Original title: Inferno dei morti viventi
Bruno Mattei’s laughable contribution to the Italian zombie cycle of the early 80s (known as Zombie Creeping Flesh in the UK and Hell of the Living Dead in the States) features everything you’d expect from the genre and much more besides – ravening packs of zombie flesh eaters, undead rodents, a Goblin score lifted wholesale from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and more puking than seems entirely necessary. Stir in a few terrorists, zombie children being shot through the head and a finale liberally adapted from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2/Zombie Fleasheaters (1979) and you’ve got Mattei’s slap dash contribution to a cycle that was never really that great outside Fulci’s canon.
The initial scenes of zombie blasting mayhem seems to have drained Mattei’s meager resources as he spends an inordinate amount of time with National Geographic stock footage of stampeding elephants, dancing tribesmen and less-than-riveting United Nations meetings. The latter footage is intercut with close-ups that clearly betray the film’s non-existent budget – only three members appear to be present at the crisis meeting of nations!
Along the way, the script by J.M. Cunilles and Claudio Fragasso alternately attempts to lay the blame for the zombie holocaust at the feet of callous western capitalism while adopting a sneering, patronising tone when dealing with the undead third worlders. This schizophrenia is never more evident than at the climax, when the top secret Hope research facility The Hope Center is revealed to be the focal point for an insidious plot to depopulate the third world by turning those obviously intellectually inferior natives into cannibals who will simply solve the food crisis by eating each other. It all backfires, of course, as the final frames suggest that the zombie virus has now spread to New York in a scene cribbed directly from Zombie Flesheaters.
Zombie Creeping Flesh is a treasure trove of truly inspired moments of Italian cinematic madness – it’s not easy to forget the wince-inducing dialogue, the horrendous acting or the sight of one of the macho commandos prancing around a house in a top hat and green tutu. The cat that bursts from the stomach of a geriatric zombie is a nice touch, somewhat bungled by inept editing, and the remarkable way that actors who are not required to do anything at the moment simply stand still in the backgrounds of shots looking vaguely embarrassed is the cause of much unintentional merriment.
However, the moronic plotting, insipid pacing and sheer paucity of wit render much of Zombie Creeping Flesh all but unwatchable. The fun bits are few and far between and probably best viewed in isolation (fast forwarding over that stock footage certainly helps) and the painful lack of style or even the most basic technical skills makes it one of the worst of the series of films inaugurated by Fulci’s infinitely superior Zombie Flesheaters. Even Andrea Bianchi’s see-it-to-disbelieve-it Le notti del terrore/Night of Terror/Burial Ground (1980) manages to be more appealing than Mattei’s disaster (it’s mercifully a lot shorter) which perhaps helps to position Zombie Creeping Flesh at the very bottom of the Italian zombie movie cess pit.
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