Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

Title: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

Director: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

Review:

It’s kind of hard to believe that four people hold writing credits for this completely nonsensical film, but yeah, four brains got together to write this stupid, stupid film! Normally you’d think that the more writers the better the movie should be, but truth is that in Hollywood the rule of thumb is the more writers, the worse the movie. This is certainly the case here, this movie blows! Yes my friends, this movie is awful, but in that Italian horror sense that also makes it completely watchable? This is the reason why you’ll find people that will tell you this film rules and in a strange sort of way, it does. Yes my friends, this is yet another “so bad its good” flick from those money loving horror directors of Italy. And by money loving I’m talking about directors Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso two guys who just loved to make cheap knock offs of American films to make a quick buck. These guys knew these films were so sleazy and low grade that they always used pseudonyms for these films, which is why instead of saying this film was directed by Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei, the title screen says ‘Directed by Vincent Dawn’, as if they were ashamed at the film they just produced;. chances are they probably were. These films would get made at lightning fast speeds and with very little money, the results would usually be the kind of film we’ll be talking about today, the nonsensical (yet entertaining just for that) Hell of the Living Dead a.k.a. ‘Virus’ a.k.a. ‘Night of the Zombies’ a.k.a. ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ a.k.a. ‘Zombie Inferno’.

The story goes something like this:  a chemical leak has taken place in a chemical plant in New Guinea. The air borne chemical spreads all over the land, bringing the dead back to life. As chaos spreads throughout New Guinea, a swat team of four men is sent to investigate this situation. I thought it was funny how there’s talk of zombie threat in New Guinea and all that gets sent in are four SWAT team members? For a whole zombie threat? What the --? But whatever, so these guys are sent in and apparently left for dead because they’ve lost contact with whomever it was that sent them; I’m guessing it was the U.S. Government. These crazy SWAT guys end up meeting with a crew of two documentarians who are here to investigate what’s going on in New Guinea. For whatever the reason, they end up together for the rest of the film; together they must try and uncover the mystery behind the appearance of zombies in New Guinea.

Hell of the Living Dead was shot in Spain and Italy but in order to give the illusion that the film takes place in New Guinea, the filmmakers spliced in all this random stock footage of wild animals flying and jumping from trees and running through the wilderness. This stock footage is pretty funny because it appears randomly at any given moment in the film, so it’s like, we’ll have these characters talking and suddenly, there’s a monkey jumping from tree top to tree top! Characters walk a bit and then we get a gazelle flying, then, a stampede of elephants, then, a fox eating a rabbit and so on, it’s a cheap-o way to make your film longer. They even used stock footage of real life tribes conducting their rituals. Most of the time, whenever we see tribes men dancing and running, what we’re actually seeing is footage from a documentary called ‘La Valle’.

I’m afraid that with the kind of film that Hell of the Living Dead is, this is going to be the kind of review that makes fun of how nonsensical and stupid everything is on this film, so excuse me for that, but I just can’t help myself. So these zombies are the chemical kind, and since this chemical is airborne, it spreads all through out New Guinea, reaching deep into the desserts and forest and turning even the Indian tribes that live within into zombies. The first time we meet these tribes, they are conducting a burial of some kind. The lady documentarian says she knows how to deal with these cannibal tribes because she’s lived with them before, so she immediately strips which I thought was hilarious, because she strips right in front of these horny SWAT guys,which by the way apparently have nothing to say about this naked lady. Then, she puts on some body paint (which she apparently always keeps handy) and then goes mingling amongst the tribe. This scene was so sleazy; it was obviously just an excuse for some nudity! She could have done just the same with her clothes on, but whatever. A few minutes after that, the SWAT guys meet up with her and the tribe and all hell breaks loose when the dead guy that the tribe is burying comes to life and starts infecting the whole tribe. It turns into a full blown gorefest of a scene, in this respect I must say that the film does not disappoint, there’s tons of gore.

Earlier I mentioned that this film was a rip off, and it is. It’s a rip off of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). This is blatantly obvious when we see that some scenes are almost identical . Let’s see, we get little kid zombies, we get a SWAT team, a hostage situation…they even stumble upon a priest, who ends up being a zombie, mimicking that scene where the SWAT team guys in Dawn of the Dead stumble upon that freaky priest. We get scientists and politicians talking on television trying to solve the zombie situation. The main characters work on television and so on.  But of course, this film is also NOTHING like Dawn of the Dead, because Dawn of the Dead was never a comedy which is basically what Hell of the Living Dead feels like to me. Funniest part is that it was all unintentional; it’s obvious these guys didn’t know they were making such a hilarious movie, but they did it anyways. The comedy comes from how stupid these characters are and the dialog they say. For example, it is made abundantly clear that in order to kill these zombies you have to shoot them in the head, yet the characters keep shooting an exorbitant amount of bullets in the chest! It makes you feel like screaming out loud to these stupid characters, they’d save so much ammo if they simply shot one bullet to the head, but no, they empty a whole machine gun in every other body part that isn’t the head! Even after a character has screamed it and showed them how effective it is to shoot them in the head.

