August 17, 2018
Written by: Claudio Fragasso and Jose Maria Cunilles
Starring: Margie Newton, Franco Garafalo, Selan Karay
Quote: "What's the matter? Dissapointed? Sorry, boys! I guess I'm not on the menu after all! Ha, ha, ha, don't let it worry ya! I figure we'll all meet again... in hell!"
Trivia: Stock footage from the film Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali (1974) was used for the native scenes. Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali, aka Guinea Ama, has been recently re-released on DVD as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.
Okay, so sometimes there are movies that are just perfect. The acting is incredible, the story pulls the viewer in, and the cinematography is stunning. Casablanca and Citizen Kane are two examples. I would also put most of David Lynch's films into this category. Then there are movies that are great for the opposite reasons. The story line meanders, the acting is over-the-top and the dialogue is silly. Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space and Tommy Wiseau's The Room are two classic examples of this. For me, Hell of the Living Dead falls into that category. It is a terrible movie and I loved every minute of it! The gore is excessive, the actors are caricatures of what Italy thinks tough Americans should be, and the plot makes almost no sense. It is sexist. It is stupid. It is mean spirited. It is great!
Hell of the Living Dead (or Night of the Zombies or The Virus or the half dozen other names this film has had over the years) is a really interesting film that draws inspiration from two distinctly 1970s movie subgenres. First, Hell of the Living Dead falls into the Italian hobby of creating unofficial sequels to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Beginning with Lucio Fulci's Zombi (Zombie 2) in 1979, there came dozens of Italian directors who took inspiration from the Romero films. It cannot be understated the profound effect Night of the Living Dead had on Italian cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second subgenre is the cannibal craze movies that swept through the exploitation films in the seventies. Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, and The Mountain of the Cannibal are just a couple of the enormous number of cannibal films that came out. These films were excessively gory, often included graphic rape scenes, and even animal torture. It is no surprise that they were heavily targeted by censorship boards due to their extremely graphic nature. While Hell of the Living Dead doesn't have some of those more extreme elements it does include many of the subgenre hallmarks: documentary footage of indigenous peoples, pseudo-anthropology, and gory footage of animals being eaten.
The film begins at a factory where scientist break break all kinds of HR rules with conversations like this:
Technician #1: She may not know much about chemistry, but in bed, her reactions are terrific.
Technician #2: I'm not surprised with that cute little ass.
Technician #1: I'm a tit man, myself.
Unfortunately we don't get to hear the end of their conversation because a zombie rat that got into the chemicals kills one of them by crawling into his suit and making his head pop in an explosion of blood. From there on, the rest of the factory turns into zombies and so does much of the island. Oh, yeah, they're on the island of Papau New Guinea for some reason. I don't think they ever tell you where they are which is confusing later in the film. I know they don't explain why a bunch of Italians have a factory/laboratory on Papau New Guinea.
Next, cut to half a dozen Italian Rambos taking down some ecoterrorist that were trying to shut down the factory where the zombies came from (they didn't know it is full of zombies yet). Italian Rambos blast the hippies away right as they give a dire warning. Next Italian Rambo Squad is in Papau New Guinea making sexual jokes about the skeletons that are scattered about. Why sexually joke about dead people? Maybe they are just trying to keep up the rampant dirt-baggery. Next, there is a guy in a car berating his crying wife over her decision to bring their son to Papau New Guinea. The child is very sick and the mother is very upset but her father just keeps attacking her. Eventually her kid becomes a zombie and tries to kill them.
Then we get the anthropologist and her photographer. The Anthropologist, in order to blend in with the natives, strips naked, dons a loin cloth and paints her face and breast. This apparently helps her communicate with the natives. The director at this point got real weird with inserting documentary footage of natives and animals. The movie Cannibal Holocaust made a sensation a few years before using documentary footage and maybe this director was trying to capitalize on that. I don't know. It is just one of the weird but wonderful aspects of the film.
Eventually, everyone turns into a zombie. That's not what's important. What is important is that there is this great scene where they find an older man (or woman, I forget) but she has a zombie cat burrowed inside of her. It eventually jumps out and the man (or woman) pops up and tries to eat everyone with its guts hanging out. Awesome! In the final scene a zombie rips out the anthropologists tongue and pops out her eyeballs when it gouges them threw her mouth. It doesn't look particularly real but it is still pretty great.
The film has a score by the incredible Italian horror movie score band Goblin that is borrowed from other movies. Silly acting? Yes. Ridiculous dialogue? Absolutely. Cheesy special effects? Uh huh. A damn good way to spend ninety minutes? Definitely.
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