#39 Zombie Death House 1987

It took a while to get going. The beginning was like an early 80's police drama. For a little while I thought I got the wrong disc in the mail.

A veteran gets a job as chauffeur with a mob boss. Unfortuantely the gangster's girlfriend wants a different kind of ride from our hero, so the baddy frames the goody for the murder of the loose lady. This is all setup just to get the goody into prison where the action takes place. Experiments on the inmates, conducted by an Army General, turn some of them into blood-thirsty zombies. Luckily there is an escape tunnel that might provide escape if they can get there before the whole prison is blown up by the General.

Eh, it could have been worse.

3375m

#38 Bio Zombie 1998

This is kind of a mix between Clerks, Shaun of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead (either version).

Two slacker clerks in a Japanese mall end up trying to save other mall employees from an onslaught of zombies created by biochemicals disguised as pop bottles.

I was even tempted to watch it again with what the DVD called the "Engrish" subtitles turned on.

When I grow up I want to move to Japan.

3283m

#37 Redneck Zombies 1987

Some movies really make me want to cuss. But I will control myself since this is a family oriented zombie movie blog.

This was entirely shot on video tape instead of film. My cats and I could have made a better video than this too. I fell asleep at least twice. My head is still a little foggy so this entry will be short.

When a dope smoking military guy is driving through the woods with a barrel of toxic waste he has a crash and the barrel rolls away. It ends up in the hands of some rednecks who spill the chemicals and use the empty barrel to make moonshine, which of course turns them into zombies who attack and eat some hikers camping in the woods.

Okay, I can't do it. If there are kids in the room cover their eyes.

FUCK! This movie was steaming pile of shit!!!

3193m

Zombies, Lions and Umbrellas

Someone asked me the other day if all zombies were evil. My response was basically "Are lions evil?" Sure zombies kill and eat people. But lions kill and eat all sorts of other animals, including people. That just means they are higher on the food chain, but not evil.

Evil to me has to have some sort of malevolent intent behind it. The lion isn't attacking the wildebeest in order to see how much pain and suffering it can cause. It is attacking the wildebeest for food. So is the zombie. That is its nature.

Now having said that, sometimes a zombie is being controlled by an person or entity. That person may be evil and have malevolent intentions. A person can do evil with an umbrella, but the umbrella itself is not evil. It is merely a tool of the evil person. Zombies can be the tool of an evil person.

So in conclusion zombies, lions and umbrellas are not evil.

#36 Zombie 5: Killing Birds 1987

More problems that I am sure are related to the metric system, just like Zombi 2. This time Zombie 5 is from 1987 but Zombie 3 and 4 are from 1988. It might also have something to do with a few scenes in 5 were the characters were sort of transported back in time to see events which had taken place.

A group of student ornithologists travel to remote Louisiana in search of a rare and possibly extinct bird. They meet with the last man known to have seen the bird and discover that he is blind. He had his eyes pecked out 20 years earlier by his wife's pet birds after he killed her and her lover and some other people who were carrying a baby. Maybe the wife's parents or a sibling, I don't know. Anyway, one of the ornithologists turns out to be the baby "all grows up". Well, you know how zombies are about getting revenge.

This one was much better than the rest of this series. The actors were better, the dubbing was better. The zombies stay in the shadows for the most part, so I can't whine about the makeup being bad. There was actually a plot that I could follow. Not all of the people were killed by zombies. One caught himself on fire another got a necklace or something caught in a generator which pulled him into the gears. Overall it had a pretty good 80's horror film feel.

3095m

#35 Zombie 4: After Death 1988

More Italians, doing bad movies. Actually the actors were all American, but still bad. The movie's hero was Jeff Stryker probably the most famous gay porn star. I know that from the extras not from personal experience. More talking zombies and even a few who know how to shoot guns. I find that hard to believe.

A little girl's family is killed by zombies created by the local voodoo priest, while they were doing medical experiments on a remote island. The little girl escapes only to accidentally return to the island decades later. Oops!

3005m

#34 Zombi 3 1988

Did you miss me? Netfux has not been nice to me this week.

Another Italian zombie movie. Oddly enough, there were no topless women. Go figure. It was not very good. Make up was bad, dubbing was bad, acting was bad. The zombies were extra bad because rather than just attacking like a starving animal they would fight like a person. Sometimes they used weapons, which I disapprove of zombies doing. To top it off, some of them spoke.

