EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1979)

Dir: "Joe D'Amato" (Aristide Massaccesi)

This strong  contender for Most Ridiculous Title Award status came out on the heels of Lucio Fulci's better-known ZOMBIE. Italian horror maven Joe D'Amato is at it again with this demented entry, forcing eerie horror and raunchy sexuality together with directorial and storytelling techniques that are the filmic equivalent of duct tape and a nail gun. From the start, the crazed soundtrack tells you this film is going to be a little unusual. The score sounds like THE ADDAMS FAMILY's Lurch trying to make up his own version of the Disney Haunted Mansion theme on harpsichord while he's high on crack, with backup vocals provided by The Blind Dead. After a nasty but energetic opening set in a mental asylum where patients have sex with the nurses, an incoherent story, told in flashback, begins. A privately chartered boat captained by GRIM REAPER star George Eastman takes a few sex-starved Italians to a feared and allegedly cursed Caribbean island where an epidemic long ago wiped out the whole population. The island turns out to be guarded by a strange young woman (Laura Gemser) who's really some kind of voodoo cat goddess. After everybody has sex with everybody else in long, crude, ugly, decidedly unerotic scenes, the foreshadowed and long-awaited zombie invasion finally gets underway. The horror portions of this schizophrenic feature are surprisingly well done and will wake you up after all the mind-dulling tedium of the sleazy and laughable goings-on of the movie's first half. Directed and photographed in an impressively atmospheric style, the moody zombie scenes seem all the more at odds with the film's trashy sexual nature. Despite the Romero memories evoked by the dumb English language title, the monster activity is much closer to that of ZOMBIE or THE BLIND DEAD than anything in the American "Dead" trilogy. Ancient robed corpses with moldy worm-eaten faces are seen standing picturesquely along the shores of the island, their tattered shrouds blowing in the breeze while deep-voiced, ghostly chanting is heard. Stock horror elements like protective amulets, creepy cats, a coroner being attacked by a corpse and the ever-popular neck-biting are put to good use but it's a shame how the potentially scary story keeps grinding to a halt for more frustrating, silly sex scenes that are poorly integrated into the mix and only serve to kick the legs out from under the horror by threatening to invoke audience giggles. It's not often one sees tense, claustrophobic terror in the same movie with so much vulgar, amateurish 'naughty' footage. Still, the zombie attacks are sufficiently shocking and the ghouls themselves so effectively scary that if you keep your finger on the fast-forward button you may get a few legit chills from this strange mix of themes and styles. Several ,different cuts exist, with running times varying according to how much sex and violence was left in.

 EVIL CLUTCH (1988)

Dir: Andreas Marfori

Filmed in English with a total cast of five people who speak with heavy, wearisome accents, this unambitious Italian shocker copies techniques and concepts from Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD. After some Polaroid snapshots make for the most boring credits sequence you'll ever see, we meet a slutty woman with a bad hairdo. A big rubbery monster claw reaches out from between her legs and rips up a guy's crotch. We then follow a young couple on an ill-fated vacation to a picturesque but strangely empty small town outside Venice. The pair are so nauseatingly 'cute', laughing and singing along the way, that I was ready to kill them myself. They meet up with the demon woman and then are warned to leave town by a man who claims to be a horror story writer. The only interesting character here, the writer rides around on a motorcycle, talks through an electric voicebox (which makes him even harder to understand than the others), and dresses in what looks like a labcoat and an aviator's mantle. Nothing creative is done with this uniquely offbeat eccentric, though, as he simply ends up getting killed only to return as the world's most incompetent axe-wielding zombie. The guy who had his groin shredded at the beginning haunts the forest as a growling, rotten-faced zombie too. The dialogue includes such great lines as "I'm scared" uttered by a guy who's just had both his hands chopped off. The only thing EVIL CLUTCH has going for it apart from the scenic locations is the outstanding and artful photography. Although clearly inspired by the low-to-the-ground tracking shots from EVIL DEAD, the very fluid, dizzying camerawork here is so consistently professional and fun to watch that it should've been used in a movie that actually involved a story. Other elements lifted from EVIL DEAD include tree limbs that attack people, a wall clock that's affected by unseen demonic forces, and zombies that melt into puddles of glop when they're defeated. The demon woman sometimes sports scary makeup, vampire fangs, and eventually even big popping eyeballs that look like the ones worn by Warren Oates on the old OUTER LIMITS episode "The Mutant"! All of this is beautifully shot and lighted but nothing of any real consequence ever happens in this movie. People just walk around in the woods, talk about a curse, and chop each other to bits. The heroine's nonstop whining and constant loud cries of "Aagh! Ohh! Waah! Eeyaah!" during the second half is guaranteed to get on your nerves. Some critics seemed to take this exercise in stupidity seriously, but I couldn't see anything worthy of attention here except for that smooth, swirling camerawork. It's hard to believe a film could be this loaded with monsters, action and makeup effects and still be so boring. Recommended only to those who are really starving for some mindless, bloody monster mayhem.

