Like regular Nazis, they were inhuman bloodthirsty animals that craved only violence, but unlike regular Nazis, they couldn’t be killed. In fact, they even went as far as to engineer these Death Corps types so that they would be particularly adept at surviving in the deserts of Africa or the winters of Russia. The particular Death Corps group that runs amok in this movie are of the underwater variety (this way they could man submarines that never had to surface).

The fact that our boys went over there and banjaxed these barbaric boobs is all the more impressive when you consider all the covert missions they must have undertaken to destroy the catalog of B-movie projects Mengele had cooked up. However, and I’m not trying to take anything away from the Greatest Generation, if those legions of Nazi monsters were anything like the ones depicted in this film, the only question I have is why it took us so dang long to win the war in the first place.

Sure, these pasty-faced blonde SS guys looked like a million bucks of scare when they silently rise out of the depths and start walking around, but you have to question the success of the program when these killing machines can be defeated by simply tearing their sunglasses off in the middle of the day, causing these goofs to
flop around screaming “mein Blue Blockers! Mein Blue Blockers!”

What was the reason for that particular weakness? They’re supposed to be running around underwater in subs all day long. Presumably, it isn’t going to be pitch black in the sub, just because it’s got a crew of zombies. Besides, if the whole point of the program is to get a bunch of troops that don’t have to surface in their subs, why does it have to be a bunch of killer zombies?

If their job is to sail around in their sub sinking crap and never surface, they aren’t ever going to get involved in hand to hand combat. Just find a way to re-animate dead sailors and stick them on the sub. If you can create a race of super soldiers that exist somewhere between life and death and rip people up with their bare hands, doing a little voodoo on a submarine crew should be stuff any loser in the Hitler Youth could do.

Where the movie really started to smell like a thirty year-old waterlogged SS uniform though was when it became apparent that nothing beyond a bunch of people running around an island while these expressionless freaks chased after them was going to happen. No plan for world domination. No plan to turn other people into zombies. No plan to resurrect the Third Reich. No plan to even fix up the old abandoned hotel that their old commander Peter Cushing was living in!

To be fair, Peter did mention that the hitch in the Death Corps’ giddyup was the fact that while these guys loved killing people, they never really distinguished between the enemy and their fellow Nazis, resulting in a lot of what we’d probably call “friendly fire” incidents. But really, couldn’t they come up with something better than just having the former child star of the Flipper TV series running around swamps and using his getaway rowboat to escape the clutches of these things?

Minimal action and even less story drops anchor all over this one. Both Cushing and co-star John Carradine are squandered (they don’t even share a single scene!) in roles of little importance. (Though Cushing is the commanding officer of these creatures, he doesn’t do anything in the movie but explain what the zombies are before getting bumped off.)

While the film does sport very effective and creepy scenes of these guys rising from the waters, the movie gives them very little to do. They chase some people, choke them out, bust up some of the hotel, and get fried in the sun. Other than the menace they are to the five or six people on the island that we don’t care about, they wouldn’t seem to be much of a threat to anyone else. If they ever managed to make it to civilization, how much damage could six of these things do before we got around to hiding their Oakleys?

They are the best looking Nazi zombies I’ve seen, outclassing their undead brethren from Zombie Lake, but the utter lack of ambition the movie has confines all of it to the category of forgettable, inoffensive (except maybe for that bit with the oven) time waster. And don’t fret for John Carradine in this movie. Though he looks worse than the zombies, he actually went to appear in forty more films after this one!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Tom is the leader of a biker gang called The Living Dead. We immediately recognize Tom as not just your regular run of the mill biker leader when he interrupts a make out session with his old lady (Abby) at the local cemetery so that he can catch this really big frog. Though you make think that Tom must have been about eight years old, I assure you that he wasn’t and that he actually had a very good reason to catch this big frog.

I never did catch on to what his good reason for catching that big frog was, but as soon as he brought it back to his mom’s house, his mom’s butler Shadwell (Sanders) seemed duly impressed. In fact, Shadwell really had a thing for frogs (or at least jewelry featuring them) and this big frog was kept under a glass container until the end of the movie when he ended up sitting on a chair, presumably mocking me for being dullwitted enough to have been taken in by all this frog-reincarnation-cult-biker nonsense.

Tom’s mother is something of a medium and is just wrapping up a séance when Tom comes motoring back home with his frog. Tom’s intentions that night are to get some answers to some of his longstanding questions.

Among these questions are what’s in the locked room in the house and what’s the secret to life after death. Even though the room has been locked up for 18 years (even since Tom’s dad died), Shadwell and Mom realize that Tom will not be denied, so Mom reaches into her blouse, pulls out the key to the room, and hands it to Tom. (If I was Tom, I would probably just have had her unlock it for me after that.)

What happens in that room can only be described as muddled. Tom finds his dad’s eyeglasses and has a vision of the past. He sees his mom out at the local strange rock formation known as the Seven Witches and she has this baby there (must be Tom) and she’s signing some contract with a mysterious guy with a frog ring (must be Shadwell).

