Zomploitation Blog: September 2005

Full title: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

Dir. "Lowell Mason", 1991

This is Night of the Living Dead with the audio re-dubbed, plus some silly-ass "bonus" scenes. It's sub-MST3k at best, but it has a couple moments.

The best thing about this movie is what it says about the source material. While it's true that having your work parodied does not automatically mean that it's a classic (again, see MST3k), I actually saw this before I saw Night of the Living Dead and it didn't ruin it for me. That is, it's a better movie to actually enjoy than it to make fun of.

Favorite moment: "I'm gonna wiggle a board. This one'll do. Bulabulabulablablubula." This had us ROLLING for some reason, and it DID ruin that particular scene in the original for me, forever after.

Dir. Bruno Mattei, 1980

This is a bad movie. Bad, but not unwatchable. It follows a group of loutish soldiers and the two journalists they've picked up through the jungles of New Guinea on their mission to do...something. They shoot a lot of zombies, drive a jeep, and establish their patriarchal relationship with the primitive tribesmen through a bit of "nude anthropology". It's not exactly original, but it moves through it's video game-like structure (i.e. the jungle level, the house level, the factory level) at a pretty decent clip.

Today, Bruno could probably defend some of his moves under the post-sampling/mashup aesthetic, for example the preponderance of National Geographic-style footage that he clumsily cut in and the fact that he outright jacked the music that Italian synth-prog band Goblin did for Romero's movies for his soundtrack. His directorial pseudonym is "Victor Dawn", and the even the soldiers' uniforms are identical to those of the cops in Dawn of the Dead.

Contribution to the zombie canon: Mattei frames the film with some explication of the zombies' origin, and it's actually pretty good. Instead of the zombies being the result of the dark-skinned natives' hoodoo (as seems to be standard for Fulci and many other jungle-cannibal-zombie-holocaust movies of the 70s), it turns out that they were created by the Western military-industrial complex to depopulate the Third World and presumably free up their resources for the taking. Cue cuts to hilarious U.N. scenes during the climactic carnage.

Favorite moment: Aside from the nude anthropology and bad English-over-Italian dubbing, I liked the dvd interview with Bruno Mattei (titled "Hell Rats of the Living Dead", of course). It just goes to show you that a hack who has the distinguishedness of age, a nice suit, a melodic Italian accent is still a hack. However, though he opens with the statement that all fifty or so of his films are his children, he ends by admitting that he doesn't really like his movies anyway...though he can see why Quentin Tarantino does.

Zomploitation Blog

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating

Hell of the Living Dead

Zombie movies we have yet to acquire

Zombie movie checklist

Blog Archive

Links

Contributors

Followers