The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

I may have spoken too soon. Maybe silly romantic melodrama is the theme of the marathon. This movie makes it five of six movies that contain that sudsy element. Zombie Honeymoon was reminiscent of the plodding, emo, “thinking man’s” zombie movie I, Zombie, only more briskly paced. Our lead gets attacked and turned to a zombie on his honeymoon, spends the rest of the film killing and feeling kinda bad about it. But not that bad. His wife, who kind of looks like a poor man’s Maggie Gyllenhaal and is topless briefly, helps him deal with it — which mostly means covering it up. It struck me as goofy and forgettable, but not altogether unpleasant. I suspect this one could have been better as an old-style movie, with more focus on the romantic melodrama (not that there wasn’t plenty) and less on the unimpressive gore.

Tomorrow I’m watching the timeless 1985 classic Return of the Living Dead with my daughter. That should be fun.

Brigitte Lahaie: By far the best part of Grapes of Death

Night two of the second annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month brought us the mediocre Grapes of Death. Seems the French just can’t give good zombie. They can, however, give great hot French girl, as this film proves via the presence of Brigitte Lahaie. Wowza. Something special here, folks. And for the people who keep finding my website via variations on the search term “gratuitous nudity,” you’ll be glad to know that Grapes of Death is all about the gratuitous nudity — including a nice nude scene with Lahaie, which almost justifies this movie’s existence.

This film is basically a protracted chase scene broken up with gratuitous nudity and cheesy gore effects. Snore. Still, it’s arguably an important developmental zombie flick, and it is far better than director Jean Rollin’s other zombie flick, the execrable Zombie Lake. Still, it’s not good. I paired my mediocre French zombie flick with a mediocre French wine, so at least I got a decent buzz out of the deal. I’ll have a full review up in a few days (and a splitting headache tomorrow) most likely. Next up is our June 3 installment, I Walked with a Zombie, an American film, but directed by a French guy.

Watch out, she bites

Unlike the first two movies in the series, which planted tongue firmly in cheek for one great horror comedy (the original) and one below average one (the sequel, reviewed here), Return of the Living Dead III abandons the humor angle and takes a much darker tone. It’s a strange decision, considering that fans must have been expecting something in the same vein as the first two, but for a while it almost – almost – works. Then the admittedly meager promise of the beginning falls apart, leaving a tattered mess

The story this time around focuses more intently on the army’s involvement with Trioxin, the gas that reanimates the dead. Being the army, they are trying to weaponize it. Being the army in this series, they are utterly and completely incompetent, to a degree that is beyond ridiculous. The whole plot hinges on this incompetence and unfathomably lax security around base.

The leads are an army brat and his goth girlfriend. The two of them witness a reanimation test that goes awry, leading to some death and dismemberment. When she ends up dying in a motorcycle accident shortly thereafter, he decides to reanimate her. Once she’s back, they have a run in with some gangsters, she starts eating people, the army tries to catch her and bring her back, she tries to re-kill herself and things get more ludicrous by the second until it finally ends.

The film takes two serious liberties with the original. First, the bite of a zombie makes more zombies, which was not the case in the original — only exposure to Trioxin created zombies. Second, they introduce the idea that pain allows the zombie to control its need to feed. That’s in direct opposition to the original, where the pain of being dead was what caused the zombies to cave brains in the first place. These changes are extremely obnoxious.

On the plus side, the second change does offer an excuse for Julie — the girlfriend — to transform herself into the sexiest (yeah, I said it), most badass zombie you’ve ever seen. She pushes glass, scrap metal and chains though her skin, strips down to almost nothing and ends up looking like an extremely gruesome BDSM fetish model – which is kinda hot, admittedly. I assume that was the real reason for this movie.

The look of the zombies was wildly inconsistent. The original experiment zombie looked fantastic – dead, creepy and believable. Later, some zombies that get released from Trioxin canisters look subhuman, like trolls or goblins, rather than rotting, reanimated corpses. Most of the rest, such as the clerk Julie eats early on, just looked cheesy and bad. The credits list three different studios for the zombie work, which explains the inconsistency. Why they didn’t stick with the original studio and look is a mystery.

Considering the lack of continuity in tone from the first two movies and the extreme liberties taken, RotLD III would have been better served to abandon the connection altogether and set itself up as an entirely new movie. It would still be pretty crap, but at least it would have been more original crap then and wouldn’t have suffered from the comparison to the original.

Return of the Living Dead III/US/1993

After the break, enjoy a NSFW pic of Julie in all of her BDSM zombie-babe glory

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You want more Nazi zombie badness? We got more Nazi zombie badness. French/Spanish Nazi zombie badness in the form of the cheap, schlocky Oasis of the Zombies from the early ’80s. In this slow, ponderous outing a group of treasure hunters run afoul of a group of Nazi zombies haunting an oasis where millions in stolen Nazi gold is hidden. The zombies are some kind of weird hybrid ghost-zombies who disappear at dawn (even though it’s clearly light out in several scenes…) and hide in the sand when they aren’t busy stalking and murdering.

The problems of this movie are legion. The set and production design is possibly the worst I have ever seen. For example, one bit of evidence the Nazis had been there was clearly just a slab of wood with a swastika clumsily painted on it in white. The story was weak, the writing was miserable and the dubbing was atrocious. Yet despite being a bad movie by most every measure, there was something strangely watchable about it. It had a nice sense of atmosphere and really hot girls, a few of which supplied the obligatory gratuitous nudity. It’s not worth the time if you aren’t a total zombie-movie fanatic, but I’d call it the best of the terrible Nazi zombie movies, for what little that is worth.

Sweet lord, is Zombie Lake bad. Bad. It’s one of the curious subgenre of  Nazi zombie movies. You’d think angry, dead, fascist Germans eating folks would be a can’t-miss proposition, but you’d be very, very wrong. I swear this subgenre is cursed. So far every Nazi zombie movie I have seen has been god-awful. Seriously, these are some of the worst of the worst in a genre teeming with terrible ideas, half-baked execution and incoherence.

Anyway, you’ve got some Nazi zombies living in a lake. Or not living, I guess. They came to be there after being slaughtered by some French folks at or near the end of WWII. For some reason they revive to eat the occasional swimmer in the titular lake. Then they come out to terrorize the town, or in the case of one zombie, to reconnect with his daughter. Curiously, his daughter doesn’t seem particularly concerned with the fact that her dead father is a rotting, shambling mess, despite never having met him before. Eventually the town folk formulate a plan to save the day. Hooray. None of this is explained and it all happens at a plodding, interminable pace. Long, long before this is over you will be begging it to end.

The make up and gore effects were, hands down, the worst I have ever seen. Seriously, I’ve seen little kids’ Halloween makeup that was much better done. The gore was limited to buckets of fake blood — they basically didn’t bother faking wounds for the most part. A zombie bites, fake blood is doused on the area and they call it a day. Add to the mix execrable writing, dull direction and terrible acting, and you have a big pile of vomit. It did have plenty of nudity, which honestly is one of the few things saving this from being the single worst zombie movie I’ve ever seen. Let’s face it, some attractive naked women help break up the monotony. There are two full frontal nude scenes, one of which featured like ten women. All hot. It was still not enough to lift this off the bottom of the barrel, but I’ve helpfully included a NSFW shot of a few them after the jump, to save you the trouble of actually watching the movie. Read the rest of this entry »