Tom also sees a giant frog starring at him. Tom finally succumbs to these heinous apparitions and freaks out. Outside the room, he hears Shadwell and his mom babbling about how Tom’s dad died when he tried to cross over because he just didn’t believe in life after death hard enough. Tom instantly recognizes this as that vital bit of info he needed to carry out his plan and it isn’t long before he drives his bike off a bridge into the river below to his apparent death.

Tom’s death leads to a funeral highlighted by one of the Living Dead singing a protest rock song called “Riding Free” as well as Tom being buried upright and seated on his bike. It looked a little silly when they were doing it, but there was no way you could argue that it didn’t look super cool when he was busting out of his grave on his cycle, dirt flying in every direction!

Following the not unexpected bar fight his first night back, Tom spends the remainder of the film attempting to convince the rest of his crew to kill themselves so that they too can live forever without ever being hurt. This leads to one of the stranger montages you’re likely to see as gang members kill themselves in a variety of ways.

You’ve got a guy jumping out of a multi-story building. There’s guy who loads himself up with chains and flops into the river where he drowns. Another guy takes a swan dive off a highway overpass into the path of an oncoming truck. And then there’s the dude that sky dives out of an airplane without ever opening his parachute. The unimaginative Abby was just trying to overdose. Of course she fails because she wants to live. What kind of girlfriend is that?

With his mostly zombie team of biker pals, Tom begins to execute his master plan. So they all head to the local grocery store and drive around knocking over boxes of cereal, displays of canned goods and plowing into baby carriages!

Tom and the gang head back to his place where Tom tells Abby they should each drive through a brick wall. Tom does this, but Abby fails to do so and Tom realizes that their relationship is in trouble. She confesses that she is actually alive and Tom is understandably miffed at this complete lack of support of his undead lifestyle. It’s off to the Seven Witches where Tom tells her that she either kill herself or the gang will do it for her.

The fact that this is when the big wrap up to everything takes place kind of shows you how little went on in the movie. It’s basically the “boy meets girl, boy kills self, boy comes back from dead, boy wants girl to kill self” plot we’ve all seen before, but you know, with bikers. And frogs. And Oscar-winning film legend George Sanders.

The ending probably only made sense if the beginning made any sense to you. I never understood Shadwell, his frogs, his bargains, or how any of this related to coming back from the dead simply because you wished for it to happen.

But then again, I didn’t need to since I had a bunch of grubby bikers peeling around the English countryside crashing semis and outrunning the fuzz. I mean, these guys wore helmets with skulls painted on the front, complimented with big white goggles. So what if there were some amphibians and washed up actors milling around in the background?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Just as scary though is that our hero is about a hundred years old! Don’t misunderstand me, André Morell is a comforting presence in any movie, but I’m not comforted when it’s up to my great grandpa to take on a bunch of zombies, even if they are just British ones.

The role requires him to dig up and rebury graves at regular intervals. I kept waiting for the old coot to stroke out or drop over from a heart attack. That isn’t the type of concern you’re supposed to have for your hero’s safety in these sorts of pictures.

Morell, who plays Sir James Forbes, eminent professor of medicine from London, also generates cheap suspense when he has to have a fight scene. How are we supposed to believe that this geezer is going to be able to control his bladder long enough to move out of the way of a dagger, let alone brawl with a guy, set him on fire, and stab him to death? I guess the filmmakers would have us chalk it up to all the special forces training he received in medical school.

Well, what the devil is a hoity-toity centenarian tough guy like Sir James doing in Cornwall hanging out in some hick village that’s gone and gotten themselves a bad case of the zombies?

It all begins with a mysterious letter from one of his former students. Sir James would later claim that the guy was his cleverest student, but I think he was just trying to pump the guy up a little since he let his entire village get taken over by a voodoo cult of all things.

His star student is Dr. Peter Johnson, a man characterized by his chronic whining and flop sweat reaction to any stressful situation. Sir James may have been classmates with Methuselah, but at least he had the guts to roll up his sleeves and do an autopsy on Dr. Peter’s wife right in front of him: “Well, don’t just stand there son! Lend me a hand and help me take out your old lady’s gizzard, for Pete’s sake!” (All quotes are made up for purposes of critical analysis.)

Dr. Peter writes complaining that a strange malady has overtaken many members of his village. It’s characterized by a loss of appetite, paleness of skin, and sudden death. Also, that old abandoned tin mine just outside of town is finally going to reopen again. It’s probably a foreign company using their own workers though because they’re all grey and lumber around and are a bit musty smelling.

Sir James isn’t too keen on having anything to do with any business up in Cornwall but he has his great granddaughter Sylvia living with him. Dr. Peter is married to Sylvia’s friend Alice and Sylvia thinks it would be a good chance to go and visit her.

