In Oasis of the Zombies, a caravan of Nazis shipping gold is attacked by allied forces in a desert oasis. The shipment was never recovered and the locals say that the dead soldiers still guard it to this day. When the sole surviving soldier from the battle, a British officer, is killed after disclosing the location to a treasure hunter, the officer’s son and college friends venture out to the oasis for the untold millions and find strange happenings. By strange happenings I mean the remains of past treasure hunters and zombies guarding the oasis.
This movie bored me to sleep at 5pm on my day off. What little action there is is few and far between. With such a slow pace, I’m amazed by the amount of story I was actually able to pay attention to.
The camera work is deplorable. They seem to like doing these dramatic zoom-ins of virtually nothing, but can never seem to quite get the targeting right and always have to adjust it once they zoom all the way in. So, they’re zooming in on whatever is next to what they want and have to move the camera over to see what they actually wanted to zoom in on. It’s actually so bad it’s amusing after awhile. A person could get smashed making a drinking game out of it.
The editor obviously decided to get a lot of mileage out of his filler footage as you see the same zoom up on the the same crap in the oasis over and over again. When you see the mounted machine gun poking out of the pile of leaves, take a drink. When you see the pristine skull sitting on the ground, take a drink. When you see the jeep panel on the ground with the white swastika painted on it, take a drink. When you see the zoom-up on the spider’s web take a drink. When you get blood alcohol poisoning halfway through the movie, remember that I warned you this would happen.
Most of the time it’s difficult for me to judge someones acting ability when their voice is over dubbed, here it was no problem, the actors were hokey and bad. The voice-overs just made it worse. Some of the scenes just don’t add up. There’s actually a scene where there’s a good 15 second gap between when the voice-over stopped and the lips and hand movements of the person talking have stopped.
If you like your horror movies with nudity, your out of luck. Oh, they put nudity in there, they just did such a poor job of it that it’s more frustrating than prurient. This is due largely to the camera work. The guy just didn’t bother to point the camera at the boobs. And it’s not even like they’re trying to be coy and keep the boobs tastefully hidden behind their lovers arm, they just flub it all together. The one love scene that they have is ridiculous. This boy is interested in this girl, they’re in a tent and he asks her if she really wants to go all the way. She responds positively and takes off her shirt. They kiss with their shirts off for 30 seconds and the boy says “I have to get back to my friends now” meaning he’s gotta go sleep in another tent. This is all just a set up so he can see a zombie or something.
The zombies were pretty gruesome, but the camera lingers too long and tends to reveal the man behind the curtain. The special effects team seemed to be happy with the camera trick where everything happens off screen and it either cuts away just before it happens or cuts in just after it happens. Doing this once or twice in a film is kosher, but every time is just down right insulting. The fact that the zombies were supposed to be Nazi soldiers is a little hard to swallow when you see them. They all have very dark and longish hair unbefitting of a soldier or someone of a white-bread Aryan background.
It would take lots of beer and friends with an outstanding sense of humor to make this movie watchable. If you like watching how bad a movie can be, by all means rush out and snag a copy of Oasis of the Zombies, I’m certain it will not be checked out already. But, if you want a zombie movie with even the faintest shred of quality, look elsewhere. I don’t know what language or country this was originally made in, but the term “steaming pile of bum shit” would easily translate into almost any language and would adequately be comparable to the quality of this film in any culture.
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