Zombie Holocaust | Through the Shattered Lens

Traditionally, I like to start my film reviews with a trailer but, with this trailer, I do feel the need to include a quick warning. The film being advertised, 1980’s Zombie Holocaust, was released at the height of the Italian exploitation boom and combined two notably gory genres of horror — the cannibal film and the zombie film. The trailer below is pretty explicit (even by the standards of the free speech zone known as the Shattered Lens) and is definitely not safe for work.

Like many of the classic Italian grindhouse films, Zombie Holocaust opens in New York City. A hospital attendant is caught devouring a cadaver in a morgue. After he attempts to escape by throwing himself out of a window, it’s discovered that 1) he’s a native of the Asian Molucca islands and 2) he’s only one of several natives to have both recently immigrated to New York City and gotten a job at a morgue. Dead bodies across NYC are being eaten and anthropologist Lori (played by Aelxandra Delli Colli, who is best known for being the only sympathetic character in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper) is determined to discover why.

In order to investigate, Lori and Dr. Peter Chandler (played by Ian McCullough, who was also in Fulci’s classic Zombi 2) lead an expedition to the island. Almost as soon as the expedition arrives, they find themselves being pursued by not only cannibals but zombies as well! Even worse, it turns out that there’s a mad scientist on the island. Dr. Obrero (Donald O’Brien, an Irish actor who appeared in a few hundred Italian films of every possible genre) is convinced that he can unlock the secrets of life by experimenting on dead bodies and doing brain transplants.

(To be honest, I’ve seen this film a few times and I’m still not quite sure what exactly Dr. Obrero was trying to accomplish but I guess it doesn’t matter. He’s a mad scientist with his own private laboratory so I guess he can pretty much do whatever he wants.)

I love Italian zombie films but, for the most part, I try to avoid the cannibal films. I saw both Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Apocalypse because they both featured Giovanni Lombardo Radice and I saw Cannibal Holocaust because, seriously, that’s one of those films that any student of cinematic horror has to see at least one time. But otherwise, I tend to avoid the cannibal films because, to me, they’re just not that much fun to watch. (And the fact that most of them contain scenes of actual animal cruelty doesn’t help…)

However, Zombie Holocaust is one of the rare cannibal films that I can watch and enjoy because it’s just so ludicrous and over-the-top. It also helps that the film’s gore is so obviously fake that it becomes almost a postmodern statement on Italian cannibal films. And, finally, this film has got zombies in it and who doesn’t love zombies?

Of the countless zombie films that came out of Italy during the early 80s, Zombie Holocaust is one of the odder entries in the genre. While most Italian exploitation films were shameless when it came to imitating other movies, Zombie Holocaust attempts to outdo them all by cramming the conventions of three different genres into one mess of a movie. As such, the movie starts out as a standard cannibal film just to suddenly become an almost shot-by-shot remake of Zombi 2 before then finally wrapping things up by having Donald O’Brien pop up, acting like Peter Cushing in a Hammer Frankenstein film. There’s nothing graceful or subtle about this film’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to its story and, while the end result isn’t exactly pretty, it’s still watchable in much the same way that a televised police chase is watchable.

Director Marino Girolami was a veteran filmmakers who was ending a long career with his work on Zombie Holocaust and you have to admire the fact that, as opposed to many other filmmakers who have found themselves in a similar situation, he made an honest and unapologetic exploitation film, a shameless rip-off of about a thousand other films. Instead of being embarrassed by the film’s silliness, he instead embraced it and his cast did the same.

Playing the lead role, Scottish actor Ian McCullough plays his character with an attitude that, at times, almost comes across as a parody of stiff upper lip English imperialism. You may have to be a fan of grindhouse cinema to truly appreciate it but, whenever I’ve sat through this film, I always found myself smiling every time that McCullough discovered that another member of his expedition has been killed and responded with a frustrated, “And none of this would have happened if you had simply done as I had told you to do.” By the end of the film, I was expecting McCullough to approach the last remaining native and tell him, “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

However, the film is truly stolen by Donald O’Brien, who plays the mad scientist with an almost alarming sense of authenticity. For the most part, nothing that O’Brien says during the film makes the least bit of sense but he delivers the lines with such conviction that it really doesn’t matter. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, O’Brien delivers the line, “Patient’s screams annoying me…performed removal of vocal chords.” It takes a special type of actor to make a line like that work and O’Brien was that actor.

Indeed, watching a film like this, it’s hard not to admire the fact that both the filmmakers and the cast managed to stay sane regardless of how ludicrous the film eventually became. That’s perhaps the best way to describe Zombie Holocaust. It’s ludicrous but it’s still a lot of fun.

(Speaking of ludicrous and fun, when Zombie Holocaust was released here in the States, it was renamed Dr. Butcher, M.D. and it was apparently advertised by a sound truck known as the Butchermobile. To me, that sounds like a lot of fun and it again reminds me that I was born a few decades too late.)

