Director: Bruno Mattei (as Vincent Dawn), Claudio Fragasso
Year: 1980
Country: Italy/Spain
Alternate Titles: Virus; Night of the Zombie; Zombie Inferno; Dusk of the Dead; Zombie 4; Zombie Creeping Flesh; Zombie of the Savanna
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
After stopping a terrorist organization, a special anti-terrorist group arrives in Guinea on vacation where they run across a reporter and her crew who are on the run from zombies created by a radioactive leak from a chemical plant and must find a way to stop the zombie outbreak.
Review:
This one wasn't all that bad and is quite fun. What really makes this one so much fun is the fact that this one goes for the utterly demented and bonkers route of the Italian zombie films at the time. There are numerous sources for this, ranging from the sheer absurdity of the storyline that is carried out here to the low-budget, rushed tone. There is a pretty fair amount of action which can seem pretty nonstop, from the opening assault on the consulate, the first encounter with the zombies in an abandoned village which features plenty of good times with the slowly-approaching zombie hordes coming out of the buildings or featuring plenty of zombies advancing on them forcing the group to shoot their way out of trouble. The later village sequences are also full of action as the creatures come shambling into the area dining on the participants in huge swarms, and it gets nonstop deeper into the movie which is rather fun as this one generates plenty of fun encounters with the zombies as the increasingly desperate group is whittled down one-by-one in the jungle.
There really isn't all that much when looking at the total time of stock footage used and doesn't distract from the gut-munching, the real reason for this one since the film does have some great moments of flesh-ripping which produces some good gore moments. From bites that cause blood spurts to shoot out to some nice full-body corpse devouring, the gore gets moving and flowing once the zombies get in on the action. The last plus here is that the zombies on display are quite passable with the usual rotting faces complete with large facial wounds typical for the scene.
However, none of these factors can override the fact that the film is really shoddily made in most regards. Most of the film looks borrowed from other films and used as stock footage, there are shots of animals randomly thrown in to pad out the running time and on the whole, things don't make sense at all. These can all be distractions at times making them all the more obvious as to which ones are included and why they are there in the first place. Many times the animals shown aren't even in the New Guinea, and the stock footage of regular scenes are not in the slightest made to blend in with the normal film and just come off as padding, while the fact that the soldiers continually shoot the zombies full of holes despite learning in their first encounter that a headshot is an ideal way of dealing with the creatures makes them come off as incompetent more than anything. The last big flaw here is the utterly clumsy story that is way too low-budget and shoddy to have this kind of ambitious story be told throughout since this severely bungles the social commentary aspect and just comes off as too weak to really matter. These flaws really hold this one down.
Overview: ***/5
A cheesy Italian zombie film of the highest order, this is a really silly and cheesy effort that quite silly at times but still maintains a watchable air due to that. Give this a shot if you're a huge fan of schlocky cinema, are a huge fan of Eurohorror in general, or appreciate the creative crew while most others out there should heed caution with this one.
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