La revanche des mortes vivantes

The French and movies about the living dead don't really seem to match together very well, do they? Remember "Zombie Lake"? Well, "Revenge of the Living Dead Girls" is almost as awful as that one, only it wasn't so fortunate to hoard a gigantic cult status and became pretty much forgotten over the years. Nevertheless, this is entertaining bad cinema in case all you're looking for is no-budget exploitation, sleaze and a handful of repulsive gore sequences. The film opens like standard zombie guff, with three recently deceased teenage girls coming back from the dead after toxic waste has been spilled on their tombs. The girls immediately go after the management of the local dairy factory since poisoned milk caused their deaths to begin with. Or at least so it seems, because the whole factory hangs together by fraud, conspiracies, scandals and bribery. There's a fairly ingenious plot-twist near the end but, until then, all we get to see is terrible acting, pointless red herrings and completely hilarious dialogues ("a little bit of necrophilia never hurt anyone"). The gory scenes, albeit amateurish, are effectively nauseating and offensive! Some woman gets her eyes poked out by high heels, another one poor soul gets a sword inserted in her vagina and THE most stomach-turning moment involves a totally random but incredibly bloody miscarriage in the shower. That was just too much! Proceed at your own risk...

REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRLS (Pierre B. Reinhard - France 1987).

The premise of spilling some toxic waste in awakening the dead is rather similar to Jean Rollin's girlie zombie flick LA MORTE VIVANTE (1981), in this case it's the spilling of contaminated milk that awakes three slumbering girls in a graveyard instead of one. Some even suggested Jean Rollin directed this one too, and that Pierre B. Reinhard was a pseudonym. Does three living dead girls mean more fun? Well, not exactly. Now, I'm not a big zombie fan, but sometimes it can be fun, even the bad ones, but the only thing this one delivers is a couple of truly sickening - but not too convincing - gore scenes, like a woman's abortion in the shower, a sword used as a dildo and some genital mutilation. Despite this, even gore lovers or those looking for a couple of laughs, better look elsewhere. In between the occasional and quite infrequent zombie action, we're treated with a hokum storyline, wooden acting and when talking atmosphere and cinematography, Jean Rollin's oeuvre begins to look brilliant in comparison. This one is plain dull, and Brigitte Lahaie isn't even in it. The pits.

Camera Obscura --- 2/10

While a hitch-hiker seduces the driver of a milk tanker, a mysterious motorcyclist sneaks on board the vehicle and pours a bottle of liquid into the container; soon after, three young women drop dead, having drunk the contaminated milk. The three victims are laid to rest in a cemetery that just so happens to be the chosen illegal dumping ground for several barrels of industrial waste called MZ31. The toxic sludge seeps into the ground and reanimates the dead girls, who emerge from their tombs to take revenge on the living.

Despite non-stop female nudity and the occasional moment of extreme nastiness, French '80s horror The Return of the Living Dead Girls somehow still manages to be quite dull for much of its runtime, the plot dwelling too much on dreary industrial espionage and blackmail instead of gory zombie action. The script is terrible, and the acting poor, while Pierre B. Reinhard's direction is about what one would expect from a man whose movie career prior to this was... shall we say... not very demanding of style or imagination.

Trashy highlights include a woman getting a shoe heel in the eye (the wound spurting profusely), personal assistant Brigitte (Anthea Wyler) fondling herself before slipping into a jacket with massive shoulder pads, a prostitute molested by the undead before being shish-kebabed with a sword, a man having his manhood bitten off by a zombie, and a pregnant woman's stomach opening up to reveal her unborn baby. There's also fun to be had as the zombies use a doorbell before entering a house, go for a relaxing swim in a pool, and drive a car, all of which sounds daft, but can be explained by the film's twist ending, which -- trust me -- is far more ridiculous. These bits are admittedly fun, but quite a lot of perseverance is required to make it through to the end.

I really don't know why this film has gotten such a bad rap. I personally had a blast with this one. It's total trash cinema at it's "finest" and after reading all the horrible reviews, was surprised to find how much I enjoyed it.

DEAD GIRLS is a strange combination of exploit style horror/crime caper. The town's milk supply is tainted with a chemical that causes those that drink it to die. Three girls fall victim to the bad milk and are buried in the local cemetery. Meanwhile, the sleazy chemical plant manager is paying to have toxic chemicals dumped and the guy doing the dumping chooses the same cemetery. The chemicals cause the dead girls to come back to life and they want revenge...

DEAD GIRLS is a fun, gory, sleazy "zombie" film. The best part (other than the high-heel-eye-gouging, penis-munching, undead-orgy-vagina-stabbing, and spontaneous-shower-miscarriage...) is the "twist" ending that really comes out of nowhere and is sure to throw the audience for a loop. The zombies in this one aren't your average, no-brain flesh eaters - these girls plan, hide, go for a swim, and even drive cars...and in the end, you'll understand why. Definitely not high-brow art, DEAD GIRLS is pure goofy sleaze at it's finest. 8/10

This is one of those films that "irresponsibly" intermixes extreme sex and violence. This doesn't bother me, however, because the two things are like drinking cold beer in a hot tub--both are enjoyable but for completely different reasons. And just as no sane person is going to start bathing in cold vats of beer or drinking hot tub water, these kinds of movies aren't going to make gore erotic and sex repulsive, however much they mix the two. The real problem with THIS movie though is that it fails miserably both as a sex movie AND as a splatter movie.

Three nubile young girls die and come back to life as zombies either because some misguided environmentalists poisoned their milk with chemical stolen from a chemical company OR because the same chemical company is pouring toxic waste in the graveyard--the incompetently plotted movie never quite makes up its mind on this. The zombie girls have dessicated faces and hands but perfectly firm young bodies when they disrobe (which is very often). They are thus neither very sexy nor at all scary. Maybe this was meant to be an absurdist comedy, but I sure wasn't laughing. The non-zombie girls aren't much more appealing (how do you say "sleazy skanks" in French?). They kind of look like refugees from "Traci, I Love You" (Traci Lord's French-made, only-legal porn flick) except that their acting is not quite up to the level of 80's Euro-porn.

The splatter scenes are very puerile in their attempts to shock the viewer, resembling more the shot-on-video, sold-to-suckers-over-the-internet efforts of modern-day amateur filmmakers than the European horror masters like Argento and Fulci (or even the European horror hacks like D'Amato and Mattei). The director, another hardcore-porn refugee, apparently went on to helm the "French Lolita" (hardly a necessary film in the "zank 'eaven, for leetle girlss" French cinema).

Not a good film in any sense of the word , but if you're still interested contact me--I'll sell it to you, CHEAP.