Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980)

Day 61 of Sobriety. 

Well, today marked the end of my second calendar month of sobriety. What better way to celebrate than sitting down to watch a film that no one in their right mind would watch sober.

Also known as Hell of the Living Dead and Virus, I think this is the second film that I have seen that was helmed by notorious Italian exploitation director Bruno Mattei, the first being Zombi 3, which was co-directed by Lucio Fulci and which I remember absolutely nothing about because I was drunk when I watched it. I do remember thinking it was mediocre though. “Mediocre” is not really a word that can be applied to Zombie Creeping Flesh, because in some ways it is astonishing—or maybe flabbergasting would be a more appropriate term. “Good” is also not really a word that could be applied. In fact, this film is so weird and messed up that almost no words can be applied without a lot of qualification. I was entertained though, so maybe “entertaining” would be the exception to that.

Where to start. The movie is often criticized for being a rip-off of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), and that is clearly what it sets out to be. Even the score by Goblin, is largely lifted directly from their score for Dawn of the Dead, as well as other sources (including their non-soundtrack Roller album, apparently). The jumbled plot concerns an industrial accident at a secret experimental facility in New Guinea that causes the leak of a chemical weapon that turns people into—guess what? Yes, zombies. A crack team of (four) Interpol commandos led by the hilariously named Lieutenant Mike London goes to investigate the incident as does a female journalist, accompanied by her cameraman and other only vaguely-identified persons, including a young child (who doesn’t last too long). Along the way the group bump into a tribe of cannibals—and, of course, lots of zombies.

The film was clearly not shot in New Guinea—apparently it was shot in Barcelona on a five-week schedule (one of the funniest scenes has the group of commandos in a children’s playpark—with a slide and swings). But in order to give the impression that the action is taking place in New Guinea, copious use is made of inserted stock footage. The stock footage is mostly shots of wildlife (much of which is apparently not found in New Guinea) and footage of native tribes, which was apparently culled from a mondo documentary titled New Guinea, Island of Cannibals. The inserted footage is jarring to say the least. The quality of the film stock is completely different to the footage actually shot for the film. Some of the animal footage has a binocular shaped cut-out imposed onto to it to make appear like the characters are looking at the animals through binoculars. Some of the footage of the “cannibal” tribes was pretty gross to my western sensibilities—such as people dissecting animals with their bare hands, an open casket funeral, and someone (apparently) eating maggots out of a corpse’s eye sockets. But the most incongruous (and funniest stock) footage moments were probably the scenes of people speaking in international committees, with dialogue relevant to the plot dubbed over them. The shots that were supposed to be a meeting of the United Nations were particularly bizarre.

So, that’s the kind of film that Zombie Creeping Flesh is—definitely one of those “so-bad-its-good” type of films. The gore scenes in the film (other than the mondo footage) was mostly pretty cheap-looking, but occasionally effective in its willful nastiness. The filched soundtrack by Goblin--whose logo appears prominently at the beginning of the film--is used heavily, and lends the proceedings a certain degree of stylishness that they would not otherwise have in a million years. Even me, who prefers to take even the most low-rent Z-movie pretty seriously, had trouble with this one. But like I said—it was entertaining, if slightly overlong at 100 minutes.