| Product: |
Toxic Zombies (DVD) |
| Date: |
29.03.08 (90 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: The location is quite nice
Disadvantages: There's not much to recommend this
A review of just the film - there's a region free DVD available through amazon's international sellers, but the picture quality's not so good.
This is a very cheap horror film from 1980. It was released on video in the UK in the 80s as Forest of Fear (it's gone by many other titles). It was banned as part of the video nasties scare, which is most likely the only reason anyone's heard of it.
Some hippies are growing cannabis in a forest. An unidentified government agency dusts the crops with an untested defoliant. The hippies get 'dusted' too, by mistake, and soon enough they've become sort-of zombies slaughtering anyone in their path. The usual woodland horror types dutifully turn up to be terrorised - camping families, people out fishing, that kind of thing.
This is not a good film, you'll be shocked to learn. It's one of quite a few forest-based American horrors on the nasties list (to be fair, it's not as bad as Don't Go In The Woods). After a while it becomes obvious that videos got banned purely because they were a bit like other videos on the list; this has to be the case with this one, as there's nothing in it that would have warranted banning, even in 1984.
The cheapness isn't so much of a problem. The location doesn't really feel like it's as remote as it's supposed to be (possibly because so many people are conveniently hanging out there just to provide a decent body count); but it *is* quite pretty. It's very wet, as if it had just stopped raining heavily, and actually made me feel quite refreshed watching it. It also means that the only props that are needed are a few tents and cars.
There's no real flair to the film, but it's rather more competent than some I've seen lately (Jess Franco, I'm waving my fist in your direction.) It's not so much technical ineptness that sinks this film as a general lack of anything inventive. The plot is derivative, of course, but more than that, you just don't get the sense that there's any real idea of how to make these kinds of stories work. Suspense? Characters you can root for? Forget it! The film even goes on for seven minutes after the story has ended. The director, one Charles McCrann, never made another film (and later died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, sadly). He was also the writer, producer and editor of this film. And the lead actor.
His acting isn't too bad, truth be told. You can occasionally see him realising how he should be delivering a line halfway through speaking it, and changing direction accordingly, but that's par for the course for films like this. The acting for the most part is generically wooden. A few characters hit the sublime heights of bad acting that can make these films enjoyable, but mostly they're a bit drab. It's the kind of film where teenagers are played by people who appear to be in their 30s and most of the women look like men. There's one guy - a reclusive cabin dwelling paranoid crazy - who is actually very convincing, mainly because he doesn't look like he's acting at all. There's even one face horror fans will recognise - John Amplas, star of George Romero's brilliant vampire movie Martin, turns up for a few scenes. He isn't very good in this.
There's not too much actual violence on display. We often see the bloody aftermath of an attack (usually not *that* bloody, although there's sometimes a bit of offal thrown in), but rarely the attacks themselves. There is one over-ambitious but fun hand-lopping, but otherwise this is quite tame. There's one flash of hippie boobs at the beginning, but otherwise the film's fairly sexless. My favourite bit was when the hippies set fire to a cabin in the woods - we see them waving their torches at the walls of the cabin, but because it would be much too expensive, we never see the cabin on fire. Instead we see the hippies standing watching, while vaguely fiery lights are projected onto them. There's a generic synthesiser score, which rips off Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.
Obviously I'm not recommending this. I'm close to the end of my video nasty quest now (to the relief of the film guides, I've no doubt) - I clearly had to get hold of this at some point. I can see no reason why anyone would want to see this apart from a collector's mentality gone too far. If that applies to you, expect to spend £12 or more to import the DVD.
Summary: A very obscure video nasty
|
|
