I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I sat down to watch this. I’m not a fan of wrestling, or more appropriately Lucha libre, so I really didn’t think that I would enjoy this movie at all, zombies or not. But I must admit, I really enjoyed watching this. Enter…Zombie King (2003, aka Zombie King and the Legion of Doom, Zombie Beach Party) did a good job of keeping my attention through the whole film, even during just a hand-full of slower scenes. A mix of way over the top acting, raunchy surf punk music (mostly by the Tijuana Bibles), zombie wrestling, weird Jack Kirby inspired art, and a high priest who looked like the bastard child of Gary Glitter and Ming the Merciless, made watching this really fun. It really comes across that the filmmakers had a great time making this film.

The film centers around a small group of Lucha libre wrestlers, led by the mighty Ulysses (they also moonlight as agents for the government), and their attempt to bring down the dastardly Zombie King, an ex-wrestler, who has now begun building an army of the undead to gain world domination. There are great characters in this film, with names like Murdelizer, the French Vixen and Tiki the Loner (who believes he has found a way to “domesticate” zombies), who fill the screen with crazy action and colorful Lucha libra masks. While the FX in this film can be a little on the weak side, but is completely made up for by the insane action; including kicking off zombie’s heads and ripping out their throats with nothing but their bare hands! Basically, this is the age old tale of good vs evil, with a classic set-up (poisoning the cities water supply with zombie blood!), and is camp at it’s best. Throw in a pretty funny Keystone Cops-esque chase scene through an amusement park, a small part by pro-wrestling legend Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart (as the local sheriff), and a beach luau with zombies, how can you really go wrong?  This might sound like a mashed-up pile of obscure references and the much abused freedom of indie filmmakers, but it pulls it off this time. I would recommend checking this out, especially with a group of friends. It’s like a living comic book. I had a good time.

P.S. This is not an animated film, as IMDb.com says it is. They lie!

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In Zombie 5: Killing Birds, a soldier returns home to find his wife in bed with another man. He kills his wife by slashing her throat which provokes the birds kept in cages in their Florida room to attack him, leaving him bloody. Years later, a group of bird researchers at Loyola University journey out to the Louisiana bayou to find an endangered species of bird. A journalist from the school paper is begrudgingly allowed to tag along. In the bayou they find the home of Dr. Fred Brown, a reclusive blind man with a past shrouded in mystery. The students venture off into the bayou and have a grand old time researching birds and playing the harmonica. After finding a dead body in a pick-up truck, they come upon a house where they hang out and write up their research. Steve, the leader of the group, has hallucinations of being chased by Dr Brown and other unseen evil forces. Gradually the evil forces of the house start to kill the students. One of them curiously catches fire after walking over a puddle of gasoline. Another gets killed when his necklace gets caught in a generators gears. Suddenly a few zombies start grabbing at them and ripping their necks off. Common doors may stop them, but roofs and walls are no match for the zombies’ strength as they rip right through to tear the heads off their prey. What can stop the evil that lurks in this house/the zombies/the killing birds?

What the fuck is up with this stupid movie? First off, the entire thing is called Zombie 5: Killing Birds. 1) It has nothing to do with Zombie, Zombi 3 or Zombie 4 (yet this is lack of a pattern is a pattern, so I move on) 2) There are two zombies at best, although I don’t remember seeing more than one on the screen at one time, so it might have been the same one on different days of shooting 3) There really aren’t any killing birds! The birds at the beginning only maim the guy and I suppose you are led to believe that they kill the guy in the end, but to name a whole movie after this is ridiculous!

Then I have to know, what the hell is killing the people in this movie? First it’s the stupidity of the victims themselves (i.e. setting themselves on fire, getting caught in the gears of a generator), then the zombie(s) come(s) and rip(s) their heads off, then the old guy gets attacked by birds AGAIN! They almost go down that This-house-is-just-evil road, but then the zombies come and blow that idea out of the water. This movie was all over the place!

