An accident at the Hope Research Facility in Papua New Guinea unleashes a deadly agent that causes the dead to return to life as flesh-eating zombies.
Some time later and a group of environmentalist commie pinko types have obviously heard about the incident, taking the staff at the embassy hostage in a bid to gain publicity. Unfortunately for them the authorities prefer to send in a SWAT team. They neutralise the terrorist threat and look forward to some well-earned R&R in Papua, little suspecting the horrors that await them…
We rejoin the team lost in the wilderness and some way away from their intended destination, the Hope Facility.
Meanwhile, ace reporter Lia (Margit Evelyn Newton) and her crew have just arrived at a zombie-infested village.
The SWAT men show up just in time to save Lia and her Yanni-look alike cameraman, although the alliance between the groups is an uneasy one, the SWAT men conscious that a reporter is hardly the best accompaniment for their top-secret mission and Lia rightly suspicious that the SWAT men are hiding something.
The erstwhile allies arrive at a native village and are able to relax for a while, until the zombies attack…
Of all the Italian zombie films, this Spanish co-production, variously known as Virus , Hell of the Living Dead , Night of the Zombies and Zombie Creeping Flesh , is the most unashamed in ripping off George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead .
Not only does director Bruno Mattei steal a number of Goblin's music cues – though, ironically, I find them more effective here than in Romero's film – and the whole SWAT team idea from Romero's film, he also has the temerity to use the pseudonym Vincent Dawn.
Away from the Romeroisms, the film's recycling extends to the use of stock footage on a scale that would make even Ed Wood ashamed. Every time a character gazes up or away into the distance, Mattei cuts to a piece of National Geographic footage of animals or natives. It doesn't matter that they're natives of somewhere else, nor that the African plains elephant is somewhat out of place in the Asian Pacific rainforest…
Other noteworthy highlights include Lia's excursion in naturism to win the natives' trust and one of the SWAT men's secret penchant for cross-dressing.
Zombie Creeping Flesh is a very, very bad film best appreciated with a bunch of drunken friends. Of course, screen too many films like this and you'll soon know who your real friends are…
Anchor Bay's Region One DVD, presents Hell of the Living Dead fully uncut in its original 1.85:widescreen aspect ratio, enhanced for 16:9 televisions. It looks good and sounds fine. (I wish I could say the same for my Anchor Bay Zombie DVD, which is grainy as hell and full of artefacting.)
The extras include the standard issue theatrical trailer, a poster and stills gallery and a Bruno Mattei biography and interview segment, Hell Rats of the Living Dead – the composite title a nod to Rats , the director's post-apocalypse horror tale, also released by Anchor Bay and also including the featurette.
There's nothing particularly outstanding here, but then again this is not the sort of film that would honestly warrant a two-disc deluxe edition with full-length director and cast commentary, alternate and deleted scenes – though one gets the impression that we're hardly talking about a Polanski-style perfectionist director here, Mattei's ratio of footage shot to footage screened presumably being in the order of 1:1 – and so forth.
A reproduction poster booklet with brief but entertaining liner notes by Michael Gingold and Scooter McCrae rounds the package of nicely.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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