Category: Zombies

BURIAL GROUND (1981) (AKA: The Nights of Terror, Zombi 3) A professor doing research on Etruscan black magic releases a horde of zombies that descend on a nearby country estate. In a scene very reminiscent of Fulci’s Zombie, one of the maggot-infested corpses reaches out of the ground and attacks a couple having sex in a graveyard . More people in the midst of sexual escapades are interrupted by the zombies—until one of the cast tries destroying them with a gun but ends up getting eviscerated. The remaining survivors lock themselves in the house but underestimate the intelligence of the living dead, which use axes and scythes to smash their way in. The professor eventually turns up as a zombie and makes lunch out of one of the humans by ripping the guy’s guts out and eating them. The last of the breathing characters seek help at a neighboring monastery only to find the place crawling with the hungry undead—Karin Well has her nipple bitten off in the film’s most memorable scene. Burial Ground is an incredibly idiotic but nicely atmospheric entry in the Italian zombie sweepstakes that makes no pretenses for being anything other than a full-throttle splatter epic. B (Currently streaming on Tubi.)

DAWN OF THE MUMMY (1981) The last ten minutes of this movie are fast-paced and exciting. It’s too bad the rest of the film is a waste of time. In Ancient Egypt, a high priestess places a curse on the tomb of a powerful pharaoh. In modern times, a group of fashion photographers and models on a magazine shoot run into a tomb raider (George Peck) whose discovery of the cursed burial chamber has brought the pharaoh and his servants back from the dead as bloodthirsty zombies. These bandaged stiffs are pretty lively for 5,000-year-olds, and they go about tearing people to pieces and gorging on the leftovers. There’s a sequence where the mummies crawl out of their sandy graves in the sun-bleached desert that gives the film some much-needed visual imagery. Why it takes over an hour for the majority of the gory action to materialize is a question the writers of this Dawn of the Dead cash-in never answer. I’m assuming it’s to pad out the endless 92 minutes of this clinker. C– (Currently streaming on Tubi.)

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985) A weaponized toxic gas created by the military—and secreted away in canisters in the basement of a medical supply warehouse—is accidentally released by a couple of meatheads. The gas reanimates the place’s medical cadavers and eventually seeps into the nearby cemetery, turning the corpses into an army of hungry zombies. The characters in this movie discuss how to kill a zombie, directly referencing George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the idea of destroying its brain. But unlike your typical walking dead, the zombies here can’t be put down by demolishing the brain—or by any other means. This proves bad news for a group of punk rock teens partying at an abandoned graveyard just as its rotting residents decide to do a little partying of their own. Abandoning the rules created by Romero (and subsequently used in every zombie movie), Return of the Living Dead‘s fresh take on the subgenre not only makes for an exciting film but creates an idea that eventually seeps into the zombie pop culture lexicon: the brain-eating ghoul. Smart, funny, and scary, Return of the Living Dead is in many ways the definitive zombie movie of the eighties. Sorry, George. Followed by sequels. A– (Currently streaming on Pluto TV and Tubi.)

ZOMBIE LAKE (1981) A woman skinny dipping in a French country lake is attacked by a green-faced zombie that emerges from below the water. This scene is supposed to evoke the fear we felt at the beginning of Jaws when a helpless swimmer is terrorized by the shark. Judging from the amount of close-ups of the woman swimming nude from below, the only thing you’ll feel is that director Jean Rollin mistook this production for a softcore porno. Another green zombie arises from the lake and kills a passerby. All of this is happening because, ten years earlier, German soldiers were massacred during WWII by the locals, and their bodies dumped in the lake. This places the majority of the present-day action in 1955, yet the fashions and cars are straight out of the seventies. We’re offered even more gratuitous T&A in the form of a women’s basketball team stripping nude and going for a swim before being submerged by zombies. The townsfolk have enough and band together to lure the walking dead into a burning mill. Technical goofs include a zombie chomping a woman’s neck but producing no wound, the image of a crew member in a mirror, a soldier’s jackboots are removed before being drowned but he returns later with a new set of shoes, and another solider is shot in the head but the action is out of sync with the sound of gunfire. The underwater sequences were obviously filmed in a pool dressed in seaweed. Julian de Laserna stepped in to direct additional scenes, resulting in the credit “A.J. Lazer.” Zombie Lake is often called the worst zombie movie of all time. You can’t argue with reason. D (Currently unavailable.)

For a review of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead please click here!

