Zombi 3
Halloween’s almost here! I don’t feel like I’ve reviewed half as many movies as I should’ve this month, but I’m going to keep plugging away until the ref calls time. With any luck, for the next few days I’ll have the time to do double-features. No guarantees, but I’ll do what I can to tell you about such wonderfully classy films as Zombi 3 (which might actually be meant to read as Zombi3, but that’s about as clear as most of the rest of this film). And no, it only LOOKS like I have a zombie fetish. But you can always count on fun when you rent a zombie flick, which is typically more than I feel I can say for vampire flicks. To each his deranged own, eh?
Premise: 1/5
There are these scientists, and they’re working on something called “Death One.” Whether it’s a bacteriological chemical weapon (which they tell you it is once) or whether it’s a process to restore life to the dead (which they imply at the beginning that it is), it’s never made too clear. Anyhow, it’s supposed to be top-secret, but I guess it’s not top-secret enough that two guys in a van with labcoats on can’t make their way in through the gate, gun down like six military folks (where only one of these labcoat wearing dudes bites it) and then make off with the “Death One” transport box. He doesn’t make it too far, as a chase helicopter pops a shot through his hand, making him drop the box, and, as he runs back to try and pick it up, you guessed it, he gets some “Death One” goop on him. The infection has begun.
So, yeah, anyhow, fast-forwarding—the thief guy makes it to a hotel, starts zombifying, murders a room-cleaner by pushing her face into an unbroken mirror (yeah, I don’t know how that’d kill you either), the military find the place, kill everyone inside to contain the infection, then pack off the thief’s body to HQ where they decide it’d be a brilliant idea to cremate him. In classic “Return of the Living Dead” fashion, this turns out to be a huge mistake, as the smoke coming out also has the “Death One” crap in it and infects birds. Then things pretty much go to hell and everybody in apparently the whole friggin’ world manages to become a zombie in a single day. Enter our buffet table, 3 military guys on leave and a Winnebago full of young women, plus one driver and also a nerdy guy who will later get to die because he was chasing after a chicken. Yep.
So, anyhow, fate conspires to bring all these characters into an abandoned hotel (even though one of the characters had only been there a week ago, now it’s rundown and there are vines and weeds everywhere? Sure, why not!) where they also manage to find a crate of M-16s in the basement(?!) which they decide they’ll need, even though not one of them has so much as seen or heard of zombie attacks at this point. Yep. Eventually everyone decides to split up to go find stupid ways to get killed, zombies attack and get shot up, people run, people die, the military starts shooting everyone (living and undead), things explode, and eventually the two most insipid characters get to fly off in a helicopter and, presumably, survive. Honestly, the plot just does not matter in this movie, and the more you try to think about it, the more you stand the risk of causing yourself serious brain damage. Just don’t do it!
"Mommy, I feel urpy..."
Cast: 1/5
Oh man…I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m not going to list any of the actors because I don’t want to encourage them. It doesn’t help that I don’t even remember half their names, and the movie certainly doesn’t require you to. It’s just like “hey, look at how that guy got killed!” for the most part. This movie’s also an Italian flick, so you can expect that even the dubbing is super-shitty. Okay—I take that back, there’s one guy I want to mention because he’s hilariously awful. That would be, I guess, Robert Marius, and the only reason I think it’s him is because he’s listed on imdb.com as “Professor Holder” which could’ve been the head scientist/doctor/whatever guy’s name. Nobody else has a “Professor” or “Doctor” in their name, so I feel it might be a safe bet. Anyhow, this head honcho scientist guy is singularly bad at his craft—he emphasizes everything he says via idiotic arm waving, screwing his face up, pounding on things, or the clincher, tearing his glasses off his face and looking outraged. See, this by itself wouldn’t necessarily make him so laughable, it’s the fact that he often appears to have just forgotten his line while in the middle of his wild exaggerations and has to compose himself for a second before finishing. Really, that’s just about the silliest damn thing I ever saw in a shitty cast for a bad movie, and I can’t help but love it.