Want funnier stuff? Well, how about the fact that some zombies are repeated during the film? We’ll see a zombie in this scene here, then cut to another scene somewhere else and there’s the same actor playing the same zombie! Ha ha ha! Hilarious! How about a SWAT team member who in the middle of a zombie attack decides to put on a Tu-tu and start dancing and singing “Singing in the Rain”? How about motor boats that are simply lying around on the beach waiting for the protagonists to arrive? How about the fact that characters seem to simply wait around for the zombies to grab them? Arrgh this annoyed the hell out of me! I’m like run, don’t just stand there waiting for all those zombies to grab ya! Ha ha…hows about the fact that this films borrows the soundtrack from Dawn of the Dead and Alien Contamination (1980)? Ha hah….How about the fact that characters never seem to run out of bullets? EVER? And the dialog? It’s pure cheesy brilliance. For example, when a group of characters stumble upon a building one of them says: “Buildings have people in them, we’d better go investigate” I mean the hilarity is never ending with this movie and therefore it’s watchable just for that; its empty calories of the zombie kind.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

Title: Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

Director: Brian Yuzna

Cast: Melinda Clarke, J. Trevor Edmund, Sarah Douglas, Kent McCord

Review:

There’s this thing that happens only to movie buffs, you watch a movie at a certain point in your life, then you revisit the same film 20 years later and suddenly it takes on a whole other meaning, or you see things in it you never saw the first time. I guess this has a lot to do with how we filter films, books and songs through our own lives, our own experiences. Sometimes you watch a film as a kid and don’t get it, you watch it as an adult and it makes all the sense in the world. Or vice versa, you loved it as a kid, and end up hating it as an adult. Return of the Living Dead III was a film that I didn’t think much of the first time I saw it. For some reason, it just didn’t click with me. I was in my teens and to me, Return of the Living Dead III was something of a letdown because it didn’t have as many zombies as the previous Return of the Living Dead films did, it didn’t have scenes taking place in cemeteries with zombies coming out of their graves, which is what I loved about the previous ones. Also, this film has a more serious tone to it, it's less fun in a way and more of a sci-fi horror film. I had a chance to rewatch Return of the Living Dead III the other night and low and behold, I ended up enjoying the hell out of it. In fact, I think it is quite underrated!

The story this time around concerns two teenagers who are deeply in love, Kurt and Julie. Kurt is something of a rebel; he wants to move out with his girlfriend Julie to Seattle to follow his rock and roll dreams of becoming a drummer and living the rock and roll lifestyle. One night, when Kurt and Julie are feeling particularly adventurous, they decide to sneak in to the secret military base where Kurt’s father works at, to see what kind of sick experiments they conduct in there. When they do, they discover that the government is experimenting with the reanimation of corpses so they can be used as bio-weapons! They actually see with their own eyes how the government re-animates a corpse with the help of the chemical compound known as 245 Trioxin! Later that same night, Kurt and Julie decide to escape, to go off on their own into the world; unfortunately in their excitement Kurt and Julie have a motorcycle accident and Julie dies! In the middle of his sadness and desperation, Kurt decides to take Julie back to the military base to bring her back to life! Will she be the same Julie when she comes back?

This sequel is a bit different than the previous Return of the Living Dead films, but at the same time it walks on familiar ground. It is different because on the first and second films the military functions from behind the scenes, we known the containers with the zombies inside of them were misplaced by the military, and we know they are trying to control the whole zombie threat, but we only see the military from afar, not so on this third film in which we actually go inside the military base where the government conducts the experiments to bring back the dead. This is one of the things that I enjoyed the most about this film, how they actually show these grizzly experiments and how they can get out of control. Speaking of getting out of control, the film opens up with this extensive sequence in which we see how they reanimate a corpse that is just awesome, the sequence eventually becomes this orgy of gore and zombies! If you’re a zombie fan, you will love these scenes; they really go into the whole process of how they reanimate the dead.