 

 

 EXHUMED (2003)

Dir: Brian Clement

Where did they dig this one up?  It's a very ambitious, off-the-wall indy production that suffers from amateur acting and a low budget, but these flaws are compensated for by a commitment to its own highly unique style and some real imagination.  Shot on video and "film-looked", it's an omnibus combining three vignettes (I can't bring myself to call them "stories" since none of them make any sense) about zombies, all linked together by a common thread. That thread is an ancient mystical artifact that can enable its owner to resurrect the dead.  I was never sure exactly what this artifact was, but maybe that wasn't thought to be important. The first segment, set in feudal Japan, has a samurai and a crazed monk looking for the cursed object while fighting off zombies in a haunted forest. The amazing thing about it is that it's actually shot in Japanese with English subtitles for authenticity!  Next up is a lengthy and ambitious B & W segment cleverly designed to look like a 40's Hollywood film noir production, with credits, sets, wardrobe and dialogue all impressively planned to capture the look and feel of films of that vintage. The confused plot has a wisecracking female PI investigating a mysterious torch singer and her connection to a mad scientist who has successfully reanimated dead bodies.  The third and only uninteresting episode takes place in an unlikely future period during which miscast militant bad guys capture the warring vampires and their enemies the werewolves, in order to use them in experiments in time travel, and also to pit them against hungry zombies just for amusement. (It's sort of like UNDERWORLD only on no budget). This final segment is the only part of EXHUMED that seems juvenile and phony. The first two episodes are so meticulously crafted that it's amazing this was made as a semi-pro cheapie. You've sat through big-budget Hollywood blockbusters that had a lot less originality and creativity. Unfortunately, EXHUMED never brings enough of its elements into focus to seem like it really has anything on its mind. And by the time space aliens are worked into the plot too, it becomes impossible to take any of this comic bookish monster madness seriously. Still, it's a lot more imaginative than most independent productions and demonstrates that huge amounts of money aren't necessary to create interesting, polished looking film projects.

 FLESH FREAKS (2001)

Dir: Conall Pendergast

No-budget zombie plague tale that's more ambitious than most but is still an unqualified dud that's no fun to watch.  A college student is the sole survivor of a disastrous field trip to some ancient ruins in Belize.  The official story is that terrorists were responsible for the violent deaths of the rest of his party, but the lad insists that it was in fact a zombie who staggered around the dig site knocking everyone off.  The zombie was discovered at the bottom of a well that had been sealed off for many years, which a laughable line of narration describes as "an ancient well, its purpose long since forgotten".  (How many purposes for wells are there?)  The unconvincing ghoul has a black crusty face but is wearing white clothes that show almost no sign of dirt or decay after umpteen years at the bottom of a well.  This implausibly well-groomed corpse takes forever to shuffle ten feet but still manages to kill one inattentive archaeologist after another in the interminable flashback.  In the present, the zombie virus strikes again, inadvertantly brought back home with the survivor.  A few peripheral characters (terrible actors all) become zombies before it is discovered that the source of the infection is a strain of slugs from outer space that burrow into their victims' bodies and turn them into flesh-eating undead.  For a low-end project this is complex, elaborate suff, but the acting, effects and production values are spectacularly poor.  When the zombie invasion finally kicks in, the only corpses affected are apparently the recently deceased bodies from the medical college campus and in nearby funeral parlors, morgues and hospitals.  Which made me wonder why the filmmakers chose to use zombie masks that look like severely rotted, skull-faced mummies that have been dead for 400 years.  The masks in the Italian BURIAL GROUND seem to have been the inspiration.  It's too bad all these dark, wormy, dried-out dead are wearing such clean, ordinary clothes, because it really destroys the effect.  They never look like anything but guys in rubber zombie masks and sadly ill-matched costumes.  There are quite a few gory effects but most look like homemade, ketchup-squirting foolishness.  A professor turns into a zombie and is quickly attacked with an ordinary desk fan with plastic blades.  Even if you could be persuaded to accept the idea that such a fan could tear a human face off, you'd still laugh at the result: instead of a shredded, chopped-up face, he ends up a blackened skull that looks like it was burned, not mutilated.  A large sculpted model of one of the alien slugs seen on a scientist's desk bears little resemblance to the ones that are eventually presented as the real thing.  The editor tried harder to make this interesting than anybody else involved did, using a lot of separate shots and impressive fast cutting to try to keep you watching.   But a lot of time is wasted on meaningless shots of sunsets, trees, bugs and wildlife, and all the rapid edits are insufficient to disguise the fact that very little is actually happening most of the time.  More shabby effects work mars the big climax, after which the usual "But wait!, The horror isn't over yet!" cop-out is delivered at the close.  

