julie out the back way while he tries to delay the zombies to give him time to get away

Reynolds arrives just then and takes care of the zombie gang with his ice bolts. Curt runs after Riverman and Julie but finds that Julie has killed him and eaten his brains. Thinking she has gone totally mad with hunger he stands by and lets his father shoot her with an ice bolt.

Back at the military base Curt has been debriefed and is now wanting to know what is going to happen to the zombies. He wanders around the lab till he finds where Julie is being kept and sees Colonel Sinclair putting a metal exoskeleton onto Riverman and locking it to stop him moving. One of assistants tell him that Julie is next which makes rush to try and unlock her cage. RIverman’s exoskeleton gets unlocked in the struggle to stop him. Riverman goes on an unstoppable rampage against the lab staff also smashing open several zombie cans and throwing Sinclair into the storeroom with them. as the lab staff fight back he gets limbs basted away with a shotgun but can still move thanks to the exoskeleton and proving it really is a very effective way of weaponising the trioxin zombies

The security breach has triggered the security system and sealed them in the lab. Curt frees Julie and persuades Riverman to open the locked door to the lab.The canned zombies Riverman freed are running through the lab complex and munching through most of the staff. The whole complex is sealing up while Curt tries to find a way out and his father is trying to find him.

Curt suddenly gets bitten in the arm by the same zombie he freed while re-animating Julie. His father finds them and pleads with Curt to come with him while he hold the security door open but Curt shows Reynolds the bite. Reynolds has to let the door close and watch Curt and Julie go together into the lab complex. Curt takes Julie to the incinerator and Curt promises they will be together forever and then enter flames and burn together.

This really marks complete tonal shift from the dark humour of the original film. Curt’s love for Julie is like mental illness and it drives him from one crazy action to another and the consequences are tragic for a lot of  the people who cross their path. His clingy desperate love created the monstrous bad ass zombie Julie. J Trevor does a pretty good job as the naive teen but the biggest acting credit has to go Melinda Clarke who really turns in a very touching and dangerous performance as Julie.

The zombie effects are done using a mixture of make-up and animatronics with mixed results but I  thought it looks pretty good considering what looks like a very tight budget. [Geek Whine Moment Some people complain about this film having people becoming zombies after being bitten by one which did not appear to happen in original film. While this is true it certainly can’t be ruled out as a possibility in that film and remember what the military did at the end of that film. If it could not be spread by the zombies why take such drastic action? Anway I really could not care less and I will never let such nit-picking interfere with my enjoyment of this film Whine Moment Over]

Rating 7.8/10

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