Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, Monsters goes to Vietnam.

Episode 3.6 “The Hole”

(Dir by David Severeid, originally aired on November 4th, 1990)

At the height of the Vietnam War, two U.S. Marines and their guide stumble upon a hole in the middle of a deserted village.  Lowering themselves into the hole, they find a complex maze of tunnels.  The Viet Cong dug the tunnels so that they could move and smuggle weapons without being seen by their enemies.  But as the guide (played by Glenn Kubota) explains it, they dug their tunnels so deep that they awakened a far more evil power.

More evil than communism?  This is a scary episode!

Soon, Sgt. Kenner (Ahmad Rashad) and Corporal Torres (Antone Pagan) find themselves being pursued through the tunnels by zombies.  Kenner is determined to fight and destroy as many of the undead as possible.  Torres just wants to get out of the tunnels.  But it turns out that finding their way out is not as easy as Kenner and Torres assumed it would be.  And the men are definitely at a disadvantage because the zombies know the maze.  The maze is their home.

This episode is surprisingly straight-forward.  There aren’t any huge twists or anything of that sort.  Three men enter a tunnel system and find themselves being pursued by zombies.  The underground maze of tunnels is properly atmospheric location and I did jump a few times when the zombies suddenly appeared coming around a corner.  The zombie makeup was well-done and this episode was a bit gorier than the average episode of Monsters.  The special effects brought to mind the grotesque imagery of the Italian zombie films.  This episode owed quite a bit to the legacy of Lucio Fulci.

That said, I do wish the episode had been a bit more surprising.  It was so straight-forward that it actually become a bit predictable.  I’ve seen enough George Romero films to know exactly what was going to happen to each person who entered the maze.  The episode was brutally effective but it’s still hard not to feel that the plot needed an unexpected twist that just didn’t come.  In fact, as I watched the episode, I found myself thinking about how a film like Cannibal Apocalypse managed to make a powerful statement about the horror of war by portraying Vietnam vets who had been infected by the cannibal virus while serving in the conflict.  I also thought about how Fulci, at his best, crafted zombie films that reminded us of just how fragile the human body actually is.  There wasn’t much subtext to found in The Hole and that’s a shame because often the most interesting thing about a zombie story is the subtext.

Still, the episode worked in its own crude way.  The undead are frightening, no matter where they appear.