In The Zombie Chronicles, a young woman journalist is trying to reach a town that is not on the map. She runs across an older man, Ebenezer Jackson, and agrees to take him where he’s going, to the same town, if he’ll show her the way. She’s trying to do a piece on the ghost stories of this town and as luck would have it the old man is full of them. He spins a yarn about an ex-drill sergeant on vacation with his girlfriend. They experience car trouble. He runs off into the woods to find a gas station and later comes across his girlfriend who has been kidnapped by the ghost of an old soldier he once killed.  Ebenezer then tells a story of 3 campers that enrage the ghostly family of Wild Jim Conklin, the meanest, craziest gunslinger in the west. Each story, including the story of the reporter, ends with a “spooky zombie twist”.

The acting in The Zombie Chronicles ranges from atrocious to subpar. I would say it was shot on someone’s home video camera, but since it is shot in 3-D it must have been the inexperience of the camera man or the director that made this movie so poor looking. The dialog in the movie is really cheesy and uninteresting, especially that of old Ebenezer Jackson, who seems to have gone to John Lovitz’s Master Thespian school of acting.

The whole movie seems to be a showcase for someone’s haunted house grade special effects make-up skills. Again, this could be the low skill level of the effects person or the low skill level of the camera man/director, but the man behind the curtain, so to speak, is very apparent in every bit of special effects. The zombies look pretty cool, but as the camera lingers they look worse and worse. And how does it linger! This is why I say it seemed like a showcase for the special effects team.

Calling this movie The Zombie Chronicles seems to me to be a misnomer given that the stories deal mainly with ghosts of sorts, or at least restless spirits in bodies that rise from the dead. There is no zombie uprising, no turning humans into zombies or anything like that. They seemed to have thrown some bona fide zombies in at the end, but the meat of the story deals with single or a couple dead folk that come back for revenge of sorts. The end zombies seem to be a way to end the movie with some sort of bang.

There are some funny continuity problems in The Zombie Chronicles. The most glaring one is when Ebenezer starts his story with something to the effect of “Back in 1971…” as the scene dissolves into a shot of the couple driving a brand new Kia Sportage (i.e. NOT made in the 1970’s). I’m crapping you negative! Another one is when a man tells this scared woman to “run towards the setting sun” to escape the woods and their assailants. The thing is, the sun is glaring in his face, head on as he points to his right (which would be north logically, assuming that this takes place in the PM, which it seems to) and directs the woman to run in that direction. It’s this kind of painstaking attention to detail that shows you the level of quality that the creators of The Zombie Chronicles were striving for.

The Zombie Chronicles in a high school project level movie that somehow made its way into being distributed by major discount stores. I spent all of $3 at Meijer on this movie brand new. Nate tells me he spent the same amount shortly after its initial release. I think we both got ripped off. There is no reason why anybody would need to watch this movie unless you know someone that was in it and want to have a chuckle at their expense. It could have been neat had it come with the 3-D glasses which aren’t the standard red and blue ones), but getting those would probably double the amount of money I would have wasted on this crap.

Don’t bother.

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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.

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In Dead Meat, a couple driving through a rural part of Ireland hit a pedestrian and apparently kill him. During there attempt to take the body into town where the authorities can deal with the matter, the dead man up and attacks them, biting the driver on the neck. His girlfriend Helena runs from the attacker only to find she is being chased by other undead assailants. She happens upon a friendly grave digger who offers to help her out by taking her back to his farm. So starts their journey over zombie occupied rural territory in an attempt to survive this mad cow induced zombie outbreak.

Dead Meat is a good example of what a talented director can do with a low budget. Some of the gore gags come off as being inspired by Peter Jackson, but not overly so. The cinematography was pretty good compared to most low budget production, even good for regular Hollywood productions. The plot wasn’t all that great, it’s mostly just people trudging through the country-side trying to get somewhere. The acting was decent and the dialog was passable.

The special effects make-up probably suffered most from the low budget, but the camera doesn’t linger far too long, which makes it more bearable. The zombies pretty much just had a messed up latex and blood look to them.  There were more than a few decapitations and dismemberment scenes with varying rates if success.

All in all, Dead Meat was enjoyable, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to non-zombie fans. At 78 minutes long, it’s short and sweet and could be enjoyed by a group imbibing alcohol and engaging in merriment. Not bad.

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In Planet Terror, a rogue army unit is after a highly toxic gas that keeps them alive and turns men into blood-thirsty cannibal mutants. When their acquisition of the chemical goes awry, it’s released into the air of a small town, turning it’s population into the flesh-craving zombies. A small band of rag-tag misfits, including an ex-special forces soldier of legend Wray and Go-Go dancer amputee Cherry Darling, join together to survive the zombie hordes and end up in the thick of battle against the army unit that started the whole thing.

