The year is 250 A.B. in a distant Mad Max world where the planet Earth has been blown to dust by nuclear bombs. A group of bikers are on the look for food and shelter and discover some decayed, empty laboratory in the city. But don’t get too comfy cuz the place is crawling with rats! Big, fat rats. Thousands of them! And like our group of bikers they’re hungry as well and takes a bite out of every human flesh they can jump on. It’s already time to find the flame thrower.
The only believable aspects about this very cheese-smelling low budget apocalyptic flick is the abandoned city set-designs which also was used in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. And with a pretty decent cinematography, despite the circumstances, the film at least gets the atmosphere and the sense of the apocalyptic environment and surroundings. We also have some gory and graphic moments here as well, the most notable being the lucky rat which we can assume crawls straight into someones vagina and eats itself out of the dead victims mouth. Yum!
And then there’s the… rats. We have some hundreds of them running around the actors feet as they try to make us believe that they fights against them while they also do their very best to not harm them. Because no rats where harmed during the making of this motion picture. And it looks as inept and retarded as it sounds. Not that I want to see rats, or other animals, getting killed, but still. Several rats died of natural causes during the making, though (RIP), but director Bruno Mattei had no budget to waste them. Instead the genius used them as props by throwing them at the actors to make it look like they jumped on their victims. Pure movie magic.
We’re also entertained by a group of actors who mostly couldn’t look a bit scared even if they were paid a million. Instead we have goofy faces, monotone screams and just overall bad acting. All of course Italians which was poorly dubbed with stiff cartoonish lines, like most of the older bad Italian horror films. And if you sense the smell of cheese getting stronger, you’re not wrong. Claudio “Troll 2” Fragasso co-wrote and co-directed (without credit) the film. Other sources says that he didn’t direct a single scene. But just pretend he did, cuz that makes it even funnier. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him that came up with the batshit twist at the end.
Director: Bruno Mattei Writers: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini Original title: Rats – Notte di terrore Country & year: Italy, France, 1984 Actors: Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni, Gianni Franco, Ann-Gisel Glass, Jean-Christophe Brétignière, Fausto Lombardi, Henry Luciani, Cindy Leadbetter, Christian Fremont IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0086176/
– Troll 2 is a film that examines many serious and important issues. Like eating, living and dying. – Director Claudio Fragasso
And speaking of dying, dear grandpa Seth is dead. RIP. Even though it’s been six months after his funeral, the ten-year-old kid Joshua has regular meetings with his ghost in his room before bedtime. Grandpa Seth sits in a rocking chair as he tells goodnight stories about goblins and witches who turn people into trees, bushes and everything green.
Because you see, once upon a time there were goblins who were vegetarians, and the only way for them to eat was to turn people into everything green. But this is actually not any fairytale. Oh no, these goblins actually exist. So beware. Now, sleep tight and have a good night.
The brilliant idea of vegetarian goblins came from Rossella Drudi, the wife of Claudio Fragasso, who co-wrote the script. Here’s a quote from Best Worst Movie, a documentary from 2009 about the making of Troll 2:
– I didn’t want to write your typical horror movie. So, I came up with a story about troll (goblins) who were vegetarians. Because at that point in my life, I had many friends who’d all become vegetarians, and it pissed me off. So I had the idea of replacing the vampires in the vampire story with vegetarians (like Duckula). –
Only Joshua can see grandpa Seth (of course) and no one believes him. His mother has grown tired of him talking to his ghost and has a quick, serious conversation with him:
Banish him, you hear, boy? And yes, this is the actual piece of dialogue that was written which Josh’s mom says to him with the most dead and soulless eyes ever, as if she was straight from The Westboro Baptist Church. Good night and sweet dreams. Brrr! I prefer the ghost of grandpa Seth, thank you very much. With a script written like this, also by two Italians with very little to no knowledge of the English language, one would assume that the whole script was written in Italian and roughly Google-translated with no corrections. In reality, the script was written in such broken English that even the actors suggested to director Claudio Fragasso that they should at least ad-lib the lines to prevent the dialogues from sounding as retarded as it did on paper. Fragasso, the maestro that he is with an ego bigger than Jupiter, flat-out refused as his script was set in stone and perfect as it was.
But this little flavor of absurdity we just saw here is only the very top of the iceberg of this incompetent circus of a horror movie. It gets really batshit, to say the least, and it’s the reason why Troll 2 is praised by the same audiences who almost died from laughing at modern so-bad-it’s-good-classics like The Room,Birdemic: Shock and Terrorand all the films of Neil Breen.
Back to the film: Josh’ parents are taking him and their teen daughter Holly on a summer vacation trip to a small country, hillbilly town in the state of Utah, called … Nilbog. And the place looks like a complete ghost town which has seen better days. Grandpa Seth is still here, though, watching over Josh’s shoulders. They swap houses with a family that welcomes them with a ready dinner table. Talk about hospitality. But that’s not real food, Grandpa Seth tells Josh. It’s Goblin food which will turn anyone who eats it into vegetables – the favorite food of the goblins! Grandpa Seth displays some of his magic ghost force to stop the time for a brief moment, so Josh can prevent them eating the food. He has only ten seconds. The tension and suspense is unbearable. Josh stands on the table while the rest of the family is frozen-out, opens his zipper and – you guessed it – pisses on the food.
Or in Claudio Fragasso’s own frustrating words while trying to explain to a confused ten-year-old who didn’t understand the context of the scene, and who the hell could blame him: – You don’t worry, you jump on table, you unzip zipper, we cut, piss on table! –
Aha, okey then…
His dad, Michael (played by Aaron Eckhart’s doppelganger, George Hardy), gets furious and carries Josh up to his room where he delivers his famous line:
And yes, this is the actual dialogue. This is also the line that George Hardy used in his audition for the film. In full seriousness, he shouted You can’t piss on hospitality in front of nine cigar-smoking Italian casting agents. And they didn’t understand a word he was saying. The only reason he got the part was because they liked his energy.
Like in the original film, we get introduced to a witch by the name Creedence Leonore Gielgud. And this one is from the west and as evil as a Saturday Morning Cartoon character. She lives in a small church where she brews a green, magic, toxic potion that turns people into vegetables, so she can feed her goblins.
Alice Cooper was apparently busy feeding his Frankenstein, so the role of the witch went to Deborah Reed. And ‘boy, her performance is a trip. I have not before or after Troll 2 seen overacting on such an absurd animated level, as we see here. It’s all up to eleven and beyond, and I bet she must have burned some calories after reading her goofy lines the way she did. I’d love to se her audition reel and the reactions of the nine cigar-smoking Italians. Reed died last year due to cancer at age 73, but she will always be remembered in her iconic role. RIP.
The Oh My God clip is the most flawless piece of cinema put together. The way that the music is synchronized with his delayed scream is just perfection, not to mention the fly on the guy’s forehead. That’s Stanley Kubrick-level of perfectionism right there when it comes to subtle details with hidden meanings.
Then we have the creature designs, or the goblin costumes, the pure definition of schlock that even makes the creatures from the original film look like something from Stan Winston.
Troll 2 was filmed during thirty chaotic hot summer days in Utah where all the cast and crew were Italians who, of course, didn’t speak English. The actors were local amateurs, the one worse than the other, and all of whom auditioned to star as extras, but somehow instead ended up in the main roles. That also explains one thing or two. Michael Paul Stephenson, who plays the annoying kid Josh, already had the (un)pleasure of starring in another film by Claudio Fragasso, with Beyond the Darknes (a.k.a La Casa 5), released the same year as Troll 2. He also made the documentary Best Worst Movie.
The original title was Goblin, but was released as Troll 2, because that’s what Italian distributors always do to shamelessly cash in on the success of other films.
Troll 2 was one of the lost gems, also called The Holy Grail of bad movies, that were rediscovered many years after its release. It wasn’t until the comedy theatre group Upright Citizens Brigade started to screen the film at their base in Los Angeles that the phenomena that was Troll 2 spread throughout the United States like a turkey on fire, and soon after globally. Then the now legendary Oh My God clip was shared on YouTube and the rest is movie history.
Director Claudio Fragasso was also curious about the buzz and how the Americans had finally rediscovered his masterpiece, and flew to the states with his wife to get a sense of the phenomenon. Too bad he seems to have zero sense of irony. I’d earlier had an assumption that the guy was a first-class troll (no pun intended), like Birdemic director James Nguyen, but after re-watching some clips from the documentary Best Worst Movie, I’m not so sure. The clown really believes deep down that he made a genuine solid piece of cinema with Troll 2, and during an awkward Q&A after a screening of the film he looks completely lost, confused and irritated, and is about to implode. People were laughing too much at his film, even at parts that weren’t meant to be funny. Uh-oh! And he didn’t like that. His spicy narcissism and true colors really shine at the end of the documentary where he gets jealous of the actors’ popularity, giving them the death stare and even calling them dogs and liars. Classy.
There are many factors why Troll 2 ended up like it did for all the wrong hilarious reasons, but the main one is on none other than Claudio Fragasso, or the pseudonym of Drake Floyd he was credited as here. It’s the typical Ed Wood syndrome, just with an even more bloated ego, pompous arrogance, insanity and a head stuffed so far in one’s own delusional fantasy-butthole while refusing to hear a single input than your own bubbling farts. And to be fair, Fragasso hardly directed the film, costume designer Laura Gemser did, the one and only on the crew that spoke English fluently and translated the director’s directions to the actors. He also looked down on having any assistance from any English-speaking crew or cast because he was too lazy to learn some of the language himself. Mamma mia. Working on the set of Troll 2 must have been such a pleasant experience. I would like to see a biopic about the making of this turkey, like The Disaster Artist. Leonardo DiCaprio would be a great fit to play Fragasso.
There’s far worse movies than Troll 2, surprisingly enough, and at the end of the day, Claudio Fragasso has unintentionally managed to put together one of the best unhinged horror comedies of all time (if not the best) with not a single boring moment followed by a whole notebook of quote worthy lines. That’s a great skill and an achievement in itself. And that the guy to this day seems to be ultra-bitter about the films’ cult status and never seems to come to peace with it, is a bit sad. But that’s what happens when your ego becomes your own worst enemy.
There wasn’t made a Troll 3… or maybe it kinda was if we use our imagination a bit. We actually have two titles that were released with a.k.a Troll 3. The first one is Quest for the Mighty Sword (1990), an Italian fantasy film by Joe D’Amato. If the alternative titles wasn’t head-scratching already, this one is also known as The Hobgoblin and Ator III: The Hobgoblin. The other one is The Crawlers (1993), also a Joe D’Amato production about killing plants and was also filmed in the same area in Utah where Troll 2 was filmed.
Director: Claudio Fragasso Writers: Rossella Drudi, Claudio Fragasso Country & year: US, Nilbog, 1990 Actors: Michael Paul Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie Young, Robert Ormsby, Deborah Reed, Jason Wright, Darren Ewing, Jason Steadman, David McConnell, Gary Carlston, Mike Hamil IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt0105643/
Alice Cooper was already at the peak of his musical career in the late 1970s with fifteen studio albums in his discography, having sold several Platinums, lived a wild rock’n roll life and outlived his first drinking buddy Jim Morrison. Alice Cooper has been quite transparent about his alcoholism and the bumpy journey on the yellow brick road to sobriety throughout the last four decades, and how he was just few drops away to join his former drinking-buddies six feet under. After he got caught up in the cocaine blizzard, which has wiped all his memories of the recording of his three final albums (also called the “blackout albums“), he got into rehab for one last time before he’d risk ending up as a corpse looking like a combination of an emaciated Auschwitz victim and a horrifying drag-show version of Bette Davis. While it all just sounds like a cliché synopsis for a biopic, he was far from ready to tour again and just the thought of performing on stage in full sobriety seemed to be the most frightening thing ever. He was now in his mid 30’s without any record label, and thus back to square one. So, now what …
Well, why not kill some time by starring in an Italian low-budget horror film? Seems fun enough, right? Alice wanted the film to be cheap and sleazy, and that’s what he got. He also got to play a musician, not so different from himself and even record a music video for the film. However the film ended up, if it was released to cinemas or straight to VHS, wasn’t important to him. The one and only thing that mattered was if he was able to work while being sober which he hadn’t been for fifteen years. And with that being said, he couldn’t have picked a better director than Claudio Troll 2 Fragasso. Monster Dog became his rehab movie, so to speak, and the segway to his next life-chapter with his comeback tour The Nightmare Returns. And as I’m writing this, the guy is 75 years old, still active and let’s hope he’s kicking it for five more years so he can celebrate with the song “I’m Eighty“.
Monster Dog starts off with a music video of a rather catchy song “Identity Crisis“ by the new age rocker Vince Raven (Cooper) who is heading for his childhood home with his wife and crew to shoot a new music video. And to be honest, I don’t see much point in trying to explain the plot here, because there isn’t much. People get attacked by dogs, people having nightmares, we have several foggy night scenes, more dogs appear before the film slides into more obscurity as a gunslinging western. Claudio Fragasso also co-wrote this with his wife Rossella Drudi, just to mention it.
Given that we’re talking about a Claudio Fragasso film it has to at least be entertaining, right? Yeah, most of the known trademarks are here with bad acting, cheesy effects that goes from half-decent to absolute pure dung that has no business being on screen, and overall filled with 80s schlock all across the board. And except for Alice Cooper, who walks through the film with a stone cold face, the rest of the cast acts like silly cartoon characters, all of which are Spanish with laughable English dubbing. The dubbing of Alice Cooper done by Ted Rusoff is the only convincing thing here. Yeah, he actually fooled me big time. Applause.
All us ghouls love Alice Cooper and I really wish I could say that he is worth the film alone. But that isn’t much of the case here. Although he appears in most of the scenes, the guy seems bored, withdrawn and apathetic. And yeah, fifteen years of daily alcohol abuse does that to you. He says his lines and couldn’t be bothered with the rest. It’s quite the opposite of what we’re used to see when he’s on a stage feeding his Frankenstein, to put it that way. It isn’t before the final act when Alice seems to loosen up and having fun when he gets to shoot some badguys straight in the skull with a shotgun. Even though this is his only major role in a feature, he later appeared in other films with minor appearances and cameos, such as a creepy mute hobo in John Carpenter’s The Prince of Darkness (1987), Freddy Krueger’s dad in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), and as himself in Wayne’s World (1992) and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows (2012).
And with all this said, I’m not so sure that the director is fully to blame for the incoherent final cut here though, as the film was completely cut to pieces in post-production by the producer Eduard Sarlui. He cut out as much as 20 minutes, reconstructed the scenes, assumingly with blindfolds or in pure resentful spite towards the director, and the whole thing was a mess that got Fragasso heartbroken when he saw it. It was at least a big triumph for Alice who got through the whole filming process clean and sober with Coca-Cola.
Monster Dog did never get an official DVD release expect a couple of cheap bootlegs with shitty VHS quality which explains the muddy screenshots below. For a far more watchable viewing, look for the 2016 Blu-ray release from Diabolik DVD.
Director: Claudio Fragasso Writers: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi Original title: Leviatán Country & year: Spain, USA, Puerto Rico, 1984 Actors: Alice Cooper, Victoria Vera, Carlos Santurio, Pepa Sarsa, Carole James, Emilio Linder, Ricardo Palacios, Luis Maluenda, Barta Barri, Charly Bravo, Fernando Conde, Fernando Baeza, Nino Bastida IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0087616/
Night Killah … cool title, though. And by taking a look at the tasty cover art for the dvd, you get the impression of some body-horror going on. We also see a house in the night with a big full moon. If the cover itself couldn’t lie more, the title is as misleading as it can get. But this is first and foremost an Italian produced low-budget schlock film. And with that being said, Italian distributors have for a long time been notoriously known for using some of the most misleading titles possible and promote genre films in the home country as a sequel to a more known franchise in hopes of cashing in some more bucks. The most known example is probably Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (a great film, by the way) which tried to cash in on Dario Argento’s cut of Dawn of the Dead, released as simply Zombi in Italy. I can also mention fake clickbait titles as Cannibal Holocaust II (1988), Changeling II: The Revenge (1989), Terminator II (1989), Evil Dead 5 (1990) and the list goes on.
In this case Night Killer was promoted as – and I kid you not – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 in Italy, just prior to Leatherface: The Texas Chaisaw Masscare III which was already released seven months before. So, watching this film must have been like being pranked or Rick Rolled for 85 minutes straight. The distributors must think that the Italian horror audience have mushy pasta for braincells and they should be glad that the internet wasn’t a household thing back then. And of course we have the unofficial sequel of the more obscure 80s horror/fantasy Troll, completely overshadowed by Troll 2 which was made by the same director as Night Killer. We’re of course talking of no one other than the man, the myth and one of the legends of Italians so-bad-it’s good-movies, Claudio Fragasso himself. (Applause)
The film starts off in the middle of an aerobic dance practice where the stressed and unhinged female instructor is far from impressed by the dancers. She has a quick hilarious meltdown, then goes to the bathroom where she encounters a person with a black coat and a face covered by a cheap Freddy Krueger-like mask. He’s already killed one of the dancers by shoving his rubber claws straight through her torso. While it sounds brutal on paper, the effects are, how should I even try to describe it…it’s pure hot garbage and not even on an amateur level, it’s beyond that and filmed in such a close-up and edited down to a split-second, that you’ll miss it if you blink.
Anyway… the instructor gets her throat slit by the killer’s rubber claws. And if you want blood, just forget it. There’s hardly any blood pouring from her throat, as if someone just squeezed the last drops from a ketchup bottle and used the cheapest prosthetic make up one can buy from the discount bin at Walmart. It’s the laziest shit ever. And the funniest thing is that this opening sequence was directed by Bruno Mattei because the studio wanted more gore. He didn’t add anything new other than more inept filmmaking and a perfect foretaste of what to expect for the next 80 minutes. The most notable thing in this opening is that we clearly see that the fresh cut on her throat is magically gone when she is supposed to bleed to death. Continuity error on its finest.
The “plot”, which could be hidden here somewhere, goes something like this: After the extended opening scene we’re in the sunny beachside of Virgina) in the holiday season (oh, how convenient) where we meet the middle-aged Melanie (Tara Buckam) living in her upper-class house. She is soon to be one of the targets of our mysterious Freddy Krueger-masked serial killer. But first she gets a phone call from her ex. He’s drunk and sitting in a bar. She hangs up. Then she stands in front of a mirror with a blank stare, talking to herself while she’s touching her breasts. The phone rings again, this time by the masked killer that has picked her as the new victim. He then says with a slow and cheesy distorted voice “I won’t kill you straight awayyy, first I’m going to fuck your braaains ooouuut. ” She calls the police and the police do what the police does best: nothing. He invades her home, backs her against the wall while pointing a knife to her face. She screams while looking at the camera and… we cut to the next scene where she wakes up in the hospital. Her daughter asks her, with emotions like a robot, when she’s coming home. Soon, she says. When Melanie is suddenly out from the hospital, she’s being stalked and kidnapped by some random dude (Peter Hooten) which I thought was Steve Guttenberg as first glance. While she seems to develop a bizarre stockholm syndrome to this guy in which they have several cringy scenes together, the masked killer continues his business with other victims. It’s like watching two separate movies from here on: a soap opera and something that tries to resemble a slasher film. Confused? There’s also a sideplot with a policeman trying to finally catch the killer.
Bruh … What the fuck is this whack bullshit even supposed to be, you may ask. According to the director himself, who made it under the pseudonym Clyde Anderson, this is actually a psychoanalytical, intimate horror movie, didn’t you already know that? He’s also so proud of the idea of the film which he calls “a brilliant idea, an incredible mental masturbation.” During the interview on the DVD’s extras he says with a straight face that he wanted to make something like an Ingmar Bergman film. I’ve seen some interviews of Mr. Fragasso and there’s just something about him that doesn’t make him easy to read, yet I can catch glimpses of sharp, ironic detachment within his eyes. I’m not a body language expert nor Dr. Phil, but I’ve had this theory that he’s quite self-aware and just trolling us (no pun intended). Because there’s just no way a director in his age can sit and reflect on a complete demented and incomprehensible schlock 30 years later and view it as a flawless piece of cinema work while putting the cherry on top by comparing himself to Steven Spielberg. I just can’t buy it. Sorry. I believe more in Loch Nessie having a baby with Bigfoot.
We can also just speculate how Mr. Fragasso instructs his actors, or if he just pours some green shrooms from Nilbog in their drinks before shooting. The way he makes them perform and convey emotions is nothing but absurd, if not unique, and nothing you see everyday. It’s like watching a bunch of retarded aliens in disguise trying to behave like normal human beings, or human beans like Tommy Wiseau would say. Just like Troll 2, it’s the acting that really does the film with the bonkers line deliveries, stiff, delayed reactions like Oh My GoooooooOOOOD while the actors can’t hide their confused facial expression of “what the hell did I really sign up for? Will this be my legacy?” Fragasso knows exactly what they signed up for and he has the first laugh while he thinks to himself: I now own you forever, bitch.
