Hell Of The Living Dead DVD Review
In Hell Of The Living Dead, a deadly chemical gas leaks from “Project Hope” and spreads to the natives of Papua New Guinea turning people into flesh eating zombies. A small SWAT team meets up with a TV reporter and her cameraman when they are sent in to assess the situation. When they find that everyone is turning into zombies, they try to find out the cause of it while they’re trying to survive an onslaught of zombies.
I would say that there are spoilers that follow in the next two paragraphs, but they don’t necessarily spoil the movie at all. They describe scenes of such ridiculousness, that they have to be seen, thus advertising for the movie to some degree. So, read on without worry.
Hell Of The Living Dead is so full of ridiculousness, it’s difficult to know where to start. During the team’s first encounter with the zombies, one of the 4 team members discovers that the zombies need to be shot in the head to be killed. So he demonstrates to the rest of the team, but the rest of the team refuse to do this throughout the entire film. In fact, the guy who told them all to shoot them in the head stops doing it too. Everybody just shoots them in the body the whole time (except one scene) then stand there, mouth agape, as the zombies lurch forward ceaselessly. Luckily, they never run out of bullets or even seem concerned that they might as they plug away at the zombies with there automatic rifles. The movie borrows heavily from Dawn Of The Dead, not just the SWAT team, but the music as well. When the music isn’t from Dawn Of The Dead, I hear it’s from a movie called Alien Contamination.
There are many cases where characters are in obvious danger and the rest of the group just stand there looking worried when a simple shot fired would end it all, especially if this SWAT team are any sort of marksmen (which I would think that they have to be). One scene shows the female lead being pulled at through a window by 3 or 4 zombies. So, the SWAT guy, after standing there for a good amount of time taking it all in, runs over and, instead of taking his time shooting the zombies or even hurriedly doing it, he swats at them with the side of his rifle, not the butt end, not the business end, he just kind of hits them with the side of it so they can easily grab it and haul it off. There are a lot of bad choices that are made by the characters that never seem to end up all that dire.
One of the most ridiculous things about Hell Of The Living Dead was the stock footage that’s haphazardly thrown in between scenes. It was supposed to take place in Papua New Guinea in the jungle, so they shot it in some woods and spliced in stock nature footage of birds and animals in the jungle throughout the film. They encounter native people in the jungle and we see stock footage of tribal dances and rituals mixed with their own footage of actors on a set. It gets down right goofy when they’re filming the natives because the quality of the film is so different that it looks like a Monty Python skit. I won’t even bother going into detail about the female lead dressing like a native to gain their trust for the sake of gratuitous nudity. It’s laughable.
The zombie make-up isn’t all bad, just most of it. The gory flesh wounds look pretty awesome, like the way Fulci does it. But, most of the zombies have dark grayish-green face paint on that makes them look like they’ve been working on cars all day. There are some pretty funny/gruesome scenes of particular goriness that will make any beer laden crowd howl in mixed delight and disgust.
This movie falls into the ’so bad it’s good’ category quite nicely. I could see people having a good time getting their friends together with some beer and having a real hoot watching this movie. In fact, I could only recommend this movie as a must see party flick. This is the kind of movie all your friends need to see because the residual jokes just wouldn’t stop. Definitely check this out with friends.