Then, the film turns into a Romeo and Juliet type of deal with Kurt and Julie, this is where Return of the Living Dead III is also different to all the others, the love angle. Kurt is alive, but Julie is undead, how can they ever consummate their love for each other? Will they? Should they? This film is Melinda Clarke’s show; she is the central character, the main attraction. This beautiful actress plays Julie, Kurt’s undead girlfriend. I really enjoyed Clarke’s portrayal of the zombie girl. We get to see her feeling and describing the change of becoming one of the undead, she describes her numbness and hunger with great emotion, and you get to feel some empathy for her, I dug her performance and you can tell she was really into it. The story also complicates itself even further when Kurt and Julie stumble upon this gang of trigger happy Chicanos who end up holding a grudge against Kurt and Julie, they learn the hard way not to mess with a member undead.

Return of the Living Dead III was directed by Brian Yuzna, a true horror fan and certainly no stranger to the world of the undead. He’s the director behind Bride of Re-Animator (1989) and Beyond Re-Animator (2003), plus a slew of other genre films. So we get a horror film that’s directed by horror fan for horror fans, you could tell that the guy was aware that he was making a sequel to Dan O’Bannon’s genre marking Return of the Living Dead (1985). They even reference O’Bannon’s original idea for Return of the Living Dead when they mention that the ‘245 Trioxin’ chemical compound was originally intended to be used by the military on the “war against marihuana”. We get the drums filled with zombies, we get the Trioxin, we get the military experiments, so yeah, this feels a whole lot like a sequel to Return of the Living Dead as opposed to parts four and five of this franchise which don’t feel like they exist in the same universe somehow. Also, I have to give Kudos to Yuzna for making such an entertaining flick on such a low budget. You can tell this film is smaller in scale then the previous two, yet the creativity and the direction make it look better than it should. It even explores new ideas, especially when it comes to controlling zombies with an exo-skeleton type of thing, cool idea!

So we have a film that addresses familiar themes and exists within the same universe that Dan O’Bannon created, but brings a couple of new things to the table.  My final word on this movie is that it is vastly underrated. It has good acting from all involved, and it is unusually well written, I was actually a bit surprised at how much I was enjoying it. It has great characters in it too; for example there’s this homeless character called “The Riverman” who spews these golden nuggets of wisdom, LOVED that character! Another plus for the film was the gore which was plentiful. It reminded me of how gory movies used to be. We also get some pretty cool looking zombies on this one. The end of the film is this zombie blood bath with tons of gore! Anyways, bottom line with this movie is that it’s not the greatest zombie movie ever made, and sometimes it shows its budgetary limitations (especially when it comes to the cramped sets) but the imagination and energy involved elevate it and make it a worthy sequel in my book, worth a watch.

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

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CHUD II: Bud the Chud (1989)

Title: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud (1989)

Director: David K. Irving

Cast: Gerrit Graham, Robert Vaughn

Review:

There’s sequels out there that have nothing to do with the original film, they are made and marketed as a sequel to the original film simply as a way to make some money by riding on the coat tails of the first film which in most cases was moderately successful. Examples of this are films like TROLL II (1990), which was marketed as a sequel to TROLL (1986), but doesn’t even have any trolls in it, and doesn’t have anything to do with the original. Another good example would be Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005), there’s many others, but these two are the most clear examples I can think of right now. C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is one of these ‘in name only’ sequels. What a waste of celluloid!  

Bud the C.H.U.D. resurrected by a hair dryer thrown in a bathtub! 

Remember how in the first film we learned that the C.H.U.D. creatures were all part of a government experiment gone wrong?  Well, on this one the government has decided to eliminate the ‘C.H.U.D. program’, so they send the last remaining C.H.U.D. to a government science lab to get rid of it. A duo of high school students decide to break into a government science lab to find a corpse for their science teacher. They end up taking the C.H.U.D. with them and mistakenly bringing him back to life. Not only do they revive it, they also misplace it! The C.H.U.D. ends up infecting people all over town and creating and army of C.H.U.D.’s! Why? Who the hell knows, this movie makes no sense to me. The guy who wrote it, Ed Naha wrote Stuart Gordon’s DOLLS (1987), Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and TROLL (1986) all pretty decent films in my book, but CHUD II feels like he wrote it in a day, there’s nothing special about it, it has no depth, no meaning, it’s a stupid film about kids trying to stop a hoard of stupid ass bumbling zombies. Ed Naha wrote this film, but you wouldn’t know by looking at the films credits because he was so ashamed to have been the author of this lame piece of zombie zinema that he changed his name on the credits to ‘M. Kane Jeeves’; so that gives you an idea how special this film is. 

