Category: italian horror

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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.

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A Review of Zombie (1979), by Lucio Fulci: A Eurotrash Masterpiece

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie is the perfect movie to watch when you are discovering you might have a drinking problem. The first time I watched this film was at a high school party, when we sat around the television set in the living room drinking beer and watching this flick on VHS. 

Many of my fellow partygoers were hooking up and slipping away to look at the stars, discuss the meaning of life, and paw at each other, but I was made of different stuff. Besides all the beer, I ended up eating a whole box of Oreo cookies and barely made it to the eyeball piercing scene before spewing up black chunks everywhere. I’m sure I looked like one of the zombies in this movie!

When I watched Zombie a second time as part of my Eurotrash zombie watch – you can read my review of Burial Ground here – it was better than I remembered, but my memories are so hazy so that means nothing. I quit drinking thirty-one years ago. If I hadn’t quit, I’d be as dead as one of the zombies in this movie.

Zombie is a 1979 Italian zombie flick directed by Lucio Fulci. Unlike many of his later films, this has a plot, even if the plot doesn’t make much sense. An empty sailboat floats into New York Harbor, just like the scene in Dracula when the ghost ship Demeter sails into Whitby. The boat isn’t as empty as it seems, as an unfortunate Coast Guard officer discovers when a zombie rips his throat out!

Enter Anne Bowles, daughter of the boat’s owner. Anne has no idea what’s going on and she hasn’t read the script, so she joins forces with a hard-boiled NYC reporter with a British accent. They trace her father to a Caribbean island, which they reach by hooking up with a couple on a boat. 

I’m not sure what the guy does, but his girlfriend’s hobby is topless scuba diving, one of the many things that screams Eurotrash about this film. While underwater, she sees a shark fighting a zombie, which often happens. She has a camera but doesn’t take pictures of the battle, because who’d want to see something like that?

Cut to the isle, where a woman starts off the morning on the right note by telling her doctor husband how much she hates him. He slaps her and then goes off to his job of wrapping people up in sheets and shooting them in the head. No sooner has he driven off when the zombies attack, which leads to the infamous eyeball piercing scene. Warning: there are many, many gross scenes in this movie.

Meanwhile, our marooned heroes meet the doctor, who tells Anne he was great friends with her father. Since we see a flashback of him shooting her father in the head, perhaps he’s exaggerating. Doc asks them to check on the beloved wife he just slapped. Since everyone in this movie is crazy, they agree.

When they reach the doctor’s house, they find the zombies busy eating his wife, and rush back to the hospital as drums beat in the distance. The doctor tells them a) the dead are rising; b) he’s trying to find the cure. What I want to know is, what is he trying to cure? Get the hell out of there.

The zombies attack the compound when the sun sets. Despite moving slower than grampa shambling on his walker, they kill almost everyone. The survivors reach the boat and set sail. After turning on the radio, perhaps in search of the Bee Gees, they learn that zombies have taken New York City. 

Looking back now, I realize I did have a drinking problem, which was obvious to anyone who knew me. The real shock is how heavily edited the version of Zombie I saw back then was. I don’t recall the topless scuba diving scene at all. I would have remembered, no matter how drunk I was.

If you are an aficionado of Eurotrash zombie movies, it doesn’t get much better than Zombie. Character development has left the building, replaced by a bizarre combination of bare skin and gore. Gore wins by a country mile – we have worms, intestines, and technicolor bile. I will leave you with a friendly warning. Don’t eat Oreo cookies when watching this movie. Recommended!

An earlier version of this review was published on my Substack, Abandoned Places. If you like reviews of horror movies/comics/short stories, please consider subscribing!

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Burial Ground (1981) Review: A Eurotrash Zombie Primer

This is a review of Burial Ground (1981), an Italian Eurotrash zombie movie released in the wild and wooly days of the early 1980’s. What are Eurotrash zombies, you say? I’m glad you asked! Here are three essential factoids. 1. Eurotrash zombies are gross. Think maggots, green blood, decay. Do not watch when eating lunch. 2. Eurotrash zombies don’t crave brains, and are cannibals in the more traditional sense. Entrails? Spleen? Intestines? Yes, thank you! 3. Eurotrash zombies are crafty. They wield farm implements, use hand signals, and ride horses like they are jockeys in the Kentucky Derby.

Three couples travel to a villa for some fun in the sun, but are interrupted by a horde of zombies released from their burial ground. A word about those burial grounds, which are supposedly Etruscan. Just last month I visited Italy and visited actual Etruscan burial grounds in Orvieto. I didn’t see any zombies and the tombs don’t look anything like the ones shown in this movie. Shame, shame!

Anyway, the villa is inhabited by three couples, one child, and two servants.  The only character I will mention by name is Michael, who is supposed to be a child of about ten to twelve years old but is played by an adult actor with a growth disorder. Michael wears short pants – we call them floods in N.J. – and does not look like a child. Michael interrupts his mother during sex and asks her what she’s doing. The man she is frolicking with is not her husband, which might be why he’s confused. But I don’t think so.

Eurotrash zombies hate it when people have sex, so they shamble to the villa in record time to stop the fornicating couples. In this film, sex consists of the man lying atop the woman with his pants still on while they paw at each other. This isn’t done to appease the censors, as I don’t think there was such a thing in Italy in the early 1980’s. Burial Ground contains full nudity and an incest subplot so nauseating they had to hire an adult actor to play a child.

Our hedonistic couples are in for a long weekend, because these zombies are organized! They set a bear trap, which snares one of the women. The bear trap is a highlight of Burial Ground. It might be my imagination, but it seems like the zombies paused for a moment, proud of their handiwork, before shambling in for the kill.

The survivors gather in the villa and are picked off one by one. When the maid tries to close a window, a zombie hurls a dagger or throwing star and pins her hand to the wall. Maybe it’s a Ninja Zombie! They then use a scythe to cut off her head like an overripe grape. Later in the movie, one of the survivors tosses her corpse to the zombies. It’s every man for himself!

The most disturbing thing about Burial Ground is the character of Michael, hands down. Look, he’s an adult and I sure hope he got paid, but it’s still unsettling to watch a grown man pretend to be a kid. The incest subplot – which is why a child couldn’t play the part – multiplies the ick factor by a thousandfold.

I am unsure why Burial Ground exists. Maybe the movie was a tax write-off, or part of a money laundering scheme, or something even more sinister. Perhaps the zombie apocalypse broke out in Rome and they made this film to cover it up? Bottom line: if you can’t get enough of zombie movies, and enjoy watching them drunk or high, you will love Burial Ground.

An earlier version of this review was published on my Substack, Abandoned Places. If you like reviews of horror movies/comics/short stories, please consider subscribing!