Zombi 3 (1988), by Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei

This is a convergence of divine proportions! Bruno Mattei and the Zombi series. Yes, while Hell of the Living Dead has sometimes been called Zombi 8, this is Bruno's crack at an official entry. But joining the convergence is gore mastermind Lucio Fulci, who made Zombi 2, among countless other movies generally perceived as "better" that Bruno's. And while he may have only directed a few of the scenes in this movie, his presence means Zombi 3 now has prestige. Ironically, Zombi 3 is even clumsier than Hell of the Living Dead, meaning that it has virtually no prestige at all. The sloppiness of Zombi 3, however, is its ultimate charm. So lazy of a film is it that it gains a charisma is that is distinctly Mattei's.

Somewhere on an island a group of scientists are researching something called "Death One," apparently part of a bringing-the-dead-back-to-life experiment. Of course, this works too well and when there is a fault at the laboratory people start turning into zombies. And, a group of soldiers is brought in to clean them up, with great death and horror abounding. Sound familiar? Zombi 3 essentially is a remake of Hell of the Living Dead, but it is almost a caricature of that earlier effort--as remakes have a tendency to be. As always we must turn to the Events to highlight why this movie is so charming. It is full of these little Happenings that make the movie unravel itself quickly. Case in point: the zombie infection returns after the soldiers kill all the zombies, because they bury most of the zombies in a mass grave, but insist on burning the original infectee...for...some reason. The ashes infect some birds and the birds infect the humans. General Morton, the military asshole responsible, says the idea of ashes falling back to Earth is "pure science fiction." There's also the scene where the soldiers find the original zombie, and conveniently there is a clothesline in front of his face so they can jerk it back and reveal that--gasp--he is now a zombie. Except this clothesline only has one or two thin rags of fabric on it, directly in the center, as if they couldn't afford enough clothing to make the clothesline look like anything that's not just a prop for this shocking reveal.

That's not even getting into the severed zombie head that comes to life and flies out of a refrigerator to bite someone.

The dialogue, being written by Claudio Fragasso, is of course excellent. There's a DJ named Blue Heart who acts like a stereotypical '70s black man--in the late '80s! Says a Marine of Blue Heart: "Man, I love this Blue Heart music when I'm coked up! It's makin' me horny!" You will become a Blue Heart fan by the time the movie's over, if anything because he keeps interrupting the film to give pro-eco messages. I feel like this was supposed to be related to the plot, but the zombies aren't caused by pollution, they're caused by a virus. Except halfway through the movie, they mention a "radioactive cloud"...I dunno. In any case, the revelation of this cloud is also marked by the best line delivery in the film: "There are reports...of...murder!...and...and people are eating each other!" Admittedly, though, the true star of this film is the head scientist, whose dub actor must have had a real rough time. The actor apparently insisted on putting lengthy pauses between each of his words, in order to take time to milk the giant invisible cow. Which means that every few syllables the dub actor had to stop, wait for the guy he was dubbing to stop chewing scenery, and then continue. He works well with what he's got, giving the guy a frantic and frustrated voice.

Weirdly enough, the movie ends with an extremely dramatic sequence where one of the Marines misses the escape helicopter, and fights off dozens of zombies, only to be mistaken for one of the ghouls and shot down. Of course, because there is absolutely no character development in this movie, there is no emotion in this--only the imitation thereof. Everything in this, from the action, to the dialogue, to the editing, is only an imitation of what real movies do. We have a chance to watch an unreal movie. Bathe in its blandness.

Indeed, blandness, in the most fascinating sense, is the focus here. If you are expecting anything new at all to the zombie concept--except for maybe flying severed heads--don't cross these premises. The zombies are slow and stagger around, and while some of them talk or use weapons, they're largely there to snack en masse on the designated dead characters, or to be blown to pieces by guns and explosions. Zombi 3 flirts nervously with the action genre, instead trying mostly to be a sci-fi thriller or horror film. There are some odd action-hero moments at the end that, to my mind, come from a different movie. Maybe it was that the characters were saying something defined, rather than flat and hilarious. God, and Bruno, alone possess the answers.