At the village, Dr. Peter is facing a crisis of confidence with the villagers since they want to know what is causing all these deaths and why it just seemed to start when he came to town.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with all the strange goings on at the town squire’s residence. You know the chap. He traveled extensively abroad to places like Haiti, inherited everything once his dad croaked and came back home with a retinue of natives that pound their drums in an entrancing rhythm that was loud enough to wake the dead. Even more suspiciously, when we meet Clive Hamilton, his evil theme music plays and most damning of all, he has these odd sideburns that say “my barber is a zombie.”

Since this is one of those movies where the old guy investigating some supernatural problem is accompanied by his youngish female relative for no good reason (see also The Blood Beast Terror for example) she immediately gets herself mixed up in things, thus providing us with someone in jeopardy that our heroes can rush to save as the film draws to a close.

If you’re looking for zombies, you have definitely come to the wrong place. First of all, these are voodoo zombies, not George Romero zombies. This means that they’re easily kept in line by a gang of whip-wielding supervisors and though they can apparently kill you if they are told to, they aren’t about to go running amok and taking bites out of your arms or face. The fact of the matter is, they don’t do a whole lot, but that’s okay, because you don’t get to see them much.

Most of the action is centered around Sir James trying to figure all this business out. He has to do it all himself because the other two main nominal protagonists, Dr. Peter and Sylvia don’t do anything but stand around agog at everything transpiring or get themselves into danger.

Likewise, the villain is a uninteresting cipher. All we know about Clive Hamilton is that he knows how to do voodoo and uses zombies in the mine. Why? What’s he going to get by using zombies in the mine? If it was about power and money, couldn’t he raise the dead to do something, I don’t know, a little more ambitious perhaps?

Too much old guy, not enough zombies, and a villainous scheme that no one even considered explaining. Just like Sir James did to Alice when she turned into zombie, this one needs a good whacking across the head with a shovel.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Noctem looks much better than its meager budget, but the meager bit of it that passes for originality isn’t very good and manages to slather the film in a slimy coat of self-important philosophical and religious musings that made me think these zombies weren’t really operating at full tilt since Amy and Kusey had time to debate the Biblical implications of their situation.

Kusey runs the local video store and in between the piles of previously viewed copies of Big Mamma’s House on sale for three Euros, he finds Amy in pool of her own blood, a victim not of the zombies, but of her own botched suicide attempt!

Amy is instantly unlikeable since she had the prologue to the movie all to herself and used it to solemnly intone about living a life destined to extinction and dreams and other stuff. It was typical Eurotrash posturing when she should have been out in a Panzer with an assault weapon mowing down gangs of rotting bastards with a boyfriend that looked more like Dolph Lundgren instead of Kusey, who looked like some skinny dark-haired video store clerk.

The movie also doesn’t get off to the sturdiest of starts when after Kusey gets Amy bandaged up, they get attacked by a zombie in the video store and Amy fights back by throwing videos at it! Even better than that was when Kusey fought one of the zombies off with a cardboard stand-up of Hannibal Lechter!

The interesting part of this entire sequence is that it’s played completely straight. These two are fighting for their very lives (at least when they aren’t trying to kill themselves) and just using whatever is nearby to buy some time. They definitely don’t find this to be a laughing matter. The audience on the other hand may be a different story.

They make their escape and find themselves in a “borrowed” Benz and get out of the infested city. Like most couples, the true test of their relationship is once they’re stuck on a long car ride with one another. So it is that Kusey and Amy are no more than five minutes into their trip when they have their first blow up.

Kusey notices some zombies wandering across the street, so he slows down and waits for them to get across before continuing on his way. Amy is outraged that he stopped and you can sort of see her point. Why give these freaks a chance to sneak up on your car? But then again, they were in a crosswalk.

They manage to put these differences behind them once they run out of gas out in the middle of nowhere. Stranded and without much in the way of a plan, they meet up with a stranger with long hair and who speaks rather cryptically about the difficult journey they have ahead of them.

He also knows Amy’s name and touches the wounds on her wrists saying that he can’t heal them, but can take the pain away. Once they are ready to go, the stranger says that he cannot go with them. The stranger departs, leaving them to wonder just who he was.

Much later in the film, Amy would see that the wounds on her wrists had completely healed, as if by some sort of miracle. That’s right folks! Noctem features a very special cameo appearance by the Redeemer himself!

If you think that once Jesus wraps up his gig with the movie that that was it for the off-beat religious aspects of this one, then you’ll be unpleasantly surprised to find that Kusey gets himself trapped in a basement with a Bible-toting autistic guy left behind by his family.

There’s also more prattle from Amy where she reads passages from the Bible about the apocalypse and Judgment Day and runs that same old song about how the zombie attacks are because of how we treated the world and it’s God’s or nature’s revenge for our hubris.

Why are all these movies intent on running us down for our hubris? Maybe the real hubris is thinking your cruddy little zombie movie has some greater meaning than your college buddy being able to show off the special effects skills he learned at some summer course at film school.

Slow in spots with the zombie action not as prevalent as expected, Noctem‘s story doesn’t really have anything new to add to the zombie genre: for unknowns reasons the dead walk, crave human flesh and regular people have to struggle to survive.

