Panic - 1982

 Also known as Bakterion, Monster of Blood, and Zombie 4.

I was composing this whole thing in my head for a lead in to this review about what makes movies good, or at least better, than others.  I don't feel like I need to exactly spell it out for you though.  Memorable characters, smart dialogue, cinematography, like if you don't know this stuff than watch more movies.

But the reason I was thinking this was because a lot of the zombie movies I've been watching have had nothing really worth mentioning, and that another way of saying that none of those things I mentioned or the other commonly held aspects of what make a movie stand out were present.  Thus, those without the standout parts have to be evaluated more upon things like effects, or pace, or even just something like "well, how bored were you?  Really bored?  Or only kinda bored?"

I'm trying in a roundabout way to determine why I liked Panic more than some of these others.  What can I say, it had some standout sequences, a cool ending, good effects, some topless (and bottomless) female nudity...  I mean maybe this is part of criticism, which is to say overall I'm sure its hard to make a movie, but also we're not asking for that much.  It just has to grab us in some way and more often than not that can be relatively up to you the filmmaker to give us whatever, as long as its something.

So in that way Panic stands out and overachieves in just a small way, not as big as some, but it is good.  In the scope of lookalike zombie movies, see this one.  4 stars.

Night of the Seagulls - 1975

Another case where the movie in question came out before Zombie and all the others and was retitled in various ways to capitalize on the popular event.

The Blind Dead has been on my list for a long time, and realistically I do believe I saw at least one of these movies at some point but I guess I did not leave a review.  This one is also known as Don't Go Out and Night, Night of the Death Cult, Zombie 7 and Zombie 7: Last Rites.

The reason this one stands out, lets start there.  I have to admit that in these reviews for the Zombie series so far I'm running into a lot of pretty whatever average zombie movies that seems to have very little one can say about them, very little to call out.  They've been running in the 2.5 star range which is to say "yeah sure" but ultimately to also say "I dunno".  

Number one, atmosphere.  The dark shadows, the strange eerie minimal music, the cool location of the island they're on.  But more than that the effects.  My god the effects.  I will watch all of the Blind Dead series even if this is the only one to carry a "Zombie" moniker just because of these effects.  A mix of puppets and costumes, you have these awesome fucking dusty, cobwebby zombies in cloaks with swords and armor and FUCK does it look incredible!  They're also present in the entirety of the short movie.  Don't have endless dialogue about the presence of the zombie.  Show the zombie, and keep the movie short.  This is barely 90 minutes and that should be your target always.

Its also the little stuff.  Any movie with quick editing helps, the super echo-ey sound effects help a ton, and I love the way the zombies are somewhat intelligent but not too much.  They know when to look under a bed for example, they know to avoid fire, but they also cannot see everything and they don't understand a danger before its known to them.  

Watch it in the context of the Zombie phenomenon or not, but do watch it.  You know in its relative circle, it can have a full 5 stars.

The Hanging Woman - 1972

 La orgía de los muertos (translated as Orgy of the Dead) a.k.a. The Hanging Woman (US theatrical release),.   Beyond the Living Dead, Return of the Zombies and Bracula: Terror of the Living Dead.  Regionally titled as Death Chorus of the Skeletons, and re-released in Germany on March 1, 1977 as Die Bestie aus dem Totenreich / The Beast from the Death Realm. It was shown in the U.K. as Zombies - Terror of the Living Dead, in France as Les Orgies Macabres, and in Australia as Bracula, Terror of the Living Dead, The Naked Goddess of the Zombies.

This one's going for the belt.  Nothing on Wikipedia as to what Zombie number this was and where it was titled that.   I wonder if I could've skipped this one?

There it is!  It's also a Zombie 3.  This and many others were made before the original Zombie, and they were retitled for either redistribution or I guess for video release?  I'm not really sure and nothing specifies.  How could this be Zombie 3 years before Dawn of the Dead and before Zombi?

This film The Hanging Woman is a lot more in the vein of the Hammer Horror films, with stuffy Brits talking a lot and slow plot movement in a old cold looking castle like building.  Something about a man who saw a hanging woman that people either seem to deny entirely or minimally dismiss.  It likely has something to do with the devil worshipping cult and the creepy gravedigger that are both present in the town, just my guess.