 

 

 FLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: OUTBREAK ON A PLANE (2007)

Dir: Scott Thomas

You'll have to tolerate some situations that severely tax the laws of physics, but if you enjoyed Dan O'Bannon's RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and Peter Jackson's DEAD ALIVE (like I did), you should find a lot to like about this deranged project too.  As the witty title indicates, this movie demonstrates why having zombies on a plane is far worse than having snakes.  It kicks off (pardon the pun) with an absolutely marvelous Shayna Zaid song during the opening titles before getting down to the business of trapping a manifest of familiar airplane movie stereotypes--- including the obligatory convicted criminal being escorted to prison via a commercial airline flight by a wisecracking but bumbling cop--- on board a 747 which just happens to have along for the ride an evil scientist fleeing the US with some nervous subordinates and their latest experiment, a frozen female zombie flesh eater, in the cargo hold.  It only takes a little turbulence to wreck their incredibly poorly designed alarm system and absurdly inadequate security measures, and faster than you can say "Bub" the aircraft is under seige by a growing number of living corpses whose understanding of air travel is even weaker than that of the screenwriters.  The movie has the confidence to take its time in getting to the zombie outbreak, allowing the viewer enough time to get to know the traditional characters and to recognize that this ambitious feature is not only a zombie shocker but also a wry spoof of Hollywood airplane disaster movies at the same time.  The traditional plot elements of both genres are present, including the zombies who can only be killed by a blow to the head and the aging pilot who was only one flight away from retirement.  The plane seems to have too many separate rooms and chambers and some of the sets don't look like they really belong inside a real commercial aircraft, but once all hell breaks loose things move along at such a high speed that you won't have much time to think about such matters.  There's altogether too much gunfire (you'd think the surviving characters would be completely deafened after a while), but at least we're spared the (scientifically false) bit in which bullet holes in the hull of a plane can create enough pressure to suck everything in sight out into the open air.  The zombie makeups are generally excellent and the gruesome, very wet gore effects, while uneven, frequently recall the work of Tom Savini and Gianetto DiRossi from back in the '80s heyday of splatter.  The finale overreaches itself a bit and involves some subpar CGI work (but only slightly subpar), and the film ends (rather disappointingly) on the usual downbeat "a few of the zombies got away" note, but it must be admitted that even that aspect of the thin story works better here than it did in many of the zombie invasions that came before it.  It's not exactly a shining pillar of logic and realistic science, but this extremely violent and highly energetic exercise in mid-flight mayhem is definitely worth watching for any fan of zombie cinema.  And in case you're wondering, the zombies in this funny, scary and tragic tale are the fast-moving, ferocious, agitated type.  It is a/k/a PLANE DEAD, which is an equally great title for it.  

 

 FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE, THE (1959)

Dir: Edward L. Cahn

Poor Jonathan Drake has a problem. Ever since an ancestor of his killed some Jivaro headhunters in South America 180 years ago, his family has been cursed. Every male member of the Drake line is killed by decapitation at age 60, and the heads are never found except when their bleached skulls show up in the family mausoleum. Jonathan has just turned 60 and starts hallucinating floating skulls bobbing in the air in front of him. The bad guy is Dr. Zurich, a well known voodoo expert who lives nearby with his weird assistant, a resurrected zombie who wears sandals made of human skin, has curare blood, fingerprints shaped like little skulls and lips that are are sewn shut. The zombie, named Zuati, is creepy and must have given plenty of kids nightmares back in '59. Bullets pass right through him but he makes a silly noise like a cat having its tail stepped on when he's shot. His head-shrinking boss is also a living corpse. This short 70-minute feature is unusually gruesome for 1959, showing closeups of severed heads, headless corpses and other macabre sights. The acting is good and the crisp, shadowy photography is excellent. The story, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Making this tale believable clearly wasn't a high priority. The identity of the villain is so obvious that everybody involved should have been able to solve this mystery with little difficulty. If the men of the Drake family had done anything but wring their hands in worry for the past 180 years, they would have brought down this (very vulnerable) bad guy and ended the curse a long time ago. As the evil headshrinking witch doctor, Henry Daniell is so obviously sinister and hateful that it's a bit much to take that he's been living this close to his victims all these years and nobody ever got suspicious. When the police learn that Dr. Zurich has officially been dead for 180 years, they immediately conclude that he's a supernatural walking corpse instead of suspecting that a modern-day criminal could be using Zurich's identity.  With nothing on his agenda other than waiting for men named Drake to finally turn 60 so he can send his zombie out with a basket to claim their heads for his collection, Zurich must have been awfully bored for the last 180 years. Since his housemate has his mouth sewn shut, there wouldn't even have been any conversation around the household in all that time.  When he acquires the head of each 60-year-old Drake male, he removes the skull and performs his headshrinking process on what's left, adding the shrunken head to his collection and sending the zombie back to the crypt to drop off the skull. It's all fairly spooky and morbid, but it's also wildly implausible that nobody would have figured it all out by now. The methods of police investigation depicted here are very unrealistic, so don't expect an early CSI. If you're willing to play along and suspend your disbelief during the more far-fetched parts, you may still enjoy this ghoulish quickie.

