Virus cannibale

I've seen quite a few zombie movies over the years and I have to say that the european ones are the best. The gore effects in these movies are very realistic and provide quite a few scares and Night of the Zombies is no exception.The gore effects and storyline are good and is what I expected from this type of movie, but what I didn't expect was the overlong use of stock footage from a National Geographic special which was not only unnecessary but very annoying and the dubbing could also have been handled better, but overall not a bad movie storywise. Just remember to keep the VCR remote close so you can fast forward the stock footage.

MY RATTING 7/10

This low-budget terror motion picture deals with a group formed by a four-man commando squad who run into a pack of natives terrorizing island of Papua . After a chemical leak at the Hope Centre in New Guinea , an enterprise devoted to feeding underdeveloped countries, turns its staff into flesh-eating zombies , there a special force led by Mike London (Jose Gras 0r Robert O'Neil) are sent to investigate it . They run into a TV news crew led by celebrity journalist (Evelyn Newton) , who are after the same news . As a female reporter and her cameraman boyfriend team up with a four-man commando unit in the New Guinea jungle whom are fighting flesh-eating zombies . Then , the group discovers that the entire country has been overrun by zombies .

Gory, gruesome , pretty repellent , and ghastly cannibal feast in which the stumbling flesh-eating stiffs and can be only destroyed by fire in the head . Unrelenting shock-feast plenty of disturbing images laced with brief touches of black humor . Army of Zombies appearance roaming the countryside , village and some people besieged inside a mansion and a factory deliver the goods , enough to be interesting . Bruno Mattei's main great success is regularly directed with startling visual content and acceptable production by Jose Maria Cunilles , also producing to Mattei and Fragasso a pair of "spaghetti westerns" titled ¨Scalps¨ and ¨Apache Kid¨ ; furthermore special mention to filthy make-up by the craftsman Giuseppe Ferranti. In the first draft, Claudio Fragasso had followed the idea of an entire Third World made up of an army of zombies against whom the armed forces of the industrialized nations would have had to fight. However, the script had to be altered considerably due to budget limitations. This frightening movie is plenty of thrills , chills, body-count executed by the eerie Zombies and photographed in pallid color with lurid images and passable results . Stock footage from the film Nuova Guinea, l'Isola Dei Cannibali was used for the native scenes , it has been recently re-released on DVD as The Real Cannibal Holocaust. This is an ordinary excruciatingly Zombie film where the intrigue , tension , suspense appears threatening and lurking in the sunny outdoors and every room , and corridors from a house , a shack , a native hamlet , jungle and many other places . At the time considered the plus ultra of thoroughly disturbing movie is less stomach-churning by nowadays's standards, yet its fundamental power to thrill remains undiminished. This genuinely frightening story with correct utilization of images-shock is professionally photographed by John Cabrera on location in Barcelona , Catolonia , Spain . Using yet another alias, "Vincent Dawn", Mattei middlingly directed this "Hell of the Living Dead" or ¨Virus¨ , a low-budged zombie picture inspired by other zombie cannibal movies such as Zombi (1978) and Lucio Fulci's Zombie 2 (1979). "Virus" was filmed in Spain and used jungle footage from New Guinea and a patch soundtrack from Goblins "Dawn of the Dead" soundtrack, which was a minor hit in Italy and abroad . ClaudioFragasso, the writer of the screenplay, also directed one half of the movie, he said in an interview .

Mattei directed all kind of genres in low budget and exploitation pictures . He eventually had more pseudonyms than any working director in the world. He returned to editing before making another comeback in 1976 with two low-budget Nazi exploitation films, "Women's Camp 119" and "SS Girls"(1977) . Mattei followed these taboo-breaking films with excursions into porno films and Mondo "shockumentaries", all directed under his many pseudonyms, concentrating on "shock value" with films such as Mondo erotic (1973) and "Libiodomania" . Always on the lookout for new exploitation avenues, Mattei followed with "nunsploitation", with the soft-core sex film La Monaca di Monza (1980) and the violent sex thriller "Guardian of Hell" (1981). Both films involved a partnership with writer/director Claudio Fragasso, who helped him write and direct the back-to-back productions . After directing two women's prison films starring Laura Gemser , Mattei moved to directing sword-and-sorcery flicks , starting with I Sette Magnifici Gadiatori (1983). Both Mattei and Fragasso collaborated on the Sci-Fi/horror flick "Rats " (1984), inspired by the futuristic movies of the early 1980s . Mattei considers this his best work, despite his still having to work with a very low budget. He worked relentlessly through the 1980s, some action flicks and about half of Zombi 3 (1988) after Lucio Fulci was taken off the production, though Mattei was not credited with it.

