Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence (1991) [copyright 1990]

... aka: Zombie 09
... aka: Zombie '09
... aka: Zombie 90
... aka: Zombie '90: "Extreme Pestilence"
... aka: Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence VS. Zombie '09

Directed by:
Andreas Schnaas

A military plane carrying a top secret chemical crashes and unleashes a toxin (the "extreme pestilence" of the title) into the woods. Soon after, people are infected and zombies are running amok killing and eating anybody in their path. A doctor and his colleague set out to uncover what's going on and put a stop to it. Though I wish I could provide a more in-depth plot synopsis, that is the whole plot. There's no real story, no dialogue worth listening to, no character development, no narrative push leading anywhere, nada. This film was made for one reason and one reason only: to showcase as much amateur splatter as possible. It - along with the same director's first feature Violent Shit (1987) - developed a minor reputation among extreme gore fans in the early days of home video. Nowadays, well, they just don't hold up all that well, especially considering we've had tons of professionally made movies since with ample and much more convincing-looking gore. The novelty value of something like this is now pretty much gone. Not that it was ever any good...

Instead of playing out like an actual film, this is more a series of blood-drenched vignettes of zombies killing people and people killing zombies repeated ad nauseum. A zombie comes barreling out of the woods carrying a chainsaw and cuts a guy in two before he rips out his guts. A fat woman is attacked in a sauna and has her tit cut off and eaten. When her friend goes to check up on her, she has her back sliced open and all her organs cut out. A woman in a wheelchair holding a baby gets decapitated and then a zombie grabs her newborn, tears off its head and then rips it in two. Zombies are chopped to pieces with machetes and axes and chainsaws. Heads are knocked or shot clean off, stabbed and hacked in half both ways. Fingers are bitten and chopped off. Eyeballs are poked out with fingers. Lots of guts are pulled out of stomachs. And during nearly every single scene an almost comical amount of exaggerated blood (which is usually runny and looks suspiciously like tomato soup) sprays out all over the place. The zombie makeups aren't good at all and the other effects, bloody as they may be, usually look cheap and unconvincing.

Among the many films "referenced" throughout are Romero's entire "Dead" Trilogy, The Evil Dead, Nightmare City, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, most noticeably, Zombi 2. Because this has all the gore in the world and yet still manages to be incredibly boring and monotonous, it does provide a valuable lesson to future horror directors about the importance of paying attention to everything else that's going on in your film. Look at any one of the low-budget films I've listed above that this borrows from. Even if you took away most of the gore in them, the films themselves would still be watchable for many other reasons, unlike this film, which isn't even worth watching for the gore because you can only watch so many limbs whacked off, chests torn open and messy arterial sprays before it all becomes tiresome. That's precisely why those other films all have cult followings to this day and this film is only watched by a tiny number of die-hard horror buffs like myself who'll watch pretty much anything.

It goes without saying that the camcorder photography is pretty blah, blurry and washed-out looking and the acting is awful but the latter is made even worse thanks to a horrid English dub job done by a couple of guys who are clearly making a big joke of the whole thing and more or less mocking the entire movie as it goes along. Ironically, this comic spin turned out to be a wise decision because it at least provides a few dumb laughs to help get your through it. I couldn't imagine how difficult it would to watch had the whole thing had it played out seriously!

Here in the U.S., this and a few other Schnaas films were first released by an ultra obscure company called Reel Gore Productions some time in the late 90s. Zombie '90 was then released on both DVD and VHS by Shock-O-Rama Cinema in 2002. In 2009, for the German DVD release from Cine Club, a brand new version was prepped featuring added narration (in German), a new title sequence and a different music score. That package was called Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence VS. Zombie '09. (For the record, what I watched was the original VHS release and my screen caps are no reflection of the DVDs picture quality, which appears to be much better). IMDb claims this was released here in the U.S. as Zombi 7 and in Japan as Zombie 2001: Battle Royale (?!) but I've found no evidence to back that up so it's probably not true.

In addition to the films already mentioned, Schnaas also went on to make two Violent Shit sequels (in 1992 and 1999), Goblet of Gore (1996), Anthropophagous 2000 (1999), Demonium (2001), Nikos the Impaler (2003; which was filmed in English in New York City), Don't Wake the Dead (2008), Unrated: The Movie (2009), Karl the Butcher vs. Axe (2010) and Unrated II: Scary as Hell (2011). None of these movies really got much attention.