The addition of the religious element is ill-advised as it merely consists of that one appearance by Jesus and Amy becoming increasingly obsessed with it as the movie progresses. The fact that everyone else pooh-poohs it and nothing relating to it is resolved either way only serves to emphasize it isn’t really as important as the filmmakers want to pretend it is.

Completely humorless and downbeat with sufficient gore (see a kid torn in half!) to be credible, it does have decent production values that compares favorably with other zombie flicks of the period. But should you watch it? WWJD?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

But who had time for cringing when I was doubled up on the floor, tears streaming down my face and gasping for breath, my windows still rattling from the peals of laughter that filled my living room as Gibby followed that drama queen moment by rhapsodizing about how after that his life had no meaning! How where once he felt like he had been of God, but now he was of the Devil his very self! You and me both, buddy. You and me both.

Maplewoods is one of those backyard zombie movies that every middle class white suburban male has dreamed about making at one time or another. They’ve all sat around watching the various iterations of Night of the Living Dead thinking that yeah, it was cool, but they could do so much better. And with the help of all their neighborhood friends. Why, who wouldn’t want to be all made up for an afternoon, wear old clothes and shuffle around, periodically munching on raw meat from the local Safeway?

You can forgive some of the amateurishness of the players involved and the self-absorbed length of the opening and closing credits (okay, we get it – David B. Stewart III just about single-handed birthed this defect, now get on with the movie already) if there were some original ideas or neat twists in this tale of a special group of soldiers dispatched to a secret location to wipe out all traces of the Maplewoods project. Sadly, I can only report that not only does the film manage to unironically tap most of the cliches of the genre, but manages to hang all those cliches on the skeleton of a story that makes little to no sense.

It all starts out low budget enough in a parking garage where General Gibbs has a meeting with a couple of other military types. One character apologizes for all the “cloak and dagger” stuff involving the parking garage, but it was probably cheaper to shoot in the local parking garage on a Sunday morning than to try and sneak a film crew into the local military base and commandeer an office for a couple of hours.

Gibbs is told that he’s been selected to head up a team to go in and wipe out all traces of this project his father was responsible for creating. Damn you Father! Damn you to hell! Oh wait, not yet? Sorry.

The super elite team of soldiers looks suspiciously like a super elite team of high school friends and local punks who are using up all their time off from KFC and have probably convinced themselves that this is their big break. Today, a homemade zombie movie, tomorrow the lead in a Michael Bay film!

They aren’t helped out any by the silly looking uniforms they’re wearing that make them look like police officers from some banana republic, but the CIA agent along for the ride is easily the worst of the bunch.

A doughy white guy who acts with his sunglasses and hilarious facial expressions in the way too plentiful reaction shots, is wearing some sort of fatigues complete with a CIA patch on it! Uh, wasn’t this supposed to a secret mission? You know – way off the books – and this unit and its assignment never existed and if David B. Stewart’s family is ever asked about it, they’ll deny all knowledge of this movie?

The problems with the plot become evident almost immediately when they get to the location of the project and discover that a bomb has been activated and they’ve been doublecrossed. Except that there is never any explanation as to who doublecrossed them or why.

Then once they find out there’s a bomb, do they haul super elite ass out of there? Not right away. Gibby decides to go down to the sublevel of the lab where the bomb is located and where he just lost half his squad to rampaging zombies to see just how much time is left before the bomb goes off!

Then you’ve got the scene where Gibby burns all the files related to his father’s project. Even though the bomb that’s about to detonate would probably handle that adequately.

Oh and the project? Just your standard Nazi scheme to create an army of the undead that Gibby’s dad brought back the paperwork on when he was in Berlin during the waning hours of WWII. This movie will lead no zombie cliche unturned!

Maplewoods only gets worse as it goes along, having characters miraculously run into one another in the woods just so that dramatic encounters can result. The super elite team takes all of thirty seconds to degenerate into a bunch of scared, undisciplined fools and even worse, the movie is told in flashback for no good reason.

Gibby tells his story to some guy from a cell at Ft. Leavenworth which means that every fifteen minutes or so we go back to Leavenworth where Gibby mutters something along the lines of “that was really bad, but things were about to get worse” and “I couldn’t believe that happened, but what happened next was even more unbelievable.”

Maplewoods clumsily and weakly manages to hit most of the zombie and secret military unit banalities without any style at all. Recommended only for Stewart family reunions and then only at gunpoint.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

If you’ve seen any of Kazuo Komizu’s movies, you know what to expect: random scenes of over-the-top violence complimented by bottom of the barrel gore effects.

You might also expect his icky obsession with grody sex scenes, but thankfully those expectations were dashed and instead replaced with zombies getting shot and grossly inept fight scenes.

Komizu does hold fast to the one thing viewers love about all his rotten movies – the 70 minute running time! It’s the cinematic equivalent of ripping off a Band-Aid from an open, pussy, stinky wound really fast!