Although maybe not technically “cast,” I suppose I ought to at least give an excuse for how insane and nonsensical this movie is. I’m not sure how good an excuse it is, but for what it’s worth, Lucio Fulci, who’s credited as director, really only directed maybe half the flick. I guess he was ill at the time this movie was being made, and also had hated the screenplay he had to work with from the word go, so eventually he just gave up and went home. So, with only a half-finished movie, they called in Bruno Mattei, who filmed most of the confusing “sorta plot” sections and slapped some other shit onto the movie and sent it packing. Maybe that explains why so many parts of the movie are nearly incoherent, but maybe not. You just can’t tell with something like Zombi 3.
You can't tell from the picture, but this is seriously a scene in which a zombie head, found for some reason stuffed into a refrigerator, literally flies off the shelf and starts gnawing into a guy's neck. I couldn't make that up, even if I had tried.
Special Effects & Cinematography: 2/5
ARGH. Aggravating is what I’d call this category. The action scenes are somewhat alright, if you can overlook simple things such as lack of muzzle flare from M-16s firing into groups of people or zombies, sometimes misplaced bullet holes, and so on. But apparently, this movie can’t quite figure out its own zombie rules. Sometimes they’re as fast as regular people, jumping and climbing over everything, other times they’re shuffling and stumbling so that escaping them doesn’t require much more than a slow walk. Sometimes they wield machetes, sometimes they brawl people to death, other times they can just claw their way through flesh in like a second. Apparently shooting them always works, and flamethrowers (though where the hell the flamethrower came from, I can’t quite say), but sometimes planting a huge spike through a zombie’s neck just makes him somewhat upset, while occasionally you can beat them simply by clubbing them with a gun or choking them (choking something that’s DEAD? Why not!). Sometimes the dead returning as a zombie takes hours (maybe even a day), sometimes it happens in seconds. Sure would be nice if we could keep our zombies straight!
The special effects are kind of gory, I’ll admit, though sometimes the blood looks like colored water, and most of the time you never have a clear and gruesome picture of what’s actually happening. Still, I guess it’s not bad for what it is. The movie also pushes believability with how quickly after the “Death One” crisis everything gets worn down. I mentioned the hotel earlier, but that’s not all. There’s a whole village that looks like a ghost town, and a HOSPITAL, of all places, that seems to have fallen to shit in minutes (there’s still a woman patient there who’s going through labor pains), and is just full of broken-down military vehicles. I’ve got almost zero sense of continuity between the initial infection and the suddenly zombietastic world. I’m similarly at a loss to explain why the movie occasionally completely switches film quality, between the generally professional look and then to an almost home-movie quality camera—and what makes that worse is that sometimes it’ll shift quality during particularly violent scenes, which pulls you right out of the movie and leaves you annoyed. And don’t even get me started on the bizarre love for fog machines that this movie has—it wants to saturate everything it possibly can in fog. Seriously. Pool scene? The pool would be cooler with fog coming out of it! Hospital scene? Much cooler with fog in it (although you can actually see the fog machine get turned on by a guy standing just around the corner during the beginning of this scene)! Anything you can imagine putting fog in, this movie did. I GET IT ALREADY!
A scene stolen from "Commando," or the moment when this movie blew the last of its budget? You decide!
Popcorn Factor: 4/5
Everything this movie loses for incompetence and maddening nonsense, it almost makes up for in terms of sheer goofy glee. Make no mistake, this is a very, very stupid movie. You have to really like highly stupid and improbable crap movies, but if you don’t have a problem with that, you’re gonna get a kick out of something here! I mean, this movie has a flying zombie head attack, a zombie fetus attack, and more. It is true that most of the zombies are one-trick ponies, basically just hiding and waiting for a place to pop out and go “boo” before they eat their next victim, but hey, whatever floats their boat. There’s a good dose of violence, and parts of this movie almost play out like an action flick more than horror, but that keeps the pace up really nicely, making it hard to be bored during this movie (with the exception of those “clarifying” scenes between the scientists and military). With acting so outrageously bad, plot points so carelessly thrown out the window, and nothing even remotely logical happening, this movie’s perfect for people who are looking for a terrible movie to laugh about for an hour and a half.