Cruel Jaws (1995)

 

Director: Bruno Mattei

Screenplay: Robert Feen, Bruno Mattei and Linda Morrison

Cast: Richard Dew as Dag Soerensen; David Luther as Francis Berger; George Barnes, Jr. as Samuel Lewis; Scott Silveria as Bob Soerensen; Kristen Urso as Susy Soerensen; Sky Palma as Glenda; Norma J. Nesheim as Vanessa; Gregg Hood as Bill Morrison; Carter Collins as Ronnie Lewis; Natasha Etzer as Gloria Lewis; Larry Zience as Larry; Jay Colligan as Tommy

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Cruel Jaws is talked of in the documentary Sharksploitation (2023), about the lineage of shark movies before and especially after the cultural shockwave of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), as truly one of the most infamous ones, probably with Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002) right behind, if only for a final line to rival Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) for iconic memorability. Bruno Mattei was a man behind mondo films, a shameless and proud reinterpretation of Aliens (1986) named Shocking Dark (1989), infamous titles like Hell of the Living Dead (1980), and buddies with Claudio Fragasso of Troll 2 (1990), and he will at least have a place in my heart for a film like Zombi 3 (1988), the Lucio Fulci film he and Fragasso helped on when Fulci fell ill mid-production, which I have unapologetically fallen for as late era Italian cheese. Here with Crawl Jaws, long past the golden era of Italian genre cinema, infamously the film “borrowed” footage from other Italian Jaws rip-offs, including Enzo G. Castellari‘s The Last Shark (1981), but even from the Jaws franchise. This, for a complete lack of politely language, gleeful waved its dick precariously close to fire of copyright as a result of this, such much so that, when Shout Factory in the United States attempted to license the film for physical media release in 2017, on a double bill with post-apocalypse film Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983), they decided to just release the later film by itself¹ due to these copyright issues. It makes it amazing now, with hindsight, that for our United American friends the film managed to be finally cleared by Severin Films in 2020². This is more so as there was even music from the the Star Wars franchise, or even in the version you can see so close it suggested the shark would fly in like a Tie-Fighter at one point.

They also provided the “Snyder” Cut, a joke which has actually aged faster than the film, as factoring in how Italian producers and filmmakers did try to sell their films as if they were American productions, Mattei took the pseudonym of “William Snyder” for this production. By the time Severin Films got the license, they were banking on a trend in that year over an online campaign to release Zack Snyder's original cut of the DC comic book adaptation of Justice League (2017), the four plus hour re-cut from 2021 its own subject to unpack, but now the most esoteric thing of this weird movie which has enough already to consider, including the fact that “Snyder Cut” joke on the promotion connects to them having access to the Japanese release cut for that release with more gore. As well with these films, co-productions and/or alternative releases of films existed, this presenting the dichotomy with Cruel Jaws that, in most scenes, this would be the Jaws rip-off you could show on Sunday afternoon television, family friendly enough were it not for the gore that occasionally appears, but could not be shown because of the amount of swearing and bizarre (and lurid) sex comedy dialogue you get throughout this schismed curiosity.

Premise wise, this is Jaws, as for those who do not know that film, it is about a shark, unlike those in real life, who deliberately goes out of its way to terrorise and attack humans off Amity Island, which repeats here with a shark in Florida. The major is happy ignore warnings from his police about these attacks so the windsailing regatta stays open, these shark and Jaws rip-offs, even those about killer animals on land, emphasising a distrust on small governmental officials’ ability to protect their citizens even if unintentionally, whilst Cruel Jaws also includes a subplot of a corrupt real estate figure trying to bulldoze an aquarium ran by Dag Soerensen (Richard Dew) to put a hotel there. Also infamously Richard Dew looks like he took hair and moustache tips from controversial pro wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, which is more befitting as Dew was his stand-in for two films, two TV movies called Assault on Devil's Island (1997) and Assault on Death Mountain (1999).

Imagining Richard Dew attempting to body slam the shark aside, and whether a leg drop on it would still work into water, is contrasted by the fact that, as this film continues on as a a conventional shark film in premise, playing to Jaws’ plot points as slasher films had their own tropes, he is as much part of the tonal schism too as you have a subplot about his character and his disabled daughter, a cute moppet in a wheelchair, and their trained aquatic animals for their shows, two dolphins but especially the seal, who do come from a cute animal film where they need to save the aquarium by paying the evil businessman's rent through a reward, in another film by a competition, here eventually killing a deadly shark. This is however contrasted by a film where you also have a lot of cursing, lewd comments and a dose of scuzzier teen sex comedy language with some garbled attempts at one liners, like the guy part of the villains who, with apologies to female readers for having to quote this, thinks saying he is a “pussy inspector” needing to do his job is a good pick-up line for three women on the beach.

