Hell of the Living Dead (1981)
I don't think there's a bigger group of prima donnas in the world than horror movie fans. They just sit around debating the finer points of whether some crappy flick has good gore, wringing their hands over which obscure Italian slasher movie is the best, and ranting and raving about boycotting this and that company until they release some scuzzy movie in its properly uncut form. Even worse are the wars they have over what the aspect ratio really is of some movie no one's ever heard of.
It remains unclear whether these Pollyannas of pulp cinema have ever actually just sat down and watched one of these things to be entertained. (Hey, I think they trimmed six seconds off the goat orgy scene! I better check my bootleg of a Japanese laser disc to make sure!)
With all this posing, posturing, and petulance, it is inevitable that some poor bastard without any discernible skills will become the punching bag du jour so that the unintelligensia of gore movies can feel superior about something in their lives. Sadly, Bruno Mattei, the kindly and grandfatherly Italian maestro of the low budget, high entertainment horror flick has been singled out by these B-movie bullies.
As is usual in cases like this, I force myself to come out of retirement from my farm where I raise wild stallions and talk to the rattlesnakes when I'm not mowing the lawn at the Freedom School my granola girlfriend has set up to help out all the crippled Indian kids we've taken in as farmhands. I leave my ranch retreat now to defend the defenseless and mainly to let you know that you should forget all that vitriolic ink that's been spilled in an effort to denigrate the monumental ineptness achieved against all odds by all of Bruno's films.
The usual take on this film is that the story rips off Dawn Of The Dead, the music is ripped off from Dawn Of The Dead, Beyond The Darkness, and whatever other scores Goblin did for different Italian gore movies, and that the whole thing is just the absolute worst zombie movie of all time. I would submit however that the only way a zombie movie can be bad by definition is that the film doesn't have any zombies at all in it.
Well, Hell Of The Living Dead, Virus, Night Of The Zombies or whatever name it goes by (it has as many aliases as Bruno does!), has plenty of zombies, they eat plenty of pig guts and they get their heads blowed clean off, so what's your beef? You want to say that it's just a crappy rip off of Dawn Of The Dead? Two things about that, Dawn Of The Dead was just The Last Man On Earth with gore, but minus the nightmarish atmosphere and Vincent Price. The other thing is that Dawn Of The Dead is about twenty minutes longer than Hell Of The Living Dead.
Heck, I tried watching Dawn Of The Dead not too long ago and was amazed at how much it plodded along, like so many of its local yokel zombies. I'll go ahead commit the great sin and say that I had more fun sitting through this one than I did Romero's overrated epic. Tell me you weren't laughing when one of the Interpol guys offered the leading lady some chewing tobacco in place of her cigarette, saying something like "its really pretty good once you get used to it". That is entertainment, my friend!
So what is it that gets the dead all hot and bothered so that they decide to road trip from hell straight to New Guinea? Would you believe it all started when a couple of guys in hazmat suits find a rat in the most sterile part of their mysterious manufacturing plant? Of course you would! That's why you're here!
Somehow this rat gets inside the guy's suit and eats him up and this causes him to hit some control panel and the next thing you know there's green smoke everywhere and he's chowing down on his partner. What sort of strange plant would have a gas that would turn the dead into flesh-eating zombies? The U.N. of course! Those jokers and their satanic one-world government agenda have been plotting to take our gun rights away and turn us into Soylent Green for years!
What exactly is the U.N. up to in this movie and why have they sent their crack team of four Interpol agents into the jungle to take care of the problem? There's this program they're working on to solve hunger and all these plants have been set up (we only see one, Bruno ain't a millionaire you know) called Hope Stations. That's a swell sounding name, but inside the plants they're working on something a little less-public relations friendly called "Project Sweet Death" which sounds like a heavy metal band Bruno might have used for the soundtrack. I guess the plan was for Sweet Death to cause all the poor people in the underdeveloped countries to eat other. Sweet indeed!
The Interpol mission gets off to a bad start when these four guys in their ugly blue jumpsuits and matching painters caps find themselves in the middle of nowhere with "base" not responding to their repeated complaints about this and that. A nosy reporter is on hand to muck up this zombie-gone-awry project and she and her cameraman get attacked by some zombies and are rescued by the Interpol guys.
This leads us to one of the most interesting parts of the film. I am of course referring to the sequence where the nosy reporter, who also happens to be some type of nudist anthropologist gets buck nude, puts on her war paint and tells the Interpol guys that she must communicate alone with some tribe up ahead. So she runs up to this tribe, while the Interpol guys gratefully follow right behind her loin cloth in their jeep.
This is really the only time the movie stumbles, believe it or not. How you screw up the nude anthropology angle is beyond me, but the movie bogs down here like a Range Rover stuck in ten pounds of native intestines. Part of the problem is the liberal use of grainy stock footage inserted erratically throughout the film which reaches its apex during this segment. You get guys dancing around, all painted up, with masks, and looking entirely different than the people that this reporter actually encounters.
After awhile, Bruno seems to remember that he is making a crappy zombie movie and not a crappy cannibal movie, so some zombies show up and attack. Our heroes escape and hang out at a house for awhile for no good reason until some of them can get attacked and killed. I think this includes the dude who took the opportunity to put on a dress and top hat and start dancing around. Memo to that guy: lime green is not your color - you're definitely an autumn.
It suddenly dawns on these Interpol losers that instead of playing dress up in an abandoned house that their mission was actually far different. They need to get to the Hope Center where all this stuff happened in the first place. Now, I was never sure what four dudes where going to do against an entire plant of zombies, but I imagine that was all top-secret, hush hush, and on the QT.
Once at the Hope Center it becomes clear that the plan was top secret to them as well because they all get killed! Even the nosy reporter gets it! Her tongue is ripped from her mouth and then they shove their hands in her throat and push her eyes out of her sockets from inside her nosy head! It was quite a set back for au naturale science.
There's the obligatory epilogue where the zombies show up in some other part of the world and as shocking an ending as it is, I'll admit it lacks the impact of seeing a guy with a giant rat head as in Bruno's Rats: Night Of Terror. Compared to his tale of flesh-eating rats taking over the world, this story about flesh-eating third worlders is a bit less spectacular in terms of all out looniness (Interpol guys instead of bikers is not a trade up) and some of it, like the guy in the dress, seems forced. It's also slow going in the middle, but you are rewarded with every stupid character getting completely eviscerated so I think that's an okay result.
You can carp about what a rip-off this one is, what crappy dialogue, junky effects, and what an incomprehensible story it all has, but Bruno is a genre unto himself. A far superior effort than Zombi 3 which he finished up for Lucio Fulci, Hell Of The Living Dead is the perfect companion to Rats: Night Of Terror and works as the ultimate double bill of excessive Italian horror gore movies that took their cues from better movies, reworked them into something so lacking in any redeeming qualities that they couldn't even hire Goblin to do new music, and were unleashed on unsuspecting drive-ins all over this country like a green gassy cloud of Sweet Death.