Vince Locke, amazing illustrator and friend of the ZRC, recently did this new t-shirt design for S & M Bikes, called Zombie Rider. It’s available in white or black, and unfortunatly you cant’t order it directly from them, but they will help you find a dealer to purchase it through. Look under “Products”, then “Soft Goods” on their site to see this art on the t-shirt.
In Horror Hospital, an over-worked musician, Jason, goes on vacation after seeing an ad for “Hairy Holidays”, a travel agency that caters to the young, hip and hairy demographic. On his train ride to his Hairy Holiday, he meets Judy who is on her way to see her estranged Aunt Harris for the first time ever. Upon arrival at their destination station, the station attendent sends them off to a house and secretly phones ahead. They are picked up by two leather-clad bikers wearing white helmets. They arrive at the house to find that it is not as hospitible as they may have thought. After only one night, they witness a room with massively bloody sheets, a dinner table full of guests that don’t speak or respond to there speaking and the decapitation of a their travel agent. With their suspicions aroused they try to escape only to be wrangled in by the two leather clad motorcyclists and the head of the house Dr. Storm. After which they are clued into the gruesome experiments that he has been working on, using humans as guinea pigs for his mind control tests. Will they escape before being turned into mindless zombies by Dr. Storm?
I found Horror Hospital to be pretty boring. It barely makes it as a zombie flick given that the guinea pig patients (i.e. the zombies) don’t do much beyond doing exactly what they are told to do to demonstrate their submissiveness. You’re lead to believe that the leather clad bikers are actually zombies, but it seems that they didn’t have enough money to buy more than two of the outfits. So, whenever one are dispatched the next scene is sure to have two fresh ones that look just like the other two – one taller, one shorter.
Michael Gough makes for a very creepy Dr. Storm. I never knew very much of this actor beyond his roles as Alfred Pennyworth in the Tim Burton Batman series. After watching this I checked out his filmography to see if he had been type-cast as a horror actor or not. He did have his fair share of roles in horror movies, but not overly so.
The special effects and gore were pretty lite for a movie called Horror Hospital. Throughout the movie you see that there is this gruesome monster that lurks in the dark and casts a horrifying shadow. You never really see this creature very well, maybe at the end but I was pretty uninterested by that point to keep it all in check. Most of the gore is implied rather than shown. They drive a car that decapitates pedestrians, but it never shows it happening. You just see a head quickly fall into a catcher bag below it.
IMDb writers have offered that this movie may have inspired the Rocky Horror Picture Show a whole lot, but that’s yet another movie I never got into very much. Rocky Horror fans may find this movie interesting for that aspect, but I don’t believe I could sell this to anyone else, least of all to zombie genre enthusiasts.
Turner Classic Movies, as part of their TMC Underground series, will be showing the zombie cult classic The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? on Friday September 5th, at around 2am (that’s what their website say…hilarious). Also, you can read a new comic of a lost scene from the film. Set your TiVos!
RetarDEAD is a humorous love-letter to the zombie movie. Ostensibly the sequel to the movie Monsturd, (about a horrible poop monster) it’s the perfect blend of comedy and zombie movie. Based on the names alone you might suspect you’re in for some juvenile humor, and you’d be right. The movie starts out grindhouse style with a few hilarious fake trailers and a concession stand advert with sexually suggestive foods. I laughed hard at these and it set the mood for the goofy, fun, and entertaining movie to come.
Having successfully defeated the Monsturd and sending the evil Dr. Stern to the sewers, the police department of Butte County focus their attention on capturing the Weenie Wagger – a serial peeping tom. With their attention focused elsewhere, the cops are blissfully unaware that Dr. Stern survived and took a teaching job at a special education facility. He uses his pupils as part of an experiment with a new serum that turns the mentally challenged into geniuses. Of course, the experiment goes wrong and kills the patients but the drug keeps their brains alive long after death, turning them into zombies. Dr. Stern begins feeding the school’s staff to the zombies in a few surprisingly well done gore scenes. The Weenie Wagger (who happens to be a custodian at the school) is caught and tells the police about the zombies as part of a plea bargain. Dr. Stern is caught, but the zombies have infected all of Butte County.
As the pandemonium spreads, Mayor Anton Sinclair holds a press conference. Sinclair is played by former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra and is one of the best cameos in a movie I’ve seen in a while. Speaking of cameos, zombie burlesque troupe The Living Dead Girlz also make an appearance in which they tempt Dr. Stern to his doom. The rest of the movie focuses on the police attempting to restore order. The story here sort of fizzles but the gags and gore keep coming.
RetarDEAD is one of those low budget movies that momentarily flirts with greatness. Directors Dan West and Rick Popko managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of similar independent films and really made the most of what he had available to work with. Sure some of the actors are a little wooden and in places the sound engineering could have been better, but its juvenile humor kept me laughing through the whole film.
The special effects range from quite well done to a few that probably should have been left out. Fortunately the poor ones are brief and don’t take away from things too much. I appreciate the bluish makeup used on the zombies similar to the original Dawn of the Dead. Director of Special effects Ed Martinez obviously didn’t have a ton of money to spend and took a less-is-more approach which I think paid off.