The military tries to create a biological weapon called, Death1. After burning the body of one of the failed experiments, the ashes fill the air with a mutated version of the virus which then infects area birds. The birds in turn infect people they attack and the zombie horde is born.

2920m

Zombie Bunnies

What is that you say? You want to watch a zombie movie but only have 30 seconds of free time? Well you are in luck. Here is a 30 second version of "Night of the Living Dead", acted out by illustrated bunnies. If you intend to the watch the original version, be warned that this might spoil the ending for you.

#33 Chopper Chicks in Zombietown 1989

Billy Bob Thornton, Hal Sparks and the cutest VJ ever, Martha Quinn.

A gang of biker babes hits a small town. They are less than welcomed by the town folk and the group of zombies that has escaped from the abandoned mine where they, the zombies not the chicks, were forced to extract radioactive materials from.

Not bad. I want a motorcycle even more now. Maybe I could be a Cycle Slut too.

2824m

#32 I was a Teenage Zombie 1987

It had a Violent Femmes song in it so it can't be all bad. Plus it was mildly amusing at points.

Some teens kill "Mussolini", a local pusher, in a drug deal gone bad. They dispose of the body in the river, which unfortunately is contaminated with radiation from a nearby nuclear power plant. The dealer comes back and wants revenge on the kids who killed him. In an effort to defend themselves they dump one of their own into the river for some zombie vs zombie action.

2738m

#31 Hard Rock Zombies 1984

I will not dignify this film with any comments

2647m

#30 I was a zombie for the F.B.I. 1982

30 days 30 movies. If I keep this pace, which I won't, I could watch all of the zombie movies within a year.

An 80's take on a 50's movie. So it is hard to say that it was bad, because they were trying to be bad. So that kind of makes it a good, bad movie?

Aliens take over a small town pop factory and use it to control the city folk. They try to take over a larger pop company in order to take over the whole country. But thanks to the perseverance of two agents the aliens' plot is foiled.

2557m

#29 Pet Sematary 1989

"Sometimes, dead is better." So says Herman Munster with a Maine accent. The kid in this movie is pretty cute. But he is even cuter after he comes back from the dead.

This guy is really stupid. He is first warned by the ghost of a dead man. Then he sees what happened to his daughter's cat that he buried in the Micmac burial ground. Then he is warned by the neighbor from across the busy street. Then he is told by the same neighbor about the time a person was buried up there and came back all wrong. Then his son comes back kills the neighbor and his wife. Then the ghost warns him again. Yet he still buries the wife up there only to have her come back and kill him. Hello! Did he not learn anything from Zeder?

In my opinion it is not really a zombie movie. They do come back from the dead. But, they can talk. They score high on the CAC. Their bite only kills. Plus there is some higher power at work that was trying to prevent the mother from stopping the son's burial.

2452m

The Great Zombie Debate

I knew this would happen eventually.

This all hinges on the definition of zombie, which admittedly is a grey area. Is coming back from the dead the defining characteristic of a zombie? If the definition is that broad then it would include mummies, vampires, frankenstein and a variety of other undead. I would not classify any of those as zombies, well maybe the mummy.

My definition is narrower. Zombies are a subclass of the undead. They are rotting corpses, unable to speak, lacking cognitive abilities and depending on the level of decomposition, have poor motor skills. Depending on the reason they have become zombies, they may create new zombies by killing and/or biting the living.

Vampires are highly intelligent and do not shamble at all. They are immortal unless killed using very specific methods. Methods which are vastly different from those used to kill zombies.

Frankenstein was not very smart and he did shamble. However, he could still be killed using normal methods and he did have basic reasoning skills. If he had bit or killed anyone that person would not have become another Frankenstein. So that excludes him from the zombie club.

Mummies have a very specific purpose. They are alive only to fulfill the curse upon those who have violated the tomb. They shamble and have limited intelligence, but they have one purpose only. Plus like Frankenstein, their attack does not create new mummies.

So I have come up with a Venn Diagram and a Cognitive Abilities Continuum (CAC) to better illustrate my point.
Having said and illustrated all of that, I will watch movies that are borderline zombie movies. I will not watch vampire, Frankenstein or mummy movies.

#28 Zeder 1983

Almost more of a mystery than a zombie movie. Although there are a couple of zombies near the end.

After finding odd writings on an old typewriter ribbon an author searches for the typewriter's previous owner. It turns out to be an ex-priest who believes he will come back from the dead if buried in certain locations.