 

 

 FROZEN SCREAM (1980)

Dir: Frank Roach

Poor Renee Harmon was a European would-be actress who co-produced and starred in a few American Grade-Z cheapies, of which this is one. I'm afraid poor Ms. H. had all the acting ability of a liver fluke and, to make matters worse, could barely speak English clearly enough to be understood due to a heavy Schwarzeneggerian accent. Here she's a mad doctor who's helping her older, madder doctor lover with his clandestine immortality experiments, which involve killing people, doing some sort of "pre-frontal cranial circuitry" brain operations, and bringing them back to life with greatly lowered body tempratures. We're told the cold-blooded revenants can live forever (although one of them eventually drops dead anyway for reasons I never understood). After a while the subjects' brains apparently start to deteriorate, causing them to engage in such anti-social behavior as stabbing people and wearing black hooded robes. With this movie's dark subject matter and mystery-style unfolding, it could have generated some really creepy, atmospheric scenes if at least the editing and soundtrack had been handled hetter. It turned into an unintended comedy, however, thanks mostly to hilariously wooden acting and absolutely deranged editing. A cop (sometimes "Sergeant McGuire", sometimes "Detective McGuire") tries to help a girl get to the bottom of the mystery. The continuity is so poor that he also has to try to help the audience figure out what's supposed to be happening by means of voice-over narration, which often occurs right in the middle of a scene, while other characters are talking! The acting is so somnambulistic in this insane, disjointed feature that even Ed Wood would've demanded better performances. The blood looks like thick red paint, nobody behaves with any rationality, and every surprise or shock sequence is signaled by a very loud "MM-WOOOUUWWWM!!" sound that turned out to be my favorite part of the film. After a while it got to be kind of fun predicting when the next MM-WOOOUUWWWM!! would come along. There are plenty of other unintentional laughs, too, like the scenes in which grown men who are attacked scream like girly-girls. People chant "Love and immortality" over and over again while standing on a beach at night. A girl has a nightmare in which her dead husband turns into the Grim Reaper. The unhinged living dead jump out of the dark and stab people every now and then, possibly just because they wanted to hear that cool MM-WWOOOUUWWWM!! again. The ending is particularly nasty, but like everything else in this stew of horror elements, it doesn't quite make sense. That said, I have to admit this mixed-up mess kept me thoroughly entertained during all of its 70-minute running time. I couldn't believe anybody put this together and thought it resembled a movie enough to release it! Great fun for your next "Bad Movie" party!!

 

 

 GANGS OF THE DEAD (2006)

Dir: Duane Stinnett

The metaphor of zombies as forgotten, disenfranchised citizens is hammered home like never before in this ghetto-set DAWN OF THE DEAD copy.  A green slime-filled meteor smashes into a mid-town Los Angeles bridge in broad daylight and nobody seems to notice except the gang of derelicts and winos who were gathered there listening to a crazy religious fanatic rant about the end of the world.  The victims stagger back to their feet and begin biting chunks out of passersby while the script bites even bigger chunks out of previous zombie features and relocates them to the hood.  For a film with this little imagination or originality, GANGS is surprisingly watchable and much better than it has any right to be.  Since the zombie invasion takes place in modern-day gangland, the characters tend to be interchangably detestable drug dealers and other lowlifes whose miserable existence seems so worthless to begin with that their deaths don't carry much dramatic weight.   Trapped in their misguided little world of pointless macho posturing and mindless violence, the majority of these people aren't leading legitimate lives in the first place so it's hard to care whether they live or die.  Most of the participants spend the entire film screaming threats and obscenities at each other on a pretty even level of enraged panic, so there isn't much chance for characterization other than establishing that some of the murderous thugs are slightly more evil than their peers.  The most malevolent of the many badguys is a brute named Ceasar, and he's the one whom audiences are specifically invited to "love to hate" to the point of eagerly looking forward to the moment when the flesh-eating dead finally catch up with him.  Reggie Bannister of PHANTASM fame is by far the most interesting of the film's many miscreants and the movie never quite recovers from the foolish decision to kill his character off early. There are a few instances of inspired social satire, but I found myself wishing they'd been used in a more creative feature.  The acting, such as it is, feels very natural and is more than adequate to get the point across.  True, nobody does anything beyond shout at and threaten each other, but the whole cast does an excellent job of it.  The zombie makeups are first-rate, especially those seen late in the film and the gore effects are definitely better than average.  Be warned that there some effects flaws, most noticeably when an entire crate full of hand grenades explodes inside a warehouse and the impact shatters all the windows but fails to break the building's many fluorescent tube bulbs and leaves in its wake a few small artistically placed little (largely smokeless) fires here and there. (Well, ya can't have everything.)  The ending is 100 per cent predictable and has been a staple of practically every cutprice zombie rampage since Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE, but at least director Stinnett presents it masterfully and allows it to end the film with an indelible image of doom.  GANGS OF THE DEAD never strays from the paths established by this genre's greatest hits, but it does make a sincere effort to do them justice. 

