Zombie Holocaust

If you're a fan of bad movies, you'll be thoroughly entertained. The direction is terrible in an Ed Wood kind of way, the dialogues are hammy, the performances are awful (in this respect the black actor with the artistic name Dakar stands out, in Fulci's Zombi 2 he plays the doctor's assistant Lucas, here he plays the same character, this time called Moloto). The gore effects aren't bad, there are plenty and you don't have to wait long for them. Otherwise, the resemblance to Fulci's Zombi 2 is striking: the same main characters, two women and two men, a blonde and a bearded man, the same weird doctor and his black assistant (Dakar yay!), a similar script, filmed in the exact same location, which is not surprising, given that the same producers and the same make-up and special effects artists worked on it. All in all, it was so bad that I had a pretty good time with it. More than Fulci's "little brother", although the latter is of course two orders of magnitude higher in terms of filmmaking. (22/09/2003)

One thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that this film was made in the same year as Fulci’s Zombie 2 and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. After all, it’s a clone of both of those films’ screenplays, complete with the added theme of a mad scientist creating humanoid zombie-creatures on a mysterious island (a lá The Island of Dr. Moreau). Add to that a sexy blonde who constantly takes her clothes off everywhere, a hero in the mold of Harrison Ford/Belmondo, and lots of very detailed gore. It’s also nice to see cannibals and zombies together in one movie! As Italian trash, Zombie Holocaust is irresistible. It’s brutal and unintentionally funny, with an essential helping of sex. If you devour this genre and judge the appeal of similar films by the frequency of stupid dialogue, the extent to which the music is terrible and the number of litres of blood, zombies and cannibals, you’re in the right place. (24/01/2003)

If I were to describe the film in one word, I would probably go for inane. It was really horrific, not that it was such a terrifying horror film, the horror was only in the way it was made. The script, direction, editing, dialogue and acting were simply pathetic, yet I can’t boo the film because it worked quite well as an unintentional bizarre comedy. I almost laughed my head off watching certain scenes. For example, when a guy desperately jumps out of a window and the manikin's arm falls off on impact, it’s just priceless. If you add the obviously fake "tattoos," the masks of the undead and a chest cut open with a scalpel to take the heart our, it’s hard not to laugh. Alexandra Delli Colli had the expression of someone undergoing a painful colonoscopy the entire time, but then again, she was also willing to appear in nude scenes typical of these Italian B-movies. The scene with the skull opening and bodypainting follow one another other perfectly, that was really something… (16/04/2020)