The acting in Zombie 5: Killing Birds was goddamn horrible. It was like watching 3^rd graders read allowed in class. No feeling, no inflection, no sense of what the hell is going on at all.

The special effects in Zombie 5: Killing Birds was bottom fucking rung. It was gory as all hell, but the technique was severely lacking. It was painfully obvious exactly how each gag was done. There was no sense of misdirection or wonder about any of in. Robert Vaughn’s plucked-out eyes looked like wads of gum with a marble jammed into his eye-socket. Ridiculous!

The fact that Zombie 5: Killing Birds exists as a sequel to any of the other movies in the Zombie series is a joke. The fact that Zombie 5: Killing Birds exists as a stand-alone movie is another joke all together. This movie was so bad I had to watch it in 5 parts because it bored me to sleep. I can’t really say that it would go very well with the party crowd just because you’d have to fight to pay attention to all the dumb crap in the first place. Don’t get suckered by this potential drink coaster.

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In Zombie 4: After Death, a group of scientist on an island form a community to research a local drug used by voodoo priests as a cure all for diseases like cancer and leukemia. After the voodoo priests daughter dies of leukemia in their care, he opens the door to hell and the dead spill forth to reap his revenge for the loss of his daughter. The island communities only survivor is the infant daughter of the head scientist who wears an amulet that it the key to the gates of hell. 20 years later, the daughter, Jenny, returns as a groupie for some mercenaries on R&R. While joyriding in a speed boat around the island, the hear the voices of the dead crying out just as they are running out of gas. Though terrified, they dock to look for gas. Upon docking their mood immediately lightens as if they are on spring break, not desperately searching for gas on an island that they mildly believe is inhabited by the living dead. One of the group sees someone in the jungle and runs off after him, without so much as a “Hey guys!” to warn them. Once he catches up to the person, he punches him and says, “Why are you running?” In the scuffle he is bitten by what turns out to be a zombie. Meanwhile another group of scientists has come to the island to research what happened to the last group of scientists on the island. They find a cave wherein they find a book entitled “The Book of Death” that they always refer to as “The Book of the Dead”. The book tells them not to say a certain 3 words because they would raise the dead. So one of them does it and is completely surprised when he is attacked by zombies and killed. The sole survivor of this group joins up with our group of mercenaries who are holed-up against the shambling dead in an abandoned hospital which is conveniently stocked with M-16s and grenades. The bulk of the movie takes place in this hospital as random appearances of zombies occur without rhyme or reason as our protagonists make ridiculous decisions that lead to their own death or undeath as it were.

Zombie 4: After Death is excessively bad. The acting isn’t great, basically on par with most soap operas, but looks even worse because of the cheesy English voice-overs. The basic problem with this movie it seems that it was written with a children’s cartoon kind of mentality, yet with a subject matter that is definitely not suitable for children. The way zombies seem to just jump off a table that it slightly out of frame whenever it is deemed that they should; the way all the zombies are clothed in dirty green or black gauze pajamas; the way that zombie got kicked and then, seconds later, jumps as if he is recoiling from the blow, all shows that a great lack of care went into making this movie.The zombies are pretty crappy looking in Zombie 4: After Death. They are all clad in these black or olive drab pajamas with a matching swatch of gauze drooped over their heads. The have this cheap looking gray and black face paint with maybe a hint of pink texture on the featured zombies. The main characters that turn into zombies don’t actually have to turn-in their clothing for the required zombie uniform though. Their make-up is a little better, with more emphasis on having an eye gouged out and a fresh drip of green blood out of their mouth at the beginning of each shot. The main characters gone zombie don’t actually look half bad.

The title Zombie 4: After Death is obviously an after market addition as the beginning credits tout it’s name as simply After Death. While the zombies look as bad as the ones in Zombi 3, the is absolutely no connection whatsoever with the earlier works of Lucio Fulci or Bruno Mattei.

Zombie 4: After Death would most likely go over real well as an easily derided party movie with beer…lots of beer. But, overall it is a completely crappy time marked by low production value, slow pacing, poorly choreographed action sequences, bad English overdubbing and a generally retarded sense of reason to the film. Unless you love BAD cinema, avoid it like the plague.

