What’s an Undead Ringer?

I review zombie movies for the ZRC. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t want to come right out and peg their movie as a zombie flick. Maybe it’s artistic integrity or they just don’t want to be dismissed by being lumped in with such a stigmatized genre, so sometimes you have to read between the lines. Every now and again, I come across one that looks like it’s totally a zombie movie, but they don’t want to use the ‘Z’ word, so they call them ‘the dead’ or talk about an ‘outbreak’ or ‘cannibalistic creatures’. Sometimes they use these terms to try to sucker YOU, the zombie fan, into picking up their flick, knowing full well it’s about ghosts or lame-ass monsters. By and large, these movies aren’t very good, so to add insult to injury, you’ve just rented a really bad movie that’s not even the zombie movie you hoped for. Well, I’ve been suckered on occasion and I’ll admit it so you don’t have to. We’ll call them Undead Ringers. I’ll review them, discuss them and, yes, spoil the hell out of them, all out of spite for being fished-in. This is the only SPOILER ALERT you get. Now on to:

This is how NetFlix described Living Dead Girl:

“When her grave is disturbed by both earthquake and toxic waste spill, a deceased girl comes alive to walk the Earth again in French filmmaker Jean Rollins’s macabre tale. After rising from her tomb, zombie Catherine (Francoise Blanchard) hungers for flesh and blood and sets out to find childhood friend and blood sister Helene (Marina Pierro). Helene decides to help satisfy Catherine’s bloodlust by luring people into their lair.”

In Living Dead Girl, toxic waste, dumpers that moonlight as grave robbers, awaken the corpse of a beautiful heiress, Catherine Valmont, who craves blood. After killing an amorous naked couple in what was her castle, but is now a rental, Catherine contacts her friend, Helene, whom she made a childhood blood pact with to ensure that they would die together, something that obviously did not happen. Helene comes to the castle to find out that her recently dead friend needs human flesh to survive and begins helping her by trapping unsuspecting good Samaritans in her in basement to feed on. Meanwhile, an American photographer sees Catherine Valmont and photographs her. Becoming enchanted by the pictures, she takes them about town asking the locals who she is. The response that she is a two year dead heiress only heightens her intrigue. She and her husband go to the castle to investigate but end up blowing the lid off the castles dirty secret.

The reason I was surprised to see that the writer/director of this film was the same director as Zombie Lake was that I couldn’t believe someone let him make another movie. This film reminded me very badly of Zombie Lake. It’s painstakingly slow, excruciatingly boring, way too much about love and the zombie sucks. There’s one zombie in this movie, it’s Catherine Valmont and in two years she didn’t decay, rot, age or deteriorate at all. In fact, blood seems to come right off of her burial dress with little wear and tear.

This is hardly a zombie movie. She’s not a vampire because she’s not adverse to sunlight or anything like that, yet she does feed on blood. She’s not really a zombie given that her victims don’t come back as zombies and she really does eat their flesh, just their blood. You’d have to create a new genre for this movie, not vampire, not zombie, how about sucker, because she totally sucks…blood. Calling this a zombie movie only serves to sucker zombie enthusiasts in to watching this movie about a sucker.

Jean Rollin, Writer/Director of Living Dead Girl, learned something from Zombie Lake too. He must have learned that he couldn’t do gore very well, so he backed off from using it a whole lot. The “zombie” bites people and pokes them with her sharp nails and blood comes out, but after that there’s no hole or wound or anything but blood.

And what that hell was the deal with the toxic waste dumpers/grave robbers? Were they taking time off of clubbing baby seals and stealing old ladies purses? Seriously, these guys are dumping toxic waste in this vault below the Valmont castle and then they move on to stealing the jewelry from the corpses that have been laid to rest there. This all goes to show that these are some really evil guys.

Living Dead Girl was better than Zombie Lake, but that still doesn’t say shit for Living Dead Girl. It was slow, boring, not scary and just all around sucked. I can’t really see this being a hilarious party movie, but I guess beer has done funnier things.  I also have to add that the cover art is totally some kind of after market spruce up. The movie within looks nothing like that. I recommend that this movie be avoided.

Comments(0)

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our  RSS feed!     Bookmark to:

What’s an Undead Ringer?

I review zombie movies for the ZRC. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t want to come right out and peg their movie as a zombie flick. Maybe it’s artistic integrity or they just don’t want to be dismissed by being lumped in with such a stigmatized genre, so sometimes you have to read between the lines.  Every now and again, I come across one that looks like it’s totally a zombie movie, but they don’t want to use the ‘Z’ word, so they call them ‘the dead’ or talk about an ‘outbreak’ or ‘cannibalistic creatures’. Sometimes they use these terms to try to sucker YOU, the zombie fan, into picking up their flick, knowing full well it’s about ghosts or lame-ass monsters. By and large, these movies aren’t very good, so to add insult to injury, you’ve just rented a really bad movie that’s not even the zombie movie you hoped for. Well, I’ve been suckered on occasion and I’ll admit it so you don’t have to. We’ll call them Undead Ringers. I’ll review them, discuss them and, yes, spoil the hell out of them, all out of spite for being fished-in. This is the only SPOILER ALERT you get. Now on to:

I got this one through Netflix. It was lumped in under their zombie sub-genre list. Here’s how they described it:

“Deep in an underground research facility, a band of scientists and soldiers awakens with no memory of how they got there. An escape tunnel is their only way out, but vicious mutants hungry for human blood stand in their way. Will the survivors live long enough to regain their memories and discover the truth?”

I’ve never before, in my history as a reviewer for this site, turned off a movie halfway through because it was so bad. There’s a first time for everything. Shadow Walkers was that first time for me.