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985) George Romero’s concluding entry in his original Living Dead trilogy (1968-85) might lack the excitement of both Night and Dawn of the Dead, but the unfairly maligned Day of the Dead is actually a solid film filled with inventive storytelling and some truly knock-your-socks-off FX. The living dead now outnumber humans 40,000 to 1. A group of survivors made up of doctors and military personnel have turned an underground missile silo into a laboratory where they can experiment on the undead and figure out a way to coexist. The scientists are led by the maniacal Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), whose knife-happy dissection of the zombies grants him the nickname “Frankenstein.” The soldiers are commanded by the hot-headed Rhodes (Joe Pilato), who believes the only good zombie is a permanently dead one. Romero was forced to scale down his script when the film’s budget was cut in half, resulting in a chapter that feels incomplete. Despite its budgetary restrictions, Day of the Dead is an intelligent and intense movie featuring good acting—Sherman Howard’s Bub is a zombie for the ages—and some of Tom Savini’s most complex and realistic make-up work. Much better than Romero’s later and much-praised Land of the Dead. B+ (Currently streaming on Hulu, Peacock, and Shudder.)

OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (1982) (AKA: Oasis of the Living Dead) Third Reich soldiers come back from the dead to protect their Nazi gold in this lousy French/Spanish Romero/Fulci clone. The movie uses the same template as previous zombie films: a group of people stranded in an exotic locate is pursued by hordes of the living dead. The difference with a production like Oasis of the Zombies is the inclusion of nondescript characters not worth giving a damn about. The characters in question are imbecilic treasure-seekers looking for lost gold in North Africa. Their arrival revives the decomposing corpses of German soldiers who take their sweet time killing the dolts. Those hoping for a gore-soaked zombie apocalypse will be sorely disappointed in director Jesús Franco’s handling of the material—too many uninteresting subplots take center stage, with the majority of the zombie action is saved for the last ten minutes. Even Francophiles will most likely give this one a wide berth. Absolute dreck—this makes Zombie Lake (1981) seem good by comparison. F (Currently streaming on Tubi.)

SHOCK WAVES (1977) A group of tourists on a boat cruise are rammed by a ghost freighter and seek shelter at a nearby island. Unfortunately, the place is overlorded by a former Nazi commander (Peter Cushing) who’s been living on the island since the war with a squad of undying SS super-soldiers experimentally designed to adapt to their environment—in this case it’s water, which makes the perfect hiding spot for the zombies to attack their prey. The first of the short-lived “Nazi Zombies” subschool of Night of the Living Dead-influenced films, Shock Waves utilizes its claustrophobic atmosphere by offering a story with more suspense than violence; a rarity within a subculture of movies usually made with the sole purpose of delivering extreme bloodletting. Cushing is on hand to provide backstory but only appears in a few scenes, while the lovely Brooke Adams (The Dead Zone) makes an appealing and smart damsel in distress. This film was later ripped off as Zombie Lake, which according to numerous horror and zombie film scholars is one of the worst zombie movies of all time. How’s that for accolades? Director Ken Wiederhorn would go on to make another zombie movie (to lesser results) with Return of the Living Dead II. B (Currently streaming on Peacock and Prime.)

RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1986) 1986 might be the date with which this movie is stamped but it was obviously filmed years earlier. A terrorist sporting Converse Chucks and a Sherpa jean jacket (severely dating this film in the process) tries to sabotage a nuclear power plant but ends up electrocuting himself and dying. A would-be journalist (Robert Deveau), investigating an abandoned farm where a mass grave was discovered, stumbles upon zombies controlled by a fiendish doctor (Leonard Corman). A Christmas Story‘s Scott Schwartz plays a suburban teen who transforms a LaserDisc player into a ray gun, which becomes a handy bully- and zombie-repellent. Boris Karloff’s costar in The Mummy, Zita Johann, is a local historian who informs Deveau about the unsavory activities happening at the nearby prison involving Corman. This cheap hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and seemingly unrelated subplots has the feel of having been stitched together from the remains of two unfinished movies. The title is supposed to evoke the excitement of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Night of the Living Dead, but in reality Raiders of the Living Dead has more in common with a dead body: it’s stiff and lifeless. A real bore, with Schwartz giving a singularly terrible performance as the kid hero. D– (Currently not streaming.)

