We haven't had a zombie film on here for a while, have we? And I mean actual zombies; not rabid-but-alive people erroneously labelled as zombies; not animal zombies whose bite turns humans into mutated zombies; and a whole movie about them, not just having them shoehorned in to please an international market. Although Lucio Fulci is still involved with this one. Yes, it's time for another of the more infamous of the video nasties - Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi[e] 2; Island Of The Flesh Eaters; Zombie; Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us; and Island Of The Living Dead - and those are just the English language titles).
A boat drifts into New York harbour; it's seemingly abandoned except for the morbidly obese zombie stumbling around on board who takes a bite out of one of the police officers sent to investigate before getting shot and tumbling into the water. The boat belonged to a Dr Bowles, but he is nowhere to be found - so his daughter Ann and reporter Peter West decide to do their own investigation and head off to the Caribbean island of Matul, where Ann's father was last heard from. Along the way, they meet up with two tourists with a boat, Brian and Susan, and all four go to Matul together. There they discover that the dead on the island are returning to life, allegedly because of a strange new disease but there are suggestions of voodoo being the cause from the locals. The four of them then find themselves fighting to survive against an onslaught of zombies long enough to escape the island...
Zombie Flesh Eaters is best-known for two scenes in particular: a scene where a zombie and a shark have an underwater fight over which of them gets to eat a half-naked Susan; and a scene in which a screaming woman slowly has her head pulled forward until her eye is impaled on a large splinter of wood in loving close-up (which then snaps off while still embedded deeply in her eye, just to add insult to injury). The former scene leaves you no doubt thinking, "What a bloody brave stuntman that was,"; while the latter scene was most likely the reason the film ended up on the DPP's video nasties list - violence to eyes was always a great big no-no for them.
Not that the eyeball impalement is the only scene of gore in the movie, of course. Throats are ripped out; chunks of flesh are torn from arms, and when zombies are killed they don't just fall over - their heads explode and their bodies collapse into piles of sloppy, decaying miasma as whatever is animating their corpses stops working. The zombie makeup effects are particularly gruesome as well, as zombies look like they're decaying and rotting away as they stumble around, and at one point a graveyard of conquistadores digs their way up from underground (although we'll not question how 300-year-old bodies can still have flesh and skin on them). Zombie Flesh Eaters is a bloody, messy zombie film that deserves praise for its special make-up effects if nothing else.
In Italy, George Romero' Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi[e], and so when Zombie Flesh Eaters came out the year later it was called Zombi[e] 2 in Italy, to make it seem as though it was a sequel to Romero's film. (Just to confuse matters, as you can see above it was also called Zombie in some markets.) The beginning and ending scenes in New York were shot as an afterthought, in another attempt to connect the two films together, although the way the narrative plays out it would make Zombie Flesh Eaters more of a prequel than a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, as it implies that the events of the former were the cause of the events of the latter. There's also the throwaway line from one character that has a certain familiarity to it: "The father of my father always say when the earth spit out the dead they will come back to suck the blood of the living." Apparently, the script for Zombie Flesh Eaters was written before Dawn of the Dead came out, but I suspect a few lines were tweaked to reference the film during filming, just as scenes were added to link the two together. (I do hope everyone is taking notes here; there might be a test at the end...) In another marketing scheme that only seemed to happen in the 60s and 70s and with some of the more infamous films, vomit bags were actually handed out in cinemas for any of the audience who couldn't take the violence and gore.
Zombie Flesh Eaters might not have the strongest plot, but it doesn't really need one, as people aren't watching it for the storyline. They're there for the gore, and it delivers that in buckets (also the exploitation shots, where the film manages to find two places to fit some gratuitous female nudity in). It plays to its strengths and manages to come away as a success, as well as one of the video nasties that rightly deserves to be remembered for more than just its inclusion on that list.
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