A weaker effort in the Italian zombie sub-genre that flourished for a short time in the late 70's and early 80's, although the movie is not without its charm and inspired moments. The make-up effects are on the cheesier side and obviously the production didn't have much of a pyrotechnics budget, consequently the gunshots and exploding squibs don't have much pizazz. Not surprisingly the film's set-up owes much to George Romero's "Dead" movies.The story line? A government is creating some type of dangerous chemical in an unimpressive-looking smoke stack factory. The chemical leaks out – a dead rat makes a cameo. Don't ask. People turn immediately into zombies and naturally enough want to eat juicy regular Homo sapiens. A political statement about over-population is thrown in. For some reason a SWAT-type team who blows away a band of eco- agitated terrorists at the beginning of the movie is sent on a mission to Zombie Island. This is where the bulk of the film takes place. The quartet of commandos is comprised of a charismatic squad leader, a somewhat colorful psycho who likes to taunt the zombies and two other nondescript types. The commandos run into a fairly hot-looking Iti reporter chick and her annoying mustachioed cameraman on the island. A husband and wife along with their zombie-bitten son are quickly dispensed with at this juncture. The best thing to do when watching a flick of this type is throw logic out the window and enjoy the high points. And there are a few. Most notably when the reporter chick tells the guys she'll have to go ahead and smooth the way for a powwow with the local villagers. She then proceeds to pop her top, revealing a most exquisite pair of natural breasts. As we all know, wacky tribes people go around topless, so it only makes sense that our reporter would do likewise – to make them feel at ease as it were. Hey, when in Rome… It's a great way to introduce gratuitous nudity into a picture and also be able to tell the actress playing the part, "But this is essential to the story, honey." There's some National Geographic type footage of tribesmen and women dancing around and eating maggots. Then our stars get to react with extras dolled-up to resemble the tribes people in the other footage. I learned a lot about native customs. Another inspired scene has one of the commandos (who can remember their actual names?) deciding to suddenly become a transvestite by donning a tutu and doing a little dance while in the midst of searching an abandoned house for zombies. Of course he enters the wrong room and ends up being devoured by the dead.It would be remiss of me to not also mention:All Italians seem to have (at least in this movie) a predisposition to helplessly watch as their fellow countrymen are eaten alive by zombies. They seem incapable of moving or doing anything to help. A very strange condition. They can even watch themselves being eaten without actually resisting. Must be attributable to pasta shock. Hell of the Living Dead (aka Night of the Zombies) should win an award for some of the worst examples of mismatched wildlife stock footage integration in a motion picture. And couple that with worse sound effects. At least half of the shots of birds and other animals are inexplicably accompanied by the sound of gobbling turkeys. Guess they only had one wildlife sound effects album in their collection.The driving Goblin soundtrack ain't bad at times. Another tip of the hat to Romero.The commandos constantly have trouble remembering to shoot zombies in the head even after being frequently berated by their resident psycho comrade. Sooner or later every character cannot resist wandering off by themselves, acting as if they are on a picnic - and sure enough they find zombie trouble.Overwrought characters repeat lines such as, "Die bastard! Die!"

As with a lot of those classic horror films where chemicals or toxic waste mutates people into evil creations, this one is bad for it. The beginning credits show a chemical factory with a turquoise tint to it, and of course they're trying to make a harmless factory look like NASA's launch site, with the professional-sounding loudspeaker voices and futuristic music, but even worse, the supposed zombie chemical control room, it's obviously a nuclear power plant! The scientists are wearing the most ridiculous outfits, and then one guy just stands there and kills himself by inhaling the "zombie virus". Yes, it was a low-budget fiction film, but they kind of overdid the evil science drama. Next, it introduces a team of men who seem to think of nothing but grabbing at girls and swearing. They are sent to an island (which was mainly stock footage), and there they discover a whole whack of zombies, and they befriend a reporter and her cameraman. They both want the same thing - to find out what's going on.Okay, I'd rate it a 6/10 for the comedic side. The scene with the army man putting on a tutu and dancing in the middle of an apocalypse is pretty funny, but really I think it was never made to be serious.