The very beginning of the movie is probably the only time Komizu demonstrates anything close to competency when he posits that a meteor has landed in Tokyo Bay and somehow has caused the dead to come back to life to lay a beat down on the living. Derivative? Yes, but at least I can understand it. (And no, this competency I speak of does not extend to the cheesy special effects involving the meteor, the un-acting that occurs, or the lack of skills behind the camera).

The Japanese military quickly sets up death zones around Tokyo to prevent the spread of the virus that currently affects the undead and also so that the world won’t know how lame Tokyo is now that it’s being run by zombies.

There is also some mention that the virus is affecting humans as well, though I don’t really know much about that because in zombie movies, I’m not paying much attention to whatever sniffles the humans have. I’m here to see guys with gooey heads using arms for toothpicks!

In the midst of this mess is our heroine Keiko. Her father is some type of military bigwig who apparently took time out from fighting the zombie invasion to record all sorts of messages for his daughter.

She follows the instructions contained in the messages which eventually bring her into possession of a black battle suit that her dad also managed to leave her during this mess. I’m assuming the battle suit allows her to fight really well since she’s able to put some super sweet moves on evil humans and zombies alike, but like everything else in the movie, no explanation is offered.

Apparently concerned that his poorly funded, poorly shot zombie vs. babe in battle suit idea was not sufficiently terrible enough, Komizu adds another twist to the zombie movie genre. The military is taking advantage of the situation to create a zombie-human hybrid! These freaks are characterized by wearing face paint and wardrobes cribbed from early 1980s Italian post-apocalyptic movies which means one thing: spiked shoulder pads!

These creatures don’t like humans or zombies and just want to kill everything which I suppose should ratchet up the tension, but I think there were only four of them and the fact that the evil general had to huddle up football-style with them to give them instructions didn’t inspire much confidence.

They do provide the single highlight of the movie however. During a fight with Keiko, one of them starts putting pro-wrestling moves on her! Sadly, it was only a backbreaker and piledriver (couldn’t we get a Stone Cold Stunner or a Sharpshooter, too?), but it was a welcome addition to the zombie mythos just the same.

Demonstrating the stupidity this movie is suffused with, the evil general in charge of the mutants explains that he is going to use them to take over the world!

No one will laugh at Japan being taken over by zombies because they’ll be too busy getting their ass kicked by his mutants! Um, except that the mutants exist to kill everything. How is that taking over anything? His crazy plan ends in the only way it could – with a grenade shoved into his mouth.

Keiko isn’t done with her mission yet though. She also meets up with her father and he gives her a job being in charge of a rescue mission or something. It was a very touching reunion, but we see what a different world we now live in because she goes to shake his hand and he salutes instead!

If we’re living in a world where a gal has to wear a sexy battle suit her dad made for her, gets a job in his anti-zombie army and has to salute him, haven’t the zombies already won?

And in the case of this movie, the zombies would have won with a minimum of effort. There wasn’t a whole lot of zombie action going on. They tear up maybe a handful of people and those aren’t even that messy!

And as far as the zombie killing goes, I suppose if you like to watch mannequins with exploding heads, then you might pop a woody over this one, but the only gasps of horror from us normal folks will be at how unprofessional it all is.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Some type of plague has either killed everyone or turned them into a vampire, with Morgan being the lone exception. Towards the end of the movie he theorizes that he was immune to the plague because he was bitten by a vampire bat and that has something to do with the plague.

Of course there is nothing mentioned about the plague that would lead you to believe that vampire bats had anything to do with it. This whole idea is kind of hokey when you actually break it down. I mean, a plague that causes you to die, come back to life thirsting for blood, but also leaving you vulnerable to all the traditional defenses against vampires such as wooden stakes, garlic, mirrors, and crosses?

It’s been three long years since Morgan began to battle these creatures. We know that because he has written a calendar on the wall of his house. You’d think he’d just be able to drive down to Staples and take a planner or something what with him being the last man on Earth and all.

Morgan needs some more fresh garlic, so he goes grocery shopping. I was surprised that even three years later, the grocery store would still have three giant tubs full of fresh garlic, but then I remembered that the movie was shot in Rome and it all made sense.

He drives a station wagon because he needs to use it as a hearse to ferry all the corpses he stabs to the open pits that burn continuously, fed by the bodies he dumps into them.

These scenes are genuinely creepy with Morgan donning a gas mask and heaving corpses over the cliff into these fiery pits. The sense of hopelessness as he does this is overwhelming. For every corpse he incinerates he drives by five more laying in the streets.

As he drives through the city, we see wrecked cars, empty streets, and deserted buildings. There is also very little sound. Most of the first part of the movie is Morgan doing a voice over so that we can hear what he’s thinking.

Of course, as so often happens in these films, they overdo it a bit and so there is a scene where you actually see tumbleweed blow across the road! Come on! Is this the old west or something? I kept waiting for Wyatt Earp to challenge one of these vampires to a gunfight at high noon!

