Review: Goremet, Zombie Chef from Hell (1986)

Directed by: Don Swan
Starring: Theo Depuay, Kelley Kunicki, C.W. Casey
Written by: Jeff Baughn, William Highsmith, Don Swan
Music by: Steve Cunningham, Dan Smith, Don Swan
Country: United States
Not currently available on physical media
IMDb

Don Swan’s one and only gift to cinema was this whacked-out 8 mm ballad to culinary terror. In it, Goza, a powerful ancient priest who resembles middle-aged Clive Barker, has been cursed by his religious sect to feed on human flesh to live. At some point in the 600 years between the start of his curse and the “current day” of this film, Goza decided the best way to procure his lovely human meats was to open a restaurant of some unspecific variety. So mostly, he’s running a whatever-the-fuck food establishment while lounging around smoking weed and eating beautiful women and wearing jeans and half-buttoned Hawaiian shirts and breaking the fourth wall to critique 1980s socioeconomics and cannibal-shaming. For some reason, he serves most of the long pig he snares to his customers instead of eating it himself, which is poor planning all around.

Buzzing around the periphery of Goza’s Deli and Beach Club are lifeguards who moonlight as saxophonists, health inspectors with distinctly unhealthy grudges that of course result in their anthropophageously induced doom, “blondes” (who are Goza’s favoritest flavor), beautiful blondes who work in slaughterhouses but whose career aspirations are to be groupies for sax players-slash-lifeguards, and the nerdy-ass members of the vague magical brotherhood that’s been keeping tabs on Goza over the centuries. Primarily, though, everyone’s just slamming beers, eating human stew, awkwardly cavorting with strippers, breaking out in blues jam sessions, and yelling, “Fuck off, asshole!” to each other, while we listen to a jazzercise score written by Giorgio Moroder’s distant cousin.

But not everyone’s into Goza’s beach-themed seafood bullshit. The girlfriend of a prospective diner warns that “it looks a little evil in there,” a vibe she must have picked up via the bevy of robustly hairy middle-aged men boogying down to country and western tunes, or maybe the fucking asshole buzzkill dressed in a monk’s robe and carrying a plastic staff who begs every customer to stay away or face their doom. The movie’s focus veers between epic battles between supreme powers and the most banal nonsense you can imagine. When those two worlds collide, it’s magic. Powerful magicians who’ve defied the wrath of time hang out on benches, dressed like off-duty community college professors, proselytizing in “thees” and “thous” about the end-times. Against the most ominous music imaginable, aeons-old arch-enemies ride mountain bikes to their climactic final confrontation in a park. An omnipotent librarian-cum-high priestess neglects her vast powers in favor of defeating Goza with … super glue … and … a nail gun? Though it may seem like this movie is about a timeless battle between good and evil over the fate of the universe, it’s actually a timeless battle between good and evil over proprietorship of a bar and grill.

Goremet, Zombie Chef from Hell features what might be the most insane screenplay ever concocted. The glut of groan-worthy puns and pop culture jokes is the highlight of a script written by three people, none of whom have ever heard actual humans talk to each other. This movie is a true bounty of weird conversations. There are words and sentences, but they are articulated in an array of nonsense that comes across like a broken artificial intelligence. There’s some gore here and there, but a lot less of it than anticipated based on the lurid title — but also just enough to add the appropriate edge of sleazy violence. There are not one, but two “body bag specialists” who worked on this movie, per the end credits, and that has to be a good thing. Don Swan’s debut and swansong (turns out, I have not lost that punning feeling …) is an exquisite embodiment of what can make amateur horror so simultaneously wondrous and awful. It’s a Michelin-starred dish that gives you severe diarrhea.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10