Zombie Brigade

In a small Australian outback township, a greedy mayor agrees to sell off some land to a Japanese conglomerate for development into a Robotman theme park (because the arsehole of nowhere is the perfect location for such an attraction!). The only problem is that the site is currently home to a memorial for those brave Aussies who died in the Vietnam war. Still, nothing that a few sticks of dynamite can't put right. But no sooner has the memorial been demolished, than hordes of undead soldiers rise from the rubble to cause havoc in the town.

Very low budget, very talky, and featuring some of the worst zombies I have ever witnessed (a bit of mud on the face and a pair of plastic fangs and we're done), Zombie Brigade really has very little going for it. The acting is just about passable, given the nature of the film, but the script is so dull, with lengthy swathes of dreary dialogue serving as exposition, that it's difficult to remain interested. A couple of novel ideas-aboriginal spirit warriors and an army of reanimated dead WWII soldiers-might have lifted matters if they had been better developed; Carmelo Musca and Barrie Pattison's lifeless direction ensures that any sparks of ingenuity are quickly extinguished.

"The Zombie Brigade (from Lizard Gully")came out at the time of the Australian Bi-Centenary. It's got an aboriginal hero (John Moore) squiring an Asian heroine (Kihm Lam)in a battle with the undead of three wars - the fallen military are the most revered group in Australian culture. This is precipitated by the local councillors setting up a land deal that sells off the site of a Vietnam memorial for a Japanese developer (Adam A. Wong)'s theme park.

About this time a scheme to set up a multi-functional Japanese retirement polis was in the papers. Ben Elton used the same incident in a TV series a few years later.

"The Zombie Brigade" is just about the last film to be made under the tax concessions which terrified the powerful Australian Film bureaucracy, because they showed that their assessments, consultants, grants and awards were unnecessary - if not counter productive - to Australian production. More films were made without them, on tax breaks - and they could always turn out to be (shudder) like "The Zombie Brigade from Lizard Gully."

Produced in Western Australia, never a center of sophisticated film making, this one arrived after the demand for trashy entertainment, that had been generated by the spread of multiplexes, had already been cut back by closures and multi screen programming. It did not meet with the favor of it's international distributors and had limited showing, though local audiences regularly laughed in the right places - and a few of the wrong ones. Spontaneous applause was not unknown. It had a minor reputation as a good film to get high on.

It was the first film of star Moore who became the leading young black Australian actor of his generation and the support was drawn from Perth theater talent. The pitting of Geoff Gibbs' conniving mayor against Leslie Wright's upright copper (with Scobie Malone and Trooper O'Brien then the only police heroes in Australian film) centered the story and the twist ending was picked up by a few observers as offering an unexpected comment. Placing trash movie monsters among gum trees and Australian wooden verandah buildings still has novelty value.

A tight budget was stretched to - and occasionally beyond - breaking point and the first time director often had to settle for what he could get but years later some people do still retain the memory of night the risen Vietnam War dead marched through an Australian town which had turned it's back on the values that they had died defending, the film's central image.

Also, ponder the menace of vampire sheep!

I found this one by accident in an old Polish video store and I bought it immediately."Zombie Brigade" is one of the dumbest horror flicks I have ever seen,but still it manages to be both entertaining and amusing.The zombies(undead Vietnam soldiers)are funny looking with these fake fangs-the make up is truly horrible!The acting isn't so hot either.The film is worth watching just for curiosity sake(Australian horror movies are pretty rare)or if you like such brainless entertainment!Rather not recommended.

See, I like horror movies, zombie-stuff in particular. I love em, and I try to collect as many of em as possible. I even like the 'bad' ones like Hell of the Living dead, or Zombie Holocaust. I considered myself to be a good tolerant zombie-fan. Until I saw this piece of garbage I bought the DVD for an extremely cheap price (the title! That damn title tricked me into it!!), two euros or something, and I got what I paid for. The story is bad (zombies and vampires? Just because it is not usual, does not mean it can be considered as original or, let alone, good), the acting is bad, ... and the rest is even worse. I'm not gonna elaborate anymore. If you want to see this, then do so. Consider it as an act of mere charity, feel good about yourself because at least someone watched the movie, so the time was not completely wasted. I give em -8/10

There isn't thousands of Aussie horror movies on the market so that alone makes this B-grade film interesting. The story is set in rural outback Oz, where a bunch of veteran zombies decide to return from the dead after their grave has been desecrated. Some of the acting talent isn't so hot, but there is a certain charm about it's 'ockerisms'. Slow at times, unbelievable and silly at others, but this is the only film I believe where you'll ever see an Aboriginal spirit spear and kill the living dead.