Back home, Morgan settles in for nice evening of booze and home movies. He watches his wife, who tragically has a Jackie O hairdo and his daughter at the kid’s birthday party. His friend Ben is there and everyone is happy and soon Morgan is upset and wah-wahing a bunch and then we close in on his face and we flashback to a time when the plague was still a few months away.

Morgan and Ben worked together to try and find a cure for the plague. All the while people are croaking and the army is sent in with trucks and gas masks and forcibly takes the corpses away to be burned in the pits. They won’t allow them to be buried because they’ll just dig their way out and raise a ruckus!

Morgan’s daughter dies and she’s given the old heave-ho into the pits. When his wife croaks, he hides that fact from authorities and goes out and buries her. One icky late night visitor later and Morgan realizes that maybe there just might be something to this whole burning-corpses-in-the-pits strategy.

Back in the present, Morgan finds a dog! It’s a black poodle that is just the cutest little snookums you’ve ever seen! Morgan takes it inside, cleans it up and is delighted to have a friend.

Morgan checks out the dog’s hair under a microscope and starts to laugh. The next scene is of Morgan dumping a snookums-sized bag into the ground and burying it!

This guy can’t catch a break. But wait, he sees a woman! She’s out in the daytime so she isn’t a vampire and he chases her down. Her name is Ruth and he takes her home.

Eventually she pulls a gun on him and reveals her double-crossing ways! (Even when you’re the only guy left on the planet, a woman will play you if she gets the chance!)

The Last Man on Earth is an apocalypse of apathy what with the whiny Morgan moping around his cruddy house for three years fending off half-hearted attempts by vampires to break through his half-hearted defenses. (Three years and the best you can muster is some two by fours sparodically nailed up over your windows?)

And what was he doing in the same place for three years when the vampires knew where he was and attacked his house every night? Why wouldn’t he make some attempt to leave a city full of these things in search of other survivors? It surely wouldn’t be any less safe to do than the pointless and tedious trips he made every day to hunt down the vampires in the city.

While Price is fine when the movie requires him to bore the viewer with his crying jags and his whining, the agonzingly few times he’s required to be a man of action, he’s completely unconvincing. When your sluggish end times movie climaxes with a guy throwing smoke bombs like a girl, humanity has already lost.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Dr. Adam Penner is a man who believes that the governments of the world shouldn’t be working on nuclear weapons and should instead be working together in an effort to bring peace to the planet. I’m sure your invisible masters from outer space will appreciate that, you traitor! You know, when we outlaw radioactive weapons of mass destruction, only invisible invaders will have radioactive weapons of mass destruction!

Penner is visited by a zombiefied John Carradine. Carradine announces that he is really an invisible invader who is inhabiting this dead Earth man’s body and that his race of aliens who live on the moon have determined that since we have entered the nuclear age, we will be destroyed unless we surrender in twenty-four hours.

If you were trying to generate some buzz for your pending alien invasion, would you really leave it all in the hands of a guy who just quit his job because he disagreed with this great country’s policy of peace through strength and deterrence? Wouldn’t this guy just be regarded as a laughingstock or crank? Yes, as a matter of fact he would just as the faux newspaper headlines point out in the next scene.

The aliens quickly realize the error of their ways when their alien invasion is laughed off. Figuring that if you want an alien invasion to start off right, you need to do it yourself, they begin taking over the bodies of people and using them to announce the alien invasion.

And where do they decide to make this big announcement? At the United Nations? On all the cable news channels? At the Golden Globes? Nope. They take over the press box at a hockey game and in between calls of icing and announcing that someone left the lights on in their 1973 Maverick out in the parking lot, they declare the invasion is officially on! My God! There must have been seventy people in the crowd! And you know that at least half of them were wasted on Molson or LaBatt’s!

Eventually, they just decide to begin the invasion even though its beginning was only carried on ESPN2. There’s some scary blather about how the dead are going to wipe out the living and the next thing you know, zombies are stumbling around and apparently burning down buildings and blowing up dams. I say apparently because all you really see is a bunch of stock footage of stuff burning up, buildings collapsing, and firefighters pouring water on raging infernos. I thought I was just watching my local news during sweeps or something.

Is there no man who will stand up to these living dead firebugs? Though he’s undercover as Major Bruce Jay, there’s no mistaking John Agar’s ability to quickly learn lines and concoct wild schemes that see him going toe to toe against a zombie in a radiation suit with a fire extinguisher strapped to his back!

Major Bruce is assigned to help Dr. Penner and Dr. John Lamont find a way to defeat the aliens. Major Bruce decides that what they need to do is capture an alien so they can figure out how to defeat it. This involves the creation of a special acrylic spray that will harden into plastic and seal the alien in the corpse it’s inhabiting because the aliens must be absorbed through the pores of the dead bodies. Well duh! Like they had to explain that to me!

Once they get the plastified corpse with the alien inside hauled back to the lab, the boys have to try and figure out what to do next. Luckily it isn’t long before Dr. Lamont’s yellow streak rears its cowardly head and he attempts to let the alien loose so that he can cut a deal with it.

