Zombie Holocaust review by The Grim Ringler

Zombie Holocaust

How many zombies does it take to star in a zommie movie? Not bloody many if you are in this movie. But that’s ok, in this case less is more. Sorta.

Welcome to New York as seen by an Italian, it’s loud, big, and dear heavens, there is a mad butcher on the loose in the local doctor’s college. What ever shall we do?

Enter Ian McCulloch, a man on a mission, and that mission is to find the madman that has been mutilating dead bodies in the hospital, and then find out why they have been bogarting these leftovers.

The hell of it is that the trail to the snatcher leads to a mysterious tribe of cannibals that live on a distant island. But does that stop our McCulloch, of course not you bastard, perish the thought. So off our heroes go, McCulloch and two lovely ladies and an equally lovely man, off to find the bastards that are committing these unthinkable crimes.

But upon finding their secret island, quite accidentally as it turns out, since their boat captain had hoped to steer them wrong, they also find a strange, reclusive doctor that seems to be hiding something more than his secret yahtzee strategy.

Wackiness ensues!

Cannibal Holocaust is not a great film. But you know that. It’s a zombie film for god’s sake. And not a half bad one. Yeah, the plot is pretty odd and hard to follow, but aren’t most of them? I mean, if it isn’t a voodoo curse, or a damned acid rain thing, it’s those meddling kids bringing the dead back. It’s always something isn’t it? But what makes this a neat movie is that the stars of the attraction, the zombies, don’t show up until the last reel of the film. Hell, we get more crazy cannibal action than we do zombie mayhem. And that is a good thing. Because it’s a hell of a set-up…if the damned movie weren’t called Zombie freakin’ Holocaust. UGH! But the ploy still works, and when we finally do see the zombies, it’s a neat surprise because we almost give up on the slow bastards.

The bad thing about the movie though, the damning thing, is that like way too many Italian horror films (mainly zommie movies) they build all this tension up and then try to resolve it in the last four minutes. As if they had everything set but an ending and really didn’t give much of a damn about how they were gonna end it at all really. And that’s a shame, because had they put some effort into the ending, the movie would be wonderful, or at least pretty damn original. Ok, hell, it’d be more fun than it is.

Ok, the gore. The gore starts slow but by the time they hit the island, shoo-boy, it looks like a hillbilly picnic, what with the people being split in half and having their brains pulled out and such. So yeah, there is a lot of gore, if you like that sort of thing. Which, hell, let’s admit it, who doesn’t? Even grandma’s like a bit of the old pull-the-guts-through-the-bellybutton.

As for extras, well, there ain’t a lot. There is a neat little bit of footage that was used when the film was re-cut for American audiences and re-titled Dr. Butcher M.D.. And the interview with the maker of part of that footage, Roy Frumkes, is awesome. Whereas the interview with the FX guy is good only for a laugh at how asinine he is. All the guy has to say is how wonderful Lucio (Zombi 2) Fulci is. Wow, what an ass!

This is a pretty neat disc. The picture is beautiful, which is scary since it’s a cheapie zommie movie, and the action, while slow at first, gets rockin’ near the end. And you cannot beat an Ian McCulloch movie where he wears a friggin’ trench. BADASS! Not ground breaking but the, that’s what the zombies are there for.


7 out of 10 Jackasses

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