Planet Terror does an outrageously good job of paying homage to old grindhouse B-movie action thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s and contains a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek “mistakes” that will bring you back to the glory days of grindhouse. The “film” is intentionally distressed looking, more so during parts of tension, to first give it that authentic grindhouse look, but also to give the viewer a certain forebodding. The action is non-stop, as is the gore. The way reality is totally sacrificed in the name of over the top action, especially in regards to the character Cherry Darling, is typical grindhouse and leads to many smirks and cheers. I’m speaking of the way Wray fabricates a prosthetic leg/machine gun for her all while on the run and the mysterious way she fires it or it’s genade laucher (which propells her inthe air with the greatest of ease).

The special effects and make-up by Greg Nicotero (Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Day of the Dead with Tom Savini’s crew) is the best in the business today and is taken way over the top with an expert blend of make-up and CGI. Every gunshot wound erupts with half a body’s worth of blood, every wound is the deepest and slimiest, every zombie-mutant bulges and oozes god-knows-what from god-knows-where.

Planet Terror is not strictly a zombie movie, but a fantastic thrill ride that any movie enthusiast could enjoy. It has a wonderful cast, a spectactular soundtrack and completely sick special effects. If you haven’t already, I’d suggest picking this one up.

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Children of the Living Dead is the story of Abbott Hayes, a convicted serial murderer and rapist that was killed in prison and arose from the dead to kidnap children and lead a legion of zombies against people that want to build an auto-mall  in place of the cemetery across from his old home.  Years after being kidnapped, the children are killed by zombie Abbott Hayes while on their way to a concert, only to rise from the dead as part of his legion of zombies. The construction crew keep finding mysterious things that are happening to the bodies at the cemetery; bodies missing, evidence of live burial. Is this the work of the fabled Abbott Hayes or just vandals and miscreants?

Any way you slice it, this movie is a travesty of cinema. The Night of the Living Dead 30^th Anniversary Edition is supposed to be a prequel to this movie, with the Cemetery Zombie (Bill Hinzman) being Abbott Hayes.  

Tom Savini starts out the film as a zombie hunter creatively dispatching zombies with a fine array of fire arms and other improvised techniques. This is all made incredibly goofy by the over-dubbing of simple dialog that could have easily been inner monologue. Since Tom’s mouth isn’t moving, it comes across like the mumblings of Popeye. In fact, the first half of the movie has an exceeding amount of over-dubbed dialog that sometimes obviously doesn’t fit with what’s being shown on screen. There are times when the teenagers look like they are talking and even motioning with their hands, yet the dialog had already stopped long before. Most of this over-dubbed dialog happens while the characters faces are not necessarily shown on screen and comes off as dialog that the ”Mystery Science Theater 3000” cast would be interjecting or something from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. These are all obvious attempt to “fix” the film in post production, but given that these are all tactics used by comedic groups to deride certain works, it comes off as making a jokes of itself.

There are certain things about the movie that just don’t add up. When the teenagers die, there is a funeral for them. You see their 5 caskets lined up and people standing around them mourning. There is a service, after which everyone departs while the caskets stay lined up and above the ground. I haven’t been to too many funerals, but every one of them, and every one I’ve seen on screen, ends which the casket being lowered into the ground, not just left out to rot. Why would they leave them out like this? Because it makes it easier for the grave robbers to come take their jewelry like it says in the script.

There’s a scene in a diner where Matthew, the son of the man building the auto-mall, goes to see Laurie, the young waitress that has tickled his fancy. He sits down and orders a cup of coffee from her as they chat. Before he even sips the coffee she gives him, she takes the cup away and replaces it with a fresh one and pours another cup. Before he even sips that one, she refills it. Before he even sips the second one, she refills it again. He ends up leaving having never even tasted one of the four cups of coffee that she served.

During the big zombie fight scene at the end, which looks more like a bar brawl scene that should have taken place in the movie Roadhouse, Laurie hides in the store room of the diner while Matthew goes to fight the zombie hordes. She’s left with a handgun and a flashlight. When the power goes out, she fumbles to make the flashlight work. When it does, Abbott Hayes is there, growling in her faces. She screams and cowers on the floor. Suddenly he’s gone and she ventures out of the store room to be attacked by other zombies and subsequently saved by the Sheriff who is able to gun down 6 zombies with 2 shots from the hip. What was that all about?

I really could go on all day about this movie. The fact that it was created with the help of many of the people who made the original Night of the Living Dead is definitely saddening. Tor Ramsey, director of Children of the Living Dead, issued this letter of apology for his involvement with the film along with an account of what he believes went wrong with it. When we saw John Russo at the Flashback Weekend horror convention in Chicago, Nate asked him about Children of the Living Dead in a polite side conversation and he refused to talk about it. I believe that these to things speak mountains about the quality of this film.

