Movie Review: Zombie Holocaust (1980)

Zombie Holocaust (1980) - Italy - Horror - Rated R

Directed by Frank Martin (Marino Girolami)

Stars Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Delli Colli, Donald O'Brien, Sherry Buchanan, Dakar

A mixed bag of zombie, cannibal and mad doctor movies adds gore, nudity and production goofs to make for a fun b-movie experience.

A hospital orderly is discovered to be practicing cannibalism using bodies in the hospital morgue. It is further discovered there is an outbreak of cannibalism in New York City and the cannibals all hailed from a group of islands in the East Indies. A team of doctors and a journalist, with the aid of a doctor who treats natives in the islands, puts together an expedition to discover the reason for the outbreak of cannibalism. Their expedition will lead them to the heart of a mystery involving cannibals, a crazed doctor and his human and inhuman experiments.

Zombie Holocaust is like taking the basic plot of an old Boris Karloff, or similar actor, mad doctor on an isolated island movie and updating it with cannibals, gore and nudity, and it works! This movie is not going to win any awards. It has occasional goofs such as a suicide jumper falling to the sidewalk below and an obvious mannequin breaking apart when it hits the ground, but those goofs add to the fun of the movie. It also has a story that works, it you don't try to dissect it, and keeps a pace which rarely takes a time-out except to get Alexandra Delli Colli naked, and that's a good reason for a time-out in my book. It is a little slow in the beginning, but once it moves beyond the city the pace picks up.

My Rating: 3 Fingers. If I were to rate this for my enjoyment of it I would give it 5 fingers, but realistically not everybody is going to enjoy it. It does have its gaping flaws and it is far from Shakespeare, but the fun meter if you enjoy this kind of movie is very high.

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