Zombie Nightmare

MST covered this one and did a good job with it.(The quote is from the first zombie attack.) And as I recall, Adam West even introduced their cover of it for its first broadcast during a "Turkey Day" Thanksgiving marathon. (Good for you, Adam! You look good!)

Hey, Frank Dietz, it was fun to see your comment about the movie; glad you have a good sense of perspective about it, and I hope you are doing well. ZN was completely cheesy, but it wasn't your fault...you were just in over your head!

Adam West has taken a lot of crap over the decades for his somewhat hammy style and fruity baritone, but he's still the real deal as an actor. Put him in a 3rd rate film like this one, and he instantly blows everyone else in the film away without trying. This movie was lucky to have him.

The film also gets an extra star for starting out with "Ace Of Spades" as the opening song on the soundtrack and a nice little thumbprint graphic for the opening title. It was a great choice and started the movie with a nice burst of energy.

But after that, things go downhill pretty fast. There are lots of missteps here: pacing, plot holes, characterization and consistency of tone. For instance, the movie stops dead in its tracks at one points and spends 2-3 minutes watching a mediocre tennis match between the tall, lanky mall punk and his blond girlfriend. It spends an inordinate amount of time driving to the local 'Twist and Creme' ice cream store. When the hero/zombie-to-be gets run over by the mall punks at the beginning of the movie, his mother doesn't call a doctor, call an ambulance, or start CPR, she calls her local voodoo practitioner "Molly Mokembe" so she can go about getting revenge for her son's death.

(This brings all kinds of questions to mind, BTW. The movie seems to find it unremarkable that there is a high priestess of voodoo just down the street in an average Canadian urban neighborhood. Geez, not ONE of the black people I grew up with turned out to be voodoo masters, not even the ones whose life my father saved! I never knew Canada was so wild at heart!)

Oh, and if YOU were attacked by a zombie, and you knocked him down with a shotgun and then you got in your car to flee, wouldn't you a)shoot the zombie in the head and knees a couple of just to slow him down a bit more and b) CLOSE THE CAR DOOR while you cranked the ignition??? I'm just asking...

But the biggest weakness, IMO, is in the part and performance of the mall punk's 'psycho' member. Ooooo, he has an ATTITUDE! OOooo, he throws pasta at his mom! Ooooo, he harasses a waitress with juvenile remarks about the size of his 'member'! Ooooo, he...well, he goes for a drive! (See 'Twist and Creme' reference above.)

He's about 105 lbs, soaking wet, with pencil thin arms and elaborately blow-dried-and-feathered shoulder length hair, but we are supposed to accept that he's some kind of menacing James Dean stand-in. And he is, in fact, almost infinitely annoying. But he (the character that is) wouldn't last 10 minutes at my old junior high school (it was on the 'wrong side of the tracks' in a town of 60,000 people.)

The rest of the cast is OK. The other four mall punks are natural and at ease in front of the camera. Frank Dietz manages to hold his own in his scenes with Adam West. A couple of the murders are fairly gruesome. And the blond cutie looks sexy as she 'briskly jogs' away from the zombie in her towel. Some of the other songs on the soundtrack are pretty good, especially the one by Girlschool. Even Jon Mikl Thor is, well, not as bad as he could be, although it's pretty obvious that the project began to overwhelm him and he was forced to get another actor to play the zombie for some scenes. Don't quit your day job, JMT.

An amusing mess. Watch with one dose of alcohol clutched firmly in your mitt and several more readily at hand and you'll have no problem with 'Nightmare'.

In the grand tradition of other resurrected corpse stink-fests from the mid 1980's, such as "THE VIDEO DEAD", "FOREVER EVIL", "I WAS A TEENAGE ZOMBIE", "RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD" and "HARD ROCK ZOMBIES", Gold Gems Ltd. kindly presents "ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE" (a.k.a. "THE LAST VIDEO ON THE SHELF").

After a promising opening credit sequence, featuring the strains of Motorhead's "Ace Of Spades", it seems the film can do no wrong. The overall result is a film that's never as good as it wants to be and ends up falling extremely short of it's early promise. To put it mildly, this ain't exactly "THE LION OF WINTER", but it'll do.

Everyone's favorite steel-bending rock god thespian, Jon Mikl Thor of the aptly-named metal band THOR, plays a dork in a hooded sweatshirt who becomes victim to a hit-and-run by Tia Carrere and Co. His mother calls upon the neighborhood voodoo priestess, played by Manuska Rigaud (think Karen Black and Tina Turner's lovechild on PCP), to resurrect her dead son, so he can wreak revenge on the tire-squealing curlies. One by one, the no-good teenagers meet their end by the hands of the zombified dork in the hooded sweatshirt.

