AmateurMovieReviews.com

The Story: A virus has infected the dead, animating them so the corpses can feed on human flesh, thus feeding the virus.

The dead have overrun the Earth and the cities have become war zones. The Government sets up a team of crack soldiers called The Zombie Squad, to protect humans and hunt down the dead. An escaped virus, one in which a Doctor Bow was working on, has revived the dead. It animates the corpses and uses it to feed on humans, feeding the virus itself.

Without human flesh the virus will feed on the corpse and die. Doctor Moulsson (Bogdan Pecic) is trying to create an antidote that makes the virus feed on the corpses right away, thus destroying the threat. He needs Doctor Bow's notes to complete the job so with the zombie squad, commanded by Captain Raimi (Peter Ferry), they head for the Doctors house. Unfortunately it's not just the dead they have to contend with. A religious cult has formed, led by Rev Jones (Robert Kokai), who think the dead are a divine punishment and will fight to stop them being destroyed and thus cleansing the world!

Shot on Super-8mm, this was J R Bookwalters' first film. He has since gone on to more ambitious projects (sometimes too ambitious for his budget) such as Ozone and Polymorph, but it's with this cheap and cheerful zombie film he is probably still best known.

The budget was originally $4000 but after leaving a message on the Renaissance Pictures answering machine, Bookwalter eventually met up with Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) who offered to help with the project. Raimi increased the budget and shooting began. Supposedly, Raimi later disowned the film. I can't confirm this, certainly Bookwalter does not mention it in the production notes to the film on the VHS used here, but Raimi's name does not appear anywhere in the credits.

Given what Bookwalter and his dedicated team had to work with, they have pulled off some commendable work. The amount of extras on screen is larger than most Indie productions have to play with and this helps add a bit of scale to the zombie take-over. Shooting on location in Washington, adds to the authentic look of the project.

The zombie makeup, in most of the cases, is excellent with some agreeably horrid looking corpses. The gore is plentiful and is extremely well done, with spurting wounds, stretching flesh and stringy intestines being thrown into the story with great aplomb! It's clear that a lot of the budget was used on here. But it's in trying to do more complex creations that the budgetary constraints show, and some are jarring. The use of animatronic/puppet zombie heads for certain scenes is an idea too far and look very bad. It would have been better to stick to more complex latex effects than to attempt, without any hope of a satisfactory outcome, some of the work that desperately needs a much bigger budget to pull off. Given the outstanding work everywhere else, these puppet heads stand out badly and add some unintentional humour to certain scenes.

The acting is as bad as you would expect, but some performances are a lot of fun, such as Pecic as the loony Dr Moulsson who wears a baseball cap with 'Once I thought I was wrong but I was mistaken' scrawled on it. Michael Gross as the ill fated squad member Mercer, who also sports some excellent zombie make up. If the voice of Captain Raimi (yes, we shall get back to the names) sounds familiar that's because it's none other than Bruce Campbell! Campbell, as well as dubbing the lead also helped on the audio post production. Director and Raimi collaborator Scott Spiegel also appears as a squad member, and strangely one of the cult members is dressed exactly, including the wig, as Raimi's cult leader in Spiegel's production of "Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except", which was being filmed at roughly the same time.

The names of the characters also brings us to the biggest and sadly almost fatal fault with this film, the humour. You can forgive the naming of characters after famous horror personalities as production started around 1985/6 and this was not then such a cliche. And of course they are all here, Raimi, Romero, King, Savini and a character called Carpenter who has the most horrific mullet hairstyle this side of Bon Jovi! It's in the general humour that the film can sometimes become cringe worthy.

With supposedly witty dialogue and self-conscious horror in-jokes dragging the film down. Add some appalling line reading to put unintentional humour onto the unfunny intentional humour and the film does start to try the patience of the viewer. And was it part of the humour to make the squad members amazingly stupid? One gets bitten because he leans on the table where a zombie is strapped down! Another is killed while trying to get three zombies out the back of a car, into a ridiculously rickety cage, because his partner rolls the window down too far!

Some of the homage humour works, and it's nice to see certain familiar "Day of the Dead" zombies recreated! In fact, except for the squad which reminds you of the "Dawn of the Dead" SWAT units, this film owes more to "Day" than anything. Dr Moullson's laboratory, complete with strapped down cut up zombies is like Dr Logan's as does the keeping the zombies in cages, and Rev Jones's dead son who comes across as being based on Bub.

The addition to the basic zombie plot of the religious cult also makes for some messy plot development and slows the pace down too a crawl at a time when it should be building. But it at least shows a willingness to not simply concentrate on the more simplistic hunt the zombies story line.

The music is pretty good and is only let down by the hysterically bad song other the end credits! The transfer, at least on the VHS, is overly dark and takes away from some of the gore effects.

Overall, though it's certainly a project that was obviously close to the hearts of everyone involved and great effort has gone into it's creation, it can only really be classed as a valiant failure.

Check it out though for the zombie make up, gore effects and a sense of love for the horror genre that seems so sadly missing in today's big budget Hollywood efforts.