1988, Italy. Starring Jeff Stryker, Candice Daly, Massimo Vanni, Jim Gaines, Don Wilson, Adrianne Joseph, Jim Moss, Nick Nicholson. Directed by Claudio Fragasso.

As jaw-droppingly awful as Zombie 3 was, it's still a hilarious good time to view. Less so is the film that pretends to be the third in the series. Zombi 4 has nothing to do with Zombie 3 or Zombie 2, which of course had nothing to do with each other or the first film to sport the Zombi moniker, Dawn of the Dead. In fact, the movie isn't called Zombi 4 at all. It's called After Death, but someone decided to tack the Zombi 4 thing on the end, just like they tacked the "2" onto the end of Zombi to make people think it was related to Dawn of the Dead, aka Zombi. Why exactly someone would want to "capitalize" on Zombie 3 is a bit of a mystery, but who am I to question the Italians? Zombi 4, which is actually After Death, at least has the good manners to totally rip off Zombie 3, which was basically ripping off Zombi 2. I don't know who really decided this was Zombi 4. Most of the prints only bill it as After Death, yet lots of people list it as Zombi 4. At least Zombie 3 really was a sequel of sorts, involving, at least before his health lapse, Lucio Fulci. It's enough to make your head spin, baby!

After Death is set on a sparsely populated tropical island, where just about all Italian zombie films are set. Makes sense. The tropics are pretty nice, after all, though I don't know why shambling mounds of flesh would hang around in the hot, humid tropics that would accelerate their rate of decay. You'd think the living dead would high tail it to Canada or somewhere cool to retard the decay, but what the hell. I guess a short life as a beach-coming corpse is better than a few years as a chilly living dead popsicle. The action begins on this proverbial tropical island, where some guy is busily practicing voodoo. Some of the local research scientists decide to put an end to his mad ways. Seems the voodoo daddy is pissed because the scientists couldn't cure his daughter and prevent her death. So he turns his wife into a toothy zombie hellspawn and sets to killin'!

Everyone gets the bite put on them except for one little girl, who escapes and then comes back 20 years later. Why? Because. You know, I was once mugged with a couple friends, and I never went back to the street corner where it happened. It just seemed good common sense. And that was just two guys with a gun. If I'd been set upon by a pus-gargling zombie, I'm willing to bet I'd be equally uninterested in returning to the scene. The movie tries to pass this off as some sort of selective amnesia. She can't seem to remember much about the island, but you still have to question the coincidence there. She is accompanied by the usual party animal bunch of mercenaries who always show up for these kinds of things. And of course, they bring women and beer! And facial hair! Italy must absolutely be crawling with hairy, beer-drinking mercenaries who all boast gold chains and gay cop mustaches and like wearing unzipped camo vests with nothing on underneath.

Eventually, the incredibly stupid heroine remembers why the island is so familiar. Her revelation that, "Oh yeah, this island is a portal to hell and my parents and friends were all slaughtered," is met with the usual ho-hum bravado commonly exhibited by macho bands of hairy mercenaries who bring their girlfriends and a cooler of beer everywhere they go. Maybe I am mistaken and these guys aren't actual mercenaries, but are simply members of a band called "Mercenaries" or something. This movie would kick a lot more ass if, instead of mercenaries, it was Motorhead. Lemmy don't put up with that living dead crap. He'd just go, "Oy, that's a weird lot," and smash them with an empty bottle of Jack.

The siren song of howls of damnation coming from the jungle prove too tempting for our intrepid group of adventurers. They dock the boat and start wandering aimlessly around in the jungle, bravely pointing their M-16s at the trees. Shockingly enough, they are soon set upon by scores and scores of flesh eating zombies! As was the case in Zombie 3, there is very little consistency among the living dead. Some of them stumble around slowly and moan. Others do kungfu. Still others deliver eloquent soliloquies and use automatic weapons. And just like the zombies in Zombie 3, they absolutely love to jump through the windows and perform other acrobatic feats not traditionally attributed to the living dead. And just like the zombies in the last film, some of these zombies must have been crouched in their little hiding spots for weeks, just praying for the off-chance that someone might walk by them for a cheap jolt despite the fact that they are in the middle of the jungle on a deserted island.

Elsewhere on the island are some scientists trying to figure out what happened to the other scientists. They certainly waited long enough. This bunch of boneheads find the old voodoo site and naturally start reading the incantations that release even more zombies. Scientists of the world, if you learn anything, learn that you should not read hellish incantations while standing in a cave filled with corpses. One of the scientists is a buff gay dude with 1980s hair. Well, I don't know if he's gay. It's probably stereotyping for me to assume all muscular young men in tight jeans and their button-down shirt knotted up like Daisy Duke are gay.

