A fatuous jackass named Alen, tortures his employees on an island. (No, this is not the start of a really bad limerick.) They put up with this because they are young actors (apocryphally), who are in need of a serious break. Alen’s meandering childish shenanigans eventually devolve to the point where he disinters a corpse (the island has been used of late as a sort of potter’s field) and offers a dopey prayer to Satan in order to raise the dead. It doesn’t work, so Alen gets all pissy, and insults the Devil, before taking the corpse back to a nearby shack to serve as the centerpiece for a hundred gratingly unfunny stunts. The corpses don’t like this, or maybe Satan finally decides to get off his worthless ass and raise up some zombies, because the corpses finally (after about an hour of pointless crap) crawl their way out of the grave for revenge.

And well, that’s it really. The movie ends just about when it gets started.

I actually saw this film many years ago in Florida, on our old local UHF station’s horror film showcase dubbed “TV 18’s Friday Nights with the Gravemaster” (a.k.a., The show only I, and possibly the host ever remember existing) As a youth, my taste was embarrassingly unreliable. I remembered thinking to myself, in typical Eric Cartman-esque fashion; “That might have been a good movie, if it didn’t have so many damn hippies in it! Hippies suck!” It turns out that this is a first for me. For once, the petulant snap judgment I made in my youth turned out to be eerily accurate, if not for precisely the same reason I thought back then.

Said hippies which make up Alen’s little theater group are some of the most annoying cretins you’ll ever spend 87 minutes with. When I was young, I remember thinking how atrocious the acting was. Seeing it again, I don’t know if I could say the same thing. While some of the lesser players (the comedy relief gay guys for example) are brain meltingly bad, most of leads do what they’re required to. Which is my round-about way of saying that the scriptwriters (Bob Clark, the director and Alen Ormsby, guess who he plays!) should have been horsewhipped. Alen isn’t unfit for his particular character. He wrote himself as a prick, and he conveys the role very well. Why he should expect us to enjoy watching him do so is another matter. The same goes for Val, his outspoken (I.e. bitchy) nemesis. Competently portrayed, but to what end?
I have a very embarrassing confession to make here. Many people are horribly annoyed by the presence of Anya Ormsby (presumably Alan’s  sister, or possibly his wife, I really have no idea) as the loony-tunes mystical pre-goth spaced-out chick invariably referred to as Creepy Girl. Like Tom Servo, I have a detrimental and inexplicable attraction towards weird chicks. I found her, well, kind of fetching. Yeah, I know. I'm sick.

Maybe it has something to due with the fact that she’s the only character with one or two decent lines. As I mentioned, the writing is rubbish. The dialog consists almost entirely of lame quips, put-downs, Val’s whining, and Alen’s infantile mewling. Keep in mind, the zombies don’t show up until nearly the last 20 minutes; this repetitive crap takes up almost the entire movie! The plot is sparse at best. To paraphrase an old Mst3k line, It’s like they had three servings of screenplay that they tried to stretch out for six people.

When the zombies do finally turn up, it’s no big whoop, but it is something to look at (finally!). The movie up until this point is an almost intolerable mélange of garbage dialogue, but it quickly turns into a nice, violent, panicky fight for survival. Of course, so does every other zombie film ever made. To be honest, the makeup effects here are piss-poor, mostly consisting of lumpy gray pancake makeup and fake blood. (Insert esoteric Sifl & Olly joke here.)

If there is one feature which saves this film from the trash bin (and that’s a big ‘if’) it’s Bob Clark’s odd direction. You may know Clark as the director of the sublime ‘Christmas Story’, as well as the ‘Baby Geniuses’ line of flicks. Yeah, one-hit-wonder pretty much sums it up for old Bob. Whatever he lacks as a writer however, he makes up for as a director. The cinematography on display here is oddly disturbingly. The film is shadowy and atmospheric, and many of the shots are very well-framed. Maybe it’s due in part to the whole “I can’t believe someone actually made this film” aura the whole experience is dredged in, but the visual dimension of the movie is genuinely surreal and more than a little creepy. Clark does a good job of presenting an unnerving locale, and building suspense. Too bad he has no idea of how to fill up that setting, or deliver the pay off he’s been building up to.

All in all, an under whelming film. If you’ve seen just about every other zombie flick ever made, it might be worth a look. But whether you’re looking for real scares, or low-grade zombie cheese, there are simply too many superior films in the genre for this one to warrant a huge recommendation.