For most its length, even with some of the more gristly moments, mostly some blood and the chewed up remains of victims, this would have been PG-13 to use the American ratings system, but the script with Bruno Mattei co-writing too completely tips the scales in a peculiar direction, from the constant use of the word “fuck”, an obsession with balls and uncalled for use of fat shaming, even to a truly evil villain, with “shit” for emphasis, really undercutting the tone in what is neither fish nor fowl in tone. This is contrasted by how Cruel Jaws as a film is pretty conventional, and even its notorious use of other films’ footage will not stand out if you were to shrug your shoulders at it. The thing which stands out is its strange tonal choices in dialogue and mood. This is matched by how misanthropic this feels despite its happy ending: were it not enough his father is an evil stereotypical businessman with shady mob connections, leading to two thugs straight out of an Andy Sidaris film appear to try to get the shark, your villain's son does a family film crime of trying to poison one of the hero’s dolphins with poisoned fish, his cronies are obnoxious teens, and even another of the lead’s girlfriends, dating a marine biologist, become completely unsympathetic by rejecting his obsession, going out for a fling cold-hearted with villainous dolphin poisoning son, than everyone forget this and for her to be eaten by said shark.

There is also a sense of this mocking US culture, the idea of a resort town where the mayor and businesses will ignore the potential shark related casualties writing itself as satire if borrowed from Jaws, but one of the legitimately successful scenes of the film is where an Australian/British family, with kids, have come to the place hoping to see a shark eat a person alive. Most of Cruel Jaws is not this, a film which feels apt for the director of films I have enjoyed like Rats: Night of Terror (1984), but I will say that, for a large percentage of this, Cruel Jaws is entirely what it says, a slightly lopsided Jaws. It has a lot of lines of dialogue, unintentionally, which stick out, and it is strange to witness, but also you can see, if you are not on its wavelength, or a fanatic of these films, including the people who made the Sharksploitation documentary, that this will just cause people to scratch their heads in curiosity in what on earth the point this was attempting. Bruno Mattei would chug along, still making films even by the time of his passing in 2007, if just before the likes of Sharknado (2013) came to be; despite the fact Cruel Jaws is shambolic in many ways, I kind of wished he was able to have made another one of these, having to use CGI than footage from other shark films, and seen what madness he would bring to life, preferably with the fuller balls-to-the-walls attitude of his eighties films than this.

 

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1) Cruel Jaws - Blu-ray Release Cancelled, written by Das Wiesel for Movie Censorship.com, and published on December 14th 2014.

2) Severin Films Releases CRUEL JAWS, MASSACRE IN DINOSAUR VALLEY, AND PRIMITIVES Today!, written by "The Vault Master" for The B-Movie News Vault, and published September 29th 2020.

Halloween 31 For 31: Rats - Night of Terror (1984)

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Director: Bruno Mattei (with Claudio Fragasso)

Screenplay: Claudio Fragasso, Bruno Mattei and Hervé Piccini

Cast: Ottaviano Dell'Acqua (as Kurt); Geretta Geretta (as Chocolate); Massimo Vanni (Taurus); Gianni Franco (as Video); Ann-Gisel Glass (as Myrna)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #40

Another pairing of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, and considering how many times they worked together, one wonders if their relationship went beyond merely collaborating on a film set to a friendship. Imagine the kind of bond, the conversations at lunch between film shoots, that would've forged making films like Hell of the Living Dead (1980) and Rats: Night of Terror. Here, in the meantime from that thought, Fragasso touches upon a theme that does scare and creep many people out in the figure of rodents. Mostly this is due to symbology - a pet rat, for me and for others, would be exceptionally cute, whilst the fear of them is due to their centuries old image as disease carriers in the wild. Wild rats present a sense of unease, suggest general decay, their ability to breed quickly and even go as far as cannibalise their own to survive disturbing in how they spread in rundown environments, their cultural legacy as spreading the likes of the Black Plague still potent centuries on because, even if it was technically their fleas with spread the illness, it killed millions.

