The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

There was a certain amount of fun to be had with Enter… Zombie King. I mean, Mexican-style masked wrestlers against zombies — and the Zombie King, naturally — in a  Saturday-morning-superhero-cartoon style story with lots of gratuitous nudity certainly seems like a can’t-miss proposition on many levels, doesn’t it? And it is, to a degree. It’s the kind of movie that can almost get by on charm alone. The problem is, it pretty much has to. The story is basically there as an excuse for masked-wrestling shenanigans. The zombies seem to have been chosen strictly for “cool monster” points. And even at 76 minutes, it seemed a little drawn out.

Maybe if I liked wrestling more or knew more about the culture, I’d have gotten more out of it — there was a lot of wrestling, but not a lot on the zombies. In truth, the zombies were kind of lame — eat flesh, pallid complexion, yadda yadda. They could be domesticated, but that was neither explained nor explored, so it didn’t do much for me. Still, with lots of psychobilly and surf punk tunes, some topless hot girls (and one brief, sort of hard to see full nude), decent pacing and amusing superhero/wrestlers it’s hard to complain too much. A light, frothy slight excuse for a movie, but certainly not a terrible one.

How weird is it that I had two zombie-wrestling movies back to back? These are the kinds of coincidences and connections you notice when you watch thirty zombie movies in a thirty day span. I certainly didn’t plan it that way. Another weird thing is the only other Canadian zombie movie I’ve seen, Meat Market, also had a masked Mexican wrestler character. Coincidence, or are our north of the border friends really so into our south of the border friends’ wrestling culture?

The next entry takes us back to 1973 for the reportedly atmospheric (which might just mean slow) zombie chiller Messiah of Evil.