Exit Humanity (2011)

In the last days of the American Civil War, the dead have begun to rise from the grave to feast on the living. Edward Young returns home from the war to find his wife has been zombified and his son is missing. Edward does what he has to do, putting down his wife and searching for his son through the hostile wilderness. Along the way he runs afoul of a psychotic former Confederate officer who is rounding up the living and the undead to try to discover a cure for the hellish plague.

Exit Humanity proves that an interesting setting and some creativity can overcome the budgetary limitations of your horror movie. Setting their zombie apocalypse just after the Civil War enables the filmmakers to take advantage of the (Canadian) wilderness, some rustic cabins, and a bit of period costuming, which obfuscate the shortcomings of their budget and actors. The movie even manages to employ some animated sequences (!) that effectively fill in for a few costly action scenes and effects they probably can't pull off.

The one thing that Exit Humanity doesn't overcome is the plodding pace. The film is intentionally slow and thoughtful rather than fast and furious, but they overshoot the mark between deliberate and dull. Still, the zombie makeup and effects are pretty good and the setting and style are unique enough to make this a decent alternative to the standard-issue zombie movie.

City Of The Living Dead (1980)

Basically the only image from this movie that isn't disgusting.

Lucio Fulci's City Of The Living Dead begins with a scream at a seance and a priest hanging himself in a graveyard. Naturally, this opens the gates of Hell and causes the rotting dead to rise from the grave. Bound to happen. But the zombie uprising is just one small piece of the surreal insanity in this, one of the most violent movies ever made.

A bar mirror breaks all on its own. A cat scratches a psychiatry patient's hand. A maggoty, rotten corpse discourages a local scuzzball from getting busy with a blow-up doll. A zombie priest mooshes a handful of bloody, wormy dirt into a girl's face. A woman's eyes bleed and she vomits out her entire intestinal tract before tearing out her boyfriend's brains with one hand. Something in a dead woman's coffin tears a chunk of flesh out of a mortician's hand while the body remains in repose. A woman works on a painting of a rhinoceros head floating over an ocean. Glass from a breaking window impales a wall, causing the wall to bleed. A man uses a machine shop power drill to bore through another man's head and right out the other side. A storm of maggots blows in a window, covering everything in the room, including our heroes, in writhing, wriggling larvae. Zombies teleport hither and yon. A flashing sign assures us that the bar has Schlitz on tap.

It's all foretold in the Book Of Enoch, a 4000-year-old tome the medium at the seance tried to warn the police about. The only person who will listen is a reporter (who comes off more like a low-rent Columbo), who is eager to get to the bottom of the strange occurences. He and a woman who had a vision at the seance (and was subsequently buried alive) travel to the New England town of Dunwich - a town with a dark history of witch burnings - to try to close the newly opened gates of Hell.

Unlike so many zombie movies, this one is truly suspenseful at times: seeing the woman who was buried alive scratch and claw at the inside of the coffin lid; watching from her point of view as the reporter almost impales her through the eyes with the pickaxe he uses to free her... that sort of thing.

It even ventures into the territory of being genuinely scary near the end as our remaining heroes are surrounded by shambling zombies and the undead priest from the beginning in his cavernous, corspe-riddled tomb.

But most of all, City Of The Living Dead is weirder than all get out.

Lucio Fulci's best movies are like fever dreams in the way they throw disturbing images at you with no care for logic or sense. Scenes are cut together with little regard for traditional pacing, stabbing abruptly in and out of horror set pieces to catch up with our reporter hero or the families of the recently dead. The bizarre structure of the movie is unsettling and unnerving, and gives the whole thing a nihilistic, apocalyptic vibe. As a result, City Of The Living Dead presents a more effective Hell on Earth than most any devil movie ever could.

Horrifying, vile imagery is abstract art in the hands of a visionary like Fulci. He is much more effective with the bizarre, surreal horror of this film or his masterpiece, The Beyond, than with his more traditional zombie movies. If you like your outlandish gore packaged with an enigmatic story and atmospheric direction, you don't want to miss City Of The Living Dead.

A special note for death metal fans: City Of The Living Dead was the inspiration for Death's excellent "Regurgitated Guts."

Zombi 3 (1988)

Zombi 3 is an Italian pseudo-sequel to an Italian unofficial pseudo-sequel to George Romero's classic Dawn Of The Dead. See, Dawn Of The Dead was very popular in Italy where it was released as Zombi. In the grand European tradition of ripping off good Ameican movies, Italian director Lucio Fulci Immediately put out his unauthorized sequel, which is known in the U.S. as Zombie, but in Italy as Zombi 2. Then he followed that up with today's feature, which doesn't really have anything to do with the films preceding it. Oh, and just to add to the fun, Lucio Fulci's original cut of the movie was way too short. So Bruno Mattei, who was on a break from shooting Strike Commando 2 (with the guy who would later go on to be the first Dumbledore!), shot additional scenes that added up to about 40% of Zombi 3's length.

You with me so far?

