FLESHEATER

Directed by S. William Hinzman. 1988. United States.

For the first 35 minutes, S. William Hinzman’s utterly inept zombie-slasher, FLESHEATER, feels like a poverty row remake of George Romero’s poverty row classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. A group of college kids, all of whom are 15 years too old for their roles, take a hayride up to a nondescript patch of the Pennsylvanian wilderness to spend Halloween night drinking beer and freezing their asses off. Somewhere nearby, a construction worker (I think) is putzing around in the dirt and uncovers the grave of a ravenous, bloodthirsty ghoul, kickstarting an endless parade of violence against random people whose names I cannot remember.

The Ghoul is played by the film’s writer/director, a man whose only claim to fame was that he was the first zombie to show up in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. He’s the one who gets poor Johnny. Like Ari Lehman, the dweeb who played the first on-screen Jason, Hinzman’s entire identity seems to revolve around his fortuitous casting in a cult classic. Hinzman made this film to cash in on that sliver of reputation. To cash in on his casting in a horror classic, Lehman formed a rock band called, I shit you not, First Jason. I’m not sure which is worse.

The Ghoul kills the construction worker, then the hayride operator, and then two of our main group after they sneak off to screw around in a nearby barn. After one of the girls gets her shoulder chomped on, our remaining idiots run off to an abandoned house, accidentally leaving the new couple, Bob and Sally, locked outside. The asshole of the group finds a rifle and immediately tries to take charge, while his friend argues that they need to go outside and rescue poor Bob and Sally. A minor brawl later, they start boarding up the windows.

It’s here that I thought I knew what FLESHEATER was going to do with the remaining hour of its running time. Hinzman has killed the first members of the group. The others gather in a house. One of them has been bitten and is lying unconscious in the other room. An asshole and a pragmatist argue over the best course of action. This is NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, just bad. After all, the title screen came with a subtitle: Revenge of the Living Dead. OK, I thought to myself, let’s see how badly they screw this up.

But then everyone just dies. Our group manages to board up a single window before the zombies show up. People stand with their backs to open windows and get yanked out of them to be eaten offscreen. No one locks the fucking front door, so zombies just walk in. When they finally manage to get the door shut, they still don’t lock it. Zombies just open it up again. It’s an absolute bloodbath that leaves everyone but Bob and Sally dead at the 35-minute mark of this 88-minute movie.

It’s at this point that FLESHEATER stops being a zombie movie and starts being a slasher, introducing characters just to knock ‘em down like bowling pins moments later. Bob and Sally run off, and the zombies follow, eating everyone in their way. A mid-30s mom is getting her pre-teen kids ready to go trick-or-treating, while her age-improbable daughter goes full frontal in the shower upstairs. One knock on the door later, and the youngest daughter is zombie food. The naked daughter is the last to die, awkwardly manhandled and molested by the film’s writer/director as he rubs his face against her neck. This won’t be the last time Hinzman gets handsy with a nude actress in this film. Kinda gross, Bill.

There’s an extended scene of the zombies laying waste to a husband and wife, before massacring another group of mid-30s college kids, but honestly, I was trying too hard to swallow my tongue to pay much attention. The film had worn me down. This didn’t feel like a belated love letter to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It felt like one of the dozens of Italian rip-offs of DAWN OF THE DEAD that came out in the 80s. It’s even dubbed badly. When the naked chick in the shower is drying herself off, the ADR guy just ran a tissue over the pop filter of the microphone. Why? I don’t know. I guess they thought that having no sound was worse than having it sound like this woman has cardboard for skin. Characters have weird accents that no one in Pennsylvania has any right to have. You can see blood tubing in some shots. A cop uses a megaphone to address a crowd of 20 people standing right next to him. I felt my brain melting the longer the movie went on.

I will admit that some of the onscreen violence was impressive. A nose gets bitten off. The Ghoul rams his hand through a woman’s back. A head is blown up. Juicy headshots and gratuitous flesh ripping occur at a fairly decent clip. A man has an axe planted firmly in his skull. I lost count of how many people were impaled on something. People who just want gore and titties won’t be disappointed. Everyone else will want to drink themselves unconscious. Once the sun rises and the posse starts gunning down all the undead, you know what’s coming. Bob and Sally are still alive, and that can only mean one thing. Bob and Sally get their brains blown out alongside their undead friends.

I, too, felt like I had suffered a traumatic brain injury during the final moments of FLESHEATER. In the hallowed halls of Romero knock-offs, it’s certainly not at the bottom of the list, but that’s a bit like ranking cancers. It’s a humorless affair, shockingly cheap and amateurish, filled with enough gratuitous nudity and violence to stave off brain death, but not enough of anything else to recommend it. That’s another one for the fire.