I give it a pretty solid 2.5 its very run of the mill for "this type of thing" but even in that lens, its on the mildly not as good side of things as far as Hammer Horror is concerned.

Absurd - 1981

 Also known as: Anthropophagus 2, Zombie 6: Monster Hunter, Horrible, and The Grim Reaper 2.

Perhaps more relevant than Zombie 6: Monster Hunter is the alternate title Anthropophagus 2. That would be because the first Anthropophagus has the same guy in it, George Eastman. Aka Luigi Montefiori. This dude is a veteran of Italian horror, usually in small roles, and I’ve seen him around plenty. 

This is also something that could have the alternate title of snagging basically any contemporary slasher and throwing a 2 in back of it. The zombie connection I guess comes from the plot so let’s go. 

George Eastman is infected with some disease and goes to the hospital. During his operation he gains consciousness and is drugged up. Then this keeps happening and soon enough it’s clear he’s unkillable and he raises from the dead with a vengeance and starts killings people. 

It works like a methodical slasher from that point on, and really it’s like the later Halloween or the later Friday the 13th series where these guys were basically unkillable and/or zombies. It really made me wonder, when they brought Jason and others back as truly unstoppable, was the horror trope they were ripping off truly zombie/undead horror movies there? Interesting. I had always just thought of it as them being creative and jumping the shark, not specific to copying something else  

Strange movie, definitely a bit of a one off from everything I’ve seen.  Anthropophagus is also given the name of a Zombie movie here and there in the world of horror so maybe this is similar to that.  I’ll have to watch it again to judge.  Some good kills here, some good gore, I’ll give it a 3.5

Doctor Butcher M.D. - 1980

In addition to the title Zombie Holocaust, the film has since been released under various other English titles, including Island of the Last Zombies, Queen of the Cannibals and Zombie 3. - Wikipedia

Okay so when it makes sense I'll call these their Zombie names, I said, but then I realized I'll have many entries titled Zombie 3 or whatever, some even with the same year....  so that can't work.  So I guess I'll waffle back and forth on what I call them?  I'm not sure yet.  Anyhow I like that the title of this movie is sorta Doctor Butcher Medical Doctor.  I mean, MD is doctor, so...

Same release year as Cannibal Holocaust, so I'm not really able to tell what happened here as Zombie Holocaust has no release date.  But I'm guessing this was released after and retitled when Cannibal was a hit.  This is the classic buncha people get to an island and nefarious stuff is going down plot.  There's a mad doctor on the island conducting human experiments that bring people back from the dead, but also there's a local tribe of people that are cannibals, and that's really the focus of this movie.

The other focus is topless female nudity, and man is it good.  Here is all I could find though, sadly:

The reasons are both plot and non-plot related for her to be partially or fully nude a LOT.  Again, it was good.

Pretty okay effects with plenty of gross out gore and autopsy scenes, this one checks some boxes but does not overachieve.  This is your very definition of like "average Italian 80s cannibal movie".  Oddly enough it is only now that I realize that though I am into zombies, not into cannibals, but also how closely related those two are and yet I have differing opinions.  

I'll give this a 3 out of 5.

Zombie 5: Killing Birds - 1988

 Funny how this listed year of Zombie 5 is before the listed year of Zombie 4 huh?  Almost like they're not really true sequels...

Also known as Zombie Flesheaters 4, naturally.

This Zombie entry is almost universally titled Zombie 5: Killing Birds, and I have seen and heard the title before, though not seen the actual movie until now.  The legacy of this one is a little bit mixed as it was attributed to different directors and was shifted around a little bit more than some of these.

You can't really tell though, cause I'll tell you straight out this is better than Zombie 4.  This has better music, is more quickly paced, has better effects, and even has a couple very cool sequences such as the scene where the guys are all trying to escape in a van and a zombie is holding onto a girl by her head.  This movie also has Robert Vaughn playing a blind guy, who is intermixed into the plot and plays a role in the zombies existence in this movie.

There's a somewhat loose connection to birds as well, but honestly you can just tune a lot of this stuff out and watch the zombie violence, which is fun and nonstop. This movie is definitely a step up and a fun one to watch regardless of it's Zombie connection.

