Time for the tale of the worst purchase decision I ever made. Over a decade ago, I saw that the former banned 'video nasty' Zombie Creeping Flesh (aka Hell of the Living Dead, Virus and Zombi 4) was unbanned and available on DVD. So I bought it for £20, purely because it was a zombie film and a video nasty. And what a mistake that turned out out to be, because the movie turned out to be one of the worst I have ever seen, which is really saying something.
Somewhere in Papua New Guinea a secret research laboratory is working on the top secret project Operation: Sweet Death. It all goes horribly wrong (or perhaps right, considering the project name...) when a chemical leak causes first rats and then humans to die, then reanimate as ravenous flesh-eating zombies. A SWAT team is sent in to find out what has happened at the laboratory and contain it, and they end up meeting and joining forces with a pretty female reporter and her cameraman who were also in the country trying to investigate Operation: Sweet Death, and the group have to fight their way through New Guinea as it becomes overrun by zombies.
Oh boy. Where to begin? Zombie Creeping Flesh was directed by "Vincent Dawn", which was a pseudonym for Bruno Mattei - he of Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 infamy (and more besides). The "Vincent Dawn" nom de plume was a name Mattei used whenever he made a movie featuring zombies, it seems, but it has particular notability here because Zombie Creeping Flesh is trying to be Dawn of the Dead (the 1978 version, of course) so badly it hurts. From the SWAT team clearly meant to evoke memories of Peter and Roger from Romero's film (and the SWAT team stays in those blue boilersuits for the entire film), to the music that has pretty much just been ripped whole cloth from Dawn of the Dead, to the movie's ending scenes that are clearly trying to imply that Zombie Creeping Flesh is some sort of prequel to Dawn of the Dead... The Italian film industry's tendency in the 1970s and 80s to make their own versions of western blockbusters to the point where the films were given their own genre name ("spaghetti" westerns et al), but it has rarely been so blatant as it was here.
And the movie itself is not good. Not good at all. Well, the zombie and gore effects aren't really that bad at all, to give them their due. But as for everything else... The plot is ridiculous (the secret behind Operation: Sweet Death is that it was created to solve the Third World hunger crisis by making everyone in those countries eat each other? Really?); the film is full of stock footage from several mondo films - and most of it doesn't fit the film's setting anyway; and so on. There are just too many stupidly ridiculous moment in the film to properly list them all, but they include: the bit where the pretty female reporter has to wander around topless for a while to gain the trust of a native tribe; the bit where one of the SWAT team decides to put on a lime green tutu and dance around while searching a house for zombies (and there are no prizes for guessing what happens to him); and there's the bit where an African (or perhaps from Papua New Guinea itself - the film never goes so far as to identify anything) UN delegate gives an impassioned speech about how the Western countries have destroyed his country with these events... to an almost completely empty debate hall. And then, just to top it all off, when he is finished the British delegate replies simply, "Well, we'll continue this tomorrow." That, of course, also ties in with both the racial commentary threaded through the film, as well as the more uncomfortable instances of racism that would also surface in the jungle cannibal films of the time (in this case, the most notable examples being that nearly every zombie is black and the protagonists are all white; and the aforementioned scene where a white woman strips down to meet with a primitive tribe who treat her with a mixture of undue fascination and near-worship).
If I'm completely fair I guess I can say I've seen worse films, although I never paid quite so much for the displeasure. And I suppose Zombie Creeping Flesh is the kind of film that would lend itself well to a MSTing. Get some friends round, get the beverages of your choice and settle down for an unintentionally hilarious film.
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