Halfway into the film, Adam West makes a welcome appearance, playing the local police chief who may have something to do with the intricate proceedings. Well, I won't give anything away here! Let's just say, if your name is Ronnie Milsap, you'll never see it coming! Think "THE USUAL SUSPECTS" with Manuska Rigaud. Get the picture?

For those who may ponder Adam West's involvement in such a film, allow me to put it into perspective, how many actors can say they've worked with The Three Stooges AND Jon Mikl Thor? I rest my case.

Thor went on to star in a whole 'nother nightmare, "ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGHTMARE" (a.k.a. "THE EDGE OF HELL" or "Hey, I rented ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE, and when I got home to play it, this tape was inside"). If "ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE" is good, then "ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGHTMARE" is DAMN good... or, maybe not.

I recommend watching both films back to back and then running around naked in a chicken coop, with petroleum jelly on your feet, for three hours. Compare the experiences and get back to me ASAP. Thanks.

ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE was my very first movie as an actor. I was chosen to play the hero, Frank Sorrel, a young detective who uncovers the secret of the zombie murders. When I made this picture, I was told it would be a big theatrical release. And I was thrilled to work with my childhood hero, Adam West. But about half-way through production, I began to realize how low-budget this epic was. I was mortified by the final product...that is, until MST3000 turned it from a lousy horror film to a downright hysterical comedy. Thank you, Crow and Tom Servo, for making me proud to be an actor!

After witnessing the murder of his father, young Tony Washington grows up into the hulking, musclebound version of himself (Jon Mikl Thor). Meanwhile, a gang of brainless punks are causing trouble. Tony, busily ridding the streets of crime, encounters said ne'er do wells, resulting in his untimely demise.

Thankfully, Tony's mum knows the local voodoo priestess, who dresses up like an eeevil clown and whips up some mumbo jumbo tout de suite! Let the ungodly ineptitude that is ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE begin! Rising from his grave with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, Tony sets out for ultimate vengeance.

A masterwork of hyper-schlock cinema, this movie excels in every category! There are non-actors, acting as though they've just been handed their scripts for the first time. This gives the dialogue that fresh, robotic sound. Lines are delivered in a quasi-human fashion, making us believe that animated mannequins have somehow learned to speak.

The plot proves that scripts can be written "on the fly", during filming, without editing! This forces the various characters to wander about, oblivious to whatever is taking place. The crooks, the cops, the squawking medical examiner, the whole cast!

However, no one outshines Thor as the Frankenstein-in-sweat-clothes hero, who's hair length changes in every scene! A true stroke of genius!

EXTRA POINTS FOR: Adam West as Capt. Tom Churchman. He's rough! He smokes cigars! He's Batman with a mustache!

EXTRA-EXTRA POINTS FOR: The music! Any movie that opens with Ace Of Spades by Motorhead... um, at least has that going for it!...

As a boy, Tony Washington witnesses the fatal stabbing of his father after he goes to the rescue of a young black woman, Molly Mokembe, who is being sexually molested by two teenage thugs.

Cut to the present day, and Tony (now played by heavy metal singer Jon Mikl Thor) is a musclebound, long-haired baseball player who, like his father, has no time for hoodlums: when his local grocery store is held up by armed robbers, Tony steps in and saves the day (the Italian shopkeeper is-a so-a grateful, he lets-a Tony have his-a groceries for-a nothing!).

Unfortunately, as Tony crosses the road with his freebies, he is run down and killed by a gang of no-good punks, lead by psycho Jim Batten (played by Shaun Levy, now a successful Hollywood director). When Tony's mother sees her son's lifeless body, she calls for Molly (Manuska Rigaud), who uses her voodoo powers to resurrect Tony from the dead. Armed with his trusty metal baseball bat, shuffling zombie Tony goes looking for revenge.

As I type, Zombie Nightmare is currently sitting at #53 on IMDb's bottom 100 movies (most likely thanks to being featured on MST3K); but while I cannot deny that the film is no classic of the zombie genre, and is sadly lacking in both the gore and nudity one expects from 80s trash (a blonde cutie in her underwear doesn't cut it), neither is it deserving of such contempt. I've seen hundreds of films that are tougher to endure than this one, which at least entertains with its 80s cheesiness and sheer silliness.

Boasting a rocking metal soundtrack courtesy of Motorhead, Girlschool, Thor, Deathmask and Fist (no, I've never heard of the last two bands either), an early performance from Wayne's World babe Tia Carrere (schwing!), Adam 'Batman' West as a police captain with a dark secret, hilariously bad zombie make-up, terrible acting (Manuska's Haitian voodoo routine is a masterclass in over-acting), some really nasty 80s fashion, and a fun finale in a foggy cemetery (smoke machine on overdrive!) that sees West dragged to hell, Zombie Nightmare is definitely worth a go for fans of z-grade horror.