Major Bruce gets into a physical altercation with Lamont and in the course of the brawling he-man action something gets thrown against a bunch of electrical equipment and everything starts blowing up. This hurts the alien and everyone quickly determines that their weak spot must be sound waves!

I have no problem ignoring the total lack of logic to any of this since it means that Major Bruce is going to invent a big sound gun and have Dr. Lamont drive him around in a van while Major Bruce lies on top of it shooting aliens with the supersonic weapon they cobbled together from parts lying around their underground bunker.

You don’t need me to tell you that this movie didn’t make any sense. That fact pretty much lumbers around stiffly its sixty-seven minutes like the corpse of John Carradine. If you were a race of invisible beings bent on taking over the world, why choose to achieve that goal by possessing the bodies of dead people so that you can wreck buildings and public utilities? Why not just stay invisible and do whatever you wanted? No one would even know the destruction was intentional that way.

And if you think you can be dictator of the universe, why bother with Earth at all? And why would you be stupid enough to wait until we had nuclear weapons to take us out?

Director Edward L. Cahn was capable of some decent science fiction movies like It! The Terror From Beyond Space and fun ones like Invasion Of The Saucer-Men, but Invisible Invaders is just moronic nonsense that feels even more dashed off than is usually the case with these types of things. Maybe that’s because it was. Cahn’s filmography lists this as one of seven movies he directed in 1959. (He made around 20 more movies in the next two years, too!)

© 2009 MonsterHunter

But when the last man on Earth got drunked up on a six pack of beer, took a whiz on some rocks and shouted, “I’m pissing on you, world!” I began to feel reassured because the one thing I’m looking forward to when the world ends is the ability to relieve myself on the go without worrying about someone whining about me watering his precious rose bushes.

Really though, we’re in good hands since the last man Earth in this movie is Mark Dacascos, star of Kickboxer 5, Only The Strong and American Samurai. He does a decent job running here and there, looking pensive whenever he thinks he hears something, and shooting, stabbing, and kicking zombies. He also blows up all of Los Angeles. How can you not like a guy like that?

Clearly, The Asylum is putting this film out to capitalize on the Will Smith version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. This is after all the company that brought us Snakes On A Train and The Da Vinci Treasure. The title, I Am Omega, is a nice combination of I Am Legend and the earlier Charlton Heston version called The Omega Man, but it strikes me as a bit of inside baseball.

Are the people dumb enough to duped into watching this movie going to even know that The Omega Man even existed? Heck, the first thing I thought of when I heard the title was that this was another one of those Jesus freak movies featuring Kirk Cameron. Sure, he starred in Growing Pains, but that’s not exactly Kickboxer 5, is it?

Dacascos plays Renchard, who is apparently the only guy left on the planet. He had a hallucination early in the film where the radio starting broadcasting what sounded like the backstory of what caused everyone to turn into really gooey, bloodthirsty bastards, but I’m not really much of a radio guy, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention.

Besides, who cares how it happened? Just so long as whatever calamity it was resulted in Renchard being slightly crazed, haunted by the death of his family, and an expert martial artist with demolitions experience, we’ll get along fine without much in the way of explanation.

The first part of the movie finds Renchard puttering around his fortress-like rural home, reading, checking maps, shaving, shooting zombies, practicing his kickfighting, and wallowing in self pity about his family getting wasted in the prologue.

When he’s not having a pity party at home, he’s out and about, making beer runs, setting up bombs, shooting zombies, running around in the sewers, and peeing wherever he wants. To quote one of the other redundant prone characters in the movie, it is a “perfect utopia.”

Renchard’s perfect utopia is shattered though when he gets a video message on his Apple laptop (PC users will not survive the apocalypse just like the Bible predicted!) from some broad in the city! It’s Brianna and she was on her way to the survivors’ enclave known as Antioch, but somehow got trapped by herself in L.A.! And she wants Renchard to rescue her!

No dice! Sorry lady! Renchard’s too haunted and/or lazy to do it! Maybe you’ll get lucky and be on the way to one of his beer runs or something.

The funny, and by funny, I mean sucky, thing about this movie is that once Brianna is introduced and the movie shifts into plot-heavy mode, the movie heads down the sewer faster than a last man on Earth laden with homemade explosives.

Two guys claiming to be from Antioch appear at Renchard’s place asking him for help in locating Brianna because her blood could be used as an antivirus for whatever is going on and could save mankind. But they turn out to be a couple of scuzzy liars who want the opposite because they don’t want the old world to come back since they believe in survival of the fittest!

From this point on nothing makes any sense. First of all, how does anyone have an Internet connection in the middle of nowhere after civilization has collapsed that allows them to broadcast and receive video messages? And somehow the bad guys could eavesdrop on Brianna’s and Renchard’s conversation over the computer and locate Renchard’s place to go and confront him?

But beyond the technical questions, the story asks the characters to ignore what they already know just so that we can have this chase through the city and conflict between Renchard and the two goons.

