Zombie Flick – Page 2

Zombi 3

What’s great about a zombie flick is that it doesn’t need much of a plot to be a success. It can just lurch from set piece to set piece until the main cast is winnowed down enough to call it a day. That makes zombies a perfect subject matter for Italian director Lucio Fulci.

Zombi 3 is the 1988 entry in a film series that requires its own Wikipedia page to make sense of. According to the internet, so it must be true, the screenplay was developed by Rossella Drudi, but it was her husband, Claudio Fragasso, who got the credit. Lucio Fulci is the only credited director, but, again according to the internet, he delivered a 70-minute cut that producer Franco Gaudenzi was not happy with. So, Gaudenzi enlisted Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to carry out reshoots, with Fragasso handling most of the work. The result is an 84-minute long film that makes up for its lack of cohesion with a boatload of blood and guts. Continue reading “Zombi 3”

Sniper Corpse, aka Corpse Sniper

Sniper Corpse or Corpse Sniper…whatever this thing is called, thank goodness for the bottom feeding filmmakers that will let nothing, from lack of a good screenplay, lack of talented actors, lack of a budget, and lack of storytelling skill, keep them from making their movie. The art of film is being preserved by these creators that love movies, that see what makes the big screen, good and bad, and think to themselves, “I can do that. How hard could it be?”

From writer, director, and producer Keith R. Robinson, Sniper Corpse tells the story of Diane Keeley (Eleri Jones), an English war widow whose husband was killed in action a couple of years previously. Things got snafued, as they are wont to do in the military, and the British Army lost her husband’s corpse. It turns out they’ve lost a number of corpses of late, and Diane takes it upon herself to find out what’s going on. Continue reading “Sniper Corpse, aka Corpse Sniper”

The Night Eats the World, aka La nuit a dévoré le monde

Ah, zombie flicks. So many possibilities, and so many variations. The basics are always there, with tweaks as required by the storytellers. It’s a subgenre of horror that’s so versatile that filmmakers have to truly work hard to make something that’s unwatchable. No worries, there, with 2018’s The Night Eats the World. This is a fine entry into the oeuvre of the undead.

Adapting a novel by Pit Agarmen, The Night Eats the World comes to us from screenwriters Jérémie Guez, Guillaume Lemans, and Dominique Rocher, with Rocher directing. From that list of names, one can guess that this film hails from France. It does, but it was filmed in English. Continue reading “The Night Eats the World, aka La nuit a dévoré le monde”

Army of the Dead

I liked Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. I thought it was a fine modern entry in the zombie subgenre of horror, helping make the creatures scary again. The heavy lifting may have been done by 28 Days Later a few years earlier, but it can’t be denied that Snyder’s film is one of the reasons zombie films and television shows remain popular today. Dawn of the Dead was also the last Zack Snyder film I’ve enjoyed. Every subsequent film he’s made since then, from 300 to this year’s Army of the Dead, has been a joyless slog — the knock from critics, and even fans, being that Snyder makes visually interesting, even gorgeous, films, but they suffer from too much length. The consensus is that Snyder’s lack of storytelling discipline is an issue, but not one that is fatal to his vision. Continue reading “Army of the Dead”

Doom: Annihilation

The first Doom flick has the distinction of being the first film to ever carry the Shitty Movie Sundays moniker here at Missile Test. That movie was cheap as all get out, despite starring Dwayne Johnson during his first run at movie stardom, and an up-and-comer named Karl Urban. 2019’s Doom: Annihilation establishes a tradition of cheapness for the franchise. Despite that, this is a far more entertaining film than any direct-to-video sci-fi/action flick has any business being.

The first Doom film paid homage to its video game source material here and there, but it was never a faithful adaptation. That’s understandable, as that source material is kind of thin. Continue reading “Doom: Annihilation”

Road Wars

Road Wars movie poster The Asylum is shameless. When they’re not churning out giant monster flicks starring washed-up TV stars for SyFy, they’re taking advantage of blockbuster movies, attaching themselves like remora and feeding off scraps. They have taken the idea of the mockbuster, cinema’s short con, and elevated it. Not to art, but it’s definitely something they’ve honed.