From here it's going to get complicated.  Oasis of the Zombies, Vengeance of the Zombies, Nightmare City and Burial Ground are sometimes labeled with the Zombie name.  So luckily I don't have to watch those.  Looks like I'm jumping to the Blind Dead series, as sometimes those carry a Zombie name, and that's kinda nice cuz I have wanted to see that series.  But last few times I looked for those, they weren't online.  So we'll see.

Zombie 4: After Death - 1989

 Also known as After Death and as Zombie Flesh Eaters 3.  Just FYI I am going to call all these unofficial Zombie sequels by their Zombie name.  Just for the sake of making things easier.

Claudio Fragasso is kind of in the same ballpark and same vein as Lucio Fulci, which is to say B and C tier Italian schlockmeisters that directed tons of horror movies in the 70s, 80s and 90s.  Fragasso is best known for directing Troll 2, and has been on this blog before with Women's Prison Massacre, the other type of movie he made: exploitation.

Just in a few minutes of IMDb scrolling I see Fragasso made unofficial Italian entries into Texas Chainsaw, the House series, obviously Zombie, need we mention Troll.  

After Death has a group of people landing on a mystery island and uncovering a sinister plot of voodoo and witchcraft that bring people back as zombies.  I like zombie and or monster movies where those monsters are known in the world, the movie is not filled with people exclaiming "Oh my god they're like dead but not dead?" instead it's just straight up "they're zombies!"

It's kind of strange because there's zombies from the beginning and yet midway through the movie the group also reads from the book of the Dead and unleashes a spell that brings more back from the dead - I thought they were already coming back from the dead?  I dunno.

After Death is also known for starring a male porn star, apparently unbeknownst to director Fragasso.  Fragasso also stated that this was “the last gasp of Italian horror" and it's kinda true and very sad.  I know there's Asylum and other similar D grade ripoffs that are still made now, but stuff that was made cheap in foreign countries with many degrees of mistranslation and blatant copyright infringement and all that just doesn't seem to be around anymore.  I'd love to see a modern Italian sequel/ripoff of Us released starring a gay porn star and tons of topless women with kickass electronic music again...

As far as this actual movie goes, however, it's not going to blow your mind or anything.  Its a tad too long and too plodding without anything really happening for most of it besides just mild zombie horror.  The effects seem to be cheap minimal face and neck scabby, blotchy skin.  Nothing really good.  Its alright, pretty tame and perhaps not the best or most interesting.  2.5 stars.

V/H/S - 2012

 It is interesting to look back at something like this and The ABCs of Death and other stitched together shorts because say what you will about their box office success, these gave birth to almost every interesting horror figure of the last 10 years.  Its more of a question of which one of these sets they're on than if they are on one.

I was over the found footage thing when this came out, this was quite a bit after Cloverfield et all had re-explored the genre like 6 years earlier, and I did see this when it was new but I never really cared to keep up with the series as it kept going and certainly did not know that it evolved into a straight to streaming or DVD thing with like half a dozen sequels.

VHS shows as 6 segments on Wikipedia, and I wonder exactly which was which because there's also a lot of interstitial things that I wonder what they consider.  Here is the synopsis:

Wrap around "Tape 56" a bunch of guys are filming their crimes and are sent to get a tape out of a creepy house with a seemingly dead guy, as we cut back to them they're picked off one by one.

"Amateur Night" some guys go partying and pick up a couple girls, one of them acting purposely creepy.  She seems almost too into it as they get back to their hotel room.

"Second Honeymoon" I couldn't really tell ya, something about guys on a trip and at night someone sorta begins fucking with them and I don't really understand the ending.

"Tuesday the 17th" some people on a hiking trip encounter a bizarre supernatural invisible killer(?)

"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" Another sorta shrug one of a few video calls where it seems a girl is seeing dead people in her house.  Her boyfriend may have set it up.

"10/31/98" some people go into a house and discover some sort of Satan worshiping thing or something going on upstairs, and when they stop it it seems they unleash the beast.

The best for me is probably either the wrap around segment or 10/31/98, but I'm really reaching there to try to figure out what I liked.  An odd amount of these are supernatural in nature, which is sorta unnecessary if you ask me, isn't the format and the concept a lot more suited for regular horror?

