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Director: Bruno Mattei (with
additional material by Claudio Fragasso)
Screenplay: Claudio Fragasso,
José María Cunillés and Rossella Drudi
Cast: Margit Evelyn Newton (as
Lia Rousseau); Franco Garofalo (as Zantoro); Selan Karay (as Vincent); José
Gras (as Lt. Mike London); Gabriel Renom (as Pierre)
Synopsis: A zombie outbreak occurs in Papua New Guinea due to a failed
experiment of an organisation called Hope. Can a group of soldiers, on a secret
mission to investigate the source of the cause, and a news reporter (Newton) they encounter by accident
survive as the end of mankind starts to take place?
Another Italian genre film but of
an different tone entirely. There are those known for their style like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and there are those who use a lot of stock footage and
make films that rip off Predator (1987)
and Jaws (1975). There are those who
make films like Troll 2 (1990) too.
Two such individuals in the later camps collaborated here, Mattei notorious for films like Strike Commando (1987) and Rats:
Night of Horror (1984), while Fragasso,
who contributes additional scenes and story ideas, directed Troll 2. Hell of the Living Dead is one of the imitators who came about after
Fulci's Zombi (1979) did so well internationally, itself an unofficial
sequel cashing in on George A. Romero's
Dawn of the Dead (1978). The film
also known as Zombie Creeping Flesh
in the UK is a peculiar stew of bits and pieces if there ever was one. The
zombie outbreak is caused by a usual convention in these films, human beings
messing about with science, but the result film is a hodgepodge of
environmental concerns and a sociological travelogue mixed with a gore fest.
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Mattei has used pre-existing
footage a few times in his career. His shark film Cruel Jaws (1995) is an infamous example of this, as Scream Factory found out when they
realised they couldn't release it in the USA recently on physical media, not only having footage
from other Italian shark movies like Enzo
G. Castellari's The Last Shark (1981),
but footage from the Jaws franchise
they were all riding the coattails of. What's novel in the case of Hell of the Living Dead is that its use
of a great deal of nature footage, originally from the Barbet Schroeder film La
Vallée (1972), and other materials, from the likes of tribal customs to a
United Nations conference, actually gives the film a hypnotic quality it
probably doesn't deserve. Its origin was a movie with a greater scale of ideas
that had to be made possible to film on a lower budget, with Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi helping to rewrite the
film to make this possible, and despite the patchwork mess it is, this footage
manages to be disarmingly fascinating by itself and in context of the film. It
helps the nature footage is very well shot, from an entirely different source
admittedly, seeing animals far from native to my own British shores that
completely disinterested in the end of the world taking place around them. The
ethological footage of tribes used as well is both engrossing and evokes the
infamous Mondo documentaries from Italy from the Sixties.
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Strangely the film manages to be
both ramshackle but also create an appropriately apocalyptic mood to scenes.
What you have to bear in mind viewing is that it'll easily betray its moodiness
with silly dialogue or something schlocky a moment immediately after. A set up of
a desolate town is appropriately ominous, but then the film resorts to a man
dressed as a priest with an entire bottle of ketchup having exploded on his
face to scare a cast member. It's strange as well this film, where the
production had to cobble together an entire plot from material at hand, is the
only zombie movie I've seen to directly bring up a global nature to the plot,
where even if they are dubbed in the same broad way that appears in many
Italian genre films, there's a Third World leader given an entire monologue
about his people being mercilessly slaughtered by the idiocy of man. Footage of
tribes moving on mass, representing tribes fleeing the zombie outbreak, is
spliced in-between him and the result is jarring in how serious it is in
comparison to what the film actually is.
As a zombie film it's just as
strange. Mattei doesn't skimp away
from the gore, or should that be Fragasso
who filmed additional gore scenes, and there's plenty of exceptionally silly
moments too to feast on. There are no qualms about a young child becoming a
zombie and munching on his own father's guts, but this is also a film where a
soldier puts on a green tutu over his head and a top hat in the middle of
investigating a house that may be contaminated with zombies. The zombies
themselves are merely cannon fodder, easy to escape background figures whose
ability to kill anyone is dependent on the plot deciding a character has to die
on a whim. The film itself is unpredictable as to what can happen, and that
doesn't even take into consideration the odd characters we follow. From a gruff
team leader to two eccentrics, everyone is a stereotype but with the English
dub's more absurd dialogue they become an amusing group to travel with through
the cheese of the narrative.
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Technical
Details:
The English language dub has a
drastic effect on the entertainment value of the film, where you appreciate the
silliness of the crass dialogue from male characters about the opposite sex or
the way the dialogue is spoken aloud with immense exaggeration. This has some
of the cheesiest line readings for an Italian genre film, bold for me to
suggest as cheesy English dubs are as common as good ones in this area, and it
befits the absurdity of the material itself without becoming intentionally
ironic.
The music by Goblin is cherry picked from Dawn
of the Dead and a personal favourite, Luigi
Cozzi's Contamination (1980). The
production was nearly sued for this, but this proved to be another advantage
for the film as it provides an atmosphere a film would rarely have. Rather than
a tin-eared, terrible score, the music by Goblin is a full sounding, elaborate
series of prog rock instrumentals that gives the mishmash of content greater
focus. It many ways this saves the film's bacon from merely being a jumble of
absurdity, the high quality of the music bringing some artistry to what is a
shambling mess.
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Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
Hell of the Living Dead the more you prod it is a perplexing
creation. It's not the most extreme example of a film cobbled together from a
messy production, but it's still an experience to sit through it. It's a film
where it can turn on a dime from a moment of seriousness to characters joking
around. There's no clear geographical map to where it's plot takes place in,
even if it's supposed to be New Guinea, a mishmash of the US, Third World
countries and the inevitable continental personality from its Italian actors
being played out on screen, invaded by seventies nature documentary footage set
to synth backed progressive rock from other Italian produced horror films. The
zombies themselves are merely placeholders for the stranger incidents to take
place, an environmental message scrambled between gore and silly dialogue. The
ending, or at least the end for the characters before the epilogue, is almost Lucio Fulci in how the survivors are
pulled to an inevitable fate, abrupt as if the film has willingly let itself
end in spite of its characters' narratives before setting up a last minute
shock scene.
Plus there's the dubbing and its
funny broadness. The cramming of ethological footage with scenes, far from
progressive, of natives running around or in one case eating the maggots
festering off a loved one's corpse evoking a sensory overload. The fact Margit Evelyn Newton, to interact with a
tribe so the soldiers can enter a village safely, has to strip off at one
point, and go ahead naked and painted up with the same aesthetic design of
professional wrestler Kamala, head
shots of her looking concerned spliced with scenes of native funeral customs
real or faked. There's the fact one of the soldiers figures out shooting the
zombies in the head is more effective early on but still has to explain this to
everyone, even his superiors, over and over again. Then there's legitimately
creepy moments like a cat appearing from an unexpectedly enclosed place that
still adds to the oddness of the film despite their effectiveness because of
how unexpected they are. Hell of The
Living Dead gets on the list merely for how much of a fever dream it is in
production and content for a Zombi 2
cash-in.
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Personal Opinion:
Definitely not in the top
categories of Italian horror cinema, but still strangely compelling. Watched
off an old VHS rip version on DVD where the sound occasionally lags it comes
off even more entertaining, something outside of good taste but memorable at
least.
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