Despite all of this, I recommend that everyone with a love for the zombie genre check out this movie, preferably on the cheap, just to see how low it can go. My ceaseless bitching about this movie could never do justice to describing just how bad it is. You really ought  to see for yourself.

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In The Mad, a family, consisting of a father, his girlfriend, his daughter and her boyfriend, stop at a small rural fair while on a road trip vacation to eat at a local diner. None of them had the burgers made with the prize winning locally grow beef, but those that did turned into ravenous, flesh-hungry zombies. Together with the restaurateur and his friendly waitress, the family must hole-up in the restaurant and fend off the onslaught of crazed zombies and get to the bottom of this epidemic.

The Mad is not an over-the-top gore kind of zombie movie; it’s more of a comedy, or zomedy as they say. This might be unexpected given the cover of the case, but I got this from Netflix, so the red envelope gave me no preconceived notions about what to expect. As a zombie movie I enjoyed it, but this is the first in a string of four zombie movies that I’ve watched in a row to be worth a damn at all. The acting was adequate, the editing was well done and the musical score worked on many levels.

While it wasn’t an extraordinarily funny movie, the dead pan delivery of the comedic lines by Billy Zane and the supporting cast worked excellently. What I mean is that whenever something that was supposed to be funny was said that ended up not being funny, I didn’t cringe or think “How fuckin’ stupid”. It was either funny, or unnoticeable. I didn’t get the idea that someone was embarrassing themselves waiting for the yuck-yucks that just weren’t coming.

The special effects make-up was pretty good, but way under used for a zombie movie. They were definitely going for a less is more approach in The Mad. The zombie make-up was excellent and worked very well without question.

I enjoyed watching The Mad, but I could see how more discerning viewers might want to give it a pass. It’s a well produced movie with a decent cast and script with a few funny moments. Don’t run out to rent it, but if you find yourself with the means to, watch it on the cheap.

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In this remake of the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Tom Savini directs a cast of actors that, by and large, favor the original actors quite heavily. Beyond delivering fantastic performances in respects to pure acting ability, the cast worked well in the roles that were cut out for them over 20 years before and brought fresh originality and believability to each character. The tension between Tony Todd’s ‘Ben’ and Tom Towles’ ‘Harry Cooper’ can be felt every moment they are on the screen.

The screenplay, beyond where it intersects with the original George Romero/John Russo collaboration, was helmed by George Romero himself. The story starts out the same with a few twists on the original to add a bit more suspense, but takes a marked turn for the better when the main character, Barbara, pulls herself together to become a gunslingin’, corpse-droppin’ bad-ass rather than a whimpering, glassy-eyed head case like the 1968 story. This new Barbara is a character that more people would like to identify with, rather than being completely frustrated with in the original.

The special effects in Night of the Living Dead are outstanding, aside from the initial kill scene where Bill Moseley’s character ‘Johnny’ is represented by an obvious dummy when he falls head first on a head stone. Regardless of the obvious dummy, the scene works as it proves to be a real wince-inducer every time. The zombie make-up in this movie is, in my opinion, the best zombie make-up in any movie made to date. The cloudy-eyed, sunken-featured, pale-faced ghouls of Night of the Living Dead are my personal favorite. The special effects team of Everett Burrell and John Vulich worked  fantastically here.

Even die-hard, purist fans of the original Night of the Living Dead should thoroughly enjoy this remade classic. It’s personally my favorite zombie movie and easily one of my top favorite movies of all time. If for some reason you’ve never bothered to check this one out, there’s no better time than now especially with all the bonus features on the DVD available now. Extra gory scenes that were cut to receive an R rating rather than NC-17 are featured as well as a full look back and ‘making of’ documentary. I highly recommend you check this out.

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Hell’s Ground is the story of 5 Pakistani teenagers that lie to their parents so they can take a road trip to a concert. Along the way, they take a wrong turn at a tea stand that sells the Pakistani version of pot brownies, whose proprietor favors Christopher Lee’s version of Dracula, much to the bemusement of OJ one of the wayward teens. He warns that the teens are entering Hell’s Ground, which is scary to about half of them.  Their trip into Hell’s Ground crosses them with flesh-hungry bumpkins, zombies and the most horrifying thing, a cross-dresser!

I don’t know whether to think this movie was really bad, or if it just illustrates the difference in values that Pakistanis and Americans have. *SPOILER ALERT* I mean, the main villain is a man that was raised as a girl or at least forced to wear a burqa. His choice of clothing is treated with the same horror as Leatherface’s choice in facial wear.  It just seemed a bit ridiculous to me.

