Zombi Holocaust

--Reviewed by Lindy Loo

Plotline: Things start off with the innocent theft of several cadaver body parts from a hospital's anatomy lab but soon escalate to an anthropologist and several doctors heading off to an island of zombies in order to make sense of what is happening back home.

Scariness factor: It's a mix of camp and creepiness. What with the music and the voice-overs, it's a bit difficult to give someone truly hardcore chills...

Gross-Out Factor: Wow, yeah. This is high high high. Eyes getting poked out. Hands getting sawed off. Skulls being removed. You name it, this movie's got it.



Complaints: This has a terrible and wandering plot with no real worthy explanation as to why the hell these people would actually travel all the way out to an island of zombie cannibals. Then again, that seems to be the case with ANY zombie cannibal movie, really, no?

High Points: Wow. This movie was great. The promotional tag-line on the front of the dvd pretty much says it all:

"3 skulls! 10 on the splatter scale! A frothing, heady stew of kick-ass gore, cannibles, zombies, nekkid babes, brain transplants and mad doctors. What's not to like here, 'pard? True art of the highest order."

It's one of the gorier movies I've seen, but in a crazy-assed, fun, groaning kind of way. It's terribly acted, and it makes really no sense. For example, during climactic scenes at the end of the movie, the blond female lead is suddenly butt-nekkid and getting giant hippie-flowers painted on her by the island's natives while her male counterpart is lying on a table, his skull about to be sawed off. The music is also horribly terrible, starting and stopping abruptly and sounding all sorts of 1970's throughout. There is gratuitous nudity, for really no other reason than to show gratuitous nudity (and this in itself is funny as well since the blond female lead, being lead to a sacrificial altar presumably to be sacrificed, appears to be butt-nekkid except for a pair of high heels--which apparently the natives (or the director) felt were ok since they made her nekkid body look all that more svelte and sexy). And my ultimate favorite moment of the movie is when, within the first 10 minutes or so, a man jumps from the 5+ floor of the hospital and, upon hitting the ground (having clearly been substituted in with a dummy), we see the dummy's arm fly off on impact, only to reappear just seconds later on a closeup of the bloodied man. I have not laughed so hard, and I actually rewound the movie to make sure that I'd really just seen that. Apparently the filmmakers figured, eh, wtf, why do a retake when there are more important scenes to move onto, like eye-gouging and body-spiking.



Overall: This movie was great campy fun, and horribly horribly gory. The latter usually makes me squeamish and bumps the movie rating down for me, but in this case, it was kind of the piece de resistance of the film. Seeing someone's eyes get gouged out has never looked so good.

Grade: B+