Films That Witness Madness

review

HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD

Try to make a list of the greatest filmmakers of all time with your friends and you're bound to come up with several hundred names and spend thousands of hours debating before you even get to a rough draft. Making a list of the worst filmmakers of all time is significantly easier. That has nothing to do with the fact that there are more skilled directors than there are hacks. It's just that concensus is much easier to come by. For example, I will toss out five names right now:

Ed Wood, Uwe Boll, Jess Franco, Bruno Mattei, and Coleman Francis.

Now those names wouldn't be numbers 1 through 5 but all five would most likely be on any respectable list. Even people who enjoy the movies of the above five directors would never consider them anything other than lousy directors. So it would be a much easier task to make a worst list. Agreed? Good. Now, for my money, the worst filmmaker of all time is Jess Franco but coming in a close second is the master of Italian rip-offs, Bruno Mattei.

Bruno Mattei is the kind of director whose work makes you die a little inside. They may not be as painful to watch as, say, a Jean Rollin film or a Bert Gordon film, but they definitely hurt. They smack around your inner aesthete, insult your intelligence and rob you of a couple of hours of your life without so much as an apology... Wait, that's not entirely true. I think I remember one in HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD.

"May God forgive us for what we have produced here and pardon us for this evil."

Granted, that's a line of dialogue from HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD and not a genuine apology but... It's as close as we're going to get.

Well, Mr. Mattei... Apology NOT accepted. Please fuck off.

HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD is a rip-off of virtually every zombie film ever made with DAWN OF THE DEAD being the most obvious. It even recycles the Goblin score from DAWN - reportedly without their permission. It replaces the more metaphysical explanations of some of its contemporaries with the more routine "chemical gas" explanation for its zombie attacks. This time it's a chemical that was designed to help curb the worlds over-population problems - specifically those in the Third World - and it does this by turning the people who come into contact with it into zombies. Too many people? Kill a third of them, turn them into zombies and let them eat everyone they come into contact with. Wow.

Anyhow, the typical accident occurs and none of the scientists can stop it. So the poison spreads, infects the natives and on we go. From the accident scene, we jump to a hostage situation. Several people with guns are holding a group of Americans hostage. Their demands: expose the truth behind and shut down the HOPE centers, the facilities producing the zombie chemical. A group of four commandos - highly trained special forces operative that look like bums - are sent in to save the day. They make quick work of the terrorists - notice the similarity between this sequence, costumes and all, with the raid scene in DAWN. Once that little tiff is cleaned up, it's on to Papua New Guinea to look into the zombie problem. Along the way they meet up with a foxy reporter and her cameraman and together they try to survive the outbreak.

This is a perfect example of lousy filmmaking. The pacing is completely wrong. It goes like this: the group travels somewhere, get attacked, travel somewhere else, get attacked, travel somewhere else, get attacked... This start-and-stop narrative does nothing to build excitement or tension and the whole feel feels as dead as its shambling masses of poorly made-up flesh eaters. It does, however, give you a good amount of gut-munching and zombie blasting. But that's par for the course in any Mattei film and nothing you can't get in much better films.

I can at least commend Mattei for not sinking into Mondo mode here - the usual course of action when filming anything that involves native tribes. While the film does feature some funeral footage from OF THE DEAD - one of the few good Mondo films - it actually treats the natives with some degree of respect, a rarity for the Italian genre film. If only it gave the same sort of respect to it's lead actress, Margit Evelyn Newton. Mattei has her character strip nude and run around topless. But when you only have one female character in your entire cast... Someone has to do it. It might as well be your top-billed actress.

And speaking of actors, this film features some of the most poorly cast actors of any film. While the appearances of Derek and Co. from BAD TASTE were part of the joke, I don't think the same can be said of HELL OF THE LIVING DEADs bad-ass commandos. These guys seriously look like they were pulled off the street. They certainly weren't hired for their acting talents. Not that a cast full of Oscar winners would be able to pull this shit off. Most of the "acting" revolves around looking disgusted while standing perfectly still as a zombie horde slowly gets closer. The only other reaction we get is one of absolute confusion. I can imagine the conversations on set:

"Mr. Mattei, what's my motivation?"

"How the fuck should I know?! I'm Bruno Mattei!"

So, does HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD do anything well? No. Does it add anything to the already crowded zombie sub genre? Hell, no. It just plays ball. Like Fulci's ZOMBIE, HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD has risen to the ranks of cult favorite and it's easy to see why. It, like ZOMBIE, is unbelievably awful, completely devoid of any redeeming quality whatsoever. It makes for a good lesson in proper filmmaking practices - if if looks or feels like HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, you're doing it wrong! - for anyone inspiring to make their own zombie epic but there are so many better examples of the sub genre out there that to waste your time watching this film is unthinkable.

Piece of shit.

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