  

I’ll tell you the truth, it was extremely difficult staying awake through this one. It’s the kind of film that I fall asleep on because it just fails to grab me. I tried finishing this movie on three occasions, but it was just so difficult to maintain my interest in such an inept, vacuous movie. It had nothing to say, it was so infantile, it has no story to it. It has a premise, that’s it. The premise is that a C.H.U.D. has escaped the militaries grasp and is going around a small town biting people and turning them into C.H.U.D.’s. Now remember how the C.H.U.D.’s in the first film were these creatures that used to be humans but mutated into these monstrous creatures with glowing yellow eyes? Well on this one they refer to that as a “rare occurrence” on this one the C.H.U.D.’s don’t even mutate, they look more like zombies; but not cool decomposing walking corpses you would see in films like Return of the Living Dead (1984), nope, these zombies look more like regular people with white make up on their faces and bad teeth, which of course is a complete rip off. So cheap! I felt cheated! Especially when we take in consideration that on the poster for this film we see mutated zombies with glowing yellow eyes that show up NOWHERE on this film! 

Seriously, this movie must have cost something like two dollars to make, it’s so cheap. I think most of the budget went on exploding a fast food joint and paying Robert Vaughn to play the military official responsible for getting rid of the C.H.U.D.’s. This is supposed to be a horror comedy, though there’s very little of both of these elements on the film; it’s neither funny, nor horrifying, which brings me to my next point: for a zombie movie, this film is pretty blood less! There’s absolutely no gore anywhere on this film. And it’s supposed to be a zombie flick! I guess, if you wanted to show your seven year old little sibling their first zombie film you could probably show him or her this infantile film and they might even enjoy it because as a zombie film, it’s pretty harmless and silly. The zombies don’t even eat people, though this is what they are supposed to do because they are always saying “meat!” when they see humans, but we never actually see anyone eating human flesh, which of course will be a major let down for any zombie fan. Why let a guy who's never made a horror film in his life direct a horror comedy? All David K. Irving ever directed were children's films, which might explain why this second C.H.U.D. film ended up being so infantile in contrast to the first, which wasn't a children's film. 

Zombies go trick or treating on this film

How stupid is this film? Well, at one point Bud the C.H.U.D., who for some reason every C.H.U.D. follows and imitates, decides to head to the local high school Halloween party, and just as they are entering the high school all the C.H.U.D.’s begin to do this choreographed dance sequence that comes out of nowhere and I’m like what the hell? Was that supposed to some sort of homage to Michael Jackson’s THRILLER or something? Then they have Bud the C.H.U.D. doing some pretty stupid things like getting a hair cut, dressing up, killing a woman doing her aerobics and attacking a fast food establishment. And it’s not only the C.H.U.D.’s that are stupid; the main characters do some pretty stupid things as well. The last twenty minutes are perhaps the only moderately cool thing about the film because the filmmakers finally decided to show a couple of deaths to liven up the pace of the film, which up to this point is a complete borefest. I could say that seeing Robert Englund appear in the shortest cameo on the planet was amusing, but I would be lying because it’s a blink or you’ll miss it type of thing, he walks in front of the camera walking a dog and then he’s gone. Personally I don’t recommend CHUD II: Bud the Chud because it has none of the things that made the original C.H.U.D. film a watchable b-flick, this ‘in name only sequel’ is cheap and cheats it’s way out of showing us some monsters by replacing said monsters with actors wearing white make up on their faces. It’s silly in a very 80’s kind of way (the film has it’s own theme song!) and maybe you might find some enjoyment in that, but ultimately, these Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers are a total bore, directed by a guy who knew nothing about what makes a good horror/comedy. I say give it a pass, there’s better zombie movies out there to see.

Rating: 1 out of 5   

Dredd 3D (2012)

Title: Dredd 3-D (2012)

Director: Pete Travis

Writer: Alex Garland

Cast: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey

Review:

Why does a film like Dredd 3-D fail so harshly at the box office? It has all the necessary ingredients for a good sci-fi/action film; in my book it should have been a moderately successful film, to have it fail so disastrously kind of boggles my film connoisseur mind. The film has good production values, it looks great, Judge Dredd looks and behaves like he should, there’s tons of violence, gore, visual eye candy, the computer generated effects are well achieved...I mean, yeah, it needed to be a bit more ‘spectacular’ I guess we could say, but in the end, even if it isn’t as loud and bombastic as Stallone’s Judge Dredd (1995), I don’t think it should have failed the way it did. Reportedly it’s only made 10 million dollars on a 50 million dollar budget!? Why didn’t this new Dredd movie take off?