Continuing my ongoing survey of classic exploitation and grindhouse film trailers, here’s six more.

1) Simon, King of the Witches — I’ve never seen this film but I caught this trailer on one of the 42nd Street compilation DVDs. It doesn’t really make me want to see the film but I love the trailer because it is just so totally and utterly shameless. Seriously, could this thing be more early 70s? As well, I’ve always wondered — would witches actually have a king? I mean, seriously, get with the times.

The film, by the way, stars Andrew Prine who apparently had a really promising film career until his girlfriend, Karyn Kupicent, died mysteriously in 1964. A lot of people believed that Prine killed her though he always denied any guilt and there’s really no evidence to connect him to the crime. Interestingly, even more people seem to think that Kupicent was murdered because she knew something about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Finally, true crime author Steve Hodel has suggested that Kupicent was actually murdered by his father, Dr. George Hodel. (Steve also claims that George was the Black Dahlia killer, the Zodiac killer, Chicago’s lipstick killer, and that George was responsible for just about every unsolved murder in history. Oedipus much?)

2) The Town That Dreaded Sundown — Though I didn’t consider this while selecting this trailer, this is another film that features the unfortunate Robert Prine. I’ve seen this film exactly one time when it showed up on late night television once. Unfortunately, considering that it was 4 in the morning and the movie was obviously heavily edited for television (not to mention that constant commercial interruptions), I didn’t really get to experience the film under ideal circumstances. As a result, I’ve been trying to track this movie down on DVD ever since. It’s not an easy film to find.

One of the reasons this movie fascinates me is because it’s not only based on a true unsolved crime but it actually follows the facts of the case fairly closely. In the late 40s, Texarkana was stalked by a masked gunman known as the Phantom Killer. The case was never solved and its gone on to become a bit of a local legend in the rural Southwest. Part of my interest in this case comes from the fact that I grew up in the rural Southwest. It’s the part of the country I know best and this film was actually filmed in the southwest as opposed to just an arid part of Canada. Interestingly enough, the Phantom Killer had a lot of similarities to the later Zodiac Killer. However, as far as I know, Steve Hodel has yet to accuse his father of haunting Texarkana.

The film itself was made by Charles B. Pierce, a filmmaker who was based in Arkansas and made several independent films in that state. Perhaps this explains why the trailer refers to “Texarkana, Arkansas” even though everyone knows that the only part of Texarkana that matters is the part that’s in Texas.

3) Nightmares in a Damaged Brain — This is one of the infamous “video nasties” (trust the English to not only ban movies but to come up with a stupid and annoying label for those movies). Like many of those films, this is a gory Italian film that seems to bathe in the sordid.

It’s also fairly difficult film to find. The DVD I own is actually a copy of the severely cut version that was eventually released in England, of all places.

(Another thing about the English — why is it that a culture that obsessively uses the word “cunt” in casual conversation seems so driven to distraction by a little fake blood? It’s as if someone told them that banning movies would somehow make up for the attempted genocide of Catholics in Northern Ireland.)

However, even in cut form, this is a disturbingly dark and frequently depressing film. Evil seemed to radiate through my entire apartment the whole time I was watching it and that atmosphere is captured in the movie’s trailer.

As a sidenote, the gore effects in this film are credited to Tom Savini. At the time of the film’s release, Savini announced that he actually had nothing to do with this movie.

4) To the Devil a Daughter — I recently read a biography of Christopher Lee in which he cited this movie, along with the original Whicker Man, as one of his personal favorites. It was also the film debut of Natassia Kinski, the daughter of Klaus Kinski. Considering Klaus’s reputation, the title is ironic.

5) Vampire Circus — This is another movie that I’ve never seen but I’ve heard great things about it. Supposedly, its one of the last great Hammer vampire films. Reportedly, it was controversial at the time of its release because it featured vampires attacking English children. (Which, if nothing else, at least prevented from growing up to kill little Irish children.) Seeing the trailer leaves me even more frustrated that it has yet to be released, in the States, on DVD.

6) Dr. Butcher, M.D. — This is actually a rather odd zombie/cannibal film hybrid from Italy. It was originally titled Zombie Holocaust but the American distributors retitled it Dr. Butcher. I love this trailer for much the same reason I love the Simon, King of the Witches trailer. It is just pure and shameless exploitation. Plus, it features some of the best moments of the great Donal O’Brien’s performance as the “title” character. I recently forced my sister Erin to watch Zombie Holocaust. Ever since, whenever I start to ramble too much, she simply looks at me and says, “Lisa’s annoying me. About to perform removal of vocal chords…” She actually does a fairly good impersonation. Consider this just more proof that the Grindhouse brings families closer together.