REVIEW: VIRUS: L'INFERNO DEI MORTI VIVENTI
REVIEW: HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD
REVIEW: BRUNO MATTEI [ 1980 ] 103'
REVIEW: BEATRICE FILMS S.R.L.
CAST: MARGIT EVELYN NEWTON, FRANK GARFIELD,
CAST: SELAN KARAY, JOSE GRAS
WTFFILM RATING:
CRITICAL RATING:
WTF-FILMOMETER: *crickets*

"There's not much I can tell you at the moment, our inquiry into this subject has just started. Yesterday for instance, in the research center of the university, I was examining a cadaver which had a quadruple amputation - no arms or legs. While we were working, to our complete surprise, it opened its eyes. It was dead, but it opened its eyes and began to move..."

For you horror junkies out there reading this article the above quotation should be relatively familiar seeing as its similarity to a quotation from one of the truly seminal films in horror history goes well beyond the realm of happy coincidences. The original quote, from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968], goes like this:

"In the cold room at the university we had a cadaver - a cadaver from which all four limbs had been amputated. Sometime this morning it opened its eyes and began to move its trunk - it was dead, but it opened its eyes and tried to move..."

In 1979, the double whammy European releases of George A. Romero's equally important DAWN OF THE DEAD and Lucio Fulci's beautiful - if one can call it that - but substance-less ZOMBI 2 set off a rather vile chain reaction in which an enormous number of European (and occasionally American) film production companies, drunk beyond recognition on the potential of scoring another financial success, began vomiting up zombie film after zombie film after zombie film. This certainly wasn't the first time that a successful film had spawned imitators - NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was the inspiration for, most notably, LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE [1974] and, on the more familiar side of the pond, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS [1972]. In the Italian film community, in particular, the idea of ripping off popular franchises (be they horror, westerns, action films, etc.) was nothing new. Indeed, this particular surge of derivatives would be nothing special were it not for the truly abysmal quality of many of the films that appeared therein (see FLESHEATER).

Riding at the heels of the latest fad in spaghetti filmdom was world-renowned hack Bruno Mattei (credited here, as he was with several other films, under the pseudonym of Vincent Dawn) - an auteur of exploitation hitherto best known for his ability to seamlessly blend such ideas as SS camps and pornography. Aside from the film at hand, which is arguably his best known in the states (it received theatrical and video release under the title NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES), he is also responsible for such cinematic atrocities as RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR [1984], VIOLENCE IN A WOMAN'S PRISON [1982], and several unofficial sequels to the Penthouse produced - and destroyed - historical epic CALIGULA [1979]. On top of that, when Lucio Fulci bowed out of ZOMBI 3 due to failing health and a total lack of desire for the premise of a sequel to his 1979 film, Mattei and his faithful screenwriter and assistant director Claudio Fragasso took up the reigns and saved it from success by chucking it well into the realm of complete and total idiocy.

It's difficult for this reviewer to dredge up any positive attributes in regards to the Mattei / Fragasso team. The closest I can come is to say that, when working together, their ability to plunder other, more successful, productions for useful ideas (and sometimes more, as you'll soon see) and then apply those ideas in an utterly ridiculous manner may be unrivaled in all the vastness of Italian filmdom. Likewise, the most that can be said for any of their completed efforts is that they retain some base level of amusement for one reason or another - sadly VIRUS (hitherto referred to by its International release title HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD) can't even manage that.

The intolerably slow progression of events begins somewhere in New Guinea, where a bunch of Europeans are busy rushing around and trying to look busy in front of an utterly useless blinky control panel thingy in what is assumed to be the control room for an industrial complex called Hope 1. Everything is checking out fine until something doesn't, and the discovery of an initially dead rat in "the most sterile part" of the factory rather unconvincingly begins a chain of events leading to an all out biological disaster. Workers are suddenly found donning black face, looking spacey, and gnawing on the sparse innards of their comrades. The head of the facility records a final message - identifying the work at the center as Operation Sweet Death - before he is overcome by blue green smoke; thus escaping the production before it becomes any more embarrassing.

One jarringly positioned cut later, we're outside of some unknown building where a group of unidentified (and ill-prepared) terrorists have taken a group of unknown people hostage for reasons that are... just kidding... they want all of the so-called Hope centers shut down and a general statement to the public made about their operations or else more idle threats will be made against the unknown hostages. An elite squad of four imbeciles who talk about sex and shooting people a lot are sent in by the police to kill the terrorists. One ominous-message-from-a-dying-terrorist-leader later they are mystically whisked to Barcelona... ehem... New Guinea... to investigate the incident at the Hope center. This reviewer can't help but wonder why the government would choose a wannabe SWAT team for the job and, on top of that, send them into the jungle with next to no information on what they are to expect and even less in the way of supplies.

