Hell Of The Living Dead (1980)

You know what really gets to me? I mean, something that makes my teeth grind, my head hurt and that muscle in my left shoulder going up to my neck twinge?

A movie that pretends to be something else.

I'll explain: say you're walking through your friendly neighborhood movie rental place (I know they don't exist anymore but just go with me on this) and you spy a copy of The Magnificent Ambersons. You're not feeling in a particularly high-brow mode so you pass on it. A few titles down, you find another DVD with scantily-clad vixens on the cover holding knives and covered in blood and it has the title Super Happy Bloodbath Vixens on Probation. You grab it up at warp speed (naturally, because I know you), rent it, take it home, pop it in your player and it starts...

AND IT'S THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS!

Oh sure, the beginning and end credits have been changed to some PowerPoint-kind of mock-up of the cover, but it's still the same movie you passed on before you got a hold of what promised to be a full-out, blood-drenched, psycho-sexual roller coater. Instead, you're stuck with Joseph Cotten and Dolores Costello marveling at Amberson Mansion and its hot and cold running water.

"Re-Packaging". It happens all the time with movies that no one would rent or watch otherwise. We've all fallen victim to it at least one time or another.

And do you wanna know which country is the biggest culprit of this deceptive practice? No, not the US of A (though we are close)... it's Italy!

Yep. La Italia. Hard to believe, isn't it? And it's not like the Boot Country doesn't make enough movies on its own, but any way they can squeeze a little more dinero out of an old cinematic property is good enough for them. A lot of their directors do it quite often (well, maybe not your Vittorio DeSicas or Federico Fellinis as much) but none moreso than the creators of those grand old standbys of moviedom: the Zombie Flicks.

I mean, how hard can it be to make a zombie movie? Seriously: just get a bunch of friends together, slap some scabs and makeup on 'em, splash around some fake blood, have 'em stagger all over and chase people, eat some calves brains or something - there. Zombie movie.

Of course, leave it to Bruno Mattei (with a little uncredited direction help from Claudio Fragasso) to screw up something as easy as that with the simple act of "committing it to film". You don't believe me? Need I suggest you back that thing up and re-read my past opines on Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws or Terminator 2: Shocking Dark? This man took delight in making unofficial sequels to series that didn't ask for his involvement to begin with. Even in series where any gun can play, so to speak.

He even goes the same route he did in his past films and depends on stock footage from other films to pad out this one (here he uses New Guinea native footage from the 1972 film La vallée). Atta boy, Bruno....

Anyway, as much as it pains me to do so, here we go with the undead plot: after a chemical leak at a factory in Papua, New Guinea turns its staff into flesh-eating zombies, a four-man commando squad led by Mike London (José Gras, aka: Robert O'Neil) are sent to investigate. They run into a TV news crew led by celebrity reporter Lia Rousseau (Margit Evelyn Newton), who are after the same story, but when they discover that the entire country has been overrun by zombies, what are the chances of them getting the message across? Pretty darned slim, seeing as how the dead are ready to chow down on every living thing they come across! Their only hope is to scream loud, run fast, be smarter than the dead guys and shoot 'em all between the eyes (not at the chest or guts, you dummies!!). Will the living people all survive and quash the undead? Yeah, right - that's as much a possibility as Michael Dukakis for President....

Of course when it comes to re-packaging, not only are the Italians past-masters of the craft, Hell of the Living Dead is a textbook example of how it's done. because with Hell of the Living Dead, we also get the same exact thing shoved in another package and handed right back to us as Virus (the original Italian title), Apocalipsis caníbal (Spain), Die Hölle der lebenden Toten (West Germany), Fate tous... zontanous (Greece), Hell of the Living Death (Belgium), Inferno dei morti viventi (Italy...again), L'enfer des morts vivants (France), Night of the Zombies (USA), Virus cannibale (France...again), Zombi 4 (USA...again), Zombi 5: Ultimate Nightmare (Italy...a 3rd time!), Zombi enantion kannivalon (Greece...again), Zombie Creeping Flesh (UK) and the all-purpose title of Zombie Inferno.

See? It's The Magnificent Ambersons all over again - and in some cases, more than once! And is it me or must Italy be really stupid, having the same movie thrown right back at them three times in a row???

Veterans of Mattei flicks should know what to expect with this: no characters of any kind (just victims), variable makeup effects (from bad to worse), lots of zoom shots (to prove the camera guy wasn't asleep most of the time), occasional female nudity (to keep some interest in the proceedings), and badly set-up scenes by the truckload which serve only to lead into clumsy stumbling zombie attacks. It doesn't take a Hitchcock or a Spielberg to make a zombie flick, but it does take someone who knows how to build suspense, compose a shot, arrange his actors and layer the intensity to make a film that earns scares instead of coming up with cheap shocks. Bruno Mattei is NOT that someone.

I think we all agree that it also doesn't take an actor to be in a movie like this: only someone who can convincingly scream and look halfway believable when being chased, chomped and devoured by zombies. We get NONE of that that, but we do get a lot of trademark Mattei Z-grade actors who half-heartedly squeak their way to a grisly end.

It's funny, though: of the actors we're subjected to, we get two types - the aforementioned half-hearted squeakers and the hysterical over-the-top types who are hysterical and over-the-top at such an annoying pace that their zombie-riffic death are a blessing. At least our lead actress Newton gets naked so that we can appreciate the generosity afforded her by Mother Nature. In terms of acting, though, Newton affects the same wide-eyed stare in all instances to suggest Bo Derek's acting expertise in Bolero. Of course, Bo got naked a lot, too. Maybe John Derek was an uncredited on-set tech advisor?

You don't go into a movie name Hell of the Living Dead and expect the latest from Brian DePalma or Steven Soderbergh. In this instance, what you see is not only what you get, it's all you get. But is it a good zombie movie?

Well, hold up a minute there, bucko. Let's look at it like this: at least the zombies aren't an after-thought like they were in The Beyond and Zombie Holocaust. They are quite literally all over the place here, to the point that normal humans seem the shocking rarity.

There is a tad of social commentary at least, which is kind of shocking, but at least Mattei and co-writers José María Cunillés, Rossella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso give us an allegory that if we don't keep the Third World countries under check, they will overrun us. Interesting.

However, for any of you suggesting the deep cutting social weight of 1968's Night of the Living Dead or 1979's Dawn of the Dead, you won't find anything so deep and multi-leveled here.

If you're looking for the sharp wit and cynical humor of 1985's Return of the Living Dead or 1973's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, you won't find any of that here, either.

But if you're looking for clumsiness, ineptitude, cheap-jack production values, uneven-to-lousy acting and some of the worst red-dye-and-corn-syrup effects this side of Weasels Rip My Flesh, you're not only covered, but covered with interest.

This is kind of a back-handed compliment, but throughout his career at least Bruno Mattei stayed admirably consistent. The same level of bad quality and poor direction remained from his first movie (Armida, il dramma di una sposa) to his last (Zombies: The Beginning). and there smack-dab in the middle of his filmography was maybe not the diamond in the rough but just another rough patch in a career filled with them.

Hell of the Living Dead, if it did absolutely nothing else, gave all of us an example of just what a movie had to be like in order to be considered the gem of the Video Nasty List, and not even the brightest jewel, either. That title belongs to Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust.

Poor Bruno: even though he made it onto one of the most notorious banned movie lists ever, he still was like Bob Uecker at a Baseball All-Stars Dinner. No respect.

Not that a film like Hell of the Living Dead deserves any respect. A bite to the jugular, maybe, but that's it.

Then just kick it right out the top window of Amberson Mansion.