Instead of merely an animal attack film however, which would've continued on the seventies tradition of nature being vindictive and trying to kill human beings constantly, Rats - Nights of Terror takes on an unsuspecting twist that was clearly influenced, as many Italian genre films, by the success of the Mad Max films, setting itself in a post apocalyptic sci-fi future. Set long after society has blown itself up with nukes, a group of marauders male and female, trying to survive on their own as explained in a very complicated opening narrative, find an abandoned building. At first finding crates of still edible food is a joy to them but they immediately find rat chewed corpses littered around the place as well. Soon they'll eventually learn that the rats are only just responsible for cleaning the meat off the bodies' bones but have more than likely killed them beforehand too. The result is even more peculiar considering the style and tone of the material.

I had been tricked by Zombi 3 (1988), itself "special" in some of its dialogue exchanges, that Fragasso was more conventional in his screenwriting style than I had come to learn, something clearly wrongheaded of myself when you get to Rats. Far from a detraction, it does mean that you have characters with very unconventional names - Lillith (Moune Duvivier), Video (Gianni Franco), Chocolate (Geretta Geretta with possibly the biggest hair even seen in an Italian post-apocalyptic film) etc. Than beyond those names, at least in the English dub, to the type of dialogue his characters have, such as Chocolate promise the geeky Video that he can make her pregnant if he fixes a computer they find in the building amongst such brief moments strangeness. Fragasso's obsession with environment issues throughout his career is found here too, Biblical proportions even when you get to the dumbfounding final twist, the group discovering the likes of plants being carefully grown in the basement with a water purifier and realising that a project by scientists was taken place in there, only to be found abandoned with rats on mass everywhere.

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I have to confess though that, for all its moments of entertainment, Rats does suffer from being surprisingly conventional and repetitious at points. Were it not for the little details, from the groups' military vehicle to the rats being made intelligent through radiation, this could've easily been made an animal attack film set in the regular day. It's a severely restricted film in terms of plot too - the marauders sleeping in the building only to find themselves having to try to survive the night from the rats - meaning that it does repeat itself constantly, from people being slowly picked off to a lot of screaming particularly from the actresses filling the soundtrack. Eventually, despite the idiosyncratic nature of Fragasso's characterisation, where everything borders between the profound to the absurd, it eventually lacks the outrageous nature needed to make up for its sluggish moments, not completely able to have the same strange aura of other Italian horror films from this period. Certainly it has the gruesome practical special effects - an un-PC incident with a woman naked in a sleeping bad, rats exploding out of people let alone out of their mouths - but baring the sub plot where a cowardly member tries to undermine their leader to save his hide, its boiled down narrative does feel lacking in the excitable madness that some of the best of Italy, the legitimately great works of genre let alone the fun ones, had. In fact I prefer Hell of the Living Dead out of Mattei-Fragasso's period here from what I've seen, even in spite of how shambolic it is next to this one's more polished appearance, because of how wider in scope its ambitious story was.

Of course, Rats does have one of the best, most delirious ending twists of any Italian genre film of this period, worthy of seeing Rats and redeeming it greatly, but I cannot ignore that considering the promise it gives as a post-apocalyptic rat attack film, it does lack the maddened energy of other Mattei-Fragasso films I've witnessed. While being of a fly on the wall for their conversations about making the film would've been wonderful to hear, as would how they dealt will all the stunt rats (and guinea pigs and rubber rats masquerading for them) on set, this does feel weaker as a film even in the context of admiring its failures.

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Zombi 3 aka. Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (1988)

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Director: Lucio Fulci (with Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso)

Screenplay: Claudio Fragasso

Cast: Deran Sarafian (as Kenny); Beatrice Ring (as Patricia); Ottaviano Dell'Acqua (as Roger); Massimo Vanni (as Bo); Ulli Reinthaler (as Nancy)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) # 25

Synopsis: A military project to resurrect the dead, a chemical contagion called Death One, breaks out into the public and even when the military themselves deal with it, their method of disposing of one of the bodies both makes the contagion stronger and spreads it over a wider area through the smoke created. In the midst of the resulting chaos and attempt to clamp down on the new epidemic, a group of soldiers, friends caught by the contagion infecting the wildlife, and a woman called Patricia (Ring) with her infected boyfriend find themselves having to survive the rampaging zombie hordes and the military trying to cover it up violently.

