Director – Tor Ramsey
Writer – Karen L. Wolf
I purchased this film for a small number of reasons: a) the cover was fun, b) Tom Savini was in it so the effects should be cool, c) it had a ‘cult’ sticker on it, and d) I thought it was a film from the 60’s or 70’s…even now I can hear the Monty Python voice in my head saying: “You chose poorly”.
Fourteen years ago, this particular small town had itself a plague of zombies…oh, and a serial killer rapist guy named Abbot Hayes too. I don’t exactly remember how the initial outbreak occurred, but thanks to the awesomeness of one man (Tom Savini’s character Deputy Hughs), the lot of them got killed off. Side note: Tom Savini wasn’t the special f/x artist on this movie, he was actually the stunt coordinator, which means he scripted pretty much every cool stunt for himself and ripped them all out in the first ten minutes; basically it started out as the Look How Insanely Cool I Am Savini Show.
Rush ahead to the present. The town has itself a new member of society and this member is opening a car dealership. In breaking the ground for his fabulous new emporium, he unleashed both the zombies and also Abbot, the zombie/rapist/serial killer (who looks a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s The Gentlemen except he doesn’t glide as much as he does this amusing lurching up and down creep walk manuveur…you know, like how you would walk if you were showing someone else that you were creeping up on someone)…sadly, his creepy creep walk was my favourite part of the film.
Oh, yes, back to killing off random dead things…which is barely noticable due to spending so much time noticing all the other bad and lame things that are going on…you know, like the horrid dub over action! Oh yeah, it took me a short while to realize that no, this is not internal dialogue we were hearing, but, in fact, this whole town has the magic ability to talk without moving their lips! I would have no doubt this is where all the world’s ventriloquists were born and raised!
Not only that, but the sheriff in this town has a magic moving birthmark! Yes. He, for some reason, just HAD to have a birthmark (although, it seems, whoever was in charge of such things didn’t think it needed to be in the same place – or the same shape for that matter – all the time like those pesky real birthmarks do). As for the rest of the special f/x, I have to say that with Tom Savini on the set, you’d assume there would be some pretty high-grade gore going on, but nope. One run through this movie (that is, if you’re a masochist) and you’ll know for a fact he had nothing to do with the film’s gore…but, of course, how could he have been? He was much too busy showing off how he could roll over a car, do a back spin, dance the cha-cha, then kill two zombies with a thrusting leg kick and a single bullet through both brain pans. I mean, he is just one man! Sheesh!
Honestly, this movie was just so bad I don’t even remember how it ended, or really all that much of anything. Actually, now that I am exercising my powers of recall, there wasn’t even a single living dead child in the film…unless they mean that the children of the living dead have grown older and now have to deal with their undead parents. Sure, they never bothered mentioning anything like that in the film, I just think that is my brain’s way of trying to rationalize this celluloidy glob of ungoodness.
This movie is horrid in so many ways, but not in a good horror movie kind of way…not even in a Troll 2 kind of way…just bad, but if you still want to watch it, have at, just remember you’ve been warned!
“Each of us contemptible, we’re criticized and cursed”.
The first part of this was good, the scene with Savini. Unfortunately the SFX were horrible.