The two bad guys know that Renchard is planning to blow up the city. The girl is in the city with no means of escape. They know that Renchard has refused to help her. So she will die when the city explodes. Which is what the two goons want. So why in the hell are they going into the city to capture her with the express purpose of preventing her from helping anyone when she’s as good as dead anyway?

Just because it allows Renchard to have a fight with one of the guys where he throws a tire at him, doesn’t let the movie off the hook for its monumental internal stupidity.

Still, the monsters are icky enough, Renchard gets shot several times, beat with a chain, has a car wreck, and sets a pile of corpses on fire. It’s pretty much enough mayhem to allow the viewer to suffer through the dumb story without too much difficulty. And L.A. does get blown up. It’s hard to criticize any film that does that!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Coming in the wake of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead and Lenzi’s fellow Italian legend Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Nightmare City doesn’t take any pains to hide the debt it owes those two films. Of course, it should be noted that Lenzi himself stated in an interview on the Black Demons DVD that Nightmare City was not a zombie movie at all, but was about contaminated people that ran amok.

See, they ran like contaminated guys are prone to do. We all know that zombies merely shamble. And we all know that’s not just crazy foreigner talk because we saw the exact same thing more than twenty plus years later in 28 Days Later!

And the guy that made that movie went on to win an Academy Award! Lenzi went on to make Cop Target which just proves that awards aren’t everything.

Perhaps not unexpectedly in a film about contaminated freaks murdering scores of Italians, there’s been an accident at a nuclear power plant.

Our hero, the very English, but very hairy and therefore very Italian-looking Dean Miller is a hothead reporter at the local TV station who has to cover the arrival of this scientist from the nuclear power plant at the local airport.

Apparently, whenever there is an accident at an Italian nuclear facility, the guy in charge immediately flies away so that he can appear on the Today show to assure all the zombies, I mean contaminated folks, that just because they all look like they tried to wash their face with lighter fluid and a lit match that everything is AOK. That’s what we in the crisis management biz call “getting out in front of a story.”

At the airport a military transport plane without any identifiers comes in and lands. And wouldn’t you know it, but it’s full up with zombies! I was disappointed that we didn’t get to see these contaminated freaks painting over all the markings on the plane before it took off. How the plane didn’t end up like looking Jackson Pollack went to town on it, I’ll never know.

Dean and his cameraman watch the antics of these guys as they hack up all the airport cops they can get their grubby paws on and decide that the interview with the guy from the nuclear plant can probably be rescheduled and head back to the TV station.

We all remember those TV station scenes on Dawn Of The Dead, right? Well, Lenzi actually goes Romero one better because he has the TV station showing some disco dancing show with ugly Italian chicks in even uglier purple leotards!

Dean tries to interrupt the show with a special report about the massacre at the airport, but is overruled by his boss and gets put on suspension! Doesn’t this TV manager have any decency? Here he had the chance to spare millions of Italians from being reminded of how ugly their chicks are by preempting that awful dance show and he just looked the other way!

Even though Dean was unable to save the viewing public from the disco show, the zombies roll into the TV studio and cancel the show the only way they know how to: by biting, hacking and stabbing everyone involved! I don’t think I’ve been more grateful to see a zombie attack happen than I was when that disco music stopped so that zombie music could play!

Among the other scenes reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead was the big “getting gas scene.” Whenever someone in one of these zombie apocalypse movies needs to get gas it involves a really tense situation where the zombies are trying to give the heroes full service when they’d be satisfied with self service. Once again, it was better in this movie because the heroes managed to not only stop the zombies but also blow up their own getaway ambulance!

Still have your doubts that maybe the wrong speedy-contaminted-guys-take-over-the-world movie director got the Oscar? Behold! I give you the big amusement park scene!

This sequence saw Dean and his wife (she had a really nasty pimple on her face so I kept thinking that she was actually contaminated with a dose of zombie) running around the park while these zombies chased them and even worse, jumped the lines!

I was never quite sure what Dean’s plan was, but for some reason he decided to make his escape by running up the side of the roller coaster. What he was going to do once he was up there, I have no clue, but luckily a helicopter appears and drops a rope down to him and his lady.

I was also wondering where the devil Dean got those grenades he kept chucking at the zombie, but he woke up next to his lady and realized it was all a dream. Unfortunately, his lady’s abysmal skin condition was not!

I was going to complain that the story didn’t make any sense, but I wouldn’t want to give any of you out there the idea that there was a story. And really, I’m not even going to hold it against Lenzi this time.

After all, this was just a dream that the overworked and stressed out Dean had, so it didn’t really have to make sense. I’m sure that the dream seemed real to him, even if like most other people’s dreams it was only interesting to the guy having it.

And Dean – I think you have a lot of anger issues to work out, especially regarding your lady’s facial disfigurement. It’s also clear from the zombie action in your dream that you have an unhealthy obsession with cutting up boobs. That’s not right. Even for an Italian guy with a beard and no respect for live disco TV shows.

© 2010 MonsterHunter