Zeder (1983) If there's one thing
worse than an Italian horror movie, it would have be the atmospheric Italian
horror movie. Atmosphere is of course a technical term to describe a film
without much in the way of action, little to no gore, and a lot of scenes where
people talk and follow up on a lot of uninteresting clues. It should come as no
surprise to those of us that watched Pupi Avati's The House With The Windows That Laughed that his take on the zombie genre would involve about as much action as you'd
find in the MonsterHunter master bedroom. Really though that's by choice. I'm a
born again virgin because I want to be. Really.
As far as this Zeder thing goes, there is actually a scene where a guy discovers a typewriter cord
in his hotel room fits his typewriter and it's treated like we just found out
that Norman Bates was dressing up as his mother. Of course this is the movie
where a wife celebrates her first anniversary by buying a used typewriter from
a pawn shop for her husband. That's really nice baby. Was the pawn shop all out
of guitars and amps? Keep in mind that the wife made a big deal about how she
had to go to an electrician to get the cord replaced since the original cord
was missing (and thus available to find later as a vital clue). I won't lay all
the blame for this typically Italian relationship on the lady though since it
was the guy who after some lovemaking, hopped out of bed and excitedly
announced that he was going to use his new typewriter. With all this typewriter
babble I was hoping we were in for one of those "haunted typewriter" movies
that would fit in nicely within that Italian subgenre of possessed appliances
(see Dial: Help to get a gander at a crabby telephone in action), but it turned out that the
typewriter was merely the vehicle to get our nosy hero into trouble.  Back at the dawn of the home video age this one went by the much catchier and
much more fraudulent title, Revenge Of The Dead. After watching this one, I think the fair thing to say is that it certainly
works better as a movie named Zeder than as a movie named Revenge Of The Dead. To me, Zeder just screams "hebetudinous foreign film" probably made by a disgruntled
Russian guy or something. In fact, this movie actually made me flashback to the
Russian-made Stalker when our boy started babbling on about K Zones. What is it with these
foreigners and their obsession with strange zones? And why do their strange
zones always fail to measure up to the greatest zone of them all - The Twilight Zone? Can't these un-Americans even get zones right? Do we have to do everything in
this world?
So what exactly is a K Zone and why does a guy who gets his anniversary
presents from a pawn shop get involved? It turns out that it's the old "hmmm,
let's see what's on the typewriter ribbon that was left by the previous owner"
gag. Instead of the expected ransom notes, angry letters to the editor, and
amateurish haiku, there's some babble about these K Zones where the dead can
come back to life. Most of us probably would've shrugged that off as the
ravings of a madman or the ramblings of a no-talent hack, but our boy is the
kind of guy who is married to a gal that shops at pawn shops so he immediately
launches a full-fledged investigation into these K Zones. This involves the
expected meetings with professors, potty-mouthed coeds, and mysterious fat guys
that hang out in churches pretending to be priests.  A guy looking for K Zones wouldn't really be that much of a movie though would
it? I mean, how entertaining is it to watch some dude drive around Italy asking
every overfed local he runs into if there's a K Zone nearby? Uh, so have you
seen any dead guys coming out of the ground around these parts or what? Pupi
realized that every good drama needs a little conflict, so he has a group of
people working on getting a K Zone up and running. For some reason this
involved about four or five people, a lot of bulky early-eighties electronics
gear, and a Mr. Big (I just checked the credits and the Internet Movie Database
actually lists him as Mr. Big!) to periodically report to. Most dramatic of all
was that it involved a gal with a wooden leg. I'm guessing that that was the
gal from the very beginning of the movie who was featured in our confusing and
clearly pointless prologue. She's just a little girl then and she leads a cop
down into the basement to find something buried there and she gets her leg bit
off (off-camera of course - this is an atmospheric movie after all) while the
cop disappears to go get some shovels or something. They dig up the basement
floor and find a skeleton there and it isn't long before the cop announces with
great gravity that they have found the body of some dude named Zeder.
She grows up to work on K Zone research and it results in some ugly old guy
getting buried in the K Zone location of their choice (I think it was the best
K Zone the group had ever run into - the dead were really jacked up when they
woke up there I guess). For reasons too dull to repeat here, our hero, Stefano
ends up at the same K Zone as the group with the old dead fat guy. This
particular K Zone is a former summer camp that the French are turning into a
hotel, so Pupi was able to take advantage of some really large, abandoned, and
no doubt cheap building for the climatic scenes where Stefano peeps the old man
with a telescope he borrowed from a local (the local had been using it back
when a bunch of nudists had taken over the summer camp) and then decides that
he should go on over and ask the fat man what's up.  Once Stefano spied Lard Butt stumbling around through the telescope, I really
have no idea why he's running over there to get a better look. Just what
exactly is his motivation at this point? Lard Butt makes a fairly silly looking
zombie, having the facial features of a rough-looking Bela Lugosi and the
mobility you would expect of an old fat guy. Stefano then is forced in the best
pro wrestling tradition to stand around and stare a little so that Lard Butt
can amble into the same frame as he. Even with Stefano tripping over his feet
and dilly dallying about whether to jump off the edge of the building to the
ground ten feet below, Lard Butt doesn't shuffle within spitting distance of
him. Back at his hotel room, Stefano has a surprise waiting for him that causes
him to make an ill-advised trip back to the K Zone.
If you remember the dull ride that Pupi's The House With The Windows That Laughed was, then imagine that movie without any of the nice looking locations or
mildly intriguing mystery and you pretty much have this movie nailed down. The
K Zones never made sense, Stefano's involvement never made sense, the wooden
legged gal never made sense, and I still can't understand what these goofs
messing around in the K Zone were trying to accomplish. The dead got up and
walked around there. What else is there to know? About the only thing good this
movie has to offer is that the picture on the Italian DVD is very good (much
better than the video version I remember seeing). Of course, for you budget
conscious types that don't want to spend thirty bucks on a crappy movie you'll
never watch all the way through, you're only option is the lackluster DVD
release Image put out on their EuroShock label awhile back. It's not widescreen
and the print is purportedly pretty bad, but since my policy is to buy the best
available release for terrible films, I wouldn't know. I can't imagine not
watching this one with the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen since
that's where I spent most of the time looking for something interesting to
happen.
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