Just because a movie is objectively bad, does not mean that it is unwatchable. That’s a maxim here at Missile Test, but it cannot be denied that, often, there is correlation between the two. A case in point is Curse of the Cannibal Confederates. It’s an objectively bad film in just about every way, and it’s tough to sit through. By the time this review is over, it will have settled into the leprous nether reaches of the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index, but it does have a few of those sublime moments of true unselfconscious ineptitude that mutants live for.
Curse is one of many films that Troma picked up for release a number of years after it first saw daylight. The film was originally released in 1982 with the title The Curse of the Screaming Dead. After Troma picked it up in 1987 they gave it a new name and did some light editing to the title sequence. This version, a low-quality VHS transfer, is what I saw. But, should one feel the need to see this flick in an HD scan that removes most of the mud and restores the original cut, Vinegar Syndrome released it on Blu-ray in 2023.
Curse is standard fare when it comes to plot. Six twenty-somethings are on a hunting/camping trip somewhere in the deep south. They’ve been to the area before, but one of them, Wyatt (Steve Sandkuhler) persuades the group to head up a different trail than the one they have used in the past. This leads them to a dilapidated stone church and Confederate graveyard. Wyatt finds a chest. Inside is a tattered Confederate battle flag and a diary written by one of the dead, detailing a harried retreat, eventual 
capture, and torture at the hands of Union forces. Wyatt, being a bit of a kleptomaniac, pockets the diary against the advice of his blind and possibly psychic girlfriend Kiyomi (Mimi Ishikawa). This, of course, angers the dead soldiers, and they crawl from their graves, zombified, to terrorize the group.
The first thing viewers will pick up on while watching this film is the poor acting. There is a lengthy setup before the cast is in any danger, so viewers will get to spend a lot of time listening to school play-quality reads. The level of dialogue is equally juvenile, as Lon Huber’s screenplay falls into typical amateurish traps. Everything the characters do annoys one another, so the dialogue is little more than cast members snapping at each other like hyenas picking over a denuded corpse. Wyatt and Sarah (Rebecca Bach) are the most guilty of this, and in a film with little in the way of likable characters, these two are the worst, even though, believe it or not, Sandkuhler’s performance does improve before credits roll.
Then there is the pace. This is a slow movie. It’s not slow because we don’t have attention spans like we used to. It’s just slow. Producer/director Tony Malanowski seemed bound and determined to make a 91 minute movie with 75 minutes of material, pacing be damned. Besides forcing viewers to spend far too much time listening to characters talk, he stretched out a gory scene of zombies munching on guts to an interminable three minutes, when even Romero wouldn’t linger for more than ten or twenty seconds.
Interminable this scene is, but it’s also one of those glorious moments of ineptitude alluded to above. It’s all about the sound mixing. Malanowski’s zombies are a hungry bunch, and he laid overmixed sounds of munching and weirdly sexual humming on top of the visuals. My personal favorite bit in this sequence is when one of the zombies pulls away the pig guts they were using for effects, and underneath is the victim’s shirt, still buttoned and whole, although bloody. It’s like the poor fellow’s intestines were teleported into the zombie’s mouth. That’s good stuff.
Like many zombie flicks, the baddies have to be shot in the head to kill them. Instead of putting squibs on the zombies, Malanowski quick cuts to exploding dummy heads that look like balloons slathered in makeup that had firecrackers stuffed up their nozzles. The effect is…interesting.
When the zombies are onscreen, this is a much better movie. It’s partly down to makeup and gore effects that are cheap but endearing. Mostly, though, it’s due to the fact we don’t have to listen to as much bad dialogue while characters are fighting for their lives. Cut some early fat, and this flick wouldn’t be such a dull affair. But, we don’t watch the movie we want filmmakers to have made. We watch the movie we have. Curse of the Cannibal Confederates is dreadful. It lands in the bottom fifty of the Index, displacing The Beast of Yucca Flats at #524. Unless one is slave to morbid curiosity, it’s best to stay away.