Revenge of the Revenant Review 20: The one made from actual found footage

 

Title: Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies, Virus, Zombie Creeping Flesh, etc.

What Year?: 1980 (Spanish release)/ 1983 (US release)

Classification: Ripoff/ Evil Twin/ Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m back with one more entry for this feature before the end of my monthly obsessive cycle. Because irony is dead, it happens that last time, I reviewed Hard Rock Zombies and ended ranting that it was the worst movie I had covered here, while alluding to the possibility that there might be worse to come. Now, the time is here, as it turned out that the one I really had in mind was already incoming, and there was no way I was going to wait to get it out of the way. So here is Hell of the Living Dead, the one movie that could break the rating scale just for being bad.

Our story begins in a nuclear power plant when an inspection finds a rat, literally. Somehow, the irradiated rodent kills and zombifies the workers who discover it, unleashing an outbreak that quickly wipes out the crew. We then jump to a group of radicals trying to stop abuse of the island nation’s native population, and a SWAT-style team that promptly wipes them out. For reasons that definitely aren’t worth trying to sort out, the same team end up escorting a pair of reporters who have been caught in the spreading epidemic. The pair turn out to be a cameraman with a suicidal dedication to his craft and an enlightened lady who knows from long experience that she can make friends with the natives by taking her clothes off. The adventure takes them through a landscape of jungle stock footage and lame anthropological films that will end back at the plant, where all will be revealed… and if you can figure out any of it, you have missed the point.

Hell of the Living Dead was a Spanish/ Italian coproduction (see City of the Walking Dead and Horror Express) directed by Bruno Mattei. The film starred Italian actress/ model Margit Evelyn Newton as the reporter/ anthropologist Lia, with a supporting cast that include Jose Lluis Fonoll of Wheels on Meals. The movie was filmed mainly in Spain, with extensive use of stock footage to represent its stated setting of New Guinea. The score was credited to Goblin, fresh off Dawn of the Dead; the music is believed to have been in fact reused from that and the horror/ sci fi film Alien Contamination. It was first released in Spain in late 1981 and in Italy the following year. Hell of the Living Dead appears to be a direct translation of its Italian title, while English reference works like The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia more often refer to it as Night of the Zombies; its additional title Virus is the same as a better-known Japanese film also from 1980. The movie is mentioned by Max Brooks in Closure, Limited as an inspiration for his zombie series.

For my personal experiences, I didn’t really catch wind of this one until I read Max Brooks’ citation, though I figured out very quickly that I had heard of it previously. I looked it up not long after, and found it largely interchangeable with other movies that are no better or worse. The one thing that made it memorable at all was its completely surreal cannibalization of obviously preexisting footage (apparently mainly from a documentary with the charming title “Island of the Cannibals” filmed in the old, savage days of 1974). I could easily have recognized this as a standard trick of much older jungle movies, such as the semi-lost pornographic film Ngagi which I’ve had a mind to write about since long before anything on this blog. Even so, it stood out to me as exceptional in its brazenness and the strange results. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of a child’s collage, pasted together crudely with limited understanding and a deeper naivete toward the source material. I thought of it on and off in the course of this feature, and finally decided to get to it as I considered a lineup to end it with. I include it not just for its own odd qualities, but as representative of many more I passed over as not good or weird enough to be interesting.

Going back in for this review, the first thing I realized was that the jungle movie footage was the least of this movie’s thefts. Almost from the start, it flatly copies Romero far more blatantly than Zombie/ Zombi 2 ever did, complete with the music and the blue-clad (and blindingly white) commandos. The two together easily supply the best moments of the movie, notably a second-act sequence in an infested plantation house; it feels like watching Dawn of the Dead, until you remember you could be watching Dawn of the Dead. Things get jarring when they get to scenes with the natives, which I realized actually contain a lot less appropriated footage than I thought. That, in turn, means that the filmmakers went to the trouble of building village sets and hiring a substantial number of people of color just to keep up the jungle conceit. The colonial baggage gets heavier with the big “reveal” that the zombies are somehow part of a population control experiment, which might be tolerated as an editorial if anyone had unpacked the racial component of that vintage panic. Then there’s an extra cringe a purportedly unscripted “cringe” moment when a commando starts dancing to “The Old Folks At Home” (aka “Swannee River”), an actual minstrel show standard. Per the lore, it’s a reference to Singing In The Rain, but it’s still the last thing a movie like this needs.

Then, of course, there are the zombies themselves. For anyone as versed in the genre as I am, it would be easy to write off the lot of them. In fact, there are some effective and even creative moments, albeit in proportion to what the law of averages would dictate. For the most part, the revenants are in the no-tech style, except for frequent shots of faces or limbs selectively chewed or rotted away. The best sequence by a wide margin is an early attack where a zombie child lunches his father, actually improving on the Romero scene it obviously imitates. (By comparison, the opening rat attack, with its shades of Dead Alive, is just as well left to the imagination.) There’s several more effective moments in the plantation house, particularly the discovery of an elderly matron and a cat where cats definitely should not be. The finale at the power plant has some more good action/ gore sequences, with the exception of the comically bad death of the main character. Things improve with the inevitable epilogue of zombies on the mainland, ending with an unsettling shot of a pack silently closing in from behind a man as he watches his lady friend get eaten.

In all this, there is truly “one scene” that seemed strangest to me from my previous viewing, a scene that baffles and vexes me even now… and it’s one guy talking. A little past the hour mark, a “native” addresses what appears to be the United Nations, interspersed with random images of tribal life, poverty and civil disorder to represent the “outbreak”. The nearly nonsensical speech is obviously dubbed, in an accent that seems more Midwest than anything else. Given the nature of the rest of the movie, it’s very safe to assume the well-groomed guy in the Black Power hat had no idea he was going to “appear” in this movie. What I can’t figure out is that there’s several establishing shots of the meeting chamber, complete with the flags of different nations at the various seats… and it’s empty. These are the kinds of moments that turn a routine knockoff like this into a surreal spectacle, far more than any of its already egregious violence and gore.

In conclusion, all I can add is that I have given this movie an “unrated” rating simply because if I really rated it by comparison with other movies I have covered in this feature, it simply wouldn’t be here. Even compared to the likes of City of the Walking Dead, this is a low point for the genre, or would be if there weren’t many more that were as bad or worse. What makes it worthy of note, at least as a representative case, is that even at this level, there are sparks of imagination and outright audacity, however unintentionally. This is the true power of the genre for those who love it, that even a very bad zombie movie can still entertain.