Zombi 3 (1988)
Behind every bad movie, there's a really sweet story just waiting to be told. Primarily that story is usually about how something so smelly and fetid could have ever been excreted onto the ground by the people (usually Italians, sometimes Jess Franco) involved. Zombi 3 has one of these histories that should warn away the semi-conscious among us and allow the vast majority of humanity to avoid ever having to be inadvertently sentenced to the 88 minute life term (no parole unless you hit the eject button) this movie imposes on all, including first time offenders.
The behind-the-scenes hi-jinks that surrounded the making of this movie are legendary. Even though the DVD box says that this movie is Lucio Fulci's, he actually quit some time during the filming and the director's duties were handed off to Bruno Mattei. Bruno as you may or hopefully may not be aware is the creative spring from which was birthed Rats: Night Of Terror and more importantly to his zombie-cred, Hell Of The Living Dead.
If you're like me, you're wondering just how they were lucky enough to get Bruno when he just happened to not be working on anything. I mean, he made three other films in 1988, one of which was called Robowar. Did I mention why Lucio quit? Because the script stunk! That is just too sweeeeet! How bad does your script have to be so that Lucio "We need more maggots here!" Fulci walks off the set over "creative differences" (I think the zombie's head should be drilled, not smashed with a two by four!)? And just who was the author of something so cruddy that not even the director of Voices From Beyond would do it? Claudio Fragasso! That would be Claudio " I also wrote The Other Hell, Rats: Night Of Terror and Strike Commando for Bruno Mattei" Fragasso!
If I was to tell you that this time the zombie epidemic starts because some mental midget steals a briefcase full of a top-secret bacteriological weapon mysteriously named, "Death One" and that it somehow cracks open (because it gets dropped) and the guy that stole it manages to get some of the poison gas that leaks out onto him, would you be the least bit surprised? I thought not.
It becomes clear rather quickly that we will be getting the script scrapings from a genre notorious for it's lack of innovation. What I like about this movie though is that it doesn't get bogged down in regular movie stuff like explanations or reasons. How many times have you sat through a movie and thought to yourself, "you know this would be so much better if they didn't explain so much or if it made a little less sense."
So anyway, you have this heist that goes horribly wrong which starts things off. What was it about the heist that caused it to fail so miserably? Um, I don't know, maybe the fact that your plan involved driving up in a van, shooting some military types that were taking the Death One secret sauce out for a walk for no discernable reason, and then running off into the lush, tropical vegetation while being pursued (and shot) by army helicopters. It sounds to me like that thing went off just like they drew it up in the dirt of the driveway to their trailer.
I hate to state the obvious, but we have no idea who the thieves are, why they wanted the stuff, how they knew the stuff was there, or why this stuff does what it does. I also remain a bit unclear why this super cool bacteria gas is being hauled around in a briefcase that busts open as soon as it gets dropped on the ground. Do you think that feature was noted in the L.L. Bean Traveler catalog that they must have bought it out of?
Even though this dude drops the stuff and gets shot, he makes his escape so that he can infect the rest of the movie. If you had just been infected with some of this Death One stuff where would you go? Hospital? Free clinic? 7-11? How about a hotel? Yep, this guy whose hand and face are rotting off decides that he could use the air conditioned, free HBO comfort of a room at the Sweet River Resort. (I'm assuming this is the same resort that other characters end up at later in the movie, but maybe this movie featured zombies in two different hotels.)
These types of movies where the dead get re-animated or people are turned into flesh-craving losers because of some dumb government experiment demand badly acted roles of scientists (trying to cure the problem) and military (too stupid to do anything but unwittingly spread the virus).
This time you have a lead scientist with very thin and badly managed hair, prone to flailing his arms about and speaking in strangely-cadenced English, whining that they are working on an antidote and that the army isn't helping things out any when they go and burn the corpse of this infected guy, thus spreading the Death One stuff through the air in his ashes.
The guy in charge of the military (represented by three guys in fatigues and a bunch of guys in white hazmat suits) brushes off everything this scientist says and whenever the scientist makes some wild prediction about how there's going to be more zombies, the general pooh-poohs that by calling the comments "science fiction." In fact, the script is so lacking, they have the general recycle this "science fiction" take again toward the end of the film.
Not content to have the standard number and type of idiotic characters, this movie goes one up on the rest of the genre by having a DJ named Blue Heart on the radio giving updates about things, spinning the stacks of wax, the platters that matter, and moaning about how Mother Earth is getting the shaft from the Man. See, this isn't some dumb as dirt Italian zombie movie, it's actually a dumb as dirt Italian zombie movie with a Message! And that Message is that we should be spinning our radio dials away from self-important DJ's with pointlessly enigmatic monikers.