Zombi 3 suffers somewhat if you haven't familiarized yourself with Hell of the Living Dead. At least, I assume so. If you do watch these movies with this one first, let me know how it goes. The good news is...both are wonderful.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980), by Bruno Mattei

Every few months I am inevitably called back to the directing work of Bruno Mattei and the writing work of Claudio Fragasso. This usually means I rewatch SS Girls for the billionth time. Last week I dove into Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, which was amusing but off-putting in the same way Women's Prison Massacre was, minus that last valuable sliver of entertainment. It was a depressing experience. I guess that just shows that sometimes you gotta stick with the classics.

Hell of the Living Dead is a classic. I've heard a few different folks say that it may well be the most incompetently made zombie film of all time. That is almost certainly true, though movies like Night of Horror still exist. It steals many scenes, ideas, and musical scores from movies like Dawn of the Dead, so originality is not its forte, but all the same, Hell sustains itself itself on not merely being a zombie movie. In my mind it succeeds at being a zombie flick, with an occasional dose of impressive atmosphere. But it's also an adventure film, an action film, a tribalsploitation film, and it has a dose of...real animal violence, to boot. Anyway, it's an exploitation film through and through, with all those elements churning in its greasy, grubby mix.

A lab is working on something called "Operation Sweet Death," which actually turns out to have an interesting dark secret behind it in the ending. What matters for now is that Sweet Death is a gas that turns people into zombies. This is released accidentally by two scientists who talk about whether they are tit men or ass men. The exchange in which they bring this up shows that every line in this movie is going to be solid gold. Next we see a group of Marines break into a building that is under the control of some ecoterrorists who want to expose Sweet Death. As one of them dies, he whispers: "You're all doomed to a horrible death. Doomed...to be eaten up. You will be killed...and then eaten. Eaten by men who were once your brothers..." That's how I talk, in Real Life. Anyway. The Marines then go on a long journey wherein they gain and lose numbers to the zombies, eventually stumbling across a village where an unbearably interminable stretch of exploitation stock footage rolls by, including a long scene of a crocodile being butchered* and an elderly nude woman eating maggots out of the eye socket of a corpse. Let me tell you, jumping from the rollicking comedy of Fragasso's dialogue to a fucking Mondo film is jarring. The end will shock you, or at the very least, make you kinda sad.

The dialogue here is key. There are a lot of weird one-liners in this movie. Namely, the Marines joke about necrophilia and quip lines like:

"Maybe there'll be chicks in grass skirts."
"Maybe there'll be some without grass skirts."

Genius. Fans of Troll 2 will feel right at home.

Let's see. What else do I love about this movie...?

-A zombie priest shows up who is played by Victor "Marty Feldman" Israel from The Witches' Mountain
-"Maybe they're just drunk or drugged. Or they're a leper colony. I don't think they intend to harm anyone." The man who says this, the news photographer, looks like Mario the news photographer from The Witches' Mountain.
-Zantoro. The "crazy" Marine. Watch the movie just for him. There is no explanation. Also, his name is Zantoro.
-Bruno Mattei has no idea how to dub black people. This is a pattern that continues into this film's remake, Zombi 3.
-This movie was remade as Zombi 3.
-This movie was also released as Zombi 8 even though it was made eight years prior to Zombi 3.
-There is a zombie lady who is full of cats.
-The soundtrack is stolen from Goblin's soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead due to a contract loophole for Dawn regarding Italian film law at the time. Perhaps, just as Women's Prison Massacre gave Claudio Fragasso's connection to Laura Gemser for the fashion sense that went into Troll 2, this movie's cribbing of Goblin led to his decision for what race his "Trolls" belonged to.
-The soundtrack is also stolen ex libris Joe d'Amato.