ZOMBIE (1979) (AKA: Zombi 2, Zombie Flesh Eaters) A New York harbor patrolman is murdered by someone with a bad case of dermatitis. Local journalist Peter (Ian McCulloch) investigates and, along with a woman named Ann (Tisa Farrow), travels to an Antillean island called Matul, the last known whereabouts of Ann’s scientist father—who might have ties to the crime. They find the place crawling with voodoo-spawned zombies, which give new meaning to the term “chowing down” as they devour anything in their path—even sharks aren’t immune to the zombie mayhem. Along with a couple of vacationers, Peter and Ann search for her father’s colleague (Richard Johnson) but instead stumble upon his eviscerated wife being eaten by the living dead. In a bad move, Peter and Ann stop in a cemetery for some afternoon delight but are put out when a Spanish conquistador emerges from his musty grave and tears apart their friends—despite its advanced age, the zombie still drips goo and other bodily fluids. More people are chomped and turned into zombies during the apocalyptic ending, but it’s too late as the walking dead have already invaded civilization. This Italian splatter epic is essentially ripping off Dawn of the Dead—it was promoted in Italy as a sequel to Romero’s film, there known as Zombi—but in recent years has secured respect and admiration from critics as a genuine work of atmospheric horror, and deservedly so. Lucio Fulci’s direction is slick and the pacing quick, leaving very little time for the viewer to recover from one gory extreme before the next strikes. Fulci followed the success of this with several more zombie-infused bloodbaths before making a legitimate (and ill conceived) sequel in 1988. B+ (Currently streaming on AMC+, Shudder via Prime.)

Stay tuned for Part 2 of The Dead Walk!

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies – 2016, Austria, 78m. Director: Dominik Hartl. Streaming: Tubi

Dead Snow – 2009, Norway, 91m. Director: Tommy Wirkola. Streaming: Tubi

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead – 2014, Norway, 100m. Director: Tommy Wirkola. Streaming: Peacock

ATTACK OF THE LEDERHOSEN ZOMBIES (2016) To compensate for the lack of snow due to climate change, the owner of a ski resort in the Alps concocts a chemical that seamlessly produces the white powder. Unfortunately, when consumed, the chemical transforms people and animals into drooling, pock-faced zombies. Soon the quaint Bavarian village is overrun with the walking dead, trapping a group of snowboarders on the mountain. The survivors arm themselves with whatever weapons they can find, which includes ski poles (used by a barmaid to take out the eyes of a zombie), and, naturally, snowboards in the climax’s snowboarding-cum-zombie massacre—accompanied by Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube.” It might lack the energy of Shaun of the Dead—the obvious inspiration—as well as any actual lederhosen-wearing zombies, but it’s difficult not to enjoy this spirited romp as nothing more than stupid escapism. The practical makeup effects are excellent. B–

DEAD SNOW (2009) Norwegian friends on vacation at a remote mountain cabin spend their time snow tubing, discussing horror movies, and drinking a lot of pilsner. Their play time is interrupted by the arrival of an old fart who tells the friends of the place’s unsavory history involving the torture and murder of the locals at the hands of Nazis during World War II. The civilians had enough and slaughtered most of the Germans in retaliation, with many escaping into the mountains but leaving their stolen loot behind. Much like the gut-munching Nazi zombies of Jess Franco’s Oasis of the Zombies, the SS soldiers in Dead Snow return as the rotten undead and go to any lengths to protect their cherished Nazi gold. Naturally, this includes ripping the vacationers to pieces, all of which is executed via some truly impressive makeup FX—one guy wearing a t-shirt of Peter Jackson’s Braindead has his face split in two. As with Jackson’s splatter classic, Dead Snow is an energetic homage to the gory delights of films like The Evil Dead, complete with deadpan humor intermixed with moments of outrageous bloodshed. A must-see for the splattery zombie aficionado. B+

DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS. DEAD (2014) In the spirit of the Evil Dead films, Dead Snow 2, like Evil Dead 2, is a slicker, more polished production. It’s also breathlessly paced and filled with wall-to-wall splatter. Martin (Geir Vegar Hoel), the sole survivor of the zombie massacre from Part 1, narrowly escapes the undead Nazi army. Standartenführer Herzog (Ørjan Gamst), the leader of the Nazi zombie squad, begins recruiting soldiers by killing a group of tourists and turning them into the walking dead. Martin discovers that the severed arm of Herzog—which was cut off at the beginning of the film—can bring the dead back to life. With the help of an American zombie expert (Martin Starr of Freaks and Geeks) Martin starts his own army by resurrecting Russian soldiers Herzog himself wiped out in 1944. Perhaps the funniest bit is during the climax where a Nazi zombie doctor sets up a makeshift battlefield triage and uses hay to “fill in” the literal gaps in the zombies’ dismembered bodies. If Red vs. Dead achieves anything it’s the reminder that sequels can sometimes be just as good (or better) than their predecessor. B+