All our annoying humans eventually meet and hole up together to try and solve the mystery of the zombies, who can be held at bay with special voodoo candle circles that have a tendency to get knocked over or blown out from time to time. Another note: if you have a magic circle of voodoo candles that can keep the legions of the living dead at bay, then don't set them out in the middle of the floor in the room with the highest pedestrian traffic. And close the window! It's like these people set the candles up in front of a fan and then ran back and forth really fast across the room. And also, even if you don't buy into the whole candle bit, despite the fact that the zombies run after you when the candles are out but stand still when they are lit, don't blow the candles out. Look' they aren't hurting you, okay? So you might as well just let them go on burning. Don't blow them out and yell, "Buncha mumbo jumbo voodoo bullshit!"

You get plenty of the usual zombie fare, like one buddy coming face to face with his previous buddy who is now a zombie. I always hate this. I mean, he's a zombie. He's spitting pus at you. The friendship is over, man! It's like those movies where the villain will transform himself into the hero's dead brother or something, and the hero will stand there and actually see the villain transform into his brother's likeness. But the hero still falls for it every time and is like, "Tommy? You're alive?" No! You just watched the villain transform, you idiot! My favorite example of this was in the movie Event Horizon. Lawrence Fishburn spends ten minutes explaining to everyone that the evil presence will take the form of loved ones and dead friends to fool you, so if your dead girlfriend is suddenly alive and has traveled through space to come kiss you, then it's the alien. And then a couple scenes later, he falls for it. Look, when you are fighting a monster with super mental and transforming abilities and you're in hell or a spaceship or some remote island, and someone you used to love or your dead brother suddenly walks up to you, then it's not your brother or your girlfriend. It's a monster, so shoot it.

And if your friend is a zombie, don't try to reason with him or "bring him back" because he's just going to bite you. Learn these things, people!

Our heroes spend a lot of time sort of sitting around while the zombies gather outside and wait for the next time some dumb-ass spills beer on the magic candles or kicks them over proclaiming his general disbelief for all this "mumbo jumbo voodoo bullshit!" They then decide to take a trip down to the catacombs where all the ancient evil was released from, thus setting us up for the usual last ditch battle and ultra super shocking ending, the likes of which we haven't seen in literally dozens of other equally super shocking surprise zombie film endings. No really! I swear.

Zombi 4, er, I mean After Death, is not a good movie. But what the hell? You got stupid humans getting their throats and chests ripped open by decaying corpses. That is, after all, what we look for in Italian zombie films, and this one doesn't fail to deliver. I still like the mind-boggling Zombie 3 more than this one. But After Death certainly has its charm. Sometimes, the best movies are the worst ones, and this one is pretty bad. Being as bad as After Death is, means it gets my unqualified seal of approval. I had a blast, and I learned something. I learned something about zombies, about surviving, and you know -- I even learned a little something about myself.

Sitting through Zombie 3 and 4 will make you appreciate how accomplished Zombie actually is, even if it's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the word's definition. Although possessed of illogical moments and half-baked notions, Zombie is, in reality, not that terribly written or paced, and the finale will really get you on the edge of your seats. Subsequent films bearing the word Zombie and various numerals behind them, on the other hand, dispense entirely with any notion of being "commercial art" as I regard some of Fulci's finer moments, that is, films made for commercial reasons but not devoid of artistic merit in some way or another. The patchwork Fragasso/Mattei Zombie 3 and the Fragasso tour-de-farce that is After Death only prove that even if you didn't like Fulci's art, at least there was some art behind it.

If After Death was Claudio Fragasso's solo effort in the world of zombie films, it's worth noting that Bruno Mattei's own Hell of the Living Dead, though never connected in any legitimate or illegitimate way to the Fulci films, can almost be added to the trio as a sort of addendum or companion piece. If nothing else, it makes Zombie 3 and After Death seem accomplished by comparison. This time out, Mattei is in the director's seat while Fragasso still delivers the derivative, wholly uninspired, completely abysmal screenplay. In a way, you gotta love the guy. If you ever studied film in school and heard how insanely difficult it is to get a script sold, let alone made into a feature, you can hold Claudio Fragasso up as evidence to the contrary. He's really some great kind of hero, and the best thing about him is that in interviews, he's completely forthcoming about his work, basically admitting that it's pretty much total crap, but as long as it's fun, who really cares?

