| "I have a few
DVDs. No, really, I do."
That's part of
my sig file over at the B-Movie
Message Board. Each sentence is a link to a different
DVD cataloging site, the DVD
Profiler listing (one long list) and
DVD Aficianado (which has the nifty feature of defining
your own categories). As of this writing, "a few"
is 660. Have I watched them all? Oh, hell no.
So when one of
the regulars at the BMMB mentioned he was in a similar situation,
and was therefore working his way through his collection in
alphabetical order to watch his neglected discs, I thought,
"Hm. That's a good idea." But Contrarian that I
am, I decided that if I were to do it, it would be in reverse
order. And so begins both an odd journey in one man's collecting
habits and an experiment in organized randomness.
|
It's moments
like this when you really start re-thinking swell ideas like watching
all your movies in reverse order and then writing them up. A venture
like that should really be inaugurated by something like Zu Warriors
from the Magic Mountain, which I still dearly love, but I watched
that for the umpteenth time a couple of weeks ago. No, this is really
for movies I haven't seen yet (or have yet to experience on DVD),
so, as luck would have it, I get to start with a Lucio Fulci/Bruno
Mattei/oh my god not again/Italian gut muncher mess.
Well, the
site is called The Bad Movie Report (and there are also times
I regret that bit of my impetuous youth, too). And, like
ripping off a Band-aid, there is no better way than to just grab
it and pull as quickly as possible, so here goes...
As you might
presume from the title, the subject of this picture is zombies.
Lots of 'em, running around and eating the living. This is put in
motion when some really inept terrorist types steal a biological
agent from some equally inept military types. How inept are the
participants? Let's see. The toxic agent (codenamed, with admirable
succinctness, Death One) is in a small lockbox, carried by two incredibly
ineffectual scientist types (who, we later discover, got their Ph.D's
in Excessive Whininess and Applied Uselessness). They plan to hand
off this box to a helicopter which is being guarded by a single
guy - in civilian clothes - with a shotgun. The terrorists, on the
other hand, simply drive a van into this high security top-secret
location and make with the bang-bang. After a half-hearted and low-budget
firefight, the lone surviving terrorist, carrying the purloined
case, runs not back to his van, but in the opposite direction, across
an open field and into some woods.
Apparently
one of the people killed in this opening sequence had the sole neuron
in the entire cast of characters.
Soldiers
take off in the helicopter and hunt down the terrorist, managing
to put a bullet completely through the case and the vial it contains,
infecting the bad guy. He then checks into a local hotel (this is,
incidentally all happening in the Phillippines), and starts turning
into a walking pustule, and then a murderous zombie. The Army swoops
in, gathers up everyone in the hotel (and, we are led to believe,
kills them all), and loads the dead-all-over-again terrorist into
an incinerator, over the protests of the lead scientist, who has
at least seen Return of the Living Dead. Intriguingly, the
filmmakers don't use the full set-up from that picture (though they've
ripped off at least three movies in the first twenty minutes) but
have a flock of birds fly through the clouds of dead terrorist ash.
Well, sooner
than you can say "How handy," three soldiers on leave
fall in with an RV full of college students (their license plate
should have read KN9-FODR), who, I guess, are touring the fleshpots
of the Phillippines and have consequently run afoul of a flock of
zombie sparrows, leaving one of them seriously hurt - and infected.
As there's no hospital for miles, they drive to a nearby hotel -
naturally (and thriftily) the hotel the dead terrorist was holed
up in. "What happened to the hotel?" asks one soldier,
echoing our thoughts, as the building has inexplicably become overgrown
with vines in the brief time since we've last seen it.
You can
write the movie from there, and chances are you would have done
a better job. I'm not even sure if the characters have names. We
get not one, but two sequences where an actress walks into
an obviously deserted building and wanders around calling "Is
anybody there? We need some water! Is anybody here? Hello?"
over and over for several minutes, until she finds some zombies
to attack her. Some of these zombies can talk, some can run, and
almost all exhibit the most amazing facility for hiding until a
character walks near, leading in one instance to an almost Keaton-esque
segment where one of our military types will fight off a zombie
and backpedal away from it, only to have another zombie jump out
from its hiding place three steps later. Over and over again. Adding
a rinky-tink piano and a bit of speed ramping would have ensured
a boffo reaction from the audience.
Though the
usual Italian gut-muncher rules are in effect - any character seems
to be fair game - the zombies can at least be put down with fairly
normal means. Anyone trying to do the traditional two-shots-to-the-torso-then-one-to-the-head
isn't going to get past the first two shots. Ooh! Ooh! Did I mention
that for some reason this abandoned hotel has a box of weapons and
ammunition in the basement? When you start thinking that a movie
like House
of the Dead
has better and more reasonable plotting, you begin to suspect
that you've accidentally stumbled into a lower level of Hell than
you'd previously assumed.
Yes, this
is the movie with the infamous flying zombie head. Everybody always
brings up the flying zombie head. That sequence lasts perhaps twenty
seconds. Don't watch it just for the flying zombie head. That would
be like watching WIld WIld West
just to see Salma Hayek's naked backside.The typical person
who seeks out this sort of thing isn't going to remember anything
but the gore scenes, anyway, so the fact that the plot walks out,
slamming the door behind it, ten minutes into the movie is no big
loss. The rest of us who prefer things like, I dunno, plot
or a soupcon of characterization might find ourselves in another
(and particularly scabrous) boat entirely.
I
can't really say the acting is bad, either. In what seems to be
a standard for Italian horror flicks, the dubbing is so horrendous,
I could be watching the Royal Shakespeare Company performing my
favorite play, and this dubbing would still make it look like Zombi
3. Not as sweaty, most likely, but just as bad.
Speaking
of which, my favorite line. Dr. Useless to Col. Psychopath: "When
the Army asked us to work on Death One, they should have warned
us of the dangers!" So... just calling it Death One
wasn't warning enough? What did you think it was? A new malt liquor?
It's hard
to pick out who was responsible for which parts of this movie -
rumor has it Fulci is responsible for, at most, fifteen minutes
of the finished flick, and I give him credit for the few effective
bits in the movie - for instance, in the first "Is anybody
there?" sequence, a surreal, dreamlike - well, okay, nightmarish
- image that is genuinely chilling precedes the zombie attack. I'll
mark Fulci on that one. Mattei's reputation speaks for itself, so
he gets the roomfull of scientists trying to find an antidote for
Death One by scribbling on pieces of paper and a dry erase marker
board. Because medicine doesn't really need all those test tubes
or fancy equipment, you know.
It's a toss-up
as to who is responsible for the flying zombie head. I guess I'll
cede that one over to Mattei, 'cause he needs a break.
If there
is one thing Zombi 3 has proven to me, it's that I don't
really need 660 DVDs that badly. It's going into the box marked
Used Disc Store, in the company of others which I'm sure will be
joining it in the course of this enterprise. Though Shriek
Show has done an admirable job creating a DVD for a very marginal
title, I'm never going to see this movie again. Ever. And I have
absolutely no use for it. Seriously. I hear a lot of "so bad
it's good" defenses, but nuh uh....This is merely so bad it's
tedious. You can rip off movies, but you have to do something special
with your stolen goods, or what you produce is a pale photocopy
of a photocopy .. washed-out, dreary, and possessing no message
or life of its own.