That's...basically it. This is probably the best Mattei movie to start with. If you can stomach this, SS Girls and Zombi 3 will open up to you. Gee, I wonder what the next movie I'll talk about will be...

---

* My personal copy of the film doesn't contain this scene. The first time I saw the movie, when it did contain this scene, it was admittedly a bootleg on YouTube. I think it's safe to say that whoever uploaded the now-missing YouTube version edited this footage in from another source. Ick. In any case I've left this reference in as a warning to those who may stumble across the same bootleg. It's best to just get it from a legitimate source.

The Awful Doctor Orlof (1962), by Jess Franco

I have to admit, preemptively, that I am more apprehensive of reviewing The Awful Doctor Orlof than I was of reviewing Blood Feast. That's not a difference in respect--after all, H.G. Lewis is a veritable idol of mine, due to not merely directing Blood Feast but also writing the novel of Blood Feast. The Awful Doctor Orlof is, if you will, the European counterpart of Lewis' overwhelming genre-busting success, leaving nothing the same in its wake. It marks the commencement of Jesus "Jess" Franco's legendary horror career, wherein he produced fantastic revolutionary classics as well as an intense amount of shit. Franco is a director often described as relentless, in ways both good and bad. Doctor Orlof is, however, one of the true Franco classics. Christopher Lee in yellowface does not lurk herein, I can promise you.

The plot of Doctor Orlof is memorable if anything because it was duplicated dozens of times through Franco's corpus. Ultimately the story is a loose lift from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face from three years prior--a movie that would see a variety of imitators and perhaps create interest in the old "Killing People to Steal Their 'Glands'" plot, which was included The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire just a year or two after Eyes, but had its origins in 1945's The Man in Half-Moon Street. Which, in turn, had its origins in good ol' Dorian Gray. What's interesting to me is that Eyes tells the story of a scientist who collects the body parts he does to restore his daughter's beauty after she is injured. Atom Age Vampire also had a scientist who killed to restore a loved one, this time his burned wife, while The Leech Woman killed people to restore her own good looks (influenced by age, not burning). With the Man in Half-Moon Street, the gland-harvester just wants to live forever. And a lot of this, along with Doctor Orlof, was probably mutated and shuffled around when they were doing the plot for The Abominable Dr. Phibes nearly a decade later.

Anyway. Having not seen most of the films I just referenced, I will instead elucidate that The Awful Doctor Orlof is a relatively straightforward story about a man, named, natch, Dr. Orlof, who goes around killing women to take their skin so he can restore his comatose daughter's face. Actually, the person who does the killing is his blind, mute, deformed ex-convict butler Morpho. If that's not fucking pulp I have no idea what it is. Except this is also a Gothic story, principally so. The city whose streets Orlof and Morpho prowl recall German Expressionism and there are spooky mansions, fancy evening clothes, and a dearth of daytime scenes. Pulp influences return when we see that Orlof largely picks up his women at sexy nightclubs, a feature of basically every other movie Franco ever made. Whatever the influence, atmosphere is everywhere. Simply put, every frame of this movie is interesting just because it is genuinely creepy. Franco, when he did his thing well, was a master of trapping us in the world he created. Orlof fulfills every desire for old-style "innocent" movies that still have a scummy sublayer to them.


Adding to this atmosphere is the ever-charismatic presence of Howard Vernon. I don't know why I'm such a big Vernon fan--actually, never mind. Go and watch Revenge in the House of Usher and see his performance in that. Make sure you have the English dubs, wherein I'm positive Vernon voices himself (his English voice and his natural voice from interviews are too similar to be an impersonator). In that one, he's being hilarious, but he still also delivers his lines fantastically, with gravitas. By the time he shows up as a cranky mayor in Zombie Lake, you'll be sold. And then he turns up in Ogroff... Think Lugosi in his movies from before the drugs got too bad, or Vincent Price but sleazier and less silly (though no less gentlemanly). Vernon was born to play villains precisely like Orlof, and Franco made a great choice in casting him.