The premise of Shadow Walkers is this: This research facility was trying to genetically create the perfect soldier (been there). When it started to go wrong, they sent in a strike team to weld all the doors shut, gas the people inside so they don’t remember anything (what kind of gas does that?) and let loose the beasts that they created to kill all the people inside. The opening sequence shows this happening. You see all these people getting killed by this unseen terrifying force; dragged screaming into the darkness, cowering in fear behind there own hands as the creature come to get them. Person after person dispatched with the greatest of ease and by the most vicious means. Yet, halfway through the movie, the main character has a kung fu fight with one of them. The thing has these razor sharp teeth and inch long claws and it’s there putting up it’s dukes rather than just charging and mauling like the beast you were lead to believe they were from the opening sequence.

The characters start to remember things at the most convenient times, even though they’ve been thoroughly exposed to the forgetting gas. This is one of the dumbest things about the movie. This handful of people that have survived the initial attack of these vicious, kung fu-sparring monsters, have this gas induced amnesia and they keep guessing that they hate each other and all this crap about hating their jobs and stuff. One of the guys had a gas mask on so he wasn’t affected by the forgetting gas and he’s all messing with their minds and being all coy, but it’s all banal and stupid crap.

What made the good folks at Netflix think this was a zombie movie is the fact that the monsters transfer the virus to their victims by biting them. When they’re bitten, they turn into these cannibalistic, flesh-hungry monsters that growl and scowl and are, for some reason, sensitive to light.

The special effects make-up is the worst. It would be really good at a Halloween party, but in a bona fide movie, it’s complete crap. Check this out. This is the big bad monster. And it looks this ridiculous on screen too. This is what the virus the folks created can turn you into if you get bitten. It looks like something out of a campy, 1950’s sci-fi B-movie.

If I didn’t remark on the acting it’s because the acting is remarkably bad. It’s not I-don’t-know-how-to-act/dead-pan-bad, it’s I-think-I-know-how-to-act-because-I’ve-seen-it-on-TV bad. Overacting for little things; under-acting for big things; it’s just bad acting.

At every turn watching this movie I was rolling my eyes. When I finally figured out that there were going to be no zombies, I was just pissed off. This movie is a complete waste of time and space.

Avoid.

Comments(0)

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our  RSS feed!     Bookmark to:

What’s an Undead Ringer?

I review zombie movies for the ZRC. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t want to come right out and peg their movie as a zombie flick. Maybe it’s artistic integrity or they just don’t want to be dismissed by being lumped in with such a stigmatized genre, so sometimes you have to read between the lines.  Every now and again, I come across one that looks like it’s totally a zombie movie, but they don’t want to use the ‘Z’ word, so they call them ‘the dead’ or talk about an ‘outbreak’ or ‘cannibalistic creatures’. Sometimes they use these terms to try to sucker YOU, the zombie fan, into picking up their flick, knowing full well it’s about ghosts or lame-ass monsters. By and large, these movies aren’t very good, so to add insult to injury, you’ve just rented a really bad movie that’s not even the zombie movie you hoped for. Well, I’ve been suckered on occasion and I’ll admit it so you don’t have to. We’ll call them Undead Ringers. I’ll review them, discuss them and, yes, spoil the hell out of them, all out of spite for being fished-in. This is the only SPOILER ALERT you get. Now on to:

Here’s what the back of the box had to say:

“Trophy husband Jack Wade kidnaps his comatose wife, an ex-Hollywood studio executive, in an attempt to kill her so that he can collect on her life insurance after she screwed him out of access to her finances. When she comes back from the dead to haunt him, Jack can’t distinguish reality from delirium. His secrets come to the foreground and he ends up destroying himself, both figuratively and literally.”

Below this are four pictures, three of which are of zombified cast members.  This coupled with the front cover depicting a ghoulish lady crawling out of a grave with “Dead and Gone” emblazoned across the headstone served well to convince me this was a zombie movie that I should review. I also have to mention that the front of the box (slightly different from the above picture in this respect) has three actors’ names across the top: Quentin Jones (the lead Jack Wade),Zack Ward (a cameo as a weatherman) and Kyle Gass (cameo as a televangelist). Why do companies insist on giving top-billing to actors that have cameos? Because they have an inferior product which they wish to sucker you into paying for. And this is the case here.

Dead and Gone is a boring, cliché, sophomoric attempt at horror/suspense. A guy goes to a cabin that has bad spirits in it from being built on an Indian burial ground, where a man once killed his family and himself. Does this sound like a low-rent version of The Shining to anyone else? Every now and again the camera either goes all haywire for a second or everything speeds up for a second. This is a stylistic trick that people have been using to death and I’m quite sick of it. Save it for the music videos.

The lead, Jack Wade, ends up killing a bunch of people that all haunt him and taunt him afterward. They all look like zombies, hence the pictures on the back of the box. The zombie make-up is actually pretty good, but all the other special effects are of fair to bad quality. The character played by Ben Moody (ex-guitarist for Evanesense), Booger, gets his hand chopped off by an axe, at least this is what you’re supposed to think when he holds up a rubber stub and wails in pain as it squirts blood for about a minute.  It looks like they spent a lot of time on the gag, but it also looked painfully rubbery. Not to mention that it is chopped off while on his knees, raising his hand in a defensive gesture. I can’t see an axe doing this the way a sword would, but evidently the makers of this movie could.

Basically, I rented this so I could review for ZRC, watched it in 3 parts because it just couldn’t hold my interest in one shot, figured out that it wasn’t even a zombie flick and was pissed that I wasted my time and money on it. Avoid this crap.

Comments(4)

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our  RSS feed!     Bookmark to: