There are some films that you just know, deep in your heart, that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with. Films that display a cavalier disregard for anything like accepted standards of film-making – films with terrible performances, a marked lack of logic and production values beyond paltry. And most of them are indeed bloody awful. But from time to time you come across a film that you know full well you shouldn’t really like but which manages to worm its way under your skin and to which you form a peculiar, almost inexplicable attachment. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you exhibit A – Marino Girolami’s extraordinarily terrible but so-hard-to-hate Zombi Holocaust.
Though Girolami cranked out low budget pot-boilers in many genres for many years, he rarely ventured into the realm of Italian horror – probably because frankly, he’s a quite dreadful director with all the film making acumen of a dead warthog. His one real claim to fame is this tawdry but undeniably hugely entertaining piece which may be wholly derivative and utterly devoid of a single trace of originality, but which is huge fun nonetheless.
Filmed on the same sets recently vacated by Lucio Fulci’s masterly Zombi 2/Zombie/Zombie Flesh Eaters, and featuring that film’s leading man, Ian McCulloch, looking even more than ever like he’s wondering how his career came to this, Zombi Holocaust is a deranged hoot from beginning to end. The ludicrous plot takes us from the streets of New York City, where a hospital worker is eating body parts in the morgue, to the Asian Molucca island of Kito, which comes complete with a wobbly, synthesised “dong!” sound whenever it’s mentioned or we see the symbol associated with the cannibal tribe that lives there. Morgue assistant and anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) and Dr Peter Chandler (McCulloch) investigate, discovering a mad scientist named Doctor Obrero (Donald O’Brien) who is conducting experiments on the locals, turning them into zombies.
At heart, Zombi Holocaust is simply a throwback to the Monogram potboilers of the 40s which cast Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist pursuing some loopy scheme that no-one but he could ever hope to understand. Obrero is the successor to those scientific maniacs, pursuing some half-baked scheme to prolong human life that, for some reason, simply produces mutant zombies with a taste for human flesh. Donald O’Brien attacks the role for all it’s worth and far from being embarrassed by the absurdity of the proceedings, plays it with such gusto that he steals every scene he’s in. He certainly gets the film’s best and perhaps most notorious line – during his Moreau-like surgical tinkering on hapless journalist Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan), he become agitated by her vocal protestations and having performed the necessary snip, sneers to his tape recorder: “The patient’s screams disturbing me, performed removal of vocal chords.” Alexandra Delli Colli is there purely for decorative purposes and inevitably she gets her clothes off a number of times before being accepted as the cannibal tribe’s white queen and leading a revolt against Obrero. Like O’Brien, Ian McCulloch, a talented actor who deserved better than this, overcomes his embarrassment and at least looks like he might believe every word of the nonsense dialogue he’s expected to spout.
Girolami and his scriptwriter Romano Scandariato – working from a story by producer Fabrizio De Angelis – have little truck with the usual niceties of screen writing. The plot meanders about all over the place, people do ridiculous things for no good reason and the dialogue is abysmal. No-one seems entirely sure if they’re trying to make a 40s-style, Island of Dr Moreau influenced medical horror, a zombie film, a cannibal film or a black comedy. Scandariato merely throws bits of business into the pot, gives them a stir and hopes that it all holds together somehow. It doesn’t but the accumulation of weird happenings and almost surreal sidetracks (everything from the badly dubbed screaming nurse to the mannequin that falls out of the window, from Obrero’s ripe dialogue to Delli Colli’s lifeless performance) merely adds to the film’s extremely odd charms. Girolami’s direction is so flaccid and lacklustre that he has has to resort to plundering Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) for stock footage and for his sets and locations.
What it lacks in coherence it more than makes up for in gore, courtesy of Maurizio Trani. The zombies make weird farting noises whenever they appear but look impressive enough and everywhere you look there are entrails flying, zombies getting their heads minced by outboard motors, eyes being plucked out, scalps removed and limbs messily severed. The effects are still pretty impressive and from that standpoint the film is a roaring success, more than delivering on the promise of messy deaths and grisly evisceration.
Mock if you will (and I’m sure there will plenty just waiting to do so) but Zombi Holocaust proves almost impossible to dislike. Yes it’s rubbish on almost every level but it’s so entertaining that, if one’s threshold for trash is suitably attuned, it emerges as a minor gem. A classic of its kind, even, though that may not be saying much. In the States it was retitled Dr Butcher M.D. (the M.D. stands for “Medical Deviate”) and combined with footage from Roy Frumkes never-completed anthology horror Tales That Will Tear Your Heart Out. In the UK, it was seized by the police during the “video nasties” furore of the early 1980s but was never prosecuted.
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