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I am absolutely fed up with the modern flood of terrible uninspired zombie movies. You'd figure that would keep me away from the glut of terrible zombie movies from the 80's too, but well, this one looks AMAZINGLY bad. Also I'm already behind on pointing stuff out. First off, I can ALMOST say boobs-by-FBI-warning. They're just barely covered by a lei, but seriously, this movie has some kind of trashy faux-piracy warning with near-porn on the side and something about punishment potentially including dismemberment and death. Then upon actually starting it, we've got the Grindhouse intro again, and on actually getting into the movie itself, we have terrible terrible production values. I can barely tell what I'm looking at here because someone REALLY doesn't get how shooting day for night works, and everyone sounds like they're dubbed over by the original Resident Evil cast. You know, where Jill had so much reverb it sounded like the microphone was jammed down her throat and the scripts were written by someone for whom English was pretty clearly a second language? Every line in this movie so far sounds about as natural as "I hope this is not Chris' blood."
Now, on the other side of the opening credits, we have a conversation at the local news paper about the local sheriff having caught a huge bass. I think we're just going for casual inconsequential dialog, but the actors in this movie can't get inconsequential across. Everything sounds like VERY IMPORTANT EXPOSITION at all times. This scene awkwardly fades to some cops playing cards, VERY IMPORTANTLY. Holy $%#@. I didn't think my respect for Shinji Mikami could get much higher, but you know the story about him being interviewed when they put out the "Director's Cut" version of Resident Evil, and asked why he didn't re-do the terrible voice acting, and he insisted it was like that on purpose as an homage to cheesy old zombie movies? OK, this here? This is clearly what he was talking about. Because it is UNCANNY. And wow. That was a heck of a zombie attack. Girl goes out to check on barking dog. Pathetic zombie looms out of darkness. Awkward cut. She kinda lays down on the floor (no zombie in sight here) with a small amount of blood coming from her mouth.
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Now here's some guy talking to... OK, what do you call this stereotype? It's not hillbillies, because this is the louisiana bayou... and Bayou Billy is more of, you know, a specific reference. This is just some girl who lives with her pappy out in a shack in the swamp. Seriously, there has to be a term for this and I should know what it is. I guess he's a reporter looking into gator attacks, so he comes back to talk to Pappy while... Bayou... Billy...etta takes a possum out of the oven. "By the way, this dinner is really good what is it?" "Possum." And then he loses his appetite. Uh... dude? You can clearly see the ENTIRE POSSUM, fur and all, right there on the platter in front of you. We can't even blame this on the director not paying attention to the script. He wrote this thing. Oh and here's zome zombie staggering around at... a time of day I'm having an exceptionally hard time placing. Or maybe he's an alien. Or maybe a zombie wo happens to be wearing a bad alien mask. This here victim girl is walking along this really groovy looking cruvy bridge/walkway/path thing though. And... again with the weird kill. OK, zombie? grabs her, she escapes, she runs further down the path, slips off and hides under it. Zombie? comes along, looks around, can't find her, gives up. She waits, climbs back up, and is... grabbed from behind because zombie? is still standing around. He wrestles her to the ground sort of, then... just kinda nuzzles her neck for a while, because, well, it's a pretty terrible mask and doesn't have a workable mouth. Then eventually we have a little mouth blood.
"What do you think made those marks on her body?" "I don't know. I mean, it could be... murder one?" Wow this dialog is all so surreal. And every single scene transition is super jarring. Especially that last one. The last word of what someone was saying was just kinda cut short as we faded out (it's always a fade out) to a band in some bar, where he was going to next. Honestly though, making fun of this just feels kinda wrong. It's like... this doesn't really qualify as a movie. It's like calling some little kid's crayon drawing a painting. I mean, the core concept is the same, and you generally use the same materials and methods, but, that's about as far as that goes. Oh and that there was a surreal pair of deaths. OK, 4 zombies slowly advance out from the trees towards this old guy who's cutting wood, and he sees them coming, and looks vaguely threatened, and just kinda... lays down on the ground so they can come over to him. He doesn't collapse, he doesn't trip, he makes no attempt to fend them off with his axe, just... weird. Then they kill his wife with a pitchfork and it's just SURREAL. She walks over to them, and stops, and then the ends of the pitchfork are sticking out of her back, and then she's lifted up, and looks mildly alarmed... notice how I didn't mention any screaming in any of that? Yeah she doesn't make a sound, or even open her mouth.
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Then we've got a non-scene of some cop or other buying some beer, with the cashier just constantly... smirking and giggling at the camera like "Oh hi! You guys are making a movie?" Which would be one thing if she weren't, you know, in it? This isn't a background character, this is her getting close-ups and all but waving at the camera. I also have to wonder if each zombie was responsible for their own makeup because wow are they inconsistent. Also I think one might be wearing some kind of wolfman mask, having really missed a planning meeting or something. And wow. Let's explain exactly what we are thinking, and what we are going to do based on those thoughts. What do you think we should do? We should take this to someone who might know what it is, like a biologist. There isn't a biologist in town. I suppose the person closest to a biologist would be the game warden. Well then we should go take this to the game warden. Let's go. I'm coming way closer to directly quoting that exchange than you're imagining, seriously.