And then we have the title itself, Night Killer. There was no chainsaw to be see in the Italian release but here we at least have a killer, even though there isn’t much killing to see. There’s only three body counts (as I remember) and they are as tame, weightless and ridiculously ineptly shot that they could easily fit in as segments in Sesame Street between Elmo and Abby’s Flying Fairy School. There’s not a single night scene here either, not even close to it. Every scene is shot like it was either a soap opera or a sitcom with its heavy use of light where in the outdoors scenes the sky is always blue and the sun is shining. Not a single shred of atmosphere or the feeling of looming threat. And then there’s a twist. No spoilers, of course, but when you thought you’ve seen it all and just thought the film couldn’t be more absurd, the twist will make your brain and head shrink (like the Goombas in Super Mario Bros) and leave you speechless. Not even M. Night Shyamalan in his wildest fever dreams could make this shit up. The film also ends with a cliffhanger, or sort of. And since Fragasso are hinting about a comeback as Clyde Anderson in the DVD interview, well, what are you waiting for, maestro? Gives us the sequel so I, among others, finally can recover and grow our heads back, per favore! Until then: Merry Christmas.
Writer and director: Claudio Fragasso Original title: Non aprite quella porta 3 Country & year: Italy, USA, 1990 Actors: Peter Hooten, Tara Buckman, Richard Foster, Mel Davis, Lee Lively, Tova Sardot, Gaby Ford IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt0401696/
In the late 1970’s, the two Italian filmmakers Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei teamed up to become a duo, a collaboration that lasted ten years. Neither of them had much of a talent, but was sure driven by a lot of naive, eccentric passion and will power. It’s basically two Ed Woods we’re talking about, to describe them in the easiest way.
Fragasso wrote most of the scripts while Bruno Mattei probably tried his best to transfer his incomprehensible and demented screenplays to celluloid under the pseudonym Vincent Dawn. And the fact that Bruno Mattei wasn’t the greatest director, to put it mildly, they never got that phone call from Hollywood. A lack of resources and budget was also a common thing. Fragasso also had to step in as an uncredited co-director when Mattei presumably needed a siesta from the insanity, and sometimes vice versa.
Still, they cranked out a film for each year throughout the 80’s, most of them being complete obscurities that are hardly seen by anyone, while three or four have been picked up to become cult films in Italian Trash Cinema, or so-bad-it’s-good, if you will. Rats – Nights of Terror, Zombi 3 (poor Lucio Fulci), Night Killer can be mentioned, and of course Hell of the Living Dead, their first feature. Fragasso also wrote The Other Hell, which I’ve mentioned some years earlier.
After the duo went their separate ways in 1990, Claudio Fragasso made his magnum opus Troll 2 for which he will always be best known for. Mattei continued with an active career of making fast n’ cheap genre films under several weird pseudonyms such as Pierre Le Blanc, Frank Klox, Herik Montegomery, until working himself to death in 2007, aged 75. The 70-year-old Fragasso still lives in his own bubble somewhere in Nilbog, where he still makes films and is still convinced that Troll 2 is a genuine good work of cinema. Tommy Wiseau and James Nguyen would probably agree.
Hell of the Living Dead, also known as Virus, Night of the Zombies, Zombie Creeping Flesh, and let’s just add What the Hell of the Living Dead while we’re at it, starts out in the traditional way with a virus that leaks from a lab in a tropical island and causes a zombie outbreak. So, who’s here to save the day? A blonde newsreporter, a camera guy and a crew of four commandos with a lot of bullets and gunpower to waste until one of them is smart enough to figure out that the only way to kill them is to shoot them right through the skull.
A bunch of random shit happens from here on. We witness a family whose son is infected and turns into zombie, to get brutally executed in RoboCop-style by the commandos. As they drive with their jeep further into the jungle, they stop by a village of natives. The reporter gets her clothes off, rubs some symbolic paint on her body so she and her crew can enter the village. And since there wasn’t any time, resources or budget to film in a real native village, the gaps gets filled in with a bunch of stock-footage clips from the documentary Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali (1974) to add some cheap shock value and random filler content. We have a glimpse of a bloated corpse getting ready for a disturbing burial ceremony, random dancing natives, cannibals eating maggots from a rotten human skull, more random dancing natives, clips of exotic animals, and did I already mention the obscure newsreels? Whatever. Back to the plot: Their visit goes of course to shit when they get attacked by zombies and have to escape to the next scenario with more flesh-eating, cheap gore, retarded zombie action, bad acting, and I almost forgot to mention the cheesy dubbing.