Somewhere else in the glaringly obviously non-New Guinean countryside are five other irritating cast members - a husband, wife, and child (none of whom escape the following fifteen minutes of film alive) as well as a reporter and her trusty furry cameraman. The child has been bitten by a "native lunatic" and is a bone of contention among the entire truckload of people. The reporter and cameraman run off into the woods to talk dirty about each other and hang out around pools of fetid water. The wife leaves the vehicle for reasons currently forgotten, leaving the father to take care of the boy. The wife encounters a zombiefied priest who promptly kills and stashes her in the rafters while the father, asleep in the car, is subsequently killed by his zombie son. The reporter and cameraman encounter several more zombies in the woods but, sadly, manage to escape unharmed. The police dudes arrive in town just in time to save the reporter and cameraman from almost certain doom (damn them!) and allow the two to tag along on their trip to Operation Sweet Death.

Lots of stock footage of animals shows up and looks entirely out of place, while even more stock footage of natives from various documentaries and the Barbet Schroeder film LA VALLEE [1972] does the same as the six characters pretend, poorly, to react to it. One gratuitous nude romp with the stock footage natives later, the lot of them are invited into the village for a ho-down. Those pesky zombies show up again and ruin things and the six have no choice but to leave their completely unarmed "New Guinean" brothers behind as dinner for the uninvited guests. More stock footage appears, including plenty of shots of animals not native to New Guinea at all, and the group ends up at an abandoned house. The dead soon rise up about it and, starting with one of the wannabe SWAT's who's decided that dancing in a tutu is a wonderful waste of an audience's time, begin to slowly munch their way through the cast. The remaining five reach a beach and, after more stock footage and a raft ride, finally find Hope 1. The cameraman and another wannabe SWAT are made short work of in an elevator as is the rest of the cast after the reporter brings the whole ridiculous plot to an even more ridiculous finale about richy puralist dogs trying to get rid of the third world by making it eat itself - literally. One underdone semi-apocalyptic ending later the credits roll and the audience is allowed to escape.

Wow. If imitation really is the highest form of flattery then this must be one of the most flattering turd-bombs ever to grace the cinema screen. The combined team of Fragasso and Mattei, through their infinite wisdom, manage to create a group of the most irritatingly pointless characters imaginable and then thrust them into scene after scene after scene lifted from other films while still succeeding in rendering the entire affair all but entirely void of entertainment value. The perpetual use of mismatched stock footage and slipshod attempts at stringing everything together with a script so void of... well... anything but aggravating characters, zombies, and stock footage, leave HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD one of the most disappointing entries into the long lived (and even longer expired) Italian zombie cycle.

So what, exactly, is wrong with HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD? A hell of a lot would be the easiest of answers to give, but I'll attempt to be a bit more satisfying than that. The first and foremost problem is with the scripting itself. Nothing in the least bit original is expounded for the entire 103 minutes the film runs and the unoriginal that's there is handled so carelessly that it can't possibly succeed. Endless segments of the films of Fulci and Romero are hurriedly copied and pasted here, a number of them verbatim (see the quotes that begin this review for a prime example), with absolutely no appreciable effect. Performances are disappointing as well, but one has to wonder if there's an acting talent alive who could have taken the material provided and made anything of it at all. Even the zombies are portrayed completely unconvincingly - with their hands constantly cartoonishly outstretched, their movements overly exaggerated, and their faces, more often than not, graced with varying degrees of a smile.

Intolerable as all of that ends up being, the direction provided by Mattei proves to be just as lackluster. Shots linger for far to long and for no discernible reason and inappropriate cuts in the action are too plentiful to even mention. A simple old-school SAT style comparison to explain the film would go something like Mattei is to Pacing as Rocks are to Fluid Viscosity. Mattei seems to have thought that if he made a zombie film - indeed, HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD is full of the living dead side of the deal - with a running time comparable to that of DAWN OF THE DEAD then it might come off as being just as successful. Sadly, HELL lacks absolutely everything that makes DAWN as successful as it is with one glaring exception. Mattei loved the music of Goblin so much that he chose to incorporate it - particularly tracks from the excellent scores for DAWN OF THE DEAD, BUIO OMEGA, and CONTAMINATION - into his own film. The result is a vast amount of complete inactivity with a wall of awesome Goblin sound behind it. Reports as to how he managed to secure the recordings for the film vary and are sketchy at best and I certainly don't consider Mattei himself a reliable source of information in this regard. Sadly enough, however, the stolen soundtrack is the only real redeeming quality HELL has to offer.

It appears that Claudio Fragasso now claims that he is responsible for directing half of HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD - I have to wonder, after seeing it, why anyone in their right mind would ever admit to such a thing. Mattei's opus is a grueling cinema experience for absolutely all of the wrong reasons and is probably best if avoided by all. And, going back to the Italian title for the film - where the hell is the VIRUS in HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD? Methinks it must be stored safely away in some sort of super-secret government facility along with Mattei's talent... in New Guinea perhaps?