★

Nekromantik 2 (1991)

... aka: Nekromantik 2: Die Rückkehr der liebenden Toten
... aka: Nekromantik 2: The Return of the Loving Dead

Directed by:
Jörg Buttgereit

Whether or not you actually enjoyed Nekromantik (1987), you've got to hand it to German director Buttgereit for making quite a lasting first impression. Working with a microscopic budget and utilizing grainy Super 8 black-and-white film stock, he managed to turn his feature debut into a successful cult hit by daring to be incredibly disgusting. The tale of necro sex (which was banned in certain countries and quite controversy upon release) has gone down in the history books as a must-see for shock cinema devotees. In other words, a sequel was in order. The major differences this time out is that there's a female lead, it's in color and it doesn't quite go the same gross-out route. It takes the proceedings pretty seriously and there's a somewhat arty approach to the material, pacing and camerawork. Things open with the memorably nasty suicide of the first film's protagonist Rob (Daktari Lorenz), which begins in black-and-white and then turns to color. Now he's about to get a taste of his own postmortem medicine when his rotting corpse becomes the sexual centerpiece of a disturbed female necrophile's dark desires.

Nurse Monika (Monika M.) shows up at a cemetery dressed in high heels, stockings, a polka dot blouse and a miniskirt and armed with a shovel and pick-axe. She digs up Rob's body, takes it home, strips it naked and indulges in a little bump n grind with the slimy, blue body (which ends up making her sick). She cleans the body up, tries to camouflage its bad odor with flowers, dresses it, poses for pictures with it and snuggles with it on the couch. But Rob isn't the only man in her life. She's also just started dating Mark (Mark Reeder), who works as a porn movie dub-over artist. After going on several dates, she starts to like him and begins fancying a normal relationship. And that means Rob has got to go. She puts the corpse in a bathtub and dismembers it with a hacksaw in loving detail while she sobs. Not able to completely part with it, she saves the head (which she keeps in a casket in her living room) and the penis (on a plate in her fridge) and takes the rest back to the graveyard.

Pretty soon, Monika and Mark start getting a little more serious, but he becomes perplexed by her odd behavior. She never wants him to move during sex and likes taking bizarre photos of him (like hanging upside down naked). He also discovers her little penis plate in the fridge, but doesn't say anything. Monika has a few of her girlfriends over (sort of a necro support group) to watch a video of a seal autopsy (?!) and Mark begins to think that something is seriously wrong with his new girlfriend. The gruesome finale proves he is correct in his assumption.

Not nearly as graphic or disturbing as the first movie (though it has its moments), this steers away from the grotesque gore for a more serious, though leisurely, look at necrophilia. Buttgereit takes his sweet time telling this simple story and many of the scenes seem to go on far longer than they needed to. Some of the camerawork is truly excellent, though, and the music score is consistently interesting. There's even a great fantasy musical number sequence in here. As far as the gore is concerned, it's mostly relegated to three scenes but Sammy Balkas' makeups (especially a very bloody decapitation) are very effective. Beatrice Manowski (star of the original Nekro) has an in-joke appearance and Florian Koerner von Gustorf (who starred in the director's follow-up Schramm [1993] along with Monika M.) has a small role as a drunk guy at a bar.

Nekromantik 2 began production in 1989 and has a copyright date of 1990. In 1991, shortly after its release, Munich police officers seized the film because they said it "glorified violence." It remained in their custody until someone made a successful case for it being art. Buttgereit (who can be seen here in a cameo viewing a ridiculous black-and-white art house film in a theater scene) also makes time to plug his obscure film Hot Love (1985).

★★1/2

La noche de Walpurgis (1971)

... aka: Blood Moon
... aka: Night of the Vampire
... aka: Shadow of the Werewolf
... aka: Walpurgis Night
... aka: Walpurgis Night: Wolf vs. Vampire
... aka: Werewolf Shadow
... aka: Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, The
... aka: Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman, The

Directed by:
León Klimovsky

This is either the third or the fourth in the Spanish El Hombre Lobo werewolf sage (a West German co-production this time out) and follows the verifiable FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR (1968) and ASSIGNMENT TERROR (1970) in the series. It may also follow a third film called The Nights of the Werewolf. No known prints of Nights have ever surfaced and there's zero evidence of its existence. No posters, no production stills, no one to come forward to claim they were in it or saw it... The only person to vouch for the film was Naschy himself, who claimed it was filmed in France in 1968 for a director named René Govar. Govar doesn't appear to have any other credits and his identity remains a mystery to this day. There was a rumor floating around that he had died in a car crash before the film could be finished, so the footage was then scrapped. Naschy himself claimed it was indeed completed, just not released. Either way, it sometimes pops up on Naschy's filmography and sometimes doesn't. What is known is that The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was the third release. Filmed under the title La noche de Walpurgis ("The Night of Walpurgis") in 1970, this ended up becoming one of the highest-grossing entries in the entire series upon release in 1971; prompting many more films in this series.