 GARDEN OF THE DEAD (1972)

Dir: John Hayes

One of the first and worst of theNIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD copies, this daffy feature may be enjoyed on a 'so-dumb-it's-funny' level but is a long way from being scary. At the world's smallest and least-guarded prison facility, where official signs are hand-lettered on pieces of plywood and prisoners' numbers are written on their shirts with a felt-tip marker, a gang of inmates are plotting their escape. Just before the big breakout, though, the not-too-bright cons decide to try getting high by sniffing formaldehyde. Of course this doesn't give them much of a buzz, but it does enable them to return from the grave later on. After the bungled escape attempt, in which the would-he escapees are gunned down, they're hastily buried under about a quarter-inch of dirt. More formaldehyde is conveniently spilled on their graves, and the next thing you know they're back from the dead. Now I'm no rocket scientist, but since formaldehyde is routinely used as an ingredient in embalming fluid it seems likely that if it had the power to resurrect corpses the world might have noticed this before 1972. Making growling noises that sound not unlike Homer Simpson eyeing a donut, the zombies terrorize prison officials with pickaxes, hatchets and bad acting. In a puerile attempt at popular anti-establishment leanings of the early seventies, the script clearly sympathizes with the prisoners but never gets around to explaining just what crimes they'd committed. The warden is an arrogant, sadistic creep but instead of getting a dramatic comeuppance he's simply axed from behind by a zombie at such a distance from the camera that there's no reaction, no emotion, and no Sense of justice or revenge; he's just another victim. Other random plotting includes a guy who's wounded early on and spends the rest of the movie recovering with no further function in the story. Maybe someone was trying for an unpredictable, real-life feel with this senseless unfolding of events but it's more likely nobody involved knew how to tell a story and so just made things up as they were going . Joe Blasco's monster makeups aren't exactly bad but they don't fit with the situation since the cons have supposedly only been dead for about two days but arise severely decaved with crusty blue~green skin. Some of them even come back with their hair turned white!  Adding insult to idiocy is the revelation that these zombies can be destroyed by aiming bright lights at them, which causes them to instantly decompose like in  INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN!  So here's the story in a nutshell: ordinary human corpses doused with ordinary formaldehyde come back to life and can be fried with ordinary floodlights.  Ah, there's nothing else on earth quite like the smell of cheap American drive-in features from the 1970s .  Only an hour long, it's a/k/a  TOMB OF THE UNDEAD.  The same director made the much better GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE the same year.

 GATES OF HELL, THE (1980)

Dir: Lucio Fulci

One of Italian splattermeister Lucio Fulci's most successful films, this was a hit in the U.S. thanks to wide video distribution.  Its theme of a physical door to hell was also touched on in the director's better but lesser-known THE BEYOND, a 1981 entry that enjoyed a rediscovery and brief theatrical run in America in 1998.  Shot as FEAR IN THE CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and sometimes known as just CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (not to be confused with the unrelated CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD), this controversial movie is fast-paced, episodic and often seriously scary.  It's full of freakish supernatural manifestations, gore effects and bizarre visuals and is recommended to more adventurous fans.  On the surface it looks like just a mindless bloodbath (especially when the obvious low budget shows), but those who have a feel for the genre will realize this strange film relies on mood and style at least as much as on its scenes of sick violence.  A priest hangs himself in a cemetery, thereby opening the gates of hell and allowing the rotting dead to materialize as flesh-ripping zombies who will destroy first the town and eventually the entire world.  This premise was perhaps a bit too ambitious to be done justice on the budget that was alloted, but in spite of some story holes as big as open graves Fulci manages to provide some impressively shocking moments and intense atmospherics.  The most famous shock is the scene in which a guy gets an electric drill shoved through his head (an excellent makeup effect), but there are plenty more sights on display that are just as extreme.  One woman is buried alive, another vomits up all of her internal organs, zombies terrorize a tavern, fireballs shoot up through floors, and there's even a literal storm of maggots to get to those viewers who aren't bothered by the sight of blood.  My favorite parts weren't the gross-outs but rather the metaphysical ideas tossed around in between and the strong feeling that the whole world is about to be turned inside-out as horrific events that simply aren't possible start happening while the barrier between the 'real' world and the world of the dead gradually unravels. The worst thing about GATES is its poor excuse for an ending, one of the weakest in horror history.  Reportedly ordered re-cut by a producer to feature a (supposed) shock in the final shot, this concludes so clumsily that first-time viewers are likely to write the whole film off as a dud, coming away as they will with the memory of that frustrating non-ending.  Apparently Fulci's ending was edited out (against his wishes) in Italy, and I haven't heard of a print existing anywhere in the world that includes it. A comic book adaptation of this confused but memorable feature is reportedly in the works. Beware of a boring unrelated  U.S. film out on video as GATES OF HELL PART 2: DEAD AWAKENlNG.  It has no connection whatsoever to Fulci's film.

