Hell of the Living Dead

Italy - Spain / 1981 Directed by Bruno Mattei Starring Margit Evelyn Newton Frank Garfield Selan Karay Color / 105 Minutes / Not Rated Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC) Anchor Bay Entertainment

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Blue Underground reissue (October 2007)

		Review by Brian Lindsey

3     6   10 = Highest Rating

Hell of the Living Dead (AKA Virus, alias Night of the Zombies) — a shameless knockoff of George Romero's 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead — is hack filmmaking as its most execrable, bold-faced plagiarism of the worst possible kind. Every aspect of this atrocious film smells worse than three-day old roadkill. Nobody involved in its production obviously gave a rat's ass about what they were doing or the intellectual property they were violating. Consequently, no one watching the film will give a rat's ass about what's happening on the screen... You'll be rooting for the zombies to not only make a meal of the irritating, moronic characters, but also director Bruno Mattei, his entire crew, and the people who gave them the money to make this atrocity. So why, you might ask, didn't I rate this piece of dung as "Pure Dookie" — i.e. meriting only 1 rating point? True, I was sorely tempted. The film probably deserves my harshest possible condemnation. It is undeniably awful. So awful, in fact, that I managed to squeeze a few laughs out of the experience.     The ludicrous story opens at the Hope Center, a high tech United Nations research facility in Papua New Guinea. Here, away from the prying eyes of the media, the U.N. is conducting "Operation Sweet Death" — a scientific means of ending human overpopulation once and for all. This goal is to be achieved by turning the underfed masses of the Third World into flesh-munching zombies who'll literally eat each other out of existence! (Just what the rest of humanity is supposed to do with the hordes of zombies thus unleashed was apparently never considered.) Naturally the experiment gets out of control. A technician investigating a chemical leak is attacked by a zombified rat (!) and horribly killed. (His partner just stands there bug-eyed, not lifting a finger to help. There's a lot of such behavior in this flick.) The dying man accidentally trips a switch that looses a cloud of toxic gas into the complex. Lickety-split the other scientists and workers are transformed into cannibalistic ghouls and start attacking one another. The project's director retreats to his office to make a tape recording of his final report. "May God forgive us for what we have produced here," he pleads, unconsciously speaking for the filmmakers as well.     The scene then abruptly switches to an unidentified European city, where eco-terrorists are holding the staff of the American consulate hostage. The terrorists demand that U.N. Hope Centers around the globe be immediately shut down or the hostages will be killed. A special Interpol SWAT team — all of four guys, who look like more window washers than commandos — ruthlessly swings into action, quickly eliminating the terrorists and freeing the captives. They can't rest on their laurels, though. The team leader, hard case Lt. Mike London (badly dubbed Piero Fumelli), tells his men that a new assignment already awaits them — they're going to New Guinea on a secret mission. In the blink of an eye they're transported there, traveling by jeep through the jungle. (Actually Spain.) But something's wrong. Unable to raise HQ on the radio, Lt. London decides to press on.     The SWAT guys, of course, are headed for the U.N. Hope Center on the island. En route they encounter a great deal of stock footage (lifted from a Japanese National Geographic-style documentary), as well as pretty TV reporter Lia (Margit Evelyn Newton) and her devoted cameraman Max (Selan Karay, who resembles a Eurotrash version of New Age composer Yanni). London wants to ditch the pair but he can't; the jungle is infested with zombies attacking anyone they encounter. Lia winds up aiding the team by smoothing the way with local natives. She does this by nonchalantly stripping down to a thong and painting herself with tribal colors, jogging barebreasted ahead of the convoy. (This gonzo scene comes out of nowhere, a ridiculously flimsy pretext to get Newton out of her clothes.) The tribe's hospitality is interrupted when their village is attacked by a horde of the living dead. Lia, Max and the commandos manage to escape, leaving the villagers to become zombie chow. But further dangers — not to mention a lot more stock footage — await the group on their trek to the secret complex.     Hell of the Living Dead is one horrendously stinky movie. It's crass and stupid, so much so that it's practically an insult to the exploitation genre — not an easy thing to achieve. Some of the zombie makeup is actually pretty good, but for the most part the flesh-hungry ghouls are represented by black people powdered to a pale hue and Caucasians made up in black face. (What's up with that?) Gorehounds will probably enjoy some of the over-the-top effects on display, but in between zombie chomps there are long stretches of the movie where not much is going on. Mattei clumsily inserts so much stock 'nature' footage that I temporarily forgot I was watching a horror film instead of a program on Animal Planet. (Marsupials, elephants, pelicans, fruit bats… All make cameos here, not to mention cranes with gobbling sounds of turkeys dubbed over them!) You certainly won't care one wit about the ultimate fate of the characters. Everyone is a complete idiot. Time and again people stand around doing nothing while others are attacked. Even after one of the SWAT team members — Zantaro, the crazy guy — discovers the only way to put the zombies down for good is to shoot 'em in the head (and tells his comrades this), the commandos continue to waste copious rounds of ammo blasting the ghouls everywhere except in the noggin. Then Zantaro himself inexplicably forgets this vital piece of info!     Aside from the jungle motif, Hell is such a rip-off of Dawn of the Dead that — in addition to characters, costumes, dialog and even blocking (!) — the memorable Goblin score for Dawn is appropriated in a desperate attempt to inject some badly needed oomph. Instead it serves only to remind the viewer how infinitely superior Romero's film is in comparison. (Though the Italian rock group does get onscreen credit here, I assume they'd rather not.) A damning indictment indeed when the best thing about a movie is something stolen from another film! Still, there are a few things here to make you laugh. The dialog contains a number of choice howlers — never quote Gandhi to Lt. London — and some of the zombies are pretty darn goofy. (One featured zombie walks like he's twirling an invisible Hoola Hoop around his waist.) There's also a vomiting scene that had me guffawing. One extremely bizarre sequence has a SWAT guy prancing around in a tutu he finds in an abandoned house. I am not kidding.

Anchor Bay, in keeping with its reputation for quality, treats Hell of the Living Dead far better than it deserves. Anamorphically enhanced for 16x9 TVs, the widescreen presentation is a tremendous improvement over any previous VHS version. The same can be said for the disc's Digital Mono audio track.     Can you believe there are Extras with this thing? An insert booklet contains 2 pages of liner notes by Fangoria editor Michael Gingold and director Scooter McCrae, who gleefully rag on the film. ("HELL... is this movie.") A 9-minute video interview with Bruno Mattei has the director discussing both Hell and Rats: Night of Terror, an early '80s "Road Warrior Meets Willard" rip-off that for some reason he seems mildly proud of. Mattei, speaking in English-subtitled Italian, comes off exactly like the disingenuous hack he is. But at least the interview segments are humorously intercut with some of the more outrageous scenes from the two films. Rounding out the disc are an image gallery of posters/production stills and the spoiler-laden theatrical trailer. 2/07/02

UPDATE The AB disc reviewed here is going OOP in 2007. On October 30, 2007 Blue Underground is reissuing the title using the same transfer and on-disc extras.

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