Zombi 3 is as much effected by your attitude to its production history as much as the content itself. At this point the Italian genre industry was in severe decline in the late eighties, though considering my opinion on this film, it wasn't that bad if you could still appreciate the cheese factor, the likelihood that whilst the industry could still churn out films it couldn't survive by the nineties, killing it off (sadly) to this day baring an occasional film getting into international festivals. Zombi 3's history is interesting in itself, and that's not even including the (unofficial) sequels to this afterwards that weren't necessarily even zombie films. For those that don't know, George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) was co-produced by Italy in the midst of their genre renaissance,  recut for Italy and dubbed Zombi, doing extremely well and leading to an unofficial sequel called Zombi 2 (1979), known famously as Zombie Flesh Eaters in the UK. Made by Lucio Fulci it did extremely well around the world and lead to a boom of Italian zombie films into the eighties. By the later eighties there's not even that many zombie films in existence, barring one or two, from even the US and Fulci's career was slowing down as his health was declining. Fulci gets to make a sequel to his film, only for his health to be at its worse during the production shot in the Philippines, and the result Zombi 3 having to be drastically fixed to be releasable.

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It varies how much Fulci actually shot for final work, but at least fifty minutes or so of what is seen is his work, the other thirty minutes having to be made in collaboration with screenwriter Claudio Fragasso and his longstanding colleague Bruno Mattei, having worked together many times before in the early eighties. It's confusing how to judge what was Fulci's work or not, as a Frankenstein creation of three different voices, because Fulci before Mattei even got hold of the footage decided to make an action horror film. The result feels like an odd sequel to one of Mattei's Strike Commando films with Reb Brown fighting zombies, a more manic tone as you have characters having to actually run away from an occasional undead who can run, alongside Return of the Living Dead (1985) enough evidence that the argument about whether zombies should run or not is pretty pointless even in terms of the historical canon of these films.

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Some of the old Fulci magic is still here, his obsession with fog machines and bold colour lighting reminiscent of his best horror films with their ominous moods; particularly with this film transitioning from a grimy Vipco release version I first saw to Blu-Ray quality, it's amazing how good the film looks despite the late eighties being when the money was bleeding out of the Italian film industry. What's a flaw is that it's not remotely scary or eerie, not even haunting or visceral like other Fulci films, instead the entertainment to be found in its various bursts of energy that defy the fact Fulci was violently ill during the entire production. Famously Zombi 3 is known for the zombie head in the refrigerator scene - utterly silly but succeeding by not caring about logic whatsoever - but there's plenty of manic moments throughout the film to like. Such as a zombie failing a machete about with surprising intensity or a gruesome, nicely set up shock with a pool of water behind a motel. Then there's the truly bizarre sequence, never evoked again in the narrative, of birds dying and coming back from the dead as zombified contagion carriers, clearly part of Fragasso's obsession with ecological issues throughout the film but a truly strange moment from Italian genre film history that, in hindsight, is one of the few cases of a zombie film showing non-human entities being infected.

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The film does have a rollercoaster structure in terms of when its well paced and when it suddenly staggers along like a drunken men, its history visible in how messy the pace is, but when its paced well its amazingly swift in how the scenes play out. The other thirty or so minutes of Zombi 3 had to be built on by Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei which is a lot of this reason. I once made a very cruel opinion of them, worse having barely seen the films of theirs, that they were amongst those responsible for killing the Italian genre industry. A lot of that was from suffering through the latter's Cruel Jaws (1995). Nowadays its clear they were working filmmakers who find themselves in the position of not being amongst the best (Dario Argento, Fulci, Mario Bava, even someone underrated like Enzo G. Castellari or Sergio Martino) but gaining a personality and reputation from their more infamous work, people who made films but were between them more drastically effected by their budgets then most and with Mattei notorious for using other people's material. Fragasso here at least comes off as an entertaining screenwriter who never feels boring, from the zombified birds to something he openly admits to taking from the carsploitation film Vanishing Point (1971), a blind African American radio DJ who is also the narrator in Zombi 3 as a strange stylistic quirk. He is, alongside Mattei, responsible for a lot of the moments, while fun, that, ironically their work to salvage the production leading to the tonal problems with additional footage of the military and frustrated scientists discussing the outbreak of Death One. The resulting footage is surprisingly naive in tone, such as the naming of the contagion written into these scene "Death One", a charm of a fifties b-movie in them which redeems them even those such scenes cause the film to loss its swift pace immediately. The other moments - action scenes and helicopter shots without the main cast - come off a lot better.

