Night of the Zombies (1980)

As a kid, trips to the video store meant many things to me; aside from renting something cool, above all, I absolutely loved perusing the Horror section and checking out all the incredible covers!  Of course, there were many, many covers that stuck out and either slightly scared me or made that internal voice inside me shout "COOL!"  One in particular belonged to Night of the Zombies, a film which I didn't actually get to see until about 1996 or so when I picked up a grey-market bootleg release from Creature Feature.

Of the many titles this movie has, this is the most common.

Let's get something out of the way right off the bat:  Night of the Zombies (or Hell of the Living Dead, as it's more commonly known on digital media) is not a good film...at all.  It's poorly acted, has shoddy direction, mind-numbing dialogue, baffling editing choices (hello random jungle stock footage), a ripped off soundtrack and, depending on which version you're watching, has a horribly murky picture!  But it's oh so much fun!

Dawn of the Dead comparisons be damned!

What little story there is begins at a top secret research facility where some scientists are developing something called Operation Sweet Death.  Of course, all Hell breaks loose and, the entire facility is gassed by their newly created chemical, effectively killing everyone.  This all starts when a zombie rat bites one of the scientists!  From there, we move to an "elite" commando unit (ie: a no-budget version of Dawn of the Dead's SWAT team) attempting to thwart some local hippies who demand research facilities such as the one we just saw get shut down.  Our crew of wanna-be tough guys shoots first and asks questions later, apparently being the best of the best so to speak. 

I can't wait to see Ethel's face when she finds this in her soup!

Our heroes are soon informed that they've been assigned to investigate the facility seen at the start since communication has been lost.   Along the way, the commandos run into a journalist and her cameraman who have just been attacked in a local village by several zombies -- including a zombie child!  From there, our four commandos and their new journalist friends (hmmm...sounds like a familiar combination from another zombie movie we've all seen, no?) continue their journey to the research facility.  Along the way, there are seemingly endless shots of wild animal stock footage, multiple zombie attacks (and decent gore), as the film plods to its inevitable conclusion.

Hey! Anyone got any extra tickets?

Notorious Italian director Bruno Mattei (under the pseudonym of "Vincent Dawn"...see what he did there?) handles the action here, which I guess could be called successful . . . in that I've seen much, much worse films and shot-on-video movies.  However, when combined with a poor budget and a weak script, it's hard to believe even George Romero could've gone for the win here! 

I don't think this is how to make kids' lunches healthier!

While watching Night of the Zombies, the first clue that we're in familiar territory comes in the fact that this film straight-up lifts portions of Goblin's scores from Dawn of the Dead and Contamination!  While I'm not sure exactly how that happened (or how it got by Richard Rubenstein), it does make for some jarring musical cues that ultimately get quite repetitive; much like the Dario Argento cut of Dawn of the Dead, there are only so many times one can hear "Zombi" before it gets boring.  Of course, the team-up of commandos/journalists is also borrowed from Romero's classic . . . why does it seem that so many Italian zombie movies ALWAYS have a journalist involved somewhere and/or start out in New York City? 

Seen here:  Geraldo Rivera speaking with protesters at the DNC.

As I said earlier, this film REALLY plods along . . . in fact, I've often thought about doing some slight editing to it to drop some of the endless stock footage (borrowed from Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali) and tighten up some of the sequences.  When the group reaches a native village, the film suddenly becomes like a mondo pseudo-documentary due to the abundance of stock footage, which paints the indigenous people as some sort of cannibals.  In fact, this footage doesn't even match the actual footage Mattei shot; the actual natives are clearly emaciated, while the zombified dead who attack are muscular and have current hairstyles!


Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior "Uggh"?

At its heart, there's a pretty decent story here, but for me, the action really doesn't start to get good until our heroes encounter an abandoned house -- which is soon overrun with zombies in a pretty cool attack sequence.  Here, the action significantly picks up with glorious zombie attacks and lots of gore! 

"Wait, you mean we're not in a sequel to Dawn of the Dead?"

The Dawn of the Dead "borrowing" continues in the final scenes at the research facility, as the last remaining commandos are picked off (one even in/on some sort of elevator!) and another is bitten and returns, to lead a heard of zombies back to the last survivor!  


Easily one of the coolest shots in the entire film!

The zombie makeups are all over the place.  Make-ups range from the grey/blue skin tones of Dawn of the Dead to purple and green tones and then, some kinda grizzly-looking specials that might be at home in a Fulci picture.  It's almost as if several different effects people worked on the film at different times! 