Rating"Hell of the Living Dead" or "Night of the Zombies" : Passable , this is one more revolting , foul Zombie horror pictures in which the camera stalks in sinister style . It's just one long unrelenting cannibal feast and average budget terror movie that still packs a punch for those who like to be terrorized out their wits.

'Zombie Creeping Flesh' (as it was originally entitled here in the UK) was one in an entire glut of zombie flicks to follow the success of Romero's endeavours into the (zombie) horror genre.

In it's entirety 'Creeping Flesh' is a decidedly 'weak' film. The acting is crass, macho and hilarious at times. And the fact that the film must consist of at least (I assume) 30% stock-footage gives the impression that director Bruno Mattei really wasn't that enthusiastic about making the film whatsoever - either that or he was severely lacking the funding that it so desperately needed.

Having said that, the film is an entertaining enough affair; in the sense that the comedy and violence is enough to keep most horror fans interested, if not glued to the screen. The idea that zombies, and cannibalism, are a sort of metaphor for Third World hunger is a somewhat unusual idea for a zombie film and I guess this is a sort of reflection surrounding the anxieties in the era in which it was made.

I personally don't believe that this film is as bad as some people have made out. It is, by no means, on par with any of Romero's or Fulci's work yet I don't feel it deserves to be totally written-off. 'Creeping Flesh' is certainly a lot more fulfilling than 'Zombie Holocaust', for example, and a great deal more 'gung-ho'. It just fails though because it is alarmingly 'corny' and very derivate of so much that stood before it. The fact that a fair portion of the soundtrack was originally used in 'Dawn of The Dead' just goes to prove this. If you thrive on gore, zombies, cannibalism, and insane violence then try and check this film out: just don't get your hopes up too high.

When someone says a movie is so-bad-it's-good, they usually mean that it's unintentionally comedic. "Virus" is so inept that it is enjoyable in a way it was not intended to be, but it doesn't fit the traditional so-bad-it's-good classification. (Actually, there was one scene in Virus that I thought was really funny. It involves breasts--you'll know it when you see it.) Here's why I liked Virus: all the ridiculousness adds together to form a fascinating and impossibly cohesive whole. The final product is sort of like a surrealist meditation on human insignificance.

The ridiculous, slow, editing; the idiotic behavior of the characters; and the meandering plot combine to make the movie like a sort of gentle nightmare. It's really like nothing else I've ever seen. There are these lazy, extended struggles with zombies where a bunch of guys just stand back and watch nervously. Most of the heroes are soldiers, and there's an officer, but they are all equally helpless and profoundly "alone." There's a laziness to everything that gives the film an appropriate sense of inevitability. The plot is ambiguous, like in a dream. You get a general sense of what's going on but it's also rather aimless, and only when the characters got to their "destination" did I realize that they had any objective at all. The simple beauty of the animal stock footage provides a startling contrast to the bleakness it surrounds.

I don't mean you have to watch it like it's T. S. Eliot and analyze everything you see for meaning. It is, of course, a meaningless mess of incompetence. But if you sit back and just soak it all in, you will find it hypnotic, bleak, and beautiful.

OK... So your gonna make a Zombie Flick... Well first you need Zombie music to set the mood, get Goblin from Dawn of the Dead. In fact, use the same music. And while we are ripping of Dawn of the Dead, let's have a SWAT team.

Now.. set it in a remote location with some natives like Fulci's ZOMBIE

OK... so CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is a pretty famous flick and Cannibals and Zombies both eat people, so let's get some Cannibal Footage to through in and some pretty wild life stuff too... we can rip that off of that Shockumentary 'Death Faces' which features all the New Guinea cannibal tribes.

Now we have to stir in a large amount of gratuitous gore and go heavy on the eye violence...

Now sprinkle lightly with nudity...

And there ya have it...one gory zombie epic sure to please any die hard zombie gore fan. (but probably no one else will like it)