Bruno Mattei's "Virus", a.k.a. "Hell of the Living Dead", a.k.a. "Night of the Zombies", is an agreeably gory and ridiculous Italian zombie shocker that unfortunately goes on a little too long for it to completely hit the spot, but it's packed with enough laugh out loud moments to make it consistently palatable.The story is nothing new: an accident at a chemical plant unleashes a virus that infects the recently deceased and turns them into shambling, flesh craving zombies. An elite SWAT team is hired to get to the bottom of things and they travel to New Guinea where the plant is located, hooking up with a bombshell reporter (Margit Evelyn Newton) and her cameraman, and encounter danger every step of the way."Virus" benefits from a couple of elements. First off, it's got the standard hilariously terrible vocal performances that we know we'll often get with these things. It's also got a hell of a hammy, delicious, eye rolling performance by Franco Garofalo, playing Zantoro, a member of the SWAT team who loves to taunt the zombies when he gets the chance. The goofy screenplay was co-written by Claudio Fragasso, whose credits include "Zombi 3", "The Other Hell", and..."Troll 2". It includes one hysterical, memorable sequence wherein another member of the team finds some clothing and decides the time is right for a little cross dressing, and launching into a Gene Kelly routine. The music by Goblin is great fun. Newton bares her flesh in one sequence, knowing this is one thing that the local tribe (and viewer) will appreciate. And the action is often intercut with utterly pointless - and thus very amusing - stock animal footage.It doesn't have the atmosphere of Fulci's horror films of this period, but it's a nice diversion just the same. The faithful will be satisfied if they stick with it. It would be just about impossible to resist any zombie flick where one of the last characters standing gets their face ripped apart in loving close-up.Overall, not bad.Seven out of 10.

I'm not super-familiar with the work of famed exploitation director Bruno Mattei (here credited under an alias), but I know a little bit about him and I've seen a few of his other films. My best friend is an enormous fan of his work (in an ironic, so-bad-it's-good way), and this past weekend brought over the DVD of this film... the oddly-titled "Hell of the Living Dead." It was an experience, I will give it that.There is no real plot to speak of. Everything seems to mush together unnaturally. In the beginning, at a military center called "Hope Center", an experimental chemical is leaked, turning the staff into zombies. Elsewhere, a crack team of commandos infiltrates a building where activists protesting the Hope Center have taken hostages, and kill them all. Sometime later, in Papua New Guinea, the commandos encounter a gorgeous reporter and her cameraman/pseudo-boyfriend, who are being chased by zombies. The commandos and the reporter team up to escape alive.From there on, the film is a messy series of skits, essentially. The characters talk a little bit, go to a new location, zombies show up, they flee. This is repeated several times until the end of the film, which without spoiling anything, is outlandishly hilarious and ludicrous as the script tries vainly to tie the plot together by book-ending the story. It's a very random, funny climax.I haven't heard of any of the actors before the film, and after seeing it, I can see why. The acting is very hammy. Despite seeing a dubbed version, you can tell from the physical performances that the actors were all going over-the-top, and they never seemed to react naturally to anything. The English voice dubbing is pretty atrocious as well.Gore effects are a mixed bag. Some of the shots are fantastic, while others are laughably bad. The zombies themselves look halfway decent at times, however, they too-often fall back on that gray "Dawn of the Dead" look.Direction is pretty sub-par, and cheap. Mattei really dropped the ball here. And the insane over-use of stock footage got grating. As did the script, which as I mentioned above is the same "rinse and repeat" series of scenes over and over again. Finally, I must complain about one thing- for a movie about zombies, there certainly aren't many zombies in it. They are there for the first few scenes, before suddenly disappearing for what seemed to be a good 30-40 minutes, during which Bruno padded the film with excessive stock-footage of native tribes, and goody, unneeded scenes of the commandos interacting with said tribes. For a while, I forgot there were even zombies."Hell of the Living Dead" is fairly entertaining at times, but it's just too basic for its own good. It isn't good enough to be watchable as a good film, not is it bad enough to qualify for "so bad, it's good!" territory. As it stands, it's just a bland, boring, crummy movie with a few unintentional laughs. I give it a 3 out of 10. If you want to see a good (or rather, so-bad-it's-good) Mattei film, look elsewhere.