J.R. Bookwalter, Akron’s finest filmmaker, strikes again. Zombie Cop, his third feature, is something of a redheaded stepchild in his oeuvre. According to Bookwalter, he was in an unhappy place with his filmmaking at the time. He had been contracted to shoot six movies in seven months for distributor Cinema Home Video (prolific b-auteur David DeCoteau, owner of CHV, executive produced), and that experience left him so burnt out he almost left the business for good. It’s no wonder, then, that he has mixed feelings about Zombie Cop. The word ‘disowned’ appears here and there in the tubes, but that seems to be an exaggeration. He may not like the final product all that much, but his name is still on Zombie Cop, warts and all.
Directed and produced by Bookwalter from a script by Matthew Jason Walsh (his first foray into a long career in shitty movies), Zombie Cop is one of those wonderfully titled b-movies that tells a viewer exactly what they will get. There is no misdirection, there are no outright lies. Nothing about that title is meant to trick potential viewers into watching this flick. There is a zombie, and he is a cop.
Detective Gill (Michael Kemper) and his partner, Detective Stevens (Ken Jarosz), respond to a late night domestic disturbance call. When they arrive at the scene, they discover voodoo houngan Doctor Death (James Black), a convicted ritual murderer and fugitive. He has faked the call to lure in unsuspecting cops, with the aim of turning one of them into his undead slave. A shootout results, Gill gets a faceful of 
zombie juice, and he dies, only to crawl out of his grave later. He’s not slave to Doctor Death, though. Rather, he, still possessing all of the faculties in his decaying body, enlists his partner’s help in tracking down Doctor Death and his assistant, Buddy (Bill Morrison), before Death can add further to his roster of atrocities.
Zombie Cop is about as low rent a production as one will ever see. It was shot on videotape, most of the location work was done at people’s undressed apartments, and there’s a graveyard set that is evocative of Plan 9 from Outer Space. That is not a good thing. In fact, this production is so low rent that it resembles the juvenile backyard shenanigans that Cinemassacre’s James Rolfe put to tape when he was in high school. This is a movie that doesn’t just require suspension of disbelief from an audience. It requires participation in childlike make-believe.
This is also a movie of its time. In 1991, it was acceptable to have a carry out clerk, played by Walsh, in brown face, with an actual bath towel as a turban, and rocking a ridiculous accent. Maybe Bookwalter should have disowned this movie.
Kemper and Jarosz were about as talented actors as one would expect from a shot-on-video horror flick. These types of movies tend to have people involved in them with very sparse IMDb pages for a reason. Then there is James Black. He puts on a fake Jamaican accent that earns many a sideways look. But, his story doesn’t end there. Black was something of a local hero at the time, having set records as a running back at the University of Akron, and getting a cup of coffee with the Cleveland Browns. This was one of many Bookwalter movies in which Black worked, and I bet little of it made his reel. But, he has since gone on to a very successful career in Hollywood, tallying up more than 150 acting credits. The origins of this success are nowhere to be found in this movie, which is a good life lesson. Keep on keeping on.
Zombie Cop clocks in at 60 minutes, so it won’t take up much of one’s life. What it could have used was more zombies. Gill is the only undead freak in the movie, and he’s really no different than when the character was alive, except his skin is grey and he wears a bandage mask. A couple of undead henchmen for Doctor Death, and some gore, would have gone a long way to making this dog more watchable. It’s just too sparse a movie, especially for a flick with such a short running time. The final act is a rip-roaring festival of dirt cheap action, though, featuring a car chase on an empty, arrow-straight road, and a fight to the death on the lip of a ravine that’s about fifteen feet deep with a smooth, gentle slope to its bottom. Not quite a cliff above a raging sea, but Bookwalter went to war with the army he had, not the army he wanted.
Zombie Cop is not a lifeless movie. It has much of the strange charm that can lead b-movie fans to SOV horror. Low rent movies have value. They are relatable, in a way. Barely professional, these flicks are what most movies would be like if they were left in the hands of you or I. That makes them something worth rooting for, and enjoying a harmless laugh at someone else’s expense. Zombie Cop still sinks into the nether reaches of the Watchability Index, displacing the execrable Rollerball remake at #462.