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In Zombi 3, scientist working for the army run tests on a chemical called “Death One” which bring the dead back to life. When a terrorist tries to steal Death One, he unwittingly becomes exposed to it and is later captured, killed and cremated, which mutates the Death One virus and makes it airborne, infecting all manner of life with a zombie virus. In an effort to contain the virus, the army sends out bio-warfare outfitted soldiers to kill anything inside the infected area. 3 soldiers on R&R and a group of tourists are caught in the infected area trying to fight off the zombies and the army, just to survive.

The zombies in Zombi 3 are pretty bad, especially for 1988. They’re pretty much just slathered in a dark gray make-up with tons in blood and dirt added. It seems that the zombies were all issued uniform pajamas when they died, too. This film is completely gory, but very poorly done gore. More attention is paid to having a lot of blood and ooze and not so much realism to it.

There isn’t a whole lot of continuity to the zombies either. It’s always weird to see a zombie that supposedly just wants to eat your flesh taking the opportunity to punch and kick it’s victim rather than just go for the throat, literally, thus ending up fist fighting with a guy as if they were sparring. A lot of the zombies don’t require head shots to die, yet some of them don’t die from the body shot that kill others. I guess it just depends on what one of the directors was trying to convey in that particular scene. Who knows?

The fight scenes and any of the action scenes are super poorly choreographed. The realism just isn’t there and it ends up looking comical to the point of embarrassment. It doesn’t help that the acting is bottom of the barrel as well.

Zombi 3, in my opinion is really bad, but may go over well as an easily derided movie by your friends that are over to party with beer. The soundtrack alone is ridiculous and that’s only the beginning. If you’re looking for a serious zombie flick or even a humorous one, you might want to look elsewhere. If you’re a fan of the “so-bad-it’s-good” films, this might be your cup of tea. The history of this series is fairly interesting and can be easily researched on Wikipedia, but may warrant it’s own post on the ZRC at a later date.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Mortuary is the story of a single mother moving herself, her teenage son and young daughter to a small Californis town to live in an old mortuary and make a business out of it. Upon arrival find see that the mortuary is in severe disrepair as it has been without occupants for several years. The mother (Denise Crosby) decides to make the best of it much to the chagrin of her teenage son, Jonathan (Dan Byrd), who meets the local bully in the first place he goes to find some food and a job, the local diner. He soon makes friends with a waitress there who tells him all of the creepy stories about his new house. She says that abusive parents, the Fowlers, kept their disfigured son, Bobby, prisoner in what turns out to be Jonathan’s room. Legend has it that Bobby killed his parents and lived in a tomb in the cemetery that is Jonathan’s backyard. Meanwhile, the mother begins getting business, which leads to a little blood on the floor, normal for a mortuary, except this blood attracts a rather ferocious fungus that creaps in from the drains. The local bully truns up missing after an altercation with Jonathan, but appears days later looking rather under the weather and coughing up black blood. Soon after, the dead arise and all hell breaks loose at the mortuary.

Mortuary is a fairly decent movie, far from the genius of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and probably not up to par with Tobe Hooper’s earlier works, but I had no problem sitting and watching until the end to find out what happened. The acting was good, the pacing worked to keep me interested and all the basic elements of a decent Hollywood movie were up to par.

The special effects make-up on the zombies was top shelf. The zombies looked great. But, some of the CGI effects looked like they were made in 1995 rather than 2005. You’d think, with a director like Tobe Hooper, there’d be some quality CGI, but it’s fairly dicey. Some of it works, unitl the creeping fungus was done by other means (i.e. Stop-Motion Animation?), but certain gags just come off as cartoony due to the poor CGI.

On the whole Mortuary is your run of the mill horror flick that’s mildly related to the zombie genre. I wouldn’t rush out to rent it, but I wouldn’t say don’t bother. You could do worse with 94 minutes on a Thursday night, but on Friday I’d hit the town if you’re so inclined. If you come across Mortuary, give it a watch and don’t expect the best, then you won’t be disappointed.