I like that The Asylum has no shame. It’s different than what a filmmaker like Roger Corman has done throughout his career. Corman was a filmmaker with talent, and he threw it all away to chase the cheap buck. The Asylum, by contrast, has always been a house of shit.

Road Wars was in the can and ready to release direct-to-video early in May of 2015, timed to match the upcoming release of Mad Max: Fury Road. That’s the film Road Wars is ripping off. From the mishmash black leather outfits and shoulder pads (my favorite accoutrement was a bicycle reflector attached to an epaulette), to old muscle cars with all sorts of metal shit welded on to them, to the desert setting (California City, take a bow), to the derivative title, this is almost enough of a ripoff for the rights holders of Mad Max to sue. That makes this shitty flick a proper mockbuster. Continue reading “Road Wars”

Hell of the Living Dead

Hell of the Living Dead movie poster What an absolute pile of trash. I loved every minute of this film. Well, almost every minute of it. I loved the exploding heads and zombies munching on guts. I loved how director Bruno Mattei slipped in some nudity and pretended it wasn’t gratuitous. I loved how wild and unrealistic were the main characters. And I loved how no one in the movie seemed to absorb, for more than a second at a time, that zombies have to be shot in the head to stop them.

What I didn’t love was Mattei’s liberal use of footage from the 1974 documentary Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali (New Guinea: Island of Cannibals). Specifically, the footage of tribal mortuary feasts, wherein natives eat parts of their dead and rotting relatives, was hard to stomach. But, I cannot deny that this did much to make Hell of the Living Dead a memorable shitty movie watch. (As an aside, Island of Cannibals has, as of this writing, one of the weirdest IMDb pages one will come across. It’s an Italian documentary, with a Japanese writer and a Japanese director, and the only people listed in the cast are Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in what I can only assume is archival footage. There isn’t even a description of what the film is about, nor have any of IMDb’s unpaid army of users posted a review. Even more strange, the only footage of this film I could find on the internet, outside of Mattei’s usage, is a short intro and title screen.) Continue reading “Hell of the Living Dead”

Death Warmed Up

Death Warmed Up movie poster There’s not a lot of plot to Death Warmed Up, the 1984 horror flick from writer Michael Heath and director David Blyth. There are hints of plot here and there, but any cohesion or sense is tossed away in service of spectacle. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Story, while necessary for most films, would just have gotten in the way of this flick’s many, many, blood-spurting wounds.

A New Zealand production, Death Warmed Up follows Michael Tucker (Michael Hurst). In the film’s intro, we see Michael come under the influence of the evil Dr. Archer Howell (Gary Day), who is conducting experiments into human resurrection and mind control. After injecting Michael with his serum, Howell sends Michael to kill Michael’s parents. Michael’s father is a professional rival who threatens Howell’s experiments. After the deed is done, Michael spends the next seven years in a psychiatric hospital. The main part of the film picks up after his release. Continue reading “Death Warmed Up”

Inmate Zero, aka Patients of a Saint

Inmate Zero is a pretty generic title for a zombie flick. But, it does have the benefit of not only fitting the story, but letting any potential viewers know what they’re in for. It’s a much more honest approach than giving a movie an evocative title and then failing to deliver, à la The Thirsty Dead. That’s just a con. Either way, Inmate Zero, as basic a title as that may be, is still much better than Patients of a Saint, the title under which this film was originally released. That is just awful. This is a zombie flick, not some agonizing Jane Austen romance. Continue reading “Inmate Zero, aka Patients of a Saint”

#Alive

I played a game of movie roulette with #Alive, the Korean zombie flick from writer/director Il Cho. The poster I saw shows the film’s main character, Oh Joon-woo (Ah-In Yoo), leaning off of his apartment’s balcony with his phone on a selfie stick taking a sweet pic for his Insta. That, combined with the hashtag in the title, led me to some erroneous conclusions about that plot. But, that’s okay. That happens when one goes into a flick blind.

The poster (shown below) and the title led me to believe this was a black comedy about a teen in Seoul who finds himself amidst a zombie outbreak, and becomes a worldwide phenomenon due to his posts from the infected area. Continue reading “#Alive”