IMDb Bottom 100 Review - 040 Zombie Nightmare

Zombie and/or monster movies are a pretty frequently recurring theme in these bottom dwelling movies that make my current playlist of doom. I have assumed from day one, that the reason for this trend is, that it doesn’t require a lot from the writers, producers, actors, cinematographers, camera and equipment and even us, the viewers. Or me in this case. And that assumption hasn’t been proved wrong yet. The few movies from this list I’ve not actively hated, have been attempts, however misplaced they may be, at writing actual story not involving some badly made up idiot trying to murder people for whatever reason. Tonight’s feature proves my assumption is based on sound and empirical proof. So if you’re still wondering if I’m right, please join me in taking a critical of less than enthusiastic look at…

Immediately after being raised from the dead, he is handed his legacy - a baseball bat.

Zombie nightmare (1986)

God damn zombies. I should probably admit at this point, that I’m not a huge fan of them in movies. Yes, I said it. All the more reason watching these fucking abominations takes its toll on me. It’s mostly the slow walking zombies that annoy me. The fast paced stuff from the likes of 28 days later or Zombieland are fine. Perhaps I haven’t watched enough of the classics to really appreciate it. But in this movie, the one zombie present just came off as extremely stupid. Everybody around him didn’t exactly help, I’ll grant him that. At least they didn’t go balls to the walls on make up. So there’s that.

Mario impersonator and two random dudes opts to bring corpse of son to mother's lawn instead of medical facility. That's a felony.

It’s a pretty simple revenge movie when the layers of pretension and ill-placed ambition has been peeled away. Some moron is ploughed down by a car full of teenagers, and his mom, and some store keeper with an Italian accent that would make Mario and Luigi shit their wrench wielding pants, immediately takes him to the local witch slash voodoo aficionado, instead of a hospital because what the fuck is the point of modern science when you can have an undead son roaming the streets instead. Immediately he returns to undead life, this wife beater wearing growler does the only logical thing: goes on a hate fueled vendetta. Apparently he retained a full memory of all 5 people in the car, and instantly knew the names and residences. Voodoo has come a long way from when I was a kid.

This fucking kid. I know he was supposed to be a douche, but I feel like he didn't have to act much. I hated his face so much.

But it’s not as simple as just picking off 5 kids. It never is, is it? The police gets involved, and a young ambitious detective tries his damndest to solve, what appears to be, murders of inhuman proportions. His captain tries to dissuade him, until he suddenly realises the murders bears the mark of the very same witch woman that did something to him years ago, and he smells the sweet sweet scent of revenge. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a vendetta twofer! As zombie-son murders his way through the 5 obnoxious teenagers, preventing rapes and other mishaps along the way (crime fighting zombie? That’ll be the day), Captain Revenge picks up the witch and drives to the cemetery where everything culminates in a showdown the likes of which Wyatt Earp would’ve tipped his blood soaked stetson to. Speaking of Tombstone, a guy with a minor, but vital role, was one of the producers of the movie of that name. Yes. Captain is dragged into the grave with the zombie and the witch is shot in the process. Young detective is left, possibly more confused than ever, with zero answers to anything. But at least the 5 teens got what was coming to them! Their hair-dos alone would’ve sent me on a killing spree that would’ve sent Charles Manson back to the drawing board.

Beautiful! This scene was emotional for me. Tears streaming, I thanked a random deity for their benevolence in granting my wish.

This is one of those movies, where you’ll recognize an actor or a name from the crew because a lot of these assholes are the kind of assholes who just barely didn’t make it big. With one, glorious, exception. I’ll get back to that in a second. We see the likes of Tia Carrera and the dude who wrote Another 48 Hours among the actors, and a director whose claim to fame was producing lewd movies with the word ‘sex’ in the title. ‘Sex Family Robinson’ was one of his early endeavors. You can almost smell the sweat soaked suede furniture from the title alone. Be all that as it may, the one exception to all these miscreants is of course the captain, played by none other than Adam West. Now that name alone should fuel you with mirth beyond your wildest dreams. Not only did he play the Batman of the 60s that Christian Bale allegedly based his Batman performance on (don’t bother researching this. I’m a movie reviewer. Trust me.) but he also does an amazing stint in Family Guy as Mayor Adam West. I’m not sure what on earth West figured he was doing in this movie, playing a tough love Captain with a shady past and a mean streak that could have made Biff Tannen sit up and take notice. Perhaps, as we so often see down here in the boondocks, it was all about the Benjamins. P Diddy would agree with me, that it’s often about those. Thankfully Adam West ditched the shitty horror genre and gifted us laughs and joy instead of yawns and accidental razor cuts.

The typical Voodoo witch getup. What the fuck was anybody thinking in putting that poor woman on screen looking like this?

I suppose I have to give a little credit where it’s due. This movie was pretty stupid and in usual style, what it lacked in story progression and character development, it more than made up for in prolonged pointless shots and montages that served precisely zero purpose. The credit I wanted to give was, that the overall quality of the movie’s look wasn’t completely horrible. The content was stupid and shallow and lacked any kind of redeeming features. But the picture quality was surprisingly good for a low budget subpar production from the mid-80s. I hated every single character, I think. Especially what I suppose we could call the main antagonist. A skinny motherfucker with the most annoying hair since Kurt Russell. I wanted to throw rocks into his eyes within seconds of him appearing on screen, which might be a new record. He got stabbed with the thick end of a baseball bat, which in itself is pretty fucking impressive. A baseball bat, if you would care to remember, is round and pretty blunt, especially at the end with which you hit balls. Still, it was pushed through his sternum with wanton ease by the vengeful zombie. I can’t claim I smiled or chuckled, because I was ready to gouge my eyes out at this point, but it definitely was the best moment of the film.

I don't have a lot of words that can adequately describe what is happening here. I just don't.

It’s rough to watch movies where so little happens that has any interest or redeeming qualities. I guess you’d think I’d be used to it by now, but it just doesn’t happen. I’m not gonna put this movie all the way at the bottom of my so far 60 watched movies. Lord knows there are plenty of candidates for the 10 most obnoxious and annoying flicks, and this, while definitely stupid and a waste of many many people’s time, was somewhere in the bland and featureless middle. It was 80s for sure, but it could just as easily have been 90s or even made in the last decade, by people didn’t know what a story was, until they clawed their way out of feral lives among wolves in their early twenties. I can’t fathom how nobody who reads these scripts or directs people enacting them, can’t see, that so much shit is lacking to make it coherent or interesting. Like jumps on story or shit the characters do that just only makes sense because we, the viewers, are able to understand, that it doesn’t make sense. One of these days, I’m gonna write a movie that fills in blanks in all of these tropes. A movie that does the opposite of every shitty flick that doesn’t make sense. And has one of every character always lacking in other movies. One of these days...

Bonus Adam West. The most Adam West person on the planet. He didn't Adam West as much as I've seen Adam West Adam West before. But you can't expect too much I guess.