La Terreur des zombies

Put them together and you get a completely mindless movie! Yes, the title of this film is completely misleading (the Zombie Holocaust one) as when I hear it, I imagine hordes of zombies rampaging the countryside. Instead, what we mainly get is a cannibal horror film fused together with a mad doctor film with a dash of zombies in it for taste. It shares a lot of similarities to Lucio Fulci's Zombie movie too as it features Ian McCulloch and another actor from that film and it appears to be on the exact same island! When they first drive to the one doctor's house they go down a street and it looks exactly like a scene out of Zombie, heck the donkey may have even been in Zombie. They depart in terms of plot; however, as this one does not focus on the zombie aspect. Well, it does not really focus on anything, as nothing anyone in this film does makes much sense. I think they just tried to fuse to many sub genres together without a complete script or something.

The story of this one is the weakest element of the film, because at times it almost seems like there is none. There are mutilations in a hospital in New York and it is soon learned that it is the work of a cannibal. Other cannibals turn up here and there because somehow they can just get jobs at hospitals. A group of four people travel to an island for reasons that are really no one's business, because them going makes absolutely no sense. They meet a doctor who provides them with some yummy looking lemonade and then they are off to another island where the cannibals live. The group which now includes three very expendable helpers and another dude soon find themselves under assail from the cannibals who get scared by zombies going "Ah" and nearly everyone is killed, but the two survivors decide to try and figure out the mystery even though it literally accomplishes nothing.

The film moves at a rather fast pace and it features some good Italian splatter and some good nudity too. That makes the film at least watchable, but the plot is so horrendously bad that I just cannot score it any higher. Some of the effects are rather horrible too, as at one point one of the cannibals is caught in New York and he proceeds to jump out a window. It is obviously a mannequin and when it impacts the ground, its arm pops off! I realize they may not want to redo the scene, but they could have at least jump cut and edited that part out! The mad doctor is the only person who seems to know what he is doing, but making a race of ineffective zombies seems kind of a waste of time. Just too much bad in this one to overcome even with the nice gore and very hot blond.

So this film is a combination film, but I think they just tried to do too much. At times it is a cannibal film, at other a mad doctor and then a bit of zombies in there for effect. Heck, the scenes where the blond undress could be considered soft core porn because the music is right out of one! They just tried to do much, and as I have said, I just do not think they had fully completed script to go along with it all. Though another interesting aspect of the film is its similarities to Zombie; however, that one is the superior film as it makes a bit more sense why things are happening and why they go to the island. Here, it just makes no sense at all.

"Zombie Holocaust" has a little bit of charm and an idea of what it's going for, but a lot of (or almost all of it) the atmosphere is sacrificed because of the gore. But even with the gore, "Zombie Holocaust" is a very boring movie with few interesting scenes sprinkled throughout the whole thing and the glorious beauty of Alexandra Delli Colli whose nude scenes are one of the rare moments of joy in this movie. Because of that, I can't give this movie a higher score than 5.5/10! Only the most hardcore fans of B movies and horror movies will find something to like here, others should avoid it...

A splatter classic, Marino Girolami's "Zombi Holocaust" of 1980 doesn't scant with blood and gore. A true B-movie and pure exploitation, this movie is probably not high art, however, I don't suppose that anybody who is about to watch a movie entitled "Zombie Holocaust" is gonna expect Citizen Kane.

After several mutilations of corpses in the morgue of a New York hospital, and the appearance of a mysterious cannibal sign, a group of people, amongst them a beautiful female doctor and a bitchy journalist, decide to go on an expedition to a tropical island, where they expect to find out about the sign's origin. This is, of course, not a very good idea. Not only is the island inhabited by cannibals, but it is also haunted by the living dead.

One of the classic Italian splatter flicks, "Zombi Holocaust", is a fun and entertaining, although not very thrilling movie, that mainly concentrates on the enormous amounts of blood and gore and on constant very graphical violence. The acting in this movie differs. As a huge fan of Spaghetti Westerns, I found it cool to see Donal O'Brien, who delivers a great performance as a mad scientist in this, in a non-western role. The Italian and English title is maybe not the best to describe the movie, since its the Cannibals, and not the Zombies who kill the most people. The German title "Zombies Unter Kannibalen" ("Zombies Amongst Cannibals") is probably better to describe the film's content.