Overall, I really liked this film, although it takes a certain sense of humor to enjoy it. I will definitely be looking for future movies from this team whether they are zombie-related or not. RetarDEAD is currently available on DVD from FilmBaby and will also be on Amazon.com in the coming weeks.
In a recent article in the Jackson Free Press, writer M.P. Heindl tackles concerns in Jackson, Mississippi about a possible zombie apoclypse.
“Often I’m up until 2 a.m., certain that tonight will be the night that one of NASA’s space probes to Venus will explode upon re-entry and radiate the brains of the freshly dead, or that one of the millions of current biological warfare experiments will escape into the public in the form of enraged monkeys.”
With several interviews of downtown Jackson employees, the article gives a well rounded look at the many concerns that Jacksonians have about zombies and their survival of a zombie apocolypse.
If you live in the Seattle, Washington area make sure not to miss the Revenant Film Festival, hosted by Revenant Magazine, on October 11th at the Museum Of History And Industry. Films being shown include 2, Colin, the short film version of Zombie Undead, Grave Mistake, Reel Zombies, and the short film Bernie Franklin: Zombie Hunter,. Tickets are $15 in advance, or $20 on the day of the show. Wish we could attend, but it’s over 2000 miles away from us!
In I Eat Your Skin, a publisher scoops up his prized playboy writer, Tom Harris, and takes him to Voodoo Island in hopes of jump-starting his next big seller. After seeing a zombie attack a woman on the island, Tom takes a greater interest in the goings on with the natives and a particular interest in Dr. Biladeau’s daughter, Jeannie. It seems that the natives believe the death of Jeannie will bring about prosperity on the island and Tom and Jeannie need to convince Dr. Biladeau to leave the island with them, but they soon find out how deep Dr. Biladeau is involved with the strange activity on the island.It’s tough for me to watch movies like I Eat Your Skin, being made in the era where women were portrayed as being of little use beyond being well manicured life support systems for their willing vaginas. The only women in this film are Tom Harris’ fawning, pawing and adoring fans hanging on every word that he recites from his cheesy romance novels, his publisher’s wife who he constantly flirts with in the presence of his publisher, Jeannie Biladeau who, doesn’t want to but, must fall for Tom Harris and his ever shirtless advances and then there’s the middle-aged black maid. It seems that the idea that a woman could be a anything but something to protect from danger, your trophy, your eye-candy, your fuck-hole, rather than someone to help you protect something or someone else from danger is beyond people of this era. For me this era in film is a black-eye that I’m rather appalled at having existed. This kind of crap usually casts an “I hate this movie” kind of shadow over the whole viewing. That said…I put this movie on at the bar where I was working and the patrons had a real hoot making fun of it and doing their own versions of Mystery Science Theater 3000 type commentary. The strikingly plastic visuals shown in I Eat Your Skin make easy sport for even the dullest of wit.
The zombies in I Eat Your Skin are pretty goofy looking, hardly scary. They seem to have started the make-up process with large, half-an-eggshell looking appliances over the eyes that give them a rather lo-fi bug look. Then they added some sort of texture to their faces, that gave the feel of dried mud, that extended past their necks and smoothed out on their exposed chests. They topped each zombie off with a sleeveless plaid shirt, worn open, with Bermuda shorts. The whole process is detailed at least twice in the movie during step-by-step dissolve transformation scenes that don’t exactly match up right. The funniest effect and probably the high-point of the film, was the use of a small plastic model of an island that they blew up. An island! Not a boat or a building or a train or a car, a whole damn island! It caps the film off quite nicely.
I Eat Your Skin is campy, goofy, 1960’s fodder for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 minded audience. It’s definitely good beer-drinkin’ party watchin’, but as a serious film it is severely lacking.
Right now over at Threadless.com you can vote for my Barrel of Zombies! t-shirt design and help me get it printed. That would be awesome. With enough votes, comments, and I’d buy it as a tee!‘s, it could possibly be picked to be printed and available for the masses to wear. Perfect for the impending zombie apocalypse. Thanks for reading my little bit of self-promotion!
If you missed our story on last year’s event, here’s a link to our coverage.
Where do we draw the line on what is and what is not a zombie movie? We just can’t decide on our own, so every Monday we’ll post a new movie to be debated by, you, our readers and ask the question: Zombie Movie Or Not? Every Sunday we’ll post our findings and possibly strike that movie off our Zombie Movie List. The week should give you enough time to rent the movie if need be or you desire.
What every reader must keep in mind is that there are two basic types of zombie that every zombie movie based off of – the Voodoo Zombie and the Romero Zombie. The Voodoo Zombie, while not always raised by Voodoo necessarily, is basically a person, either undead or entranced, that is controlled by a person or entity for the purpose of completing tasks, often killing. Romero Zombies are basically mindless, flesh-eating undead whose bite will turn victims into zombies. Now, not all movies adhere to all of these rules, but if the basics are there, you got a zombie movie.
This weeks debate is over Mutant (1984) Directed by Jon “Bud” Cardos.
IS: They want to eat your flesh and their infection spreads just like zombies.
IS NOT: They’re just toxic waste induced mutants who can die any way a normal person can.
Now it’s up to you, reader. What do you think? Mutant: Zombie Movie Or Not?
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