I haven't decided if I'm going to watch ALL of the VHS horror movies or not, but this is a fairly okay beginning.  I think I wanted it to be a little better tbh.  I'll give it a solid 2.

Children of the Corn - 2009

 Thus we come to the end of another long running series, with this 25 year anniversary remake of the 1984 film.

Rewatch the 1984 film and you'll see a slow burn feeling character drama with eerie kids and a mounting tension as Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton struggle to understand what's going on, and as the kids slowly unveil their intentions.  Watch the 2009 SyFy original remake and you'll get thrust into 50 minutes of bad dialogue between a feeding couple before you even see the kids of Gatlin.  Yikes.

It's a slow and awful plot as these two unlikable people have an ongoing fight about her being a prom queen and him being ex military, and you'll remember it because they say it about 5000 times.  Once they show up in Gatlin it somehow slows down still, or maybe remains slow because once the kids kill the main girl, you're just following one guy as he avoids the kids and He Who Walks.

As an ex-SyFy viewer I find this to be bad, even from that low bar to set.  Those movies were fun because they were so bad they were good with half-bit actors and awful CGI colliding into a ridiculous mess you could knock back a few beers and have a good enough time with.  This movie is too slow, too monotone, and really there' just nothing to grasp here except I guess about 30 seconds of topless women.  

I give this about a .5

I Live In Fear - 1955

 I believe Criterion put this on their Postwar Kurosawa set, as the themes around that set were all his non-Samurai flicks but also his more dramatic films set around the aftermath of WWII.

I didn't remember the film, but I do remember the poster from my days at the video store way back when:

The oddly colorized poster with the bizarre font always stuck out to me, and though I don't believe I ever rented this or watched it, clearly somehow it got lodged in my head anyways.

Toshiro Mifune stars as Nakajima, an oldschool elderly father figure who owns and runs a successful foundry but is willing to sell it and everything else he owns to take his family to Brazil for fear of the Hydrogen bomb.  He has memories of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and has lived in anxiety since then, and now his time has come to flee while he still can.  The family is against this and wrestles to take control of his estate so that he cannot force them to go.

The film is very much poignant with its look at the entirety of the issue at hand, with Takashi Shimura as a court appointed case worker assigned to decide the fate of the estate.  Also to be considered into this is Nakajima's illegitimate children, his intense degree of logic surrounding everything else in his life, and yet his unwavering opinion of immanent destruction.

As a character study it's very affecting and relevant.  For me it made me think, obviously in a Venn Diagram along with a lot of other things, how much does a global collective anxiety about our destructive capabilities in this modern day contribute to something like lower birth rates, failing job market, high housing cost, etc?  Given that Japan was one of the canaries in the coal mine re: economic distress, plunging birth rates, and technology destroying the culture, and Japan was the country that had been bombed, can these two things be related?

A prescient and interesting and overlooked Kurosawa film, I still doubt this is one that I'll revisit as much as some others.  Its a solid 3.5 with great acting by Mifune as always.

Valentine - 2001

 I vaguely remembered this existed as my girlfriend and I drove around on Valentines Day.  I thought it was called Valentines Day, and I thought maybe more like 2003ish, but I was wrong.

This movie is a real capitalizing on success flick, going for some of that post Scream revival.  It dates itself extremely early and many times with actors that are really of the moment.  Denise Richards, David Boreanaz, Katherine Heigl, Marley Shelton.  Then it ups the ante later by tossing in some Deftones and Marilyn Manson songs while a party scene happens.  Ah, 2001.

A formula and a killer is pretty quickly established as we have an original scene ala Terror Train but maybe dialed down a notch.  Then we cut to modern day high school or I guess college teens being methodically hunted down by a black clad guy in a Cupid mask who bleeds from his nose whenever he kills someone.

The deaths range from sorta average to just ok, they were not yet in vogue enough to be the focus and horror was still in a post-Columbine place of being censored by the MPAA.  Also in vogue somewhat at the time is remnants of the late 80s and 90s way of making you dislike the characters, a trope which I'm glad has gone away at least a little bit.  Rooting for the villain kind of remains, but hating the other characters is a little out of vogue I'd say.

I called the killer in the end and its pretty traditional horror movie fare.  I give it a solid 2.5