Hell of the Living Dead (1980) Review: Eurotrash Zombie Jungle Hell

Hell of the Living Dead is an amalgam of two crazes that swept grindhouse cinemas in the 1970s, jungle cannibalism and zombies. A word of warning: make sure you are renting/buying the correct film. According to IMDB, this movie is also known as Virus, Night of the Zombies, and Zombie Creeping Flesh. I ended up viewing twenty minutes of Zombie 3, another movie, before realizing my mistake. 

When I rented Hell of the Zombies, it skipped ten minutes into the film. I watched the first ten minutes afterwards, but didn’t need to. In fact, I believe the movie is better without the introductory sequence. By the way, I reviewed two other Eurotrash zombie movies, Burial Ground and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, here and here.

To the plot! A power plant in New Guinea run by an organization called Hope (irony!) malfunctions. Long story short, a dead rat clambers into a guy’s hazmat suit, which leads to pipes releasing noxious green gas that kills everybody. Except they’re not dead! 

Cut to an embassy, where we meet our special forces heroes, four guys who dress in blue fatigues and blue caps that make them look like janitors instead of highly trained soldiers. Maybe the costume budget ran out? 

They are sent on a secret mission in New Guinea, where we meet a pair of reporters stuck in a van with an angry man, his sullen wife, and their sick child. The kid seems to be on his last legs, but nobody helps him. This is strange, as you’d think his parents would want to get him medical attention.

Instead, the reporters leave the van and take a leisurely stroll around the deserted town. The wife takes a walk also – probably to get away from her husband – and is eaten by a zombie. The man is asleep in the van when his son dies, becomes a zombie, and eats him. Nothing in this scene makes any sense.

The reporters are the only survivors. They  join up with our four blue-clad Rambos, who are concerned they’ll blab about their ultra secret mission, but bring them anyway. Good thing they did, because they need intel to complete their mission! 

Enter the female reporter, who proves her worth by stripping down to a skimpy thong and dressing like a native. She infiltrates a village and learns that the plague is spreading amongst the natives. Since the zombies are literally everywhere, this is obvious, but it’s still a job well done! I can only imagine the brainstorming session that produced this plot point.

Hell of the Dead soon settles into a pattern, with our commandos killing bunches of zombies and then driving away. We witness grainy jungle footage, exotic animals, and wild dancing, as well as the natives disemboweling animals and eating unspeakably gross things. 

Turns out our blue-clad Smurfs aren’t just mindless killing machines. One of them has a thing for female reporters, but his hard-ass leader won’t put up with any of that romance bullshit. The commando who looks like Klaus Kinski enjoys taunting the zombies before blowing their heads off, which seems stupid but is realistic as a reaction to stress. 

The fourth commando is the quiet one, and you know what they say about the quiet ones. He wears a backwards cap and drives the jeep. But he harbors a terrible – or awesome – secret, which leads to the high point of this movie.

The Blue Goons check out a house. There is no reason to do this, other than the fact that they read the script. Backwards Cap Guy is sent to canvas the basement, where he throws away his guns and drapes a little green dress over his blue camos. Donning a tophat, brandishing a cane, he waltzes until the zombies gobble him up.

Undeterred, our valiant friends soldier on until they reach the Hope power plant, where we learn that Hope’s vision statement is solving the world’s overpopulation problem by designing a chemical that will make people in third world countries eat each other. IMO, this is nasty enough to seem plausible. The commandos’ mission is to destroy the incriminating documents, which they do before the zombies eat everybody. The end.

Hell of the Living Dead was supposedly inspired by Dawn of the Dead, and the two movies are similar in that they both contain the word Dead. By Eurotrash standards, this is a decent movie that becomes a great movie if you watch it drunk. Don’t watch it high, or when you are eating dinner. Actually, do not watch any Eurotrash movie when eating dinner. However, if you are a fan of cheesy 1980’s zombie jungle movies, this is a must-see.