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.
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