Why Waste Zombies?

Zombies spoil the party for gangsters and mercenaries, but then they turn the tables on the undead in 2014's Zombie Fight Club (屍城 "Corpse City"). It's cheap, derivative, and very trashy. But kind of fun.

The characters speak English and Chinese, about fifty percent of the time for each, with no explanation. The real life explanation is that the movie stars two Chinese Americans, Andy On and his wife, Jessica Cambensy. I don't think they know much if any Chinese.

Andy On is definitely the talent in this movie and his martial arts skills surpass everything else. Certainly the special effects, the writing, and the performances. If you think She-Hulk has bad cgi, you should see the cartoon blood splatters and explosions in this movie.

Andy On plays a mercenary also named Andy who goes in with a squad to bust up a ring of young gangsters. Meanwhile, we watch the douchy guys partying with an ever increasing number of indistinguishable, frighteningly skinny, party girls who spend the movie whining and screaming. The girls in this movie make Willie Scott look like Rambo, and that goes for Jessica Cambensy, too, who plays a gangster's girlfriend named Jenny. They're all really annoying and depressing.

The first half of the movie takes place in one apartment building as the zombie apocalypse begins. The second half skips over a few years to when we find Andy and Jenny now prisoners and forced to compete against zombies in a gladiator arena.

It's all presided over by a wealthy man who keeps a group of dominatrices (who act more like subs) and his zombified daughter, much like the Mayor on Walking Dead.

Sometimes this movie rises to the level of a fun exploitation film.

Zombie Fight Club is available on Shout Factory.

It Came from a Location

A woman goes somewhere and then there are zombies, sort of. That's about as solid as the premise is for 1973's Messiah of Evil. Written and directed by husband and wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, best known for their collaborations with George Lucas (they were screenwriters for American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard the Duck), Messiah of Evil has been called surreal, which in this case I think is a charitable way of saying it doesn't make any sense. But it has a lot of little moments that are effective if one forgets about the context, or lack thereof.

The film begins with an interesting shot of Arletty (Marianna Hill) walking down a corridor in a madhouse. In voiceover, she promises to tell us about the strange events that no-one believes her about. The ensuing flashback, essentially the whole film, leaves her point of view frequently, ruining the whole "survivor's account" quality. One of my favourite moments is when Arletty pulls into a gas station and sees the attendant firing a gun into pitch darkness. Then he walks back to the station and the two have a completely normal, casual conversation about filling her gas tank.

Arletty's going to a small town to visit her father (Royal Dano) but at his house instead finds just a few lazy young bohemians. She finds them lounging on a bed while none other than Elisha Cook Jr. is monologuing for them next to a TV.

He's telling them about the horrors of the zombie infestation but the whole scene is presented like they've hired the famous character actor to give a private performance.

The zombies start picking off the group one by one in ways that only make sense if the zombies are aware of being in a horror movie and know that their job is to be creepy. One of the bohemians (Joy Bang) goes to see a movie and all the zombies quietly file in and fill up the seats behind her.

It's creepy but what the motive is is certainly not clear.

We get a vague back story about how a strange man appeared a hundred years ago and infected the town in some way. The stranger comes from the sea in one scene, one of several things that indicate an H.P. Lovecraft influence.

The disconnect between the movie and internal logic could be taken as a postmodern commentary on horror movies, I guess. But like a lot of postmodernism, it seems suspiciously like the writers were just too lazy. The film does have a lot of interesting shots, though.

Messiah of Evil is available on Shudder.

The Running, Problem Solving Dead

Zombies are bad but at least they're slow and they can't operate machinery. Unless you're talking about 1980's Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata). These walking dead are different from the living only in that they don't speak, many are covered with grotesque sores, and they have a violent, insatiable appetite for human flesh. Especially women's breasts, for some inexplicable reason. For the most part, it's an effective tale, certainly one relevant to modern times, when a faction of humans may suddenly commit terrible violence for reasons that never really become clear.

One character, a doctor named Anna (Laura Trotter), reflects on the folly of warlike humanity utilising nuclear power, apparently because the zombies got their initial infection from a radioactive spill. But this is a tenuous moral at best. The effective point of the film is the pointlessness. Anna's husband, Dean (Hugo Stiglitz), the film's most central protagonist, is a journalist who's present at the first sight of these creatures. An unmarked military plane lands and someone Dean recognises as a professor steps out, looking perfectly normal if weirdly silent, before suddenly and without any warning he attacks one of the military officers who's come to greet him.

More zombies pile off the plane, some of them with uzis which they fire with aim and discrimination. These things can think. Later in the film, one of them even operates a manual elevator crank to access a group of civilians caught in the elevator.

This is an Italian film--I watched the English dubbed version available on Amazon Prime. Of course, like a lot of Italian genre films from 60s, 70s, and 80s, clearly not all the actors were speaking the same language, and one guy who's clearly speaking English is none other than Mel Ferrer. He turns up in this movie as head of the military, General Murchison, of whatever country this is supposed to be.

