"When the creeping dead devour the living flesh!" (Zombie Creeping Flesh (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Zombie Creeping Flesh (DVD)
Date:	13.03.08 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some great gore, a good soundtrack, quite funny

Disadvantages: Plenty of bad things, and some really tasteless stock footage

A review of just the film.

A video nasty from 1980 directed by Bruno Mattei, one of many low-budget Italian exploitation directors. You don't notice just how many Italian zombie movies there are until you sit down and try to work out which ones you haven't seen. This, like the much better Zombie Flesh Eaters, tries to pass itself off as a prequel to George A Romero's hugely successful Dawn of the Dead.

A chemical leak at a research centre in New Guinea infects the local populace, causing the dead to rise with their usual hunger for living flesh. An American SWAT team and a couple of TV journalists end up wandering around the jungle, trying to avoid the zombies and figure out what's going on.

Hmm. SWAT team. TV journalists. Wait a second! Aren't those exactly the same characters as in Dawn of the Dead? Why, yes they are, Mr Voice-in-my-head. And the similarity doesn't end there! The plot is more or less the same. The zombies look the same (with less good makeup) and do many of the same things. Several of the set pieces are the same. And Goblin provide the music, just as they did for Dawn; not content with simply getting them on board, the film even re-uses some of their Dawn soundtrack.

It also manages to rip off a number of other films. The jungle setting allows them to throw in some cannibal movie motifs. The female lead is called Lia, although she isn't a princess. Little bits are stolen from other films, both zombie and otherwise. And there's an astonishing amount of stock footage. Most of it is of jungles and animals and birds that live in them (assuming elephants live in the jungle). The cannibal village section contains ten-minutes of nauseating footage stolen from some mondo film or other: animal disembowelment, real human corpses, people eating maggots. These are really nasty, but are amusingly edited together with reaction shots from actors who clearly don't know what they're meant to be reacting to. Apart from that, most of the stock footage doesn't seem to relate to anything else we see on screen.

So it's possibly the most derivative film ever made. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, as long as it's all carried off with a certain verve. And there are elements that work well here. There's a creepy zombie kid, and some of the scenes of zombies closing in on people at least convey a sense of urgency. The gore is really over-the-top in an impressive way, and the ending is quite astoundingly nasty. The female nudity is brilliantly gratuitous (cute lady, too). Goblin's music is a frenetic treat. There are some funny bleeping noises made by the computers, and the zombie actors are obviously having a lot of fun. There's an absolutely hilarious sequence supposedly set in the United Nations. And one (male) character at one point, apropos of nothing, dons a tutu and top hat and starts dancing - in the context, this is the single most idiotic thing I've ever seen anyone do in a film, or in real life.

But on the whole the bad probably outweighs the good. The acting is either wooden or overblown, and dubbed incredibly badly. At least two of the SWAT team look as if they've never even seen guns before, let alone wielded them. One corpse is visibly moving her lips in order to have blood ooze out of her mouth. The plot, although far from complicated, is very disjointed; all too often it seems that an important piece of exposition has been dropped in place of a stock shot of a stork flying in slow motion. And clearly no one involved in the film had been anywhere near New Guinea.

The dialogue is often hilarious. The best example, from Lia: "And in case you get the idea that a woman would be afraid to shoot you, just forget it cos you wouldn't even be the first one I had to shoot in my life, either." It reads almost like a babelfish translation of something that probably just about worked in its original language.

This is almost so bad it's funny, but the ten minutes of mondo footage in the cannibal sequence was a bit too grim to quite tally with the gut-munching, synthesiser burbling and bad acting elsewhere. The DVD is pretty cheap on amazon, and it's more entertaining than a lot of films of its type, but there are better Italian zombie flicks out there.

Summary: Another low-budget Italian horror that was banned in the UK