Bargain Bin Review: Hell of the Living Dead

January is the worst. It's the Monday of the calendar year. The best part of January happens in its opening minutes, when you relish in all the optimism and potential of the new year. But then you go to bed and wake up to a gray smudge of a day that continues on for the next month, and your agenda consists of 1) put away Christmas decorations, 2) be cold, 3) wait for February to arrive.

Anyway, I was going to do a Modern Cult Classic this week. But then I thought, January is the worst -- why should it get an enjoyable movie? So instead, I've "remastered" a real stinker on the last day of this stinker month.

Directed by Bruno Mattei, 1980, 99 minutes, Unrated
a.k.a. Night of the Zombies, a.k.a. Virus, a.k.a. Zombie Creeping Flesh, a.k.a. Zombie 2… Call it what you want -- this movie is hell

It's generally a bad sign when the Netflix synopsis refers to the feature you're about to watch as an "impossibly bad movie." But it's a much worse sign when, in the opening scene of said movie, the reactor guy says the needle on the Geiger counter is "going off the scale"... and it is clearly visible that the same actor is turning a dial to make the needle bounce around.

Here's the plot, such as it is: In New Guinea, the HOPE chemical plant is covertly
running one of those terrible experiments that's bound to go badly, stuffstuffstuff ZOMBIES! Meanwhile, our "good guys" consist of a SWAT team in Day-Glo blue uniforms, armed with tommy guns. They're just like the A-Team from The A-Team, except they needlessly kill people. For example, while sneaking into a terrorist-controlled embassy, they quietly creep up behind one terrorist and quietly knock him out... then shoot him a dozen times anyway. Anyway, while the SWAT guys are on vacation(?) in New Guinea, they meet up with a TV reporter and her cameraman. Together, the six travel the countryside, encountering stock footage and packs of roaming zombies everywhere they go.

"Action" scene

It would be quicker and easier for me to talk about what does work in this film. The
visual effects for the gore work nicely in that classic George Romero sense. And
there's a scene where the TV reporter jogs around topless that appealed to the part of me that hasn't matured past the age of 14.

Everything else sucked.

My mother hates that word, but my mother didn't have to sit through this movie. The editing sucked, the acting sucked, and boy howdy, the dialogue sucked. Bad dubbing, too. You want to talk about sound effects? When the zombies bite into someone, it sounds like crunched Styrofoam. Production values? There's a priceless scene late in the film where the U.N. is debating what to do about the zombie outbreak in New Guinea. And by "U.N.," I mean a dozen actors in
cultural garb yelling at each other and throwing papers around in a giant lecture hall – just like the real U.N.!

The face I made while watching this movie

And then there's the stock footage. So. Much. Stock footage. There has to be at least 20 minutes worth of stock footage padding this movie – footage of indigenous rituals, animals running about in the jungle, etc. The footage was certainly nothing that furthered the story, and it made the switch back to the actors in the arid, Clearly-Not New Guinea that much more jarring. At least I had something to fast forward.

Credit where credit is due: this film really surprised me. I always figured, how hard could it be to make a decent zombie movie? Now I know.

*

 

Bargain Bin Review: Llamageddon

Here, my friends, is the true joy of bad movies: You don’t know what you’re going to get.

You know what you’re going to get from a blockbuster film: You’ll get an exciting incident to kick things off, the main character blanching at the Call to Action, a montage with a catchy needle-drop, a couple whiz-bang set pieces, and maybe a big-name cameo before the third act twist. I’m not slagging those things, not at all. I just know that’s what I’m getting.

But bargain bin movies? No idea. Sure, sometimes you get the dreariest movie imaginable, but sometimes you get a hidden gem. And sometimes you get a llama that shoots frickin’ laser beams.

 

Directed by Howie Dewin, 2015, 69 minutes, Unrated
“Damn kids and their laser beams!”

 

We open with death metal and some stunningly good animation. On a far-off planet, an army of angry llamas are preparing for universal domination. One llama boards its Intergalactic Trailblazer trailer and flies off through the cosmos, blows up a space station, and then lands on earth… TITLE CARD! We then cut to live action with a live llama meandering around aimlessly. But this llama has CGI red eyes… TITLE CARD! (yes, again).

A farming couple listlessly notice the llama, but shrug it off. Given that Louie the Llama is credited as “Killer Llama,” things don’t end well for the farmers. 

Louie the Llama IS Killer Llama

By the next day, the government has found the Intergalactic Trailblazer trailer and sent some of its Best Men to investigate. And by “Best Men,” I mean we get a shot of a helicopter landing, a guy climbing out, looking around and declaring, “My God… Alright, just, uh, bag ‘em up and get ‘em back to the base” before re-boarding the ‘copter and taking off. I have to believe a solid half of the film’s budget went to that shot.

Fast-forward to the farmers’ family fresh from the funeral. Sister Mel is put off by the whole thing while Brother Floyd – who is either 13, 30 or 30 playing a 13-year-old – is struggling to get his head around the death of his grandparents at the hands of “an escaped zoo animal.”

This is Floyd

Mom informs them that they’ll be staying by themselves that night at the farm because Reasons. Also, Mom is super sassy for someone who suddenly lost her parents. “You know your grandparents – they’ll buy anything that they don’t need.” Mom also calls out Floyd for wetting the bed (?!?) before lecturing them about not throwing a big party. Naturally, Mel immediately throws a party.

Much of the rest of the film takes place at the party, where the partygoers do traditional party things (drink, play beer pong, argue about movies, hook up, etc.) until the llama kills them with its laser vision. Along the way, the filmmakers make some odd choices. Some work (one character has a different shirt in literally every scene, a “space stick” that is clearly a Wiffle Ball bat wrapped in aluminum foil) and some not so much (a random extended slow-motion dance, a twentysomething telling his much older colleague that he’s “getting too old for this shit,” pretty much every sound effect decision). At least Llamageddon doesn’t take itself too seriously.

More than anything, Llamageddon reminds me of a TromaFilm. If you don’t know, Troma is a film company known for making low budget b-movies such as The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ‘Em High and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Llamageddon has the same spirit, and clearly the same budget, but – at the risk of losing my bad movie cred – it also has the same kind of queasy aesthetics: geysers of vomit, extreme close-ups of mouths, that kind of thing.

 The surviving cast, mid-hosing

With that in mind, I’m giving Llamageddon my very first quantified rating. Let’s hope I don’t make a habit of this.

For Troma fans: ***

For everyone else: **