Zombi 3

Zombi 3

Plot:

You got your 'Return of the Living Dead' in my marinara!

You got your legendary Fulci film in my endless hackery!

Together they taste like crap!

Comments:

A few days ago I watched 'Zombi 3', and was promptly laid low with a powerful virus. (I'm not blaming the movie. Wait, am I? Well, it may have weakened my immune system.) I spent the following night tossing and turning. Memories of the film were distilled through my bug-addled brain, and my dreams were filled with relentless undead and ruthless mercenaries. Why is this relevant? Well, it's almost the perfect capsule review; you see my shivering fever dreams where both more coherent and artistic than this asinine blight of a film.

'Zombi 3' is of course the sequel in name only to Lucio Fulci's eerie tropical nightmare. (If you think this film karma for Fulci riding Romero's coattails, don't. It would be akin to sentencing someone to the guillotine for jaywalking.) Ol' Lucio so the story goes tried to salvage the film from Claudio Fragasso sub-hackneyed stillbirth of a script, only to stymied at every turn by the latter's pissy instance that his scribbles be treated as holy writ. (You know, just like his script for 'Troll 2'.) Nothing more pathetic than a prima donna plagiarist. Unfortunately, despite abandoning the sinking ship that was 'Z-3' Fulci still tends to be credited as director of this pile, and the thought that some hugely uninformed person might see this film and think it indicative of the man's canon is interminably depressing.
It's apocryphal as to just what scenes Lucio was even present for. If I had to venture a guess; the opening, with its somewhat disturbing rubber faced zombie making chewy faces at the camera seems to have a slight touch of talent behind it. Likewise, when a recently deceased woman (sporting some of the film's only effective makeup) shuffles around in a dark room calling after her friend, the film approaches frightening for an all too brief instant. Other than that, the rest of the flick's flat and ugly color, pedestrian point and shoot camerawork, and criminally apathetic direction seem to scream out the name of Bruno Mattei like a dying man laying out a blood curse.

It's hard to think of any aspect of this film that was approached with a measure of competence. The acting is prototypical for cheap awful movies. Characters tripping over their own inflated sense of importance, furners' reading phonetic lines they don't understand, and just general sense of embarrassed milling about. Lest you defend the sock puppet birds, watery kool-aid blood, and dirty pajama shirts = zombiez!!! makeup effects as stemming from a want of budget, let me remind you just what Romero and Fulci himself were often able to accomplish with practically nothing. Besides, it's not even the monumentally slapdash execution that dooms this film, it's the lack of any sensible scripting to serve as groundwork.

It should come as no shock that the movie has no real characters in any recognizable sense. The three soldiers are horny. Patty is earthier than her boyfriend. The General is both stupid and evil. That's all folks.
Likewise, it's hard to grant 'Zombi 3' even the conceit of even having a story. Most of the narrative was filched hand over fist from 'Return of the Living Dead', the rest comes from nowhere and leads to nothing. Of course we have many instances of simultaneous occurrences of idiocy and theft, such as when General Disarray ignores basic biohazard procedures when incinerating a body. (Pure science fiction doctor, there's no such thing as ashes!) Other set pieces such as 'rigor mortis while alive', and 'zombie boyfriend turns' ("I'm thirsty… for your blood!") are of course lacking O'Bannon's humor. Having no twist of their own to replace it, they just sort of sit there, depressing the hell out of us.
Stealing on this level is hard work I suppose. So hard that the film can't afford even a figleaf of lucidity in those parts it hasn't lifted outright. Whether zombies shuffle, pose dramatically, or run full bore depends on… well nothing palpable I could see. Likewise whether they aggressively pursue their quarry or nonsensically wait inside cubbyholes on the off chance someone wanders by apparently has more to do with mood than instinct. This of course culminates in the infamous 'flying zombie head in the fridge scene' in which a revenant apparently detached his own self-propelled noggin, then left it on a platter in an abandoned hotel in case someone strolled by looking for well-aged tiramisu. (Though Fulci himself apparently wrote this part himself, just to screw with Fragasso. I'm willing to buy that, mostly because it made me just about bust a gut.)

If it sounds like I'm whining, well, I am. But if you were exposed to the full gale force of this movie's brainlessness you would have license too. Amazingly enough, it just gets more moronic as the dvd timer winds down. A woman falls in a pool, only to emerge undead and legless. (Zombie koi?) The head of Army research postures and bellows that an antidote is key despite the fact that no one is stopping his research. He just sucks at it, and can't understand why the bad old army is trying to contain the problem. (And even he thinks the General is retarded.) The army forgets how to use their assault rifles, being killed en masse by two shmucks in a fistfight. And finally, in what eclipses even the flying head scene on the wtf? meter, a magically appearing pregnant woman has a full grown zombie arm emerge from her stomach to grab a straggler. So I don't know, apparently she got freaky with Thing. (I would make a "fingering" joke here, but even I'm ashamed.) Did I say that was the coup de grace? How about the very end, where the only to people to escape the carnage, decide to go right back in so they can "stop this thing?" (!)

You know what? I'm going to stop this thing too. I could go on compounding idiocy after idiocy ala 'NOTLD3D', but the more I bleat about how mind-bendingly stupid this movie is, the more a body might get the impression that it might make some dramatic riff-fodder. Nothing could be further from the truth, for as idiotic as this flick is, it's also stupendously boring. The entire population of… wherever the hell this is… has dissolved into a blood orgy, yet folks can drive around endlessly and not glimpse a clue of it. This is the end of the world, we're told in drab gray offices, but all we see are a few clods in greasepaint. And while Linnea Quigley certainly wasn't going to be doing any gravestone bump and grind, they couldn't wait ten seconds for the cute Filipino girl to get her shirt off before the zombie sparrow attack started? There's a word for exploitation without nudity; "pointless".
By squeezing out Fulci, schlepping in Mattei like a drugged circus bear, and just basically being a giant hacky douche, Claudio Fragasso managed to create a film, which makes me appreciate the relative subtlety and competence of the 'Resident Evil' series.

For that sir, someone must die.

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