 GHOUL SCHOOL (1990)

Dir: Timothy O'Rawe

Try as I might, I just can't find anything positive to say about this wearying, cynical chunk of slapped-together slop. I don't like to come off as wholly unsympathetic toward any amateur or low-budget film, and indeed I almost always find something to like in even the cheesiest monster movie.  But GHOUL SCHOOL is so scornful of both its genre and its audience that it practically dares you to watch it all the way to the end.  At the end of a school day in a New Jersey high school, some cruel thugs beat up a poor old janitor and somehow manage to release a completely unexplained toxic gas that just happened to be in storage down in the school boiler room.  Side Note: somebody needs to explain to all the bad horror writers of the world that the word "toxic" doesn't automatically denote anything mysterious, science-fictional or otherwise monster-related.  It simply refers to something that can kill by poisoning.  Anyway, the teens who are exposed to the stuff (mostly, for some reason, members of the swimming team) quickly turn into blue-skinned, shambling zombie flesh eaters who stagger clumsily around the building while some nerdy horror movie fans try to escape.  This tired, unimaginative situation is made all the more distasteful by the fact that some parts of GHOUL SCHOOL are supposed to be funny.  Well, at least I think they're supposed to be funny.  In what's probably this movie's only point of distinction, regular Drew Friedman satire victim Joe Franklin puts in a silly brief appearance, but his presence (just like everything else in this spectacularly poorly made film) goes nowhere and adds nothing.  There are a lot of bloody gore effects sprinkled throughout in an attempt to keep you awake, but they all look like homemade, bargain-basement imitations of those found in Romero's and Fulci's zombie thrillers.  The whole thing exudes a dismayingly contemptous attitude that's too dumb and artless to even be called nihilism, it's more like the movie's idea of a good joke is that the film itself laughs disdainfully at people who have been suckered into plunking down their coins at the video counter to willingly see something like this even as they watch it. It's clear that very little was done to make any of it truly entertaining.  It smacks of having been cynically thrown together to make a fast buck at the expense of hapless video viewers who are eager to see anything involving monsters and the fantastic.  Unfortunately, that includes me. I'm a sucker for any movie about zombies, vampires or any other kind of 'living dead' creatures, so I naturally rented this one too. Now that I've suffered through it, you may consider yourself spared the buck-and-a-half rental fee and the eighty minutes of your life.  No need to thank me.  It's all in a day's work.  Now let's all try to think about something more pleasant.

 GOBLIN (1993)

Dir: Todd Sheets

Young nobodies in an old house are torn into bloody wads of meat by a big hairy monster called the Goblin in this shot-on-video failure. Brought to you by the maker of similar exercises in phony-looking gore like ZOMBIE BLOODBATH and ZOMBIE RAMPAGE, this is a depressingly dull outing loaded with scene after scene of ill-chosen chunks of glop being pulled out of peoples shirts, pants and heads. Since there isn't any story, characterization or ending, it's clear that the gore effects were the film's sole reason for being. Maybe whoever did them should've gotten permission to attend an autopsy first, where he might've learned that human bodies contain recognizable internal organs like hearts, lungs and intestines and not just assorted meat that resembles gobs of pink cookie dough. The Goblin looks like a refugee from your local Haunted House attraction at Halloween, with a scary green face surrounded by wads of tangled brown hair and a costume consisting of strips of torn fabric and (unforgivably) ordinary jeans and work shoes! They didn't even bother to make up his hands, but the actor playing the Goblin is very energetic and ferocious in the role as he runs and tumbles around like a pro. At the end, in some footage that was apparently shot at a different time and possibly intended for another feature (since some characters' clothes suddenly change and the gore effects begin to improve), a gang of rotting zombies attacks the house to eat the survivors of the Goblin's rampage. They're clearly not the same people we've seen killed by the Goblin, so I guess the neighborhood must've been littered with decomposing dead bodies already. One guy who got splattered by the Goblin awakens as a zombie and then the movie stops. The feature is followed by one of those embarrassing, pat-ourselves-on-the-back 'making of' segments, and watching this one was pretty strange. Director Todd Sheets, who comes off as a sincere, likeable, enthusiastic and creative individual, gives sound advice about making low-budget productions, but since the preceding film has failed to observe the very rules he speaks of, it seems like he was somehow unable to practice what he preaches. He talks about the importance of good lighting and acting, which are two of GOBLIN's most prominent areas of ineptitude. The end result is that you end up feeling sorry for Sheets in an Ed Wood kind of way, since he seems to love what he's doing but just can't come up with original or worthwhile ideas. The end credits include the caption "Flush Hollywood Support 'B' Movies!", but I'm afraid 'B' is a level to which a project like GOBLIN could never aspire. Watch for the scene in which people are chased by a rototiller that isn't even turned on! I like to see independent filmmakers like Sheets hammer out successful careers for themselves but it won't happen through undisciplined and derivative junk like this.

