FleshEater (1988)

... aka: Flesh Eater
... aka: FleshEater: Revenge of the Living Dead
... aka: Revenge of the Living Dead
... aka: Revenge of the Living Zombies
... aka: Zombie Flesh Eater
... aka: Zombie Flesh Eater: Revenge of the Living Dead
... aka: Zombie Nosh

Directed by:
Bill (S. William) Hinzman

"I think you've seen just one too many cheesy zombie flicks, paaaaal." - Actual line of dialogue from film spoken by a drunken vampire

If you're anything like me, you can't fully hate a movie with a zombie in a chicken suit or one featuring a scene where a zombie thrusts its hand inside a girl's lower stomach and pulls out her heart. FleshEater (originally released on home video in 1989 by Magnum Entertainment, who used the new title Revenge of the Living Zombies) is the type of low budget (60K) regional horror movie you need to put your brain in neutral to fully enjoy. The good news is that it delivers in spades if you like fast-paced exploitation horror with a high body count and lots of gore, nudity and cheap laughs. The bad news is if you're looking for competent filmmaking, you're best off looking elsewhere. The acting couldn't possibly be any worse, the plot is nearly nonexistent, the dialogue is horrendous and the movie is choppy and poorly edited, with little attention paid to continuity. However, I found this entertaining and likable nonetheless, so I give it a mild recommendation to all the B movie fans in the house.

Flesh was the brainchild of director, writer, producer and editor Samuel William Hinzman, who will forever be best known for playing the tall graveyard zombie who kills Johnny and chases Barbara around in the beginning of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). He also served as an assistant cameraman on that classic and went on to do further work for both Romero and Night co-writer John A. Russo. One thing that amuses me about Hinzman is that I always assumed he was much older than he actually was. Based solely on his physical appearance, I would have guessed he was at least in his mid 50s when he appeared in Night when in fact he was barely into his 30s! And he really looks no different here twenty years later playing basically the same role, though this time he's some kind of an Satanic zombie or something to that effect. While that's a potentially interesting idea, it's something the script never goes into any real detail about.

A farmer out in the middle of the woods removes a tree stump with his tractor, brushes a few leaves aside, finds a stone burial marker with a foreboding message inscribed on it, ignores said message, removes some chains and then opens the coffin (with a pentagram on it) underneath. Inside is Bill, who wastes no time immediately springing to life, jerking the guy into the coffin and biting his neck. When he throws the dead body out, you can easily see a cable attached to the actor's back pulling him.

Ten "college kids," who are all hilariously dressed in the ugliest flannel / stone washed jeans / jean jacket ensembles of the day, are on a Halloween hayride. The driver drops them off in the middle of the woods so they can drink, smoke pot and mess around. One of the girls says "I feel like dancin'!" and all the women in the group suddenly jump up and start barely moving to some generic supermarket music, trying to pull the guys up while they groan and guzzle their Iron City beer. Aside from one guy who is kind of a jerk / prankster, these "kids" are given no personality whatsoever. One girl flashes the camera for random boob shot number one. There will be many more of these. Another woman (who looks about 20 years too old to be in college) puts in a gratuitous topless scene in a barn where she virtually date rapes the guy she's with before Bill's zombie bursts in, sinks a pitchfork into the guy's chest and rips the girl's heart out and eats it. Two farmers are then killed and everyone returns as zombies to attack the others. The survivors make it to a farmhouse and try to barricade themselves in but the living dead attack and kill just about everyone inside except for one couple (John Mowod and Leslie Ann Wick) who hide out in basement. And this is only the first half hour!

All of the dead teens, plus the farmers, plus Bill, then descend on a small town and kill even more people, including several children. We also get random boob shots #3 and #4, plus random gratuitous fully naked girl who will become a fully naked zombie. What's funny is that despite all of the zombie madness going on, Bill's the only one who gets to wrestle around with and kill the naked girls and he even gets to bite one right on the breast! The best scene takes place at a Halloween keg party. While the zombies feast on the guys, all the girls screech and huddle in the corner for several minutes until it's their turn. One girl in a hula outfit tries to climb up a ladder and a zombie sticks a hook in her leg and jerks her back down. Another guy has his nose bitten off. The best gore effect though is when Bill impales a topless girl with his arm, sticking it through her back and out her chest.

The special effects are surprisingly well done at times, especially for the budget range, and there's plenty of guts, an axe to the head, impalements, pitchforkings, heads blown off with shotguns, zombies with eaten off faces and much more. In fact, this is easily one of the goriest zombie movies of the entire decade. The ending is directly "inspired" by the ending of NOTLD (i.e. ripped off), but at least our desires for the surviving Brad Paisley look-a-like and his girl are finally fulfilled. The cast also includes Kevin Kindlin and "Theresa Marie" / Terrie Godfrey (the stars of Hinzman's previous film THE MAJORETTES), Rik Billock (GORGASM), Vincent Survinski (reprising his role as posse member Vince from the original Night), Heidi Hinzman (Bill's daughter), Bonnie Mastandrea (Bill's wife) and the voice of Michael Gornick.