All things considered, "Zombie Holocaust" is a highly entertaining and very bloody Gorefest that fans of the Cannibal subgenre should not miss. Entertainment guaranteed!

Being an obsessive-compulsive fan of old-fashioned Euro-gore for several years now, I've come to expect the absurd (and usually nonsensical) plots, the constant 'borrowing' from other films, and the over-the-top gore, all mixed together to form what is usually an enjoyably trashy cocktail. I picked up "Zombie Holocaust" with some optimism and a little knowledge of its reputation, and after watching it, could only help but wonder what had just happened. No, it wasn't the incoherently surreal thrill of watching "City of the Living Dead," but a general, head-scratching confusion that raised questions such as: "How was this awful waste of time ever released?" As Tom Servo would say: "Meanwhile, in YET ANOTHER MOVIE..." "Zombie Holocaust" doesn't have a brain in its head (even though the title Doctor is a deranged neurosurgeon)--it's a low-budget splatter flick without even the slightest hint of innovation. It borrows settings and characters from Fulci's "Zombie" (not to mention a few actual snippets from that film), jungle savages from "Make Them Die Slowly," and a couple bronze-faced zombies that look an awful lot like the wooden-toothed wonders in "Burial Ground." Sounds like a swinging good time, but the movie is downright distracting in its own indecisiveness, flipping back and forth between these awkwardly, incompetently blended genres without a hint of wit or style. Perhaps this is attributable to Fabrizio de Angelis, who is known less for his screen writing capabilities than as a producer on Lucio Fulci's most notable works. It is conceivable that the producers wanted to churn out a genre-bending smörgåsbord knowing they would get some return on it, but the utter ridiculousness of the finished product is an endurance test for the viewer's patience.

Ian McCulloch (his usual stuffy self) and Alexandra Delli Colli ("New York Ripper") venture off to some faraway island to investigate a doctor's odd practices. Along the way, they encounter hostile natives, zombies, and an climax that looks suspiciously like another, better zombie flick. Eyeballs are gouged out, entrails are eaten, and Delli Colli is painted in the nude for a "Laugh-In" audition.

There's ultimately nothing in "Zombie Holocaust" that hasn't been done before, and better. Pass.

Another film known by many names (eight, to be precise, that IMDB has been able to track down), Zombi Holocaust is probably best known by American cult-film devotees as Dr. Butcher, MD. I ended up picking this one up because there are a rather large number of crossovers with Lucio Fulci's brilliant splatterfest Zombie-- writer Fabrizio DeAngelis was one of the producers of Fulci's film, male lead Ian McCulloch was the lead in Zombie, character actor Dakkar plays a native guide in both, etc. (Most interesting, one of the film's actors, Walter Patriarca, was Zombie's costume designer. Go figger.)

Simple plot, which should sound familiar to anyone who's seen Fulci's film; a number of deaths occur in New York City, and Ian McCollouch, a beautiful sidekick, and two of their pals end up going to a remote Caribbean island where there's an English-speaking doctor who treats the natives. Sound familiar?

For about the first forty-five minutes of this film, I was too busy thinking that it was exactly like Zombie to be impressed. (No one, these days, is sure which film came out first, and most people also draw parallels to another classic of the genre that came out the same year, Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust.) Then Ian McCollouch disposes of a zombie with a motorboat motor, and suddenly things started getting a whole lot more fun. Rather like The Evil Dead, this is a film where there's a whole lot of setup (though Raimi pulled it off miles better), but when the gore starts, the director lays it on thick, fast, and ugly. And while death-by-propeller is probably the funniest and nastiest scene in the film, there's certainly more than enough blood flowing/spraying/dripping/being drunk/etc. to please most fans of hardcore horror. Pound for pound, though, in comparison to Zombie, the latter stands up as the better film. As one reviewer put it, "Fulci... might have had the sauce, but [he] passed on the cheese." Fulci's obsessive attention to detail, better scriptwriting, and stunning score give Fulci the edge over Girolami. But man, it's fun to be the judge. ***