Zombie 3: Nights of Terror

With the professor absent, the other guests – three singularly unappealing bourgeois couples and one exceptionally creepy looking kid – arrive at the nearby villa to be met by the servants.

After some unpleasant bedroom action – cue the immortal line "You look just like a little whore, but I like that in a girl" – the guests re-assemble for dinner and then depart to explore the grounds, where they unfortunately all seem to feel the need for some more hot groping action…

Finally, mercifully, the shuffling dead attack. Unfortunately, only one of the group falls in this initial attack, the others managing to retreat to the villa where they blockade themselves in.

Night falls and the zombies attack, prompting a classic Night of the Living Dead style home defence scenario. Thankfully, the zombies get in and chow down on the humans one by one, before a final title of the "Profesy of the Black Spider" warns us of the "nigths of terror" to come…

Zombie 3 – the title an attempt to make it seem like a sequel to Lucio Fulci's Zombie 2 – is probably the worst of the Italian zombie movies of the late 70s and early 80s. It's inept, unpleasant, pretty much charm free and disarmingly random.

Are these supposed to be Fulci-style flesh eaters as the film's title and the (ineffectual) presence of special effects/make-up man Gianetto De Rossi would imply, or something more akin to the Blind Dead of Spanish director Armando De Ossorio's films, as the surprising degree of stragetic co-ordination and intelligence – at one point a zombie impales its victim with an expertly thrown metal spike, at another they even disguise themselves as monks – would suggest?

Why do the composers use Popol Vuh-eseque kosmische rock, easy tempo jazz, synth bleeps and insistent tension-raising cues with little rhyme or reason?

And, most of all, what was the logic behind the whole incest subplot between the mother (Maria Angela Giordano – the wife of the film's producer, Gabriele Chrisanti) and her son? Especially considering that it's weirdness is pushed still further by the fact that the guy playing the kid, Peter Bark, is obviously an adult suffering from some rare condition that's inhibited his growth.

Dutch company Italian Shock's Region 2 PAL DVD bills itself as a "Special Collectors Edition".

However there's nothing in the bog-standard extras – a trailer, stills and poster/box art slideshow, director biography and filmography – to overcome the poor quality of the film itself. Though the liner notes impel one to "throw away the crappy, fuzzy-looking bootleg video of this film and let them digitalized dead dudes run riot" the print is horribly grainy and dirty, it's chief advantage over a video being that it shouldn't degrade any further. Then again, a pristine print of a film like this just wouldn't feel right and a feature-length commentary might just make one lose the will to live…