Night of the Zombies (1983)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Great Film overall

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

A weaker effort in the Italian zombie sub-genre that flourished for a short time in the late 70's and early 80's, although the movie is not without its charm and inspired moments. The make-up effects are on the cheesier side and obviously the production didn't have much of a pyrotechnics budget, consequently the gunshots and exploding squibs don't have much pizazz. Not surprisingly the film's set-up owes much to George Romero's "Dead" movies.The story line? A government is creating some type of dangerous chemical in an unimpressive-looking smoke stack factory. The chemical leaks out – a dead rat makes a cameo. Don't ask. People turn immediately into zombies and naturally enough want to eat juicy regular Homo sapiens. A political statement about over-population is thrown in. For some reason a SWAT-type team who blows away a band of eco- agitated terrorists at the beginning of the movie is sent on a mission to Zombie Island. This is where the bulk of the film takes place. The quartet of commandos is comprised of a charismatic squad leader, a somewhat colorful psycho who likes to taunt the zombies and two other nondescript types. The commandos run into a fairly hot-looking Iti reporter chick and her annoying mustachioed cameraman on the island. A husband and wife along with their zombie-bitten son are quickly dispensed with at this juncture. The best thing to do when watching a flick of this type is throw logic out the window and enjoy the high points. And there are a few. Most notably when the reporter chick tells the guys she'll have to go ahead and smooth the way for a powwow with the local villagers. She then proceeds to pop her top, revealing a most exquisite pair of natural breasts. As we all know, wacky tribes people go around topless, so it only makes sense that our reporter would do likewise – to make them feel at ease as it were. Hey, when in Rome… It's a great way to introduce gratuitous nudity into a picture and also be able to tell the actress playing the part, "But this is essential to the story, honey." There's some National Geographic type footage of tribesmen and women dancing around and eating maggots. Then our stars get to react with extras dolled-up to resemble the tribes people in the other footage. I learned a lot about native customs. Another inspired scene has one of the commandos (who can remember their actual names?) deciding to suddenly become a transvestite by donning a tutu and doing a little dance while in the midst of searching an abandoned house for zombies. Of course he enters the wrong room and ends up being devoured by the dead.It would be remiss of me to not also mention:All Italians seem to have (at least in this movie) a predisposition to helplessly watch as their fellow countrymen are eaten alive by zombies. They seem incapable of moving or doing anything to help. A very strange condition. They can even watch themselves being eaten without actually resisting. Must be attributable to pasta shock. Hell of the Living Dead (aka Night of the Zombies) should win an award for some of the worst examples of mismatched wildlife stock footage integration in a motion picture. And couple that with worse sound effects. At least half of the shots of birds and other animals are inexplicably accompanied by the sound of gobbling turkeys. Guess they only had one wildlife sound effects album in their collection.The driving Goblin soundtrack ain't bad at times. Another tip of the hat to Romero.The commandos constantly have trouble remembering to shoot zombies in the head even after being frequently berated by their resident psycho comrade. Sooner or later every character cannot resist wandering off by themselves, acting as if they are on a picnic - and sure enough they find zombie trouble.Overwrought characters repeat lines such as, "Die bastard! Die!"

This is definitely one of the best zombie movies ever made, its gory, it has nudity and its entertaining fun, Bruno Mattei its great again and Claudio Fragasso just makes it even better, there are different types of zombies on this movie, every extra just kinda of does their own thing, one of the truly remarkable elements in the film is its pacing with the zombies, at first you just see a couple of zombies, then it becomes a group of zombies, then a whole village, then a city and it goes on and on, there's also a sense of traveling in the film since it goes from one location to the other by the time it ends it leaves you feeling like you were on a journey, the dialog its great, Claudio wrote all the characters to be sleazy bastards with interesting pasts, its one crazy fun movie, definitely a watch for horror fans.

I am not saying at all that this is a good movie, in fact as far as it goes its horrible. But it's one of those movies so bad it's good in a funny way. The English dubbing is awful and inaccurate, the supposed top secret chemical factory which caused the zombie virus in the film is actually a nuclear power station, though I'm not sure its real name it was also used in the film Soylent Green. Hell of the Living Dead is stuffed with stock footage, uses recycled Goblin soundtrack from Dawn of the Dead and Contamination, and as far as sticking to the plot, it doesn't seem to have one. It jumps from the chemical factory to some terrorist attack scene to a group of reporters in the jungle. Both the reporters, S.W.A.T. team and chemists featured in the film don't act the least bit professional, as seen when during her interview the reporter named Lia begins making goofy faces at the camera like a kid, and during the toxic gas leak at the factory one chemist named Paolo, or Fowler, it was hard to be certain, has to remind his boss to wear a gas mask when heading into a known to be toxic gas cloud. When Paolo-or-Fowler gets himself bitten and eaten alive, no one attempts to rescue him, they just watch. During an investigation of a house, a S.W.A.T. team guy stops to put on a tutu and top hat and hum a weird song while he skips around and gets himself eaten by zombies. The ending was pretty bad, Lia has her eyes popped out of her head by a former friend-turned zombie with cheesy special effects. The movie has repeatedly been considered racist in terms of the movie's lines such as "What kind of terrorist? Palestinian? Iranian? New kind?" and "he's been wounded by a native lunatic".That being said, the film has its funny moments, does have a few good actors, like the actors who played the roles of Zantoro and Professor Barrett. During the scene where Zantoro is killed in the elevator there is a zombie chemist girl with brown hair whose small five-second part in the film was excellent, she makes a very creepy face before eating Zantoro. Hell of the Living Dead is more comedic than anything else, and at least keeps your attention for the most part, though the constant swearing gets rather tiring. The scene where Lia takes off her clothes also seemed very pointless, unless to draw in an audience of perverts so the film could get some more money drawn in. It's worth watching at least once, if you're bored and want to laugh at something.

Prepare yourself for nothing but negative thoughts, so if that isn't your cup of tea, I'd suggest you read reviews elsewhere. To lambaste this film simply isn't enough. How about all the musical scores it borrowed? Dawn of The Dead, Beyond The Darkness, Alien Contamination, and City of The Living Dead among others. It doesn't have a pulsing score of its own! One of the characters is even a direct carbon copy of Roger's character in Dawn of The Dead! This was around the time where Zombie films were coming out like flies. Some of them were entertaining, others were virtually unwatchable. This is one of them. The dubbing is abhorrent. We get dubious lines such as "Hold it! That's not polite! I get the first shot!" "These mothers have more lives than a cat!" It could have realized how awful it was by adding fun cheese, but it takes itself incredibly seriously with a mundane approach. We get pointless shots of animal's at the most random times which I guess Bruno Mattei (Aka. Vincent Dawn) thought would be symbolism of sorts. The abundance of scenes with characters doing inexplicably idiotic things is uncanny. Things back then weren't so prohibited, so we do see some controversial violence. A kid gets shot in the head; a tongue gets yanked out of someone's mouth while her eyeballs pop out; countless scenes of natives and zombies doing some gut munching; many, many bullet wounds. The gore is plentiful if you're a gore hound. But since the movie is so boring, you probably won't care. It's hard to describe a performance with such atrocious dubbing, but I'll give it a go. Margit Evelyn Newton is our heroine, and she does OK. She provides a lot of screaming, and a failed tough girl act in the middle of the film, but that's about it. Final Thoughts: Please, please, please! I implore you to avoid this like the plague. If you are the die hardest of Zombie fans, you still won't get any satisfaction. If you wanna check out a good zombie movie; Dawn of The Dead (remake as well) Night of The Living Dead (original) or Zombi are pretty safe choices. 1.5/10