Zombie 4: After Death (1988) I think I've finally attained that Zen-like state I've been searching for ever
since I was old enough to hide behind my mama's curtains and take a secret
dump, later blaming it on our dog, George (whatever happened to George, I
wonder?). With Zombie 4: After Death, I was able to sit there and let it wash over me, neither feeling anger or
pain or even vague disinterest. I won't piss down your back and tell you that
it's raining though. This movie smelled like a musky Jeff Stryker (more on the
godfather of gay porn later) in a locker room full of shaved men, but really,
if you're watching a movie called Zombie 4, I think you've pretty much waived any complaints you may have with the film.
First off, has there ever been a movie in the history of the world that was any
good and had a "4" in the title? I would also venture to guess that anyone who
bought this would probably be familiar with Zombie 3 (reviewed in these parts as Zombie Flesh Eaters 2) and would thus be on alert as to what they should expect. Zombie 3, for those of us still in therapy and repressing most of it, is the movie that
Lucio Fulci began, but quit and that Bruno Mattei finished up for him. As is
the tradition in these Italian zombie tales, Part 4 has absolutely nothing to
do with Part 3, except that Part 4 continues Part 3's tradition of being an
ever deepening low point in spaghetti horror cinema. Shriek Show has released
both of them with some pretty jazzy cover graphics though, so they'll look
really nice sitting on the shelf next to all those Criterion DVDs you surely
have. Story-wise, the only thing up in the air in any zombie movie is the reason
behind the sudden urge for every rotter to stop the newspaper, board the devil
dog and go on an extended holiday on the surface world looking for brains or
chicks or sweaty gay porn mercenaries. Sometimes it's a meteor shower.
Sometimes, you've got a government created virus, and sometimes it's just some
of that good old fashioned voodoo that runs rampant in cheap filming locations
like the Philippines. Strong Christians like you and I only know about voodoo
from such movies as the first Roger Moore James Bond film, Live And Let Die as well as that Jimmy Smits movie The Believers. Some of you Smits fans out there are surely firing up your e-mail program to
angrily tell me that The Believers actually featured Santeria and not voodoo. Heck, you're going to hell either
way, so what does it matter, right? Besides, chickens are for frying, not
sacrificing. 
In any case, you've got some flabby black dude with an inverted cross painted
on his head plotting some revenge on the doctors who couldn't save his dying
kid. He does all this in some strangely lit cave that was on loan from Michele
Soavi's The Sect and this leads to a confrontation between him and the doctors. They must have
heard on CNN that this guy was scheming to unleash the undead since they're all
rushing to the cave with their M-16s and stuff. I was never quite sure why
these doctors were so heavily armed or why if you're going to pick some
God-forsaken island to do some secret research on some drug that can cure
everything, you would pick the God-forsaken island that is also home to a
voodoo cult, but that's the government for you.
I think it goes without saying that the voodoo guy gets shot, but not before he
is able to summon some stuff from the bowels of hell, resulting in everybody
getting wiped out, except some stupid little girl. Her mom gives her one of
those tiki-gods that whacked Greg Brady on his head when he was in the big
surfing competition, but this time the tiki-god helps to save the little girl,
though if she was the only one left alive on the island, I have no idea how she
was able to drive the speedboat back to civilization what with her being five
years old and all, but that's the tiki-god for you. Flash forward twenty years (though that isn't readily apparent until we see
some blonde chick playing with her tiki-god necklace) to the same island and
we're on board a boat with some mercenaries (and the blonde chick). I'm not
real sure what these guys were doing cruising around these islands, why this
blonde girl was with them, or why this other girl that was with them was
wearing a skirt in the dense jungle, but then I'm a patriot and the only
foreign land I've ever been to is Illinois (a word of caution - they may look
like us, but they're very different - they drink Old Style!), so what do I
know? There is also another group of people that we follow around. There are
three of them and the guy with the smooth chest, icky green shirt that's always
unbuttoned, and pouty lips is Chuck Peyton. Chuck is the sort of actor that if
you knew who he really was, you wouldn't ever let on to your friends, since
then you'd have to go into some convoluted and not very convincing explanation
about how you know who Jeff Stryker is because one of your buddies in college
told you. Luckily, the DVD mentions the fact that Jeff is more well known for movies like Wild Buck, Strykin' It Deep, and the classic Powertool than for bad zombie movies every chance it gets in the liner notes and the
interviews included on the disc (including the Powertool himself!) so you can
just play it off like you learned all about Jeff after you bought Zombie 4. Jeff turns out to be no better or worse than anyone else in these types of
movies, just a little more toned.  The group that Jeff is with is trying to find out what happened to the
scientists all those years ago and they eventually come upon the cave where Big
Bad Voodoo Daddy was and the next thing you know they're blowing the dust off
of a book with "Book of the Dead" written on the front in big black letters and
saying "hey, what do you suppose this is?" Jeff reads part of the book, which
naturally contains a very short incantation that is easily located in a several
hundred page long book, but shows us the street smarts he learned in the porn
biz by refusing to read the final four words which will open up the third door
to hell.Of course, the other guy he's with hasn't grown up in the gay porn biz,
so he grabs the book out of Jeff's powerful hands and promptly reads the four
words, shrugs his shoulders and says something to the effect that what was the
big whup anyway. This is precisely when hell urps up all these Filipino zombies.
The movie is incompetent trash, but it sports an evil genius in completely
dispensing with anything other than zombies attacking people with all the
accompanying gore. They don't bother trying to establish characters, there's no
story (trust me when I say that it only consists of the following- "voodoo
curse unleashes undead" - that's pretty much all the characters have to say
about it) and the movie is timed so that someone gets munched every seven to
nine minutes. Besides, I thought of the movie as merely a bonus feature to
supplement the fifteen minute long interview with director Claudio Fragasso.
Claudio drops names throughout his interview, telling us about how he always
works with Bruno Mattei (he wrote Mattei's Rats: Night Of Terror and Hell Of The Living Dead), how he got tips on blowing up model houses from Antonio Margheriti (you
remember his use of models in Ark Of The Sun God) and how he didn't know that Jeff Stryker was a gay porn star but he thought
that Jeff seemed kind of gay!  Someone really needs to do a documentary or book on the behind the scenes
stories of these movies. Claudio tells us that this movie was made as a way to
recover money on another movie they were shooting at the same time. I think it
was Bruno's Strike Commando 2 and Claudio says he shot After Death only at night, because they were using all the equipment to shoot Strike Commando 2 during the day. We also learn that the female lead, Candice Daly, was in the
movie only because her fiancee, Brent Huff (remember him from The Perils of Gwendoline?) was in the Philippines working on Strike Commando 2 and missed her and told her to come out and be in this zombie movie! You also
get a very brief interview with Daly and a slightly longer one with Stryker
(who comes off as a nice guy, but sort of creepy). The liner notes on the disc
are almost impossible to read because the font is too small, but all you need
is Claudio talking about how his movie was shot in two weeks for a hundred
thousand bucks and Stryker waxing nostalgic about how great Claudio was to work
with even though they couldn't speak each other's languages! The movie stinks,
but the extras are great though way too short. Claudio's wit and perspective
deserve at least the eighty-four minutes that his putrid zombie movie took up.
|