2nd Sitting - Zombie Creeping Flesh AKA Hell of the Living Dead

KEVS BLOG:  

Zombie Creeping Flesh AKA Hell of the Living Dead, 1980 101 mins: DPP Failed to convict

Well, here were go with one of the most (but not THE most) brilliantly inept films on the list (oh thank you director Bruno Mattai)...

We are watching the Blue Underground, region 0 NTSC dvd, anamorphic 1.85:1 ration widescreen, which I think cost me about £4 including postage on Amazon marketplace - without doubt one of the best £4s I have ever spent!!!

Jeepers, well, the original Zombie Creeping Flesh was missing about 14 minutes of footage - I saw a bootleg copy of this version and it was a bit dull, but then all the young me wanted was gore and didn't appreciate lines such as "since when did you start caring about our balls", or something like that. This version is the full dubbed US version, but the thing to remember with half of these sort of films is that often the directors may have been Italian, but they also had their eyes on the US and so shot the films with a view to english language dialogue being dubbed on - Enzo G Castellari (Bronx Warriors, Inglorious Bastards) shot most of his films with the actors speaking in English ready for American/English voice actors to overdub the lines, so let's not get too "World Cinema" on this little trip we're taking....

Anyhoo, what can I say, a film that uses extensive incidental music from other films (including some of Goblin's "Dawn of the Dead" pieces), was done on such a low budget that it seems like over a third of what you are watching is inserts from nature documentaries and mondo footage and yet runs at least 15 minutes too long; a film that seems to have been shot in about two weeks and yet still has the feel that by the end of the shoot no-one knew where the hell the story was going and maybe we'd better just end it tomorrow because we don't actually know what day it is and we might be due to start making another one; a film that has extras that reappear in different roles several times, and yet it still actually does boast a couple of nasty moments and a couple of shocking ideas and mixes genres like a cheap cocktail.... well, all I can say is that, though over long, this was probably one of the most enjoyable ones we'll see, totally ludicrous and awful, but bloody funny and entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Jay could barely believe believe what he was seeing - I could, I'd only watched it a couple of weeks before and here I was sitting through it again! Jay was convinced it was just about the most poorly made and acted film he'd ever seen but, as I pointed pointed out to him, he hasn't seen Cannibal Terror yet...

JAY'S BLOG:
Oh my lord!!!! This film is amazing, not in a 'technical' way, not in a 'display of great acting' way, not in an 'interesting storyline' way ......just in a so very very poor its incredible kind of way.
Its a weird heady mix of zombie and cannibal genres with some sort of attempt at a moral backstory to do with governments wiping out the third world of something - bit confusing and not really ever explained properly. I find it best to just try and ignore the plot in a film like this...it just gets in the way.


There seems to be a cast of about 15 people in the entire film with all them doubling up as various zombies. Whilst I am on the subject of zombies, let me embellish on that aspect of the film for a moment. For a film with the word Zombie in the title and a plot (of sorts) about zombies you would be forgiven to expect some halfway decent looking zombies. Well the zombies in this film are green......that's it, just normal people with green faces....actually there appears to be some white people who are blacked up to look like natives then 'greened' on top.


All in all very enjoyable garbage - particularly the excessive use of documentary footage which the cast are actually meant to act 'opposite' as it were. Best example would be tribal chief in real life footage wandering off camera - then someone who is clearly a different build, age and possible nationality walking onto set to give our heroine (who is naked for no particular reason) a mask that is not even similar to the one the real native is wearing in the stock footage.


I would recommend this film to anyone who loves comedy - Kev and i giggled like little girls throughout it all. One last thing - why do they make the special police force (who are fucking morons by the way) wear such tiny hats? They just kept falling off!

2 down 70 to go...