October 2013 Edition #1: ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST

Director: Marino Girolami
Screenplay: Fabrizio de Angelis; Romano Scandariato
Starring: Ian McCulloch; Alexandra Della Colli; Sherry Buchanan; Peter O’Neal
Release Date: 1980


Perhaps moreso than any other sub-category in the genre, Italian horror has proven, in my experience, to be more of an acquired taste than most. Garish, uncompromisingly brutal, often featuring tackily mismatched soundtracks, and always poorly dubbed, Italian horror films constantly tread the fine line between Ed Wood-level incompetence and sheer exploitative brilliance. The plots are threadbare, the special effects range from stomach-churningly realistic to ridiculously rubbery, the directors always have names like Mario, Dario, or Lucio, and the visuals are often unsettling and nightmarish. Whether the film in question features the artistic bravado of Argento and Fulci, or the sub-incompetent sleaziness of Bruno Mattei, I am always left with the same uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, no doubt due to the filmmakers’ willingness to plumb depths of depravity that few mainstream films dare.

Marino Girolami’s ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST falls somewhere in the middle of the “Argento to Mattei” scale, neither particularly well-crafted or technically proficient, yet not at all worthy of the much deserved scorn of such dreck as Mattei’s HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD. The film was the brainchild of Fabrizio de Angelis who, after the massive success he experienced producing Fulci’s ZOMBI 2 (which itself borrowed heavily from George Romero‘s zombie mythos), concocted a storyline that melded the two most popular Italian horror genres, zombies and cannibals, thus allowing him to completely recycle not only most of ZOMBI 2’s screenplay, but also many of the same actors and various locations. The film is admirable in it’s shamelessness, featuring gratuitous scenes of faces being forcibly introduced to outboard motors, impromptu heart removals, scalpings, defenestration, eye-gougings, and the repeated senseless undressing of it’s lead actress. ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST is Italian horror filmmaking in it’s purest, primal, most penny-pinching form, featuring such a jaw-dropping streak of mean-spiritidness and spite for it’s audience that I spent much of the film’s running time shaking my head and laughing at the filmmaker’s low-brow attempts to shock and disturb.

The film follows the same basic structure as ZOMBI 2, with that film’s lead actor Ian McCulloch portraying Dr. Peter Chandler, who uncovers what appears to be a cannibalistic cult operating in New York City after various limbs turn up missing from the corpses at several local morgues. He enlists the aide of busty (and often nude) morgue assistant/anthropology expert Lori (Delli Colli), who identifies the strange tattoo on a slain cultist’s body as the symbol of Kito, a cannibal god who supposedly reigns over a small island in the East Indies. Along with Peter’s assistant George (O’Neal) and his journalist girlfriend Susan (Buchanan), they set out on an expedition to the mysterious island and are greeted by madness and death at the hands of the cannibalistic natives. The natives follow the orders of Dr. Obrero (Donald O’Brien), a mad butcher who takes great relish in the random dissection and vivisection of his victims, keeping them alive as he removes their scalps and transplants their brains into the corpses of deceased natives, creating an army of docile zombies who do his bidding.

A rare photograph of Thomas Dolby, taken mere moments after he was viciously blinded by "Science".

From that description alone it should be clear that ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST is a film with a massive identity crisis. Girolami and his screenwriters obviously could not decide what type of horror film they were making, and so we are left with an uneven mishmash of zombie and cannibal movie tropes with a dash of mad science thrown in, with very little in the way of narrative cohesion. The early New York segment leaps from scene to scene very suddenly and without explanation, seeming to take place over a period of time that could be a week, or maybe one day, padded out with lots of establishing shots of people pulling up to buildings and entering them. The most jarring example of editorial disarray occurs as our intrepid leads discuss the arrangements of their journey in Peter’s New York office, and then SMASH CUT to B-roll footage from ZOMBI 2 of what is supposed to be their jeep traveling through the jungle. This is lazy filmmaking, clearly intended to get these slabs of meat onto an island, get them naked, and get them dead as quickly as possible.

What saves this mess is the deadpan nature with which the filmmakers approach the gruesome mayhem. In the very first scene a mysterious figure, seen only from the knees down, enters a morgue and proceeds to saw the hand off of an amazingly rubbery and overly lengthy arm for what seems like an eternity. In the next scene the same corpse is used in an anatomy class whose students try to ignore the missing limb, while their teacher attempts to explain the inner-workings of the human stomach by jamming his arm up to the elbow in the gooey innards and rubbing them at the camera in a most unprofessional manner. The entirety of the film lingers on grue for grue’s sake. Some might lob the same argument at the works of Lucio Fulci, but I would argue that his scenes of corporeal carnage and ocular mayhem carry with them a very definite sense of artistry and craftsmanship. Fulci knew how to create incredible tension and unease in his gore set pieces, drawing them out to an unbearable length before punctuating (and puncturing) them with a gloriously moist and brutal punch line, like the ending to some horrible joke.

The makers of ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST carry with them none of this talent. In fact, all they seem to be interested in is saying, “Hey, look at this fucked up shit! LOOK AT IT!!”. Which is fine on it’s own, I suppose, and I won’t deny experiencing a certain adrenaline rush during certain gory segments, the outboard motor to the face scene being a shining example. Dr. Obrero is played so ham-fistedly evil that he skips right past being menacing and winds up seeming like a thirty-years-too-early parody of the torture porn genre. I mean, he ties a girl up, removes her scalp, and keeps her alive during the entire process so he can tell her that he is transplanting her brain into the body of a rotting male native, right before he forces her jaw open and snips her vocal cords with a pair of scissors to silence her screams. That’s so fucking mean that it’s stupid, and O’Brien’s performance does nothing to convince me that the whole thing wasn’t meant to be played for laughs. It should be noted that the film was initially released in the States under the title DR. BUTCHER, M.D.(MEDICAL DEVIATE), which should give you a good idea of the tone it's distributor was aiming for.

Clearly this NEEDED to happen.

The entire sordid affair culminates in a jaw-dropping climax in which the absolutely gorgeous Delli Colli is captured by the natives, stripped of all her clothing, adorned head to toe in sacrificial paint, and made to lie spread-eagled on a giant stone slab that just happens to feature a concavity that her body fits perfectly into, all while several dozen natives stand around her chanting madly. Through some bizarre, unexplained telekinesis she is able to invoke the power of Kito and send the natives, who now worship her as a goddess, on a bloodthirsty rampage against Dr. Obrero and his minions. You’ve certainly got to respect the balls it must have taken for the actress to go through with this scene, especially for such  sleazy grindhouse fare. You would certainly never see Jennifer Lawrence put herself in such a situation for her art, that’s for goddamned sure! (Though we can always hope)

Cheap, filthy, uncomfortably racist, and just all-around cynical, ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST is typical of the exploitation fare that was coming out of Italy in the early 80’s but, in terms of pure entertainment, is certainly one of the better examples of the genre. The plot sorta makes sense as long as you don’t think about it at all, the special effects aren’t entirely terrible, and not five minutes goes by without either a titty, or some horrendously offensive atrocity being committed against a piece of rubber. It might have had something to do with the beer I’d been drinking, but as the end credits rolled over the same burning church from the ending of ZOMBI 2, I distinctly experienced what must have been the death of several brain cells as I tried to process what I had just witnessed. The feeling was oddly cathartic, so in a way I guess ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST is the cinematic equivalent of a cheap high, like huffing a can of air duster. Sure, it’s fun for a little while, but if you’re not careful, you might just wind up brain dead.

My Rating:
6/10