 GOOD BOOK, THE (1997)

Dir: Matthew Giaquinto

Some fresh concepts and social commentary make this shot-on-video cheapie worth watching even though in the long run the story comes off as muddled.  A big problem is that the plot is built around philosophical discussion and character interaction and the cast of amateur actors isn't always up to the task of conveying all the emotional complexities the script calls for.  In the near future, the ambiguous GVC corporation controls everything through the internet.  People spend their entire dull lives indoors staring into their computer screens, their every need fulfilled via online processes. Society has become so completely dependent on the internet that people are no longer smart enough to even plug in their computers without the help of a technician. Televisions show satiric commercials of the ROBOCOP variety, ridiculous vampire movies and a scene from the useless gore featurette THE DAY I MET MY MOTHER. Those who refuse to let their lives be run by computers are outcasts.  To venture outside is to risk being chased around and growled at by (and eventually joining) stiff-legged slimy zombies who make loud Chewbacca-like noises. The zombies never really do anything but they certainly are noisy. Significantly, they're no longer capable of human speech and are thus literally unable to communicate with the rest of the world as a direct result of their rejection of the internet. The hero is a computer repairman who suddenly finds himself in a timeless alternate dimension with a man who may be God, played by a co-writer with an unfortunate disco-boy look. "God" is a smug, chatty sort, given to long-winded soliloquies about the sorry state of mankind.  He wants the repairman to destroy the internet once and for all with a virus called the Satan Bug (presumably no relation to the Satan Bug in the movie THE SATAN BUG). If all this sounds confusing to you, imagine how the poor sap in the movie must feel.   His changed behavior soon catches the attention of his superiors, who dispatch a squad of corporate cops to bring him in dead or alive.  After a final showdown that includes split-second visions of Jesus' crucifixion and clawed hands tearing through a gooey red membrane, the whole movie and whatever point it was trying to make is thrown away with a closing joke that makes the filmmakers' intentions even more unclear. Some of the social criticism hits the bullseye but the movie's underlying moral is uncertain. Technical credits are above average for a video project and the dialogue is thoughtful and intriguing enough to give the impression that somebody was trying to make some kind of meaningful statement, which only adds to viewer frustration when the movie ends abruptly and without ever having decided exactly what it wanted to say. There's plenty of good work and good ideas in THE GOOD BOOK but as a whole it could stand to be remade or at least extensively re-edited to clarify its message.

 GORY GORY HALLELUJAH! (2003)

Dir: Sue Corcoran

Abysmally unfunny lowbrow comedy in the worst Troma tradition. It was written by the lead actress, who acts and sounds like Carol Burnett.  The wannabe cult film opens with a long-haired stoner, an afro-wearing militant black guy, a nerdy Jew and a disillusioned woman all trying out for the role of Jesus in a play. The director ends up casting himself in the part, so the four stereotypes set out on their own. After a barroom fight with some bulliyng Elvis impersonators, they end up in a redneck hillbilly town populated by the oldest and most shopworn of cliche' characters. Potshots at all the easiest targets (religious fanatics, crooked realtors, insincere preachers, backwoods yokels) abound, but there aren't many actual jokes and the script has absolutely nothing new or clever to say.  A kindly old black man (the best actor present) is a genuinely likeable character but he seems out-of-place in this otherwise putrid stew of tired humor and hateful attitudes. The actor playing him is much better than this project deserves. The Jewish character worries a lot and talks about his mother, the repressed smalltown women are closet lesbian feminists, and the black man is forced into servitude by a redneck family as a maid wearing demeaning silly clothes. Gee... hilarious, huh? The movie purports to poke fun at racism but it really seems to have it in for everybody: men, women, blacks, whites, Christians, Jews, farmers, businessmen, Southerners, city folks, you name it... this movie has little good to say about anyone.   After an hour of loud, mostly boring nonsense, a handful of zombies in wretched homemade makeup come to life in a goofy little family graveyard and kill everybody (although none of it is as "gory" as the title would lead you to think).  God intervenes and brings everyone back to life for the happy ending.  Try to imagine a 90-minute episode of TV's THE MONKEES made by amateurs whose idea of edgy humor is to simply try to be as politically incorrect as possible without ever getting around to making a point.  Watching zombies' greasepaint makeup dry would be more entertaining.