A good portion of the budget must have been spent here!

While Night of the Zombies/Hell of the Living Dead/Virus is often a mixed bag, it's still a gory hoot that is truly a product of its time and must have been awesome to see in the grindhouse theaters of Times Square back in the day!  If you're looking for a tastelessly fun movie night, this is the one for you!

The Green Inferno (2015)

Nothing makes a film more desirable to see than having it unreleased, shelved indefinitely, or even banned.  In the Horror genre, this has worked out quite well, generating a buzz that almost ensures fans will be there once a film finally sees the light of day.  The most recent examples of this would obviously be Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (filmed in 2000, dropped by Universal, picked up by MGM and then subsequently dropped, only to be finally released by Lionsgate -- and make them a ton of money -- in 2003) and All The Boys Love Mandy Lane (filmed in 2006 and finally released in 2013).  In terms of being banned, pictures like Faces of Death and Make Them Die Slowly ("Banned in 31 Countries!" as its poster swore) played up that angle which certainly helped put butts in theater seats and definitely made me want to see them on video back in the day! 

In short, it all goes back to that primitive instinct of wanting to experience something that's been deemed forbidden.

When Eli Roth announced that he was making a film that was essentially a love letter to the Italian Cannibal subgenre of such classics as Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (the aforementioned Make Them Die Slowly has many titles depending on which country you're in), there was immediate buzz.  Personally, I was interested to see a film like those listed actually playing at one of the mega movie theater chains in the US...I didn't think it was possible!  When the film encountered distribution woes, its buzz only increased.

Filmed in 2013 and finally just released this past weekend, Roth's The Green Inferno tells the story of Justine (expertly played by Roth's real life wife, Lorenza Izzo), a college Freshman seemingly trying to fit in with the local group of political activists on-campus. The basic plot is that the group of activists blindly follow a charismatic leader who fancies himself as the next Che Guevara (though he's more Jim Jones than anything) literally right into the line of fire to expose big industry's murderous effect on primitive, indigenous tribes in the Amazon.  The kids in this film aren't so much "tree huggers" as they're "cause huggers". 

Naturally, that's only the first half of the film; things soon spiral out of control as members of the group are captured by an indigenous tribe, where they're forced to stay for dinner...and breakfast...and lunch.  Sorry, the pun had to go somewhere!  

Roth famously cast a real-life Peruvian tribe that had never been filmed or photographed -- this only added to the maddening realism of the film, coupled with the fact that most of the trained actors are relative new faces.  While Cannibal Holocaust had its pseudo-documentary style benefiting its believability and strengthening its impact, Inferno's most effective strengths lie in its casting decisions.  It would have been much more difficult to believe someone like Brad Pitt was being eaten alive by a cannibal tribe, ya know?

Special effects duties are masterfully handled by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, expertly portraying the on-screen carnage.  Not gonna lie...there are some truly brutal and nasty bits in this film, although seeing Nicotero and Berger's names in the opening credits made it a little easier to separate the onscreen carnage as fictional, whereas both films from Deodato and Lenzi surely had shoestring budgets, making their gore all that more impressive and shocking ("did they really just kill that actor?"). 

Also, like any Eli Roth film, there is an abundance of his trademark black humor . . . several hilarious bits and one-liners carefully break the tension during some of the most disturbing sequences!  In fact, one particular kill even treads levels of absurdity reached previously by Monty Python & The Holy Grail!  In terms of the film's violence, as brutal as it is, it's difficult to take seriously and be offended by because it's so over the top.  Truthfully, the most shocking moment in the film -- which genuinely made me jump -- occurs near the end and recalls Carrie and Friday the 13th.

Another interesting element in line with the film's humor is its constant poking and prodding of social justice warriors and the need to find a cause to rage against on college campuses.  As someone who was bored to tears by the on-campus activists while attending Rutgers, I found this angle to be extra humorous!  In fact, this is where one of The Green Inferno's most terrifying ideas comes into play; never mind the rampant cannibalism and savage blood-letting, the scariest part is how easily some people can forget their principles, no matter how much their gut is telling them they're making a bad decision...they still blindly follow and make that bad decision, all in the name of an attractive person or some radical cause.  The entire first half of the film before the kids get to Peru has that sense of dread in the form of a knot in the stomach screaming "this is not going to end well!"

If you're an Eli Roth fan already, you will love this film.  If you've never seen an Italian Cannibal film and had no desire to, this probably won't change your mind.  If you're a Horror fan though, your curiosity surely has to be piqued.  See it!