Even with all these people milling around the movie sputtering out dialogue that even Lucio Fulci found abominable, we have yet to meet our heroes and heroines. This is where the jeep with three army guys on a weekend pass come in. You know they're ready for some R&R, because one of the guys listens to a song that Blue Heart plays and makes the observation that the music is "making me horny!" The beauty of riding along in a jeep is that in situations like that, you don't have to stop the car to throw his ass out since there's no top on the dang thing.
So what do a jeep load of army guys do on their time off? How about an RV load of chicks! It just so happens that the vehicle in front of the army guys is a big motor home with all these young women in it. There are also some guys in it, but they don't seem to mind that these army men are whooping it up as their babes hang out the window making goo-goo eyes at them. The women though are devious little vixens because they are hoping to hook up with the soldiers so that they can have access to the soldiers' beach. Whoa, that sounds like a plan straight out of the "let's hijack some Death One and run out into the woods with it" school of scheming.
Thankfully we don't have to concern ourselves with these inane story developments (or underdevelopments as the case may be) because soon they get attacked by a bunch of birds that have been infected with the poison ash of the first zombie's body.
I should also note that there is a separate couple that we see earlier and they notice these dead birds on the road, stop to look (what sort of date are you on where you would stop to stare at roadkill?), and the guy gets bit. Soon he has a pulsating wound on his head that is spurting blood and instead of hotfooting it over to the hospital, his girlfriend stops to get help at the old abandoned gas station.
The usual follows - zombie attack, gas squirting everywhere, really big explosion. The girl eventually hooks up with the army guys somehow (they've all since decided to trap themselves at the recently run down Sweet River Resort) and the rest of the film details their efforts to stay alive (in spite of themselves).
This is the kind of zombie-fantasy movie where the broken down resort you've stupidly cornered yourself in has crates of assault weapons in the basement and even a flame thrower! As the brochures must say, it's the kind of place to go when you just want to get away from it all and blow the crap out of stuff.
The remainder of the movie is a catalog of stupid gore scenes, deaths of people whose names we never knew, and really bad music. I really need to point out the fact that this movie went above and beyond the call of duty for movies of this ilk with its wide ranging selections of different styles of hideous sounds. You've got the generic zombie synthesizer music played repetitively, except when Blue Heart is playing the annoyingly amateurish and bland pop songs. The absolute worst moment of this movie is at the end when Blue Heart dedicates a song to all the undead in the audience and proceeds to play this light-metal garbage that would make groups like Dokken and Britny Fox cream their probably by now ill-fitting Spandex.
The best part is when the two survivors who are flying around in a helicopter (hey that's what they did in Dawn Of The Dead, right? I guess that's how you end a zombie movie then.) and are listening to Blue Heart on the radio (glad to see that while you're busting your hump escaping the flesh-eating undead that you still have time to tune in your favorite radio show) and comment matter-of-factly that it looks like Blue Heart has gone over to the other side. My God! It isn't bad enough that these zombies have been running around the countryside ruining nice resorts, screwing up weekend passes, and blowing up gas stations, but now they've gone and taken over our favorite radio program!
A terrible effort that made no sense from start to finish and reeked in every possible way. Music sucked, acting sucked, script sucked, the film looked like a monkey had been hired to fill in as director, and there were scenes that seemed to be inserted for no other reason than because they had some left over gore they needed to use.
I'm speaking of course about the infamous "head flying out of the refrigerator" scene. I saw this and was so stupefied that I actually rewound it to watch that scene again (a truly dangerous thing to do for a movie that you wish was 8 minutes instead of 88 minutes) because I thought, surely I had zoned out and missed why this scene made any sense. Well, I can tell you that it wasn't my fault. That head appears to just fly out of the fridge for no good reason and attack some dumb broad that is spending her time at the zombie attack looking to make a sandwich or something.
As far as the actual direction employed by the fifty Italian gore directors that apparently worked on this misshapen genetic defect of a film, there isn't a hint of Fulci's style in this one absent all this mist that I call "Fulci Fog" that tends to roll in for no reason other than to generate atmosphere. This fog rolls in at day, at night, near water, on land, it doesn't matter where you are. I think it even rolled in inside the hotel once or twice. I can't remember if they had room to hide a fog machine in the fridge with that flying severed head though. Somehow, against all odds, Bruno makes a sow's ear out of a sow's ear with this one.