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Technical Details:

Not a great deal to go through as I've covered a lot of the production history already, but it's worth repeating how a Blu-Ray transfer really redeems a film many would call trash. It's not up to the aesthetic style of Zombi 2 but it's still distinct, its Philippine locations and tropical look giving it some distinction alongside the late eighties aesthetic.

The music as well is worthy of mention. Yes, the main glam metal song is utter gorgonzola, memorable if just for its mid-song voice echo, but Stefano Mainetti's score aside from this is a nice dread inducing synthesiser work that makes up for the lack of scares. I'll likely uncover some of the worst Italian genre films from this period and nineties, but generally there were always bad films from the country even in the golden period, usually ones never talked about or unlikely to get Blu-Ray treatment like Zombi 3 has. Particularly against some of the terrible horror films from this era not from Italy, than this is still a bar higher in quality than I first viewed it as. Its definitely better than some of the worst of zombie cinema within the last decade if anything.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

In terms of their collected filmographies, this is far from the weirdest film in either Fulci's or Mattei's careers. (I haven't seen enough of Fragasso's yet to make comment). The only true disappointment returning to this, and why I hated it originally, is that it has none of the strangeness of Fulci's best films even when it came to some of his none horror films. He had a knack for the irrational in his work that was compelling and incredibly well made, of decay and the illogical, that is almost non-existent here baring the briefest of moments.

Abstract Tropes: Body Parts Used in Inappropriate Ways; Decay; Fog; Rich Coloured Lighting

Personal Opinion:

Considering my original low opinion of Zombi 3, if you accept its flaws it's still an entertaining Italian genre film. I don't find it a disappointment like before, the fact that the genre industry of the country was declining no longer an issue now especially as, when these films are getting releases you couldn't fathom just a decade ago, I release that even on their declining period films like this one are still so much more entertaining and better made than more modern horror films in the same template. 

Halloween 31 For 31: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

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Director: Bruno Mattei (with additional material by Claudio Fragasso)

Screenplay: Claudio Fragasso, José María Cunillés and Rossella Drudi

Cast: Margit Evelyn Newton (as Lia Rousseau); Franco Garofalo (as Zantoro); Selan Karay (as Vincent); José Gras (as Lt. Mike London); Gabriel Renom (as Pierre)

Synopsis: A zombie outbreak occurs in Papua New Guinea due to a failed experiment of an organisation called Hope. Can a group of soldiers, on a secret mission to investigate the source of the cause, and a news reporter (Newton) they encounter by accident survive as the end of mankind starts to take place?

Another Italian genre film but of an different tone entirely. There are those known for their style like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and there are those who use a lot of stock footage and make films that rip off Predator (1987) and Jaws (1975). There are those who make films like Troll 2 (1990) too. Two such individuals in the later camps collaborated here, Mattei notorious for films like Strike Commando (1987) and Rats: Night of Horror (1984), while Fragasso, who contributes additional scenes and story ideas, directed Troll 2. Hell of the Living Dead is one of the imitators who came about after Fulci's Zombi (1979) did so well internationally, itself an unofficial sequel cashing in on George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). The film also known as Zombie Creeping Flesh in the UK is a peculiar stew of bits and pieces if there ever was one. The zombie outbreak is caused by a usual convention in these films, human beings messing about with science, but the result film is a hodgepodge of environmental concerns and a sociological travelogue mixed with a gore fest.

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Mattei has used pre-existing footage a few times in his career. His shark film Cruel Jaws (1995) is an infamous example of this, as Scream Factory found out when they realised they couldn't release it in the USA recently  on physical media, not only having footage from other Italian shark movies like Enzo G. Castellari's The Last Shark (1981), but footage from the Jaws franchise they were all riding the coattails of. What's novel in the case of Hell of the Living Dead is that its use of a great deal of nature footage, originally from the Barbet Schroeder film La Vallée (1972), and other materials, from the likes of tribal customs to a United Nations conference, actually gives the film a hypnotic quality it probably doesn't deserve. Its origin was a movie with a greater scale of ideas that had to be made possible to film on a lower budget, with Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi helping to rewrite the film to make this possible, and despite the patchwork mess it is, this footage manages to be disarmingly fascinating by itself and in context of the film. It helps the nature footage is very well shot, from an entirely different source admittedly, seeing animals far from native to my own British shores that completely disinterested in the end of the world taking place around them. The ethological footage of tribes used as well is both engrossing and evokes the infamous Mondo documentaries from Italy from the Sixties.

