Hell of the Living Dead

Two years after the release of Dawn of the Dead, which was known in Europe as Zombi, the beginning of what is certainly a spate of imitation zombie movies in that ilk took place. Italian director Bruno Mattei decided to do his version of a zombie movie in the form of Hell of the Living Dead, which itself has had different names, including Night of the Zombies and Virus. By any name, this is quite possibly the unintentionally worst zombie movie of all time.

The movie begins at a power plant in Papua New Guinea where an experiment goes wrong and a mysterious gas is released that turns people into zombies. In the next scene, some eco terrorists threaten to shoot hostages if the experiment is not stopped, only to be shot down by leftover soldiers from the Dawn of the Dead movie. The next scene cuts to a couple with a child and a reporter and cameraman in a deserted camp. The reporter and cameraman head to the lake while the child, who turns into a zombie a few minutes later, eats his father while the mother gets attacked by a zombie while searching for help for the child. The surviving reporter and cameraman meet with the leftover soldiers after encountering their own zombies by the lake. If all of what I just said makes your head spin, just imagine how this all plays out on film. The only other "highlights" of the film are the reporter stripping from the waist up and throwing on paint to fit in with the natives, stock footage from National Geographic being thrown in to make it look like the movie really is in Papua New Guinea, and the repeated idiocy of the soldiers not aiming for the zombies' heads despite the fact that the advice gets repeated throughout the movie. Besides all of the complete idiocy of the characters in the movie, there is the matter of the soundtrack, which is in fact, the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. Ah, lazy movie making at its finest.