Fortunately for those of us who like consistency, the movie itself is every bit as convoluted as the story of its creation. Zombi 3 follows the theft of a military-created bacteriological agent with the cheery name of Death 1 and its subsequent contamination of the populace. In one of many ripoff moments (this time of the fantastic Return Of The Living Dead), the military types kill the contaminated guy who stole the agent and cremate the body, causing the smoke to spread the contaminant. However, this time it's not due to seeded clouds and a rainstorm, but by interacting with a flock of passing birds. Yep, that's right - we've got zombie birds in this one.

Soon the birds have infected a handful of idiot humans who are our protagonists (such as they are). The usual zombie nonsense ensues, with flesh munching, army dudes shooting everyone, and our heroes heroically running from the slow-moving zombie hordes. But that makes this sound like a normal zombie movie, which it is not. It's not nearly as good as a normal zombie movie.

The best way to illustrate the shortcomings of this movie is probably for me to share the list of questions that came to mind as I watched it. Here goes:

• Some scientists working for the military, some military dudes out on a pass, some lamely slutty girls, some random vacationers at a cheap-looking "resort" hotel...  Who are these people?  Our protagonists? Oh no!
• Where are we? It's all jungle-y outside (it was shot in the Phillipines).  Oh, they mentioned safe-houses in Santa Monica and Santa Cruz on the local radio broadcast.  So this is In Los Angeles or something?  Wait, now they mentioned San Antonio. Huh?  A scientist just asked, "what if another epidemic breaks out? In Europe? In the United States?"  Where are we??
• Why did that zombie just shove that one girl out of a window into the hot springs? 
• How did the girl's legs get torn off in the hot springs?  Is there a shark in there (which would recall the great zombie vs. shark fight from Zombi 2)? 
• Why are the zombies hiding in the bushes, waiting to leap out at the military guy? Why can the zombies leap through the air but not walk faster than somebody's 90-year-old grandmother?
• How did the zombie head in the fridge leap out to bite that guy?  Flex its neck muscles real quick?
• Why do the zombies wait patiently outside, watching while the humans barricade themselves in at the hotel?  
• Why did the birds stop being a factor after the first twenty minutes of the movie?  
• Why did the scientists disappear from the movie for a good 40 minute stretch?  
• Why can the Decontamination Squad not shoot four people standing basically side-by-side?  
• Why does the movie go on for another 25 minutes after what seemed for all the world to be the final gut-munching zombie attack?  
• Why did the heavily armed Decontamination Squad make the military duress drop their weapons and then attack them hand-to-hand, especially since the plan was for the D Squad to kill everybody they encountered?
• What was in that small barn that caused a small hand grenade to blow it up like the Death Star?  
• Why are there zombies hiding in the grass like snipers?  
• How did that one guy get way out into open pastureland when a second ago he was twenty yards from the building?

This could actually be a pretty good zombie movie if you were to rewrite the script, hire new actors, put a new director in charge, reshoot the whole thing with better lighting and sets and without the apparent smear of Vasoline on the camera lens throughout.  Maybe revamp the makeup effects and improve the soundtrack, too.  These and just a few more changes would make a remake of Zombi 3 into a pretty decent zombie flick.  As it is, this one should probably only be seen by zombie completists and/or masochists. All others should avoid it like a plague of zombie birds.

Re-Animator (1995)

You would think Re-Animator, another Lovecraft adaptation from director Stuart Gordon (Dagon), would be a hard movie to like. It is intensely gory and loaded to the gills with horribly disfigured naked zombies, cats being brought repeatedly in and out of life, and a severed head interacting with one young lady like something from a Cannibal Corpse album cover. To say it's politically incorrect is to way understate things. But if you're a horror fan and you have a sense of humor, you'll no doubt agree with me - it's just so danged fun!

When eager, idealistic Miskatonic University med student Dan Cain takes on a roommate in the brilliant but unhinged Herbert West, Dan's life becomes a wide-awake nightmare in a matter of days. He soon finds his cat dead, re-animated, re-killed, and re-re-animated. This is just the beginning of the downward spiral of horror that sees the revocation of his student loan, a fight with a super-strong zombie, his future father-in-law's death and re-animation as a mindless monster, mind-controlled zombies, and the awful discovery that West's serum works on body parts as well as whole bodies. It's an eye-popping, bone saw-whirring, head-squashing tarantella of death and un-death.

Smug, cruel, manipulative, and mean, the title character of Herbert West would be repugnant and unlikable if it weren't for the talents of lead actor Jeffrey Combs. He brings an intensity and enthusiasm to the character that makes him not only a palatable screen presence who drives the plot forward, but a delightfully devilish protagonist you can really root for despite the horrible things he does. The whole movie lives and dies (and lives again!) by Combs' performance, and he carries the movie easily.

If you are squeamish, subscribe to Cat Fancy, or can't take a joke, you should give this one a pass. If you like H.P Lovecraft's stories and think buckets of gore can be pretty funny, then Re-Animator is the movie for you. It is absolutely one of the best zombie movies of the 80s and among the funniest gross-out horror movies ever.