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Strangely the film manages to be both ramshackle but also create an appropriately apocalyptic mood to scenes. What you have to bear in mind viewing is that it'll easily betray its moodiness with silly dialogue or something schlocky a moment immediately after. A set up of a desolate town is appropriately ominous, but then the film resorts to a man dressed as a priest with an entire bottle of ketchup having exploded on his face to scare a cast member. It's strange as well this film, where the production had to cobble together an entire plot from material at hand, is the only zombie movie I've seen to directly bring up a global nature to the plot, where even if they are dubbed in the same broad way that appears in many Italian genre films, there's a Third World leader given an entire monologue about his people being mercilessly slaughtered by the idiocy of man. Footage of tribes moving on mass, representing tribes fleeing the zombie outbreak, is spliced in-between him and the result is jarring in how serious it is in comparison to what the film actually is.

As a zombie film it's just as strange. Mattei doesn't skimp away from the gore, or should that be Fragasso who filmed additional gore scenes, and there's plenty of exceptionally silly moments too to feast on. There are no qualms about a young child becoming a zombie and munching on his own father's guts, but this is also a film where a soldier puts on a green tutu over his head and a top hat in the middle of investigating a house that may be contaminated with zombies. The zombies themselves are merely cannon fodder, easy to escape background figures whose ability to kill anyone is dependent on the plot deciding a character has to die on a whim. The film itself is unpredictable as to what can happen, and that doesn't even take into consideration the odd characters we follow. From a gruff team leader to two eccentrics, everyone is a stereotype but with the English dub's more absurd dialogue they become an amusing group to travel with through the cheese of the narrative.

From http://www.necromaticmedia.com/images/zr_hotld1980_03.jpg

Technical Details:

The English language dub has a drastic effect on the entertainment value of the film, where you appreciate the silliness of the crass dialogue from male characters about the opposite sex or the way the dialogue is spoken aloud with immense exaggeration. This has some of the cheesiest line readings for an Italian genre film, bold for me to suggest as cheesy English dubs are as common as good ones in this area, and it befits the absurdity of the material itself without becoming intentionally ironic.

The music by Goblin is cherry picked from Dawn of the Dead and a personal favourite, Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980). The production was nearly sued for this, but this proved to be another advantage for the film as it provides an atmosphere a film would rarely have. Rather than a tin-eared, terrible score, the music by Goblin is a full sounding, elaborate series of prog rock instrumentals that gives the mishmash of content greater focus. It many ways this saves the film's bacon from merely being a jumble of absurdity, the high quality of the music bringing some artistry to what is a shambling mess.

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Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Hell of the Living Dead the more you prod it is a perplexing creation. It's not the most extreme example of a film cobbled together from a messy production, but it's still an experience to sit through it. It's a film where it can turn on a dime from a moment of seriousness to characters joking around. There's no clear geographical map to where it's plot takes place in, even if it's supposed to be New Guinea, a mishmash of the US, Third World countries and the inevitable continental personality from its Italian actors being played out on screen, invaded by seventies nature documentary footage set to synth backed progressive rock from other Italian produced horror films. The zombies themselves are merely placeholders for the stranger incidents to take place, an environmental message scrambled between gore and silly dialogue. The ending, or at least the end for the characters before the epilogue, is almost Lucio Fulci in how the survivors are pulled to an inevitable fate, abrupt as if the film has willingly let itself end in spite of its characters' narratives before setting up a last minute shock scene.

Plus there's the dubbing and its funny broadness. The cramming of ethological footage with scenes, far from progressive, of natives running around or in one case eating the maggots festering off a loved one's corpse evoking a sensory overload. The fact Margit Evelyn Newton, to interact with a tribe so the soldiers can enter a village safely, has to strip off at one point, and go ahead naked and painted up with the same aesthetic design of professional wrestler Kamala, head shots of her looking concerned spliced with scenes of native funeral customs real or faked. There's the fact one of the soldiers figures out shooting the zombies in the head is more effective early on but still has to explain this to everyone, even his superiors, over and over again. Then there's legitimately creepy moments like a cat appearing from an unexpectedly enclosed place that still adds to the oddness of the film despite their effectiveness because of how unexpected they are. Hell of The Living Dead gets on the list merely for how much of a fever dream it is in production and content for a Zombi 2 cash-in.

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Personal Opinion:

Definitely not in the top categories of Italian horror cinema, but still strangely compelling. Watched off an old VHS rip version on DVD where the sound occasionally lags it comes off even more entertaining, something outside of good taste but memorable at least.