Next, there is a plethora of great moments all throughout the film. My favorite trash films always have one moment that they boil down to, though not always (and sometimes the moment is the entire movie). This movie's big moment is probably the scene with the Crazy Guy who wants his name in the paper. Six or seven watches and I still don't really know what he's talking about but I get enough of the gist of it to proceed with the movie. But only just so. I want to know if you have the same reaction. There are certainly other big moments, probably involving some of the decisions regarding accents in the dubbing, but this one takes the cake.

Finally, Orlof obtains some meta-coolness by the legacy it leaves behind--the extremely overcomplicated legacy. You see, Orlof has a great many sequels, and the names of its characters are reused frequently. There are at least five movies with name of Orloff (spelled with two f's after this first movie) in the title that I can think of off the top of my head, and one of them, The Orgies of Dr. Orloff, doesn't even have a character named Dr. Orloff in it (though the main character is played by Howard Vernon). However, characters by the name of Orloff show up in Franco's films The Diabolical Dr. Z, Female Vampire, and Jack the Ripper (with the last of which revealing, in a literally unbelievable sense, that Jack the Ripper was Dr. Orloff), though admittedly the movies that did feature Orloff's name in the title probably weren't depicting the same character. Regarding other names of Franco's, then: if there is an imperiled wife/daughter/sister/mother who the main character wants to protect or heal from an injury, they are probably named Melissa, just like Orlof's daughter in this movie. Morpho also shows up, at least in name, in The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and Revenge in the House of Usher in basically the same role. Actually, in House of Usher, he was playing the exact same role, because I refuse to believe that Howard Vernon's evil scientist character is actually named Usher. He is clearly Dr. Orlof, probably the same as the one from this movie, and I say this because a lot of the substance of House of Usher is stock footage from Dr. Orlof. Morpho is shown to have aided "Usher" as a younger man and, because young!Morpho is stock footage, he has the same scenes as Morpho from Orlof. Morpho is just one less name we have to change to make House of Usher the closest thing this first Orloff movie has to a bona fide sequel.

House of Usher amusingly complicates the situation further for reasons involving the Zombi series ("series"), which I'll explain in a later article, because that is a huge mess unto itself that drags in Planet of the Apes and Friday the 13th. In that time I'll probably talk a bit more extensively about The Awful Dr. Orlof's cinematic roots, for it digs in deep both in a cinematic and literary sense. What's interesting is that as per Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, in his book Spanish Horror Film, Franco insisted that in the '50s, he wrote a series of pulp novels featuring Orlof, as well as basically every other mad scientist he created, under the name "David Khune" or "Khume," whom he credits as the writer and/or director in a lot of his films. I only wish these books were real. They aren't. Unless someone can prove me and everyone else wrong. Or at least, provide a reasonable and entertaining forgery. 

And at last (can you tell I like movie history?), I feel like there has to be some sort of connection between Doctor Orlof and the other adjectival doctor film of 1962, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Provided, this is based on the fact that as a kid I always got these movies confused with one another (because yes, I'd heard of them by 11), but riddle me this: Hichcock was released just a month after Orlof. Certainly the film had been made by then, but maybe there was a title switch at the last second that wasn't recorded. The production details behind a movie like The Horrible Dr. Hichcock were never going to be the subject of a tell-tale book, after all--anything was possible. Maybe there was the hope for a double-feature with Orlof, if not a full-on cash-in. Dr. Hichcock proved to be popular enough to have a sort-of sequel, 1963's The Ghost, as well as an in-name-only sequel, 1964's Autopsy of a Criminal, also released as The Killer of Dr. Hichcock (L'assassino del Dott. Hichcock). At the very least, it's an interesting coincidence that a movie possibly retitled to cash in on Doctor Orlof also ended up inheriting that film's curse as far as sequels went.

The Awful Dr. Orlof is both fun to watch and a lesser-known piece of cinematic history. That makes it a classic in my book. If you ever need a new page for your own--your book, that is--give it a try.