By the way, back in like... 1989 or so? A bunch of friends of mine got together with a camcorder and shot their own cheesy monster movie. I don't think anyone involved was older than 17 or so, and they had a budget of roughly... well I guess they needed to buy one VHS tape to record it to. It looked so so much better than this movie does. And here's some random swam girl taking off her shirt to go swimming. I'm... honestly not sure if that leaves her topless or not. Oh. OK, yeah. It totally looks like she's still wearing a bra on the wide shots but going in for a closeup she just has tan lines SO pronounced that even with clearly visible nipples it takes a second to process that no really, that's not an article of clothing. Of course, there's plenty of time to process that because the camera's just kinda sitting there for a weirdly long period of time staring at her as he's just kinda... standing there in the water showing her boobs off. And then after like 2 minutes a zombie finally comes along to grab her I guess.
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Now here's some zombies gradually meandering out of the swamp to kill some people whose car broke down. A song starts playing on the radio when they first start staggering up, by the time they reach them it's over. This isn't even staggering, this is taking baby steps. And again, as these things go, their victim lies down carefully, before they really reach him, and they all just kinda cluster around and... give him gentle belly rubs until blood starts oozing out of his mouth. Now again with his girlfriend. This zombie here is just kind petting her shoulder and SMILING TO THE CAMERA. Dear gods people, you don't do that! What's amazing though is that afterwards, they start eating her. One zombie has a clearly rubber hand she's munching on. The amazing thing you have to realize though is that that hand is a PROP. This is an actual piece of evidence that the people behind this movie actually went out and bought something to film for their movie, creating an illusion that something is something else. I'm seriously impressed. That rubber hand must have taken like, 25% of their entire special effects budget.
Now here's a party boat! Some really scuzzy looking people are inside smoking, drinking, listening to bluegrass music, and playing with balloons. Again, I fully expect to hear this whole song before any zombies actually reach them. Oh. OK. We're going to cut away to two other random people making out in the trunk of a car and then.... "seeing" an "explosion" from the direction of the party boat. And... apparently this was a flashback to how the zombie thing first started, as is being relayed to our investigating characters by the girl from the car. Hey, uh... Mr. Director? I'm not an expert, but I think when you do that, what you're supposed to do is have them show up, and start talking to her, and then cut away to the flashback. Maybe with some narration to carry you through. I mean, that's what I'd have done... and I'm pretty sure it's what, you know, anyone else who has ever made a movie ever would have done. I could point out a thousand or so examples if you'd like some time.
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Anyway, we haven't had a good gradual attack by zombies in a while, so let's do one of them. Gee, watch how the camera just zooms way way in on this girl's wet white T-shirt as she's talking to someone. Classy. And now here's us... skipping a chance to show guys shooting at zombies, instead having what I guess passes for our core cast pile into a truck and drive around while having some exposition. Don't know which characters I'm talking about? I don't really either. I believe they just stopped off to grab Pappy there, so I guess there's here, and Bayou Billyetta, and a couple other people, but they no camera ever really gets anywhere near the truck, this is just a bunch of long distance shots and disembodied voices. OK, now they've gotten out and are running to hide in some randomly occurring house. Uh... I don't really know where they were going, or why they stopped, or why there's zombies around. I don't think there's any narrative flow here, we just kinda wanted to have a proper zombies trying to bang their way into a house scene. I mean, immediately on getting inside, they start talking about how maybe they can make a break for the truck. The truck you just got out of so you could run over to hide in this house. Yeah.... so anyway at this point everyone is dead except for Bayou Billyetta and that guy I guess is a reporter. Also, I think maybe this movie is actually in Florida rather than Louisiana. Someone mentioned something about fleeing to Georgia. So yeah, those two get in a rowboat, and get attacked by zombies, and... fail to fight them off, and pass out for some odd reason... and for some other odd reason are not killed, so they just drift down the river until the sheriff finds them, asking about, oh right, the game warden was the 4th member of their group though. And... I THINK they're trying to go for some kind of "it was all a dream, or was it?" thing maybe? It totally doesn't work if they're trying that, and I'm really just going by the fact that they were briefly asleep, and then we've got this arbitrary final shot of a zombie rising up from the water like we should be surprised.
Special features here include a cast reunion... which is 3 random people who were kind of in there somewhere sitting around, vaguely recalling stuff about working on it, which ends with them all talking about how no, none have acting careers and cutting out on one breaking an awkward silence with "It really isn't a good movie at all." There's also a director's commentary track which has some interesting tidbits. The scenes that seem REALLY badly dubbed? Hahaha no. That would require them to do some kind of post-production. What they did there, since they didn't know you could have microphone that weren't right by the camera, is they recorded all the dialog in advance, then played it over a loudspeaker while filming, so the mics could pick it up and the actors could lip sync to it. Wow. Also- The scene where Bayou Billyetta serves up a possum? Real cooked possum. Actors didn't touch it but the director ate it afterwards. Then it's just a lot of "we had no money, didn't know what we were doing, and didn't know not to double space the script, so yeah, there's a lot of filler scenes and stuff not exposing right." and specifically calling out snarky web reviewers for getting stuff wrong, like how no, film doesn't get grainier with age, and you can't clean it up when restoring it, and run times varying from country to country aren't always scenes getting cut, sometimes it's just varying frame rates between NTSC and PAL.