 GRAVE ROBBERS (1989)

Dir: Ruben Galindo

Okay, so they couldn't think of a catchy title.  This simple, straightforward shocker from Mexico is still worth a look.  The lighting and photography are sufficiently well handled to establish an appropriately spooky mood and the many special makeup effects are both ambitious and impressive, all of which helps to compensate for the threadbare excuse for a story.   A prologue shows an evil, devil-worshipping warlock whose satanic ceremony is interrupted before he can carry out a human sacrifice.   He's tortured on the rack and gets a large battle axe buried in his chest, but not before he has a chance to make that same old vow to return from the dead that condemned witches and satanists in movies aways find time to bark out in ther final rnoments.  In modern times, a quartet of teen knuckleheads out for a pleasant evening of grave robbing accidentally discovers the long-forgotten, cobweb-filled underground burial chamber where the old ghoul was interred.  They unwisely steal an ornate jeweled medallion from his rotted body and sure enough, this act disturbs his eternal rest.  Another movie tradition, the sudden violent thunderstorm that signals the release of evil forces, sends the gang running for cover but the newly resurrected assassin grabs the very axe that killed him and starts prowling the cemetery in search of both his cursed talisman and whatever fresh victims he can locate.   As fate would have it, he finds plenty of easy prey.  Numerous heads are chopped off or bashed in and faces cleaved in two as the robed, dirt-encrusted, angry zombie makes frequent stops to plant his king-sized axe in the heads, necks and faces of strangers while trailing the teens who robbed him.  Eventually he even develops strange Freddy Krueger-like powers, resulting in nightmarish visuals in which monstrous hands suddenly stretch out or burst forth from the darnedest of places.  As the list of victims (and weird events) grows, the harried town sheriff knows he's in for a long night.  As you might guess, GRAVE ROBBERS doesn't offer much in the way of originality.   Some of the stalking scenes and sudden killings are pretty scary, though, and the film on the whole is an enjoyable exercise in standard spook-movie thrills as long as you're not expecting too much.  The monster looks like a decayed version of Lon Chaney Sr. as the Phantom Of The Opera, with shriveled-up green skin, wild eyes and exposed white bone.  It's an effective enough make-up job, but one closeup shot in which you can see the actor's big fake monster teeth start to fall out should've ended up on the cutting room floor.  As a low-budget Spainish addition to the American 'dead teenager' subgenre, this perfectly watchable (and usually overlooked) little movie stacks up nicely, emerging as a little more serious and atmospheric--and a little less annoying--than the majority of its Hollywood models.

 GRIM REAPER, THE (1981)

Dir: Aristide Massacessi

The only Italian gore movie ever to make the cover of Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters Of Filmland (it shared the front of issue #180 with the Karloff Frankenstein Monster!), this Joe D'Amato (Aristide Massacessi) film contained some of the grossest situations ever committed to film when it came out.  All these years later, even though practically the entire film industry is now devoted to coming up with the most offensive ideas possible and making audiences ill with lowest-common-denominator material, this still packs a wallop and is not for those with weak stomachs.  Shot as ANTHROPOPHAGUS (spelled 'ANTROPOPHAGUS' in Italian) and known in some countries as THE ANTROPOPHAGUS BEAST or SAVAGE ISLAND, the cut U.S. version (missing some gore footage plus a few other scenes) was renamed THE GRIM REAPER and that's still the title by which this sick, pessimistic film is most widely known in America. Tisa Farrow (just after starring in ZOMBIE) joins a group of travelers on a trip to a small, isolated island off the Greek coast. They find the place deserted except for a strange woman and a few chewed-up corpses lying around. Soon it's learned that sailor Klaus Weltman (Luigi Montefeori a/k/a George Eastman) was once shipwrecked with his wife and son and spent weeks at sea floating on a lifeboat until he finally went totally nuts and ate his own family to survive. He now haunts the island, a tall, leering cannibal with staring eyes and a greenish, crusty, rotting face. We're told that this lone madman somehow either ate or frightened an entire community off the island and even the police could do nothing to stop him. How he managed this single-handedly is never explained, nor is his decaying face, but keep in mind, this was made shortly after John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN established a new subgenre in which crazy murderers could have mildly supernatural qualities and superhuman strength with no explanation whatsoever. Such is the case with Klaus, who breathes heavily and stares at people before he tears them to pieces, showing no mercy and taking no prisoners. The score is uneven, with early passages that sound ridiculous. Later on, when we see the ghoul's secret lair (dark catacombs piled with rotting bodies), a supremely scary soundtrack kicks in, sounding like a chorus of electronically-distorted voices of the despairing dead chanting an otherworldly warning. Much of the weird original soundtrack was replaced with library cues for the GRIM REAPER recut. Although it fails to tell much of a story, is slow-moving at times and doesn't even make good use of the island scenery, I have to admit this gritty, often harshly-judged exercise in blood-'n'-guts ultimately succeeds at being scary. And that's what horror movies are supposed to do, right? Midnight Video was the first to offer a complete uncut print.  A follow-up, ABSURD a/k/a ANTHROPOPHAGUS 2, MONSTER HUNTER or even ZOMBIE 6: MONSTER HUNTER, also stars Eastman as a quasi- supernatural killer but despite often being referred to as a sequel, it's an unrelated story and the monster is a completely different character. Some sources erroneously refer to Klaus the ghoul as "Nikos" or "Mikos", but that's the miscreant from the sequel. Some English-subtitled prints change "Weltman" to "Boardman", possibly due to a mishearing of the name spoken in the original Italian, which sounds rather like they're saying "Waldman". Whatever you call it, this nasty little low-budget souvenir of the '80s still has the power to give viewers chills.