Review: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

(aka Virus, Zombie Creeping Flesh)
Directed by: Bruno Mattei
Starring: Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garafalo, Selan Karay
Written by: Claudio Fragasso, José María Cunillés
Music by: Goblin
Country: Italy, Spain
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (Blue Underground)
IMDb

There’s a distinct magic that’s conjured when Italian filmmakers Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso collaborate. Granted, it’s a sloppy, derivative, often silly, sometimes lazy, but occasionally aspirational and enterprising sort of magic. Hell of the Living Dead is Mattei/Fragasso’s gloriously ludicrous spin on George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), about a group of anti-terrorist commandos deployed to Papua New Guinea to investigate lost contact at a chemical research facility. These military honchos are cosplaying Dawn’s Roger and Peter, but they’re way shittier soldiers.

The star of the show is one Franco Garafalo, as commando Zantoro, whose entrancing, astoundingly agape eyeballs are deployed to wondrous effect in a star-making performance that includes some kind of freakout every 15 minutes or so, usually consisting of fits of manic laughter, a dangerously stupid flirtation with a pack of low-energy zombies, and sobbing when he finally gets his brain in order again. The movie is worth experiencing just for whatever the hell it is Garafalo’s doing here. Most everyone else is a serving platter for the gut buffet except Margit Evelyn Newton, a white journalist who is some kind of expert on the native population, whose expertise includes getting out her boobs and painting her face with streaks of white to patronize the tribal peoples that exist only in the stock footage with which her embarrassing charade is spliced. The excursion to Papua New Guinea allows Mattei to continue his country’s tradition of filming very frugally in an exotic location and check the Italian Horror box for “Imperialist Racism”. (“Those poor people can’t possibly understand what’s going on.”)

To a casual viewer, it likely seems as if Hell of the Living Dead is just going through the motions to collect a paycheck off of Romero’s vision. But, oh no, the previously mentioned magic occurs in the preposterous threads that make up this loony blanket. Trained soldiers spend approximately 20 minutes of screen time impotently firing machine guns at zombie torsos, even though they’re all well aware of the head thing (two of those minutes are spent turning a kid zombie into a lead repository from like two and a half feet away). One soldier uses some downtime to dress in a tutu and top hat and dance around. There’s a cat that’s hibernating in a dead old lady’s guts. People, reciting English dialog written by Italians who can’t really speak English, shout things like, “They’re all murderers! They’re selfish and self-centered” and “Stop futzing around and shit your ass!” The score is just a potluck of Goblin’s best cues, previously written for films like Dawn of the Dead, Contamination, and Buio Omega (though, frankly, they’re mostly better utilized here). And, just for the hell of it, Fragasso throws in some surprisingly astute commentary about western civilization’s smug dismissal of the third world.

Like nearly every Mattei film, this is a bunch of kittens that dressed up in an ill-fitting tuxedo to sneak into a cocktail party — you just have to forget about the shitty tux and enjoy the adorable kitten pile that has infiltrated your fancy soiree. As my brain further corrodes with age, Bruno Mattei has continued a steady ascent up my list of favorite Italian directors. He may be a shameless ripoff artist, but he does it with gusto. His movies are so sloppily made with such reckless abandon that you can’t help but be impressed that a filmmaker could care so little about artistry. And yet, despite his best efforts, nearly every one of his movies has a handful of moments of inspiration, where you think, “If only he applied himself …” and then you realize that even the slightest bit more talent or drive or attention to detail would ruin the formula entirely.

Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10