The DVD and Blu-ray from Media Blasters/Shriek Show (which uses the title Flesh Eater) is a decent enough print with some good extras, including a photo gallery, a Bill Hinzman zombie pizza commercial and a 35-minute documentary featurette called Back Into the Woods featuring interviews with Hinzman and make-up artist Jerry Gergely.

★★

Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition (1998)

... aka: Night of the Living Dead: Final Version

Directed by:
John A. Russo

Instead of leaving well enough alone or releasing a new remastered version of Romero's masterpiece NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), John A. Russo and many other Night alum got together and decided to film brand new scenes. Blasphemy you say? You would be correct for the most part. This footage (about 17 minutes in total) was then wedged into a shortened cut of the '68 version wherever it would fit for the film's 30th Anniversary release. This new stuff was shot in black-and-white (by original Night cemetery ghoul S. William Hinzman) in an ill-fated attempt to match it to the original. A new music score was the other major change. Hinzman also helped produce and edit while Russo directed, wrote and edited, plus helped finance the project through his company Market Square Productions. Seeing how Market Square was making things like Swimsuit Sensations (1992), SANTA CLAWS (1996) and Scream Queens Naked Christmas (1996) at around the same time, who'd have ever guessed the resulting footage would end up so shitty?

Other Night vets who got involved include Russell Streiner (an editor), Karl Hardman (still photographer and make-up) and Marilyn Eastman (who handled some of the zombie extra make-up). Perhaps the biggest sin of all was that they actually cut about 20 minutes from the original just to make room for the new stuff. For the record, Romero wanted nothing at all to do with this project. He didn't work on it, didn't endorse it and didn't even want his name associated with it, so I'm not going to list him as the co-director out of respect despite the fact he's credited as such on the print. I'm also not going to recap the events of the original as most people already know what goes on there.

The new footage begins at a prison as grave diggers Dan (Grant Kramer) and Mike (Adam Knox), escorted by guard Charlie (Scott Kerschbaumer), carry a coffin to their pick-up truck and load it into the back. Inside the box is the body of a notorious child molester / murderer who's just been fried in the electric chair. In order to skirt any potential controversy, the warden has ordered the men to quietly, secretly deliver the corpse to the local cemetery and bury it without any commotion. Meeting them there are Arthur (George Drennen) and Hilda Krantz (Julie Wallace), the parents of one of the young victims who want some closure, as well as bald Reverend John Hicks (Scott Vladimir Licina). Arthur demands they open the casket so he can spit on the corpse then he and his wife storm off. After reciting a prayer, the reverend then walks away. And once the corpse (played by Hinzman to connect it to the original) rises from the grave, the two movers jump in their truck and also take off. (This was used as a prologue before Johnny and Barbara arrived at the cemetery.)

Next up we visit a car crash site where a family of four lie dead. The mother and two daughters return as zombies and exit the car while more zombies - including a waitress with her arm ripped off (Heidi Hinzman) and a mangled garage mechanic (Dan Abraham) - start feasting on the father's body. We then get a parade of zombies across the screen from multiple angles. (These shots were blended in with shots of the zombies gathering outside the farmhouse after the truck explosion in the original.)

Adding to the "next day" scenes, reporter Darlene Davies (Debbie Rochon) is interviewing the Reverend about the burial of the killer at the cemetery while, hilariously, an armed posse just shoots zombies all around them. The Hinzman zombie then reappears. The Reverend is bitten on the face while trying to give him a sermon before Hinzman is finally put out of his misery with a shot to the head.

The final new bit is set "one year later" at the Ormsby Medical Center. Darlene arrives to interview the now-even-crazier Reverend, who has somehow not been transformed into a zombie despite being bitten. He claims it was God's intervention and his wounds being cleansed with holy water that protected him. However, he's being held at the center against his will so doctors can study his immune system in hopes of coming up with an antidote. He rails about evil atheists and agnostics, theorizes that the dead are "creatures of Satan" and claims that walking corpses have been possessed by demons. Darlene gets spooked and then rushes out of the room. The end.

While these newly added scenes are probably not all that much worse than what you'd find in most other low budget zombie films from the 90s and 2000s, they stick out like a sore thumb when spliced into Romero's film. Not helping matters any is the acting, which is downright awful for the most part. Licina, who looks like Anton LaVey and also did the new music score, cannot act a lick so of course they give him five times more dialogue than anyone else. Despite being shot in black-and-white, the image is too clean to ever match up to the original. Santa Claws, which was shot in color on 16mm film stock (also by Hinzman), is far grainier and grittier looking than this so perhaps they should have gone that route instead. Or perhaps they shouldn't have gone any route and not tried to enhance something that's perfect the way it is.

★