He's in charge of trying to put down the menace that quickly spreads through the city but in a recurring theme of mindless censorship the government doesn't allow him to declare a state of emergency or inform the populace of the true nature of the threat. Earlier, Dean's attempt to report the zombie attack in a special news bulletin is interrupted for some kind of gymnastics dance show.

It seems to be five or six people in formation doing some unremarkable routine. Who watches this? Those people in wherever this is sure are easily entertained.

There are some surprisingly dreamlike elements to the film which may actually make sense of the ambiguous location. One of Murchison's subordinates (Francisco Rabal) is married to a sculptor named Sheila (Maria Rosaria Omaggio) who has begun sculpting a weird, disfigured head before the zombie attack that seems to presage the incoming horror.

Some of the characters do the usual foolish horror movie things, like Murchison's daughter and son-in-law who blow off the old man when he begs them to come to army headquarters, preferring to go camping instead. You can imagine how that goes--mainly, though, the violence feels arbitrary, and certainly anyone who gets eaten alive doesn't seem like they deserve such severe punishment. A lot of horror movies use the word "Nightmare" but it turns out to be especially fitting here.

Robots Bring Zombies and Disorder

Nowadays television and movies have us well prepared for a day when we wake up and find most of the populace is either dead or mindless walking corpses. It was somewhat unusual, though, when 1964's The Earth Dies Screaming was released. This entertaining and oddly short post-apocalyptic film by Terence Fisher features a small, random assortment of people trying to figure out this suddenly strange world around them.

Shot and set in England, the film has an American at its centre, a middle aged test pilot named Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker). He's introduced without any preamble and it's almost like watching a silent film as we watch him drive up in a military jeep and wander around. He's as puzzled as we are by the sight of bodies scattered about the silent village.

Gradually a group of people accumulates around Jeff who's treated as leader by default. They compare notes about what they were doing at the time of whatever it is that happened to the rest of the population. I felt like the movie was trying to subtly suggest a weirder explanation than the one we end up getting, one of the things that makes me wonder if the film's runtime, barely over an hour, was intended to be so short from the start.

One thing that's certainly weird are the robots wandering around in space suits. They don't seem especially interested in the group until one of them, a society woman who'd been coming home from a party (Vanda Godsell) persistently pesters one. Later she becomes one of the zombies that roam the land--though not called zombies. But they are pretty close to the Night of the Living Dead style walking corpses introduced in George Romero's film four years later. Earth Dies Screaming's version has bulging white eyes and are pretty creepy.

There's another effective scene where another member of the group (Peggy Hatton) hides in a closet from such a zombie and she peers fearfully through a lattice while the it searches the room for her. It kind of reminded me of playing Alien: Isolation.

The group is nicely and credibly put together. Dennis Price plays a man with a sinister ulterior motive which for some reason the film never gets around to revealing and Thorley Walters plays an amusing, befuddled alcoholic. There's also a young pregnant woman in the group (Anna Palk). In one scene I thought effective Jeff watches her from outside while he's standing guard as she nervously gets some milk from a refrigerator. It's a nice moment with no dialogue that conveys how Jeff takes some simple pleasure in the sight of someone acting in a familiar domestic manner. Which makes it all the more effective when one of the robots in space suits shows up.

Intolerance can Swim

The question was always there but few have dared to ask it: what if Nazis could breathe underwater? This is the nightmare realised by 1977's Shock Waves. It's elevated from simple, entertaining schlock by cool locations and very good performances, particularly from John Carradine and Peter Cushing.

Carradine plays the captain of a small boat taking tourists sight seeing in the Caribbean. I love his character--the way he scoffs at the beliefs of the ship's cook (Don Stout) in paranormal phenomena at sea is so strident that you get the impression he knows all the stories are true but he's wise enough to know people are better off not believing. Carradine is just the right actor for this part, his aged face reflecting his depth of experience along with the tone of flawed authority that made him perfect as Aaron in The Ten Commandments and as preachers in John Ford movies.

Among the tourists, Brooke Adams as Rose is presented as the protagonist but mainly she's relegated to following along as the men make all the decisions or running in terror. A natural enough reaction when encountering water breathing Nazi zombies--as they do when they shipwreck on an island. Also in residence is Peter Cushing, sole occupant of a great abandoned luxury hotel.

He has top billing but not a lot of screen time. Playing a former Nazi commander about whom we learn little he's around long enough to make a monologue on genetically engineered, aquatic Nazi super soldiers sound gravely serious.

They're pretty menacing though the tourists' worst enemy, as is often the case movies like this, is their own foolishness, particular a couple of them who do really stupid things when they panic. But the best death in the film comes courtesy of sea urchins. This movie was a real pleasure to watch.

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