Fragasso's script, which has been cobbled together along with the work of a Spanish screenwriter (it was a co-production between the two nations), follows the example of Zombie 3 in throwing everything it possibly can into the film. Mattei cites Dawn of the Dead as a major source of "inspiration" for the film, and it shows in his choice of music, much of which is Goblin's Dawn of the Dead score with a little bit of their work for Contamination thrown in for good measure. In addition, our primary cast of characters run around the jungle in SWAT-like duds similar to those in Dawn of the Dead. But besides those two similarities and the fact that there are zombies wandering about, there's not much reflection of Dawn in this film. Once again we're down on a tropical island where a terrible virus escapes and contaminates the locals. Seeing as how this is an earth-shattering outbreak with symptoms the likes of which have never been seen (unless you watched some of the other movies), a small group of guys get sent in to check things out. One would think that if the entire country of New Guinea suddenly turned into zombies, someone might get suspicious.

They spend a lot of time driving around in a jeep trading bizarrely awkward quips and one liners and typical "Italian movie dub" tough-guy speak. "It's hot as a horse's ass at fly time, and I don't like the heat." It rarely makes any sense, but you have to admire their commitment to giggling insanely and cursing. They meet up with a Caucasian anthropologist type who likes to blend in with the natives by stripping down to nothing but a grass thong and painting squiggles on her boobs, which all things considered, are quite a nice pair of boobs. Together, they fend off zombies, act completely crazy, and end up investigating the plant where all this virus nonsense started.

The special forces guy are crazier than usual. One has to expect that the military in these movies will be miles over the top, full of cigar-chomping grimacing, shouting, blustering, and craziness, but these guys overdo it even within the realm of zombie film crack squads. One of them even dons a tu-tu and dances around while crooning "Singing in the Rain" as zombies stumble around. Oh sure, every crew has to have the "guy on the edge," but this guy is just plain silly, made even weirder by the fact that he possesses an uncanny resemblance to time-tested cinematic crazy guy Klaus Kinski. There are also two Tom Beringers in this outfit, which must be confusing. Now, I'm not a huge fan of real-life violence, but I'm also not a dove. I don't mind seeing criticisms of the armed forces, police, what have you, but surely the military recruits something other than absolute gibbering madmen to be in their squads.

While Hell of the Living Dead has plenty of great stuff to offer - most notably the loony dialogue and wild gore - it's not nearly as fun as it should be. Sure the gore effects are generally good, but the zombie make-up itself is slapdash, uninteresting, and cheap. There's way too much time spent with grating, idiotic human characters. And worst of all, there's way too much padding in the form of grainy stock footage from some other film. How many times can I watch elephants, kangaroo rats, and jumping monkeys? On safari, not nearly enough, but in a zombie movie, I'd gladly trade monkey and mondo footage for some gut munching. Of all the films in this odyssey of zombie cinema, this is the worst paced. There's no tension, and every "shock" is telegraphed from a mile away. Still, like most Italian zombie films, it possesses a certain goofy charm that makes it watchable even if you have to lean on the fast forward button to get through yet another volley of stock footage.

As in Zombie 3, we also get some ham-fisted attempt to add "meaning" to the film via heavy-handed dialogue about how white nations use the third world as their dumping and testing ground. Honestly, though, anyone who tries to pass Mattei's work off as putting forth any sort of social or ecological agenda is missing the point, or rather, attempting to force a point in where one doesn't belong. Bruno Mattei did not sit up at all hours of the night worrying about the plight of indigenous peoples around the world, only to conclude that the best way he could crusade for them would be via a sleazy zombie movie full of gratuitous gore and boob shots. Ecological/social messages were simply en vogue for such films, thanks primarily to George Romero's honest passion for his various beliefs promoted in his zombie films. That any similar sort of social conscience sneaks into Mattei's film is purely an accident of imitation, and any attempt to inflate these messages into anything else is simply pompous posturing from people who have a strange urge to inject politics and morality into the most amoral, apolitical grindhouse works around. If Hell of the Living Dead works for you as social or political satire, then hey, that's all well and good, but honestly now, at the end of the day is this really a movie about the suffering inflicted upon third world nations by oblivious industrialized giants?

If you want that stuff, George Romero is there for you with very real and very earnest philosophy to accompany his shocks and gore, or you can seek out Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, another film that seems to take it's social messages more importantly than the horrific goings-on. If on the other hand, you just want to see idiots and assholes get hounded by flesh-eating corpses, then Italy is the place to be and you'll see no finer example of the heady highs and laughable lows that Italian zombie cinema has to offer than by indulging yourself in this quartet of tropical island mayhem. Appreciating Italian exploitation cinema means knowing how to embrace the good and roll with the bad, even when they come bundled in the same package. From Fulci to Mattei, these movies may not set a high standard in cinematic excellence, but they certainly turn the phantasmagorical fun factor up to eleven, and like Bruno Mattei says, film is there to entertain you.

Labels: Director: Claudio Fragasso, Horror: Zombies, Italian Zombie Saga, Year: 1988