Same as Judge Dredd (1995), Dredd 3-D starts out by giving us a quick intro about who Dredd is, and why these judges exist via a quick voiceover. They explain all about the escalating crime scene which has skyrocketed out of control. Chaos and anarchy rule the streets; the judges are a police force with special weapons and armor sent out to eradicate crime; something that they are currently having a difficult time doing. Mega City One is filled with violence and death; it’s like the eternal ghetto. The queen of this ghetto is a drug lord known as Ma-Ma, and Ma-Ma sells this drug called Slo-Mo, which when you take it, makes you see everything shiny and colorful and slows things down to the point where you feel as if you were watching life in slow motion, hence the name. Of course, this drug has to be eradicated and Dredd knows where Ma-Ma lives. It’s up to him and a his newly assigned telepathic rookie to find Ma-Ma and destroy her drug dealing empire.

Does Dredd 3D’s failure at the box office mean that the ‘R’ rated action film is now dead? I really don’t think so. We have seen various ‘R’ rated action films flourish in theaters, a recent example of this would be The Expendables franchise, it’s going strong on it’s second film, and it’s got tons of action and gore. So, I ask again, why did Dredd 3D fail? All I can say is that as the tried and true (and sometimes unpredictable) waters of mass consumption have proven, it is a very rare occasion when the public will go see a film about a character they don’t know much about. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not tuned into Judge Dredd’s comic book origins. To top things off, Judge Dredd starring Sylvester Stallone also failed at the box office. To be honest, I didn’t feel like that film deserved to fail as badly as it did either. What can I say, sometimes the masses just don’t like a character and they never give it a chance to lift off the ground no matter how many times Hollywood tries; just look at The Punisher character. They have tried with three different films already; all three films failed to impress at the box office. So maybe audiences just don’t like the idea of Dredd, though I don't see why they wouldn't. I mean Judge Dredd isn't all that different from Robocop (1987), a huge box office success that spawned two sequels, a television show, comic books, an animated show, action figures for children and is currently getting the reboot treatment. So I don't know what gives with this film. 

In comparison to Sylvester Stallone’s film, this one is smaller in scale, I mean it’s not a low budget flick, but to give you an idea, Stallone’s film had 70 million dollar budget while Dredd 3D had 50. And apparently 70 million in ’94 could buy you a really expensive looking film because in my book Judge Dredd is a massive, sci-fi action epic, I loved that about it, you could see those millions up on the screen, this was when films really looked expensive as opposed to nowadays where everything just looks computer generated. While Judge Dredd concerns itself with Mega City One being taken over by a power hungry mad man, Dredd 3D is simply about Dredd showing a rookie cop what it means to be a Judge. Together they enter Ma-Ma’s domain to try and stop Slo-Mo production. Unfortunately, Ma-Ma resides on the 200^th floor of the Peach Trees apartment complex. The film doesn’t go much further then Dredd going up the tower, facing Ma-Ma’s weapons and henchmen. The film does borrow this ‘going up a tower to meet a drug dealer at the top’ premise from The Raid:  Redemption (2011), there’s no denying that, but where The Raid made things interesting by giving us a heavy dose of martial arts fighting, Dredd 3D fails in making each floor of the building more interesting. The film can be described as one long shoot out, with lots of bullets whizzing by, and piercing flesh, people hiding in corners…it gets a bit redundant. This simplistic approach towards the film was kind of a let down for me considering that Alex Garland, a writer I commonly rely on for good story and character development wrote the script. It seems like Garland deliberately kept the scope of the story small for budget reasons. 

And here’s where I go into the films one negative point: the film needed a bit more showmanship to it. It needed to be more spectacular. Shoot outs will never replace the adrenaline rush of a well orchestrated action sequence. The film opens up with a cool motorcycle chase sequence, reminiscent of the opening sequences for Robocop, but after that there’s not a whole lot of action in my book. The film does give us an over abundance of bullets and blood and that was cool, but it needed a hell of a lot more action because for a movie about cops in a chaotic crime ridden city from the future, this one felt a bit restrained in this department. What it did have a lot of was style, the camera angles were awesome, and the way the effects of Slo-Mo were achieved was visually interesting, especially in 3-D. So this is where the movie excels. Another high point was Karl Urban as Dredd, he doesn’t talk much, his basically a walking tank, if you mess with him you are dead, which is really the way Dredd should be, so the portrayal of the character they got just right. And for you puritans out there, Urban never takes the helmet off, something Stallone was guilty off and heavily criticized for. In the end, even with its hiccups, this was not a bad film, it should have made its money back, sadly, Dredd 3D is currently dying a quick death at the box office. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those movies that audiences will discover once it hits home video. 

Rating: 4 out of 5