Waldemar Daninsky (Naschy) is dead and two doctors, led by the skeptical Dr. Hartwig (Julio Peña), who doesn't believe in any of the area's silly superstitions, show up to perform an autopsy on the body. His associate warns of a pentagonal scar on Waldemar's chest, which supposedly in the "Mark of the Werewolf," but Hartwig removes the silver bullet from his chest anyway. Waldemar springs to life, kills both doctors and then retreats into the night, claiming another female victim on his way out. Meanwhile in Paris, Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) has been studying up on witchcraft and the like to prepare for an essay she has to write; becoming fascinated by the legend of notorious Hungarian Countess Wandesa d'Arvula De Nadasdy in the process. Rumor has it that Wandesa practiced witchcraft and drank the blood of young virgins to retain her youth and beauty. After discovering that Wandesa was a vampire, one of her lovers had put an end to her evil ways by driving a silver cross through her heart.

Elvira and her cute friend Genevieve Bennett (Barbara Capell) find an ancient document describing the Countess' hidden burial spot and decide to take a trip to a secluded German village to locate it. They become lost on their travels and bump into Waldemar, who claims to be a writer working on a book about Gothic churches and is desperate for intelligent conversation. The two ladies take up his offer of food and lodging for the weekend and transportation to the small village rumored to have the Countess' tomb the next day. Their first night there, Waldemar grows cold at the mere mention of Wandesa and then a strange woman bursts into the ladies bedroom at night. She - Elizabeth (Yelena Samarina) - is Waldemar's mentally deranged lesbian sister who likes to rip open women's tops and strangle them until they're unconscious. She is however kind enough not to kill. She just wants them to leave, which of course they don't.

Despite the fact that Elvira is dating a police inspector named Marcel (Andrés Resino), she finds herself drawn to - and quickly falling in love with - her brooding host. The women, along with Waldemar, discover Wandesa's tomb - located atop a mountain. The gravestone calls her "Satan's Favorite Mistress" and warns of the consequences of opening it, but they do anyway, Genevieve removes the silver cross from the body, cuts herself and dribbles blood onto the remains, which is enough to eventually revive both her and her zombie monk helper Baptiste. Genevieve is soon seduced over to the dark side by the restored Countess (an effective - though underused - Patty Shepard). Both ladies begin claiming other victims and Waldemar tries to keep tabs on what's going on so he can drive a stake through victims hearts and decapitate them before they can return as vampires themselves. Wandesa must be stopped before Walpurgis Night, or else the world will be overrun with bloodsuckers.

I'd previously only seen this one on VHS many years ago, so it's nice to finally view the restored and uncut DVD (released by Anchor Bay under the title Werewolf Shadow). It's adequately bloody and nicely-photographed at scenic locations, but it's also very poorly paced and disjointed, with lots of brief, clipped scenes, characters who seem to forget what's happened by the very next scene, characters who disappear for long stretches or who disappear and forget to come back and various mythologies clumsily thrown out like some kind of afterthought. The film's two most interesting characters; Elizabeth and Wandesa, both get set on the back burner while this unfortunately concentrates its energies elsewhere. Pointless scenes featuring Resino's character, who talks to his boss on the phone asking for time off so he can go to the village and talks to the uncooperative mayor once he gets there, had been removed from the original U.S. theatrical release print (for good reason), but restored for the DVD. The female nude scenes are very brief, even in the uncut version.

As far as the Werewolf vs. Vampire aspect is concerned, the two get into a brief tussle at the very end... which last all of 10 seconds. Director Klimovsky also made the Waldemar entry DR. JEKYLL AND THE WEREWOLF (1972) and many others with Naschy. Assistant director Carlos Aured (billed as "Carlos Aubed") went on to direct the Naschy movies CURSE OF THE DEVIL, HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB (both 1973) and BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL (1974).

Naschy himself directed, wrote and starred in a remake: THE NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF (1981), which was a minor improvement over this original.

★★