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In The Dead Next Door, the zombie apocolypse is in full swing and the Zombie Patrol, a government backed organization of zombie hunters, is on the job. Patrol officers Raimi and Kuller set off into the Ohio wilds with Dr. Moulsson to find a cure for the zombie epidemic once their fellow officer Mercer is bitten by one of Dr. Moulsson and Dr. Savini’s test subjects. They find a cult, lead by Rev. Jones, who think the zombie apocolypse is god’s will and want to help in any way possible. Finding Dr. Bow’s possible cure, being the man that supposedly started the zombie apocolypse, they need test subjects, but the Rev. Jones’ cult has rounded up al the zombies for their own devices. Raimi and Kuller must infiltrate and ultimate defeat the Jones’ cult and the zombie hordes lest they become zombies themselves.

From a viewer stand point, The Dead Next Door is in no way a good movie. The film was shot on 8mm film, so the voices and sound were over-dubbed some 15 years later. The acting is bad, the over-dubbing is worse, the special effects are not up to Hollywood standards and the story is simply lacking. If yu’ve come to enjoy a fine zombie flick, you’e come to the wrong place.

On the other hand, from and artist’s stand point, The Dead Next Door is really sweet! These guys went all out for this little 8mm film. I’ve never seen a film of this low quality with the scope and popular backing that The Dead Next Door had. Usually when you see a movie like this, there are 10 to 20 zombies at best that are recycled in every scene; they take place in one or two remote locations or obviously abandoned buildings and they try to convince you that those two settings are the entire world. In The Dead Next Door, there’s an arial shot of at least a hundred zombies and there are large street zombie mayhem scenes. It seems like the crew of this movie had the help of half of Akron, Ohio and all the time in the world to complete it.

The special effects and make-up in this film were not all that convincing, but they were goddamn ambitious. They tried everything – decapitations, dismemberings, disembowelments, gruesome throat rips, head shots, you name it. Yeah, it looked fake, but it was cool to see them go for it. It’s pretty funny to watch too and, I have to admit, entertaining.

All in all, these folks weren’t setting out to make a serious flick and they ended up making one that’ll have any good spirited party crowd howling with their beers. The Dead Next Door is definitely in the ”so bad, it’s good” catagory. If you have a good sense of humor, a Do-It-Yourself sensibility and a love of zombie films, I’d recommend this movie. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a good production done by a skilled crew with great dialog and an underlying social commentary, try something else.

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In Homecoming, a republican spin doctor for the U.S. Army, when speaking to a soldier’s grieving mother on television talk show, muses that any soldier given the chance to come back to life would surely explain that the cause they died for was a just one. No sooner do the dead soldiers that have come home start to arise – bloody, battered and hungry for…their chance to vote. The issue is hotly debated, being an election year, and republican party is trying to use it anyway they can to gie their president four more years. But, when the zombie soldiers make it clear that they only want to vote an administration that will put an end to the war, the republican party tries everything in their power for quash the uprising and quell voters. Then, when the republican party steals the election, the zombie soldier call for reinforcements.

 Think of Homecoming as Primary Colors with zombies. It is a blatantly overt and biting commentary on the state of the United States’ political predicament with characters that mirror closely their real-life counter parts like Ann Coulter and Larry King, just to name a few. As ridiculous as the story may seem, it works really well as political commentary and has a lot to say about the open secret of the stolen elections of the Bush administration.

 The special effects make-up is really awesome. I thought the zombies looked great, as real as dead corpses as I’ve ever seen. In my opinion, they are in the top 5 best looking zombies.

Homecoming made a quick turn for the absurd, but won me back immediately with it’s biting social and political commentary. It’s a short watch, at 60 minutes, but is entertaining and often hilarious throughout. Any non-republican zombie fan is sure to get a kick out of Joe Dante’s Homecoming.

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