I don’t really know why zombies were in this movie except that it made one of the main characters a bad guy in the end. The whole film is basically the Pakistani version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is cool, but for no reason they threw in zombies without an ounce of explanation. The zombies looked pretty good, though, it was fairly low budget, but decent enough.

I’ve never seen any other Pakistani films, so it could be on par with the mainstream, but I highly doubt it. It’s a pretty low budget flick with not much to it. For some reason they insist on using this fish-eye lens a whole lot through the beginning that just throws the whole picture askew. That is also the portion of the movie where the soundtrack sounded like it was recorded through a tin can.

Hell’s Ground struck me as being pretty goofy on the whole. The best reason to watch would be the use of a little person zombie that attacks through one van window and is ejected out of another. I could see a bunch of friends yucking it up with a few beers and enjoying the hell out of Hell’s Ground, but otherwise it was just pretty bad.

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In The Boneyard,  Detective Jersey Callum asks psychic Alley Cates, traumatized by the memories of dead children from her last case, for help with a new case. The investigation takes them to the coroner’s office which is overseen by iron-fisted Mrs. Poopinplatz played by Phyllis Diller and Shepard played by Norman Fell (TV’s Mr. Roper).  The corpses of three children possessed by demons come to life and terrorize the morgue. The cast try everything to get out of the morgue and away from the zombie children.

The acting in The Boneyard is on par with any other Hollywood production and garners no rewards or complaints from this reviewer. The over-all production of the film is of good quality and makes for a decent watch.

The special effects were pretty top notch for 1991. The zombies were heavily decayed latex masterpieces.  It was all good enough to get me to suspend my disbelief for the duration and enjoyment of the movie.  *SPOILER ALERT* The Mega-Phyllis Diller zombie was obviously a large puppet on top of an operator, like that of any parade, but the sheer hilarity of the idea put into action on the screen makes up for any lack of quality in the execution.  The inclusion of this is the best reason to watch this movie, that and the mega-poodle zombie. Let’s just say the movie takes a very entertaining turn for the absurd in its final half hour.

The Boneyard kind of plays out like a long version of “Murder She Wrote” with zombies, not that it’s bad or geared towards the elderly, but the era in which it was made and the age of most of the cast led me to this conclusion. I certainly enjoyed watching it and would recommend it to anyone with a good sense of humor and a love of zombies. I hear the DVD has a hilarious interview with Phyllis Diller that I will certainly check out and add to this review, given the chance.

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Shatter Dead paints a picture of a world where the dead no longer die or even necessarily rot, they just don’t grow old or regenerate. These aren’t your shambling masses of flesh-hungry ghouls, they are competent, logical, emotional beings that just can’t die. Susan is just trying to get home to her boyfriend with the groceries, but her car runs out of gas and is stolen by a mob of the walking dead and a preacher that acts as their leader. She ends up staying in a house full of vagrants that gets attacked by undead zealots who wish to make everybody undead. Surviving the attack, she makes it home to her boyfriend *SPOILER ALERT* who has already killed himself. How will she cope with the fact that her boyfriend is undead, something she hates? Will she join him?

Shatter Dead has some great ideas and asks many important sociological and philosophical questions, but the acting is so terrible that it’s difficult to find if it gives any answers. The main character, Susan, portrayed by Stark Raven, has just two looks to convey every emotion and they both look the same – stone faced. The supporting cast is no better. The fact that the subject matter of the film is a rather emotional one – life and death - didn’t phase the casting director one bit. The movie does have some interesting point to it, but they are really hard to get through to because the acting is so horrible.

The special effects make-up of the zombies is the worst I’ve seen in a modern movie. Some of them just have gray make-up on their faces, some just have latex hanging off with a bunch of blood, some of them just don’t have anything. It’s sophomoric at best and is rather confusing since some of the story hinges on the strength of the make-up, of which it has none.

Shatter Dead is heavy on the nudity. The opening scene is of an apparent angel, portrayed by a woman with gigantic, pendulous breasts, copulating with a woman with a wrist brace. The chapter list describes it as “raped by an angel”. I think that every chapter has at least one nude scene culminating in a torrid love scene between Susan *SPOILER ALERT* and her undead boyfriend where they use her gun as a strap-on, given that he no longer has blood to fill out an erection. They even show the penetration.

All in all, Shatter Dead is a really terribly bad movie with a few interesting ideas that would have been even more interesting if it had a better cast with better direction. The gratuitous nudity is bad enough to at least be a hoot in any party situation, so beer and friends might make it easier to go down.  Someone might be able to make this story worth viewing someday with a better cast and crew, but I doubt anybody ever would. I can’t say check it out, but I wouldn’t say avoid at all costs.

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