Lesson learned: If your wife is killed, and you know of a special plot of land that brings people back as zombies that kill anyone around, then do not, I repeat do not bury her there in order to bring her back. Zombies kill people.

2349m

#27 Oasis of the Zombies 1983

Hidden stash of Nazi gold - 6 million dollars
Trip with friends to the Sahara - meager inheritance from father killed by Nazi gold hunter
Oasis of the Zombies - Totally worthless!

2251m

#26 Zombie Lake 1980

Guess what the French like. You got it. Topless women. At one point a whole women's volleyball team gets naked and plays in the lake. Bad idea when the lake is full of Nazi zombies.

A French village killed some Nazis and dumped their bodies into the lake. Years later they are coming back for revenge and blood. Before they were killed one of the soldiers had a child with one of the villagers. Now that child is the key to defeating the zombies before all of the villagers are killed.

The special effects for this film involve painting a person's face and hands green in order to make them magically transformed into the living dead. Not very convincing.

2169m

#25 Zombie Holocaust 1980

Italians still love topless women. Turns out they also like recycling.

This film had the same producer as the last and he used two of the same actors, same set and some of the locations look very familiar too.

After body parts start disappearing from a New York hospital the investigation leads to a remote Asian island where the natives are practicing cannibalism and a local doctor is conducting medical experiments. As the natives were just about to sacrifice the lead female character, they changed their mind for some reason I have not been able to figure out. Then they turn on Dr. Butcher.

2077m

#24 Zombi 2 or Zombie 2 or Zombie 1979

I don't know what this one is really called. I think the confusion has something to do with the metric system, because the European title has a number and the US doesn't.

Italians like topless women. Everyone likes topless scuba divers, including sharks and underwater zombies. Lucky for the diver, sharks and underwater zombies do not like each other. Italians also like gore. Lots and lots of gore.

A woman travels to a remote island in search of her father after his boat mysteriously shows up in the New York harbor with a zombie on board. Little does she know it is an island crawling with zombies.

1987m

#23 28 Days Later 2002

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't a zombie movie. Granted no dead come back to life. But maybe, just maybe, as soon as they are infected the people die? I'm no doctor so I don't know. Either way it is a damn good movie.

Guy gets hit by a car and wakes up 28 days later alone in the hospital. He heads outside to find that no one is around. He runs into some "zombies", then a few other survivors, then some bad survivors.

1896m

#22 Buttcrack 1998

The third movie off of Troma Triple B-Header.

Brian accidentally kills his annoying roomate, Buttcrack, who cannnot keep his pants up. Buttcrack's sister casts a voodoo curse on Brian so that if someone says Buttcrack 12 times in one breath then Buttcrack will come back from the dead. Once he is back any one who looks at Buttcrack's buttcrack turns into a zombie that tries to kill Brian. Good thing that Preacher Man Bob, played by Mojo Nixon, brought along his shotgun.

I snickered once.

1783m

#21 Unspeakable 2000

I was duped. This is not a zombie movie. It came on the same disc as two other zombie movies and the intro called it a zombie movie. But guess what, no zombies, not a single one. Bastards.

A man's daughter is killed in a car crash and the man slowly descends into madness. He somehow thinks killing others will bring her back. Along the way we meet hookers, pimps, pederast priests, junkies, murderers and other not so nice people. In flashbacks we learn the man had tried to molest his daughter.

At the end the man wakes up and realizes it was all a dream. Then he sneaks down the hall into his daughters room.

1716m

#20 Garden of the Dead 1974

Not so bad. Not a single dance routine.

Formaldehyde sniffing inmates try to escape their prison camp. They steal a truck that has barrels of formaldehyde on the bed. During the shootout with the guards next to a cemetary barrels get spilled and prisoners get killed. Of course they then get buried in the formaldehyde soaked ground only to come back later that night. The zombies kill most of the guards, but leave alone all of the living prisoners who were not part of the big escape.

1635m

#19 Astro Zombies 1969

Did every movie from the 60's have a dance scene? The ratio in this movie was 2 zombies to 1 dance scene. Plus the dancer was topless so I'm not going to complain too much about it.

A mad scientist is trying to make Astro Zombies that can be sent to space and controlled via radiowaves. He takes bodies and replaces vital organs with electromechanical versions. But the one thing he cannot remove from them is emotion. Whatever.

While making these creatures he is being sought out by the CIA and a strange group of spies from China, Mexico and a mercenary from some Soviet Bloc country.

1576m