Hell of the Living Dead is an incoherent, chaotic and schizophrenic mess from start to finish. It’s really telling when Fragasso stated that the film had no budget, nor even a script when the crew arrived in Spain to start shooting. That really says it all. The only thing they had left was to rewrite and improvise and hope for the best. The acting is overall cheesy and just plain bad. Zero instructions seems to be given to them other than to run, scream, look scared and try their best not to laugh. Most of them just looks goofy and clearly don’t give a shit. Margie Newton as the news reporter is one of the worst actresses of all time. She has several scream-queen moments and can’t even bother to try to look a bit scared. My favorite is the dude with crazy eyes, played by Franco Garofalo who looks like an uncanny version of Klaus Kinski. His unpredictable and over-the-top performance adds most of the fun in the movie and is one of those who knows exactly what kind of a film this is and goes full, ballistic force with it. The zombie priest performed by Víctor Israel is also a highlight, ans so is also the soundtrack by Goblin although it’s recycled tracks from the Dario Argento’s cut of Dawn of the Dead.
So … even though most of the production value is something straight from a sewer, Hell of the Living Dead is an entertaining trashfest for those of us who love funny-bad movies, and is a great start to dive into the Mattei/Fragasso universe.
Directors: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso Writers: Claudio Fragasso, José María Cunillés, Rossella Drudi Also known as: Virus, Night of the Zombies, Zombie Creeping Flesh Country & year: Italy, Spain, 1980 Actors: Margie Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, José Gras, Gabriel Renom, Josep Lluís Fonoll, Pietro Fumelli, Bruno Boni, Patrizia Costa, Cesare Di Vito, Cesare Di Vito, Bernard Seray, Víctor Israel IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0082559/
We are in a catacomb somewhere, where a nun seems to have gotten lost. She ends up in a “mad scientist” style lab where another nun lies freshly dead, naked, ready for God knows what. One of the other nuns shows up to cut out a part of her uterus (I guess), like some kind of ritual punishment, while preaching how sinful she was. And we’re only 6 minutes into the movie where the acting is so hysterically bad with one retarded facial expression after another. And out of pure randomness, a cauldron starts to boil over as we see close-ups of two glowing, blinking red eyes that gives off some really cheap cyborg/Terminator vibes. (And yes, this is made by the same director and screenwriter who also made the cheap unofficial Italian Terminator II some years later.) The glowing eyes seem to possess one of the nuns to stab the other to death. In this local convent, run by Mother Vincenza, several nuns seems to die in mysterious ways, while priests are being burned alive… and so on.
So… just to have the non-existing plot going on, an investigator is put on the case to find out what kind of fishy things are happening inside of the convent’s walls. Well, good luck with that, for not even the movie’s Wikipedia page has a fucking clue on what to fill in the plot section, as we speak.
So… uhm… yeah, it’s hard to convey what’s really going on here. A lot of weird convoluted shit just happens… just because. With the directing (to use the word loosely) by Bruno “Italian Ed Wood” Mattei and a script by Claudio “Troll 2” Fragasso, there isn’t much movie magic to witness here. I didn’t really expect it to be either. This rather shabby duo has made over a dozen shitty schlocks together, and is perhaps best known for Hell of the Living Dead (1980) where a considerable amount of the screen time consists of stock footage.
The one and only quality to dig up here is the soundtrack by Goblin, which I have no idea they used legally or not, but it doesn’t help that much with putting some lustre on this pure stumbling incompetence or add any form of atmosphere. On the other hand, I can’t deny that I had a fun time watching The Other Hell. It’s completely unpredictable and has plenty of insane campiness to get entertained by. And of course, the absurdly bad acting itself makes it worth a watch alone.
Director: Bruno Mattei Original title: L’altro inferno Country & year: Italy, 1981 Actors: Franca Stoppi, Carlo De Mejo, Francesca Carmeno, Susan Forget, Franco Garofalo, Paola Montenero, Ornella Picozzi, Andrea Aureli IMDb:www.imdb.com/title/tt0080362/
In the late 1970’s, the two Italian filmmakers Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei teamed up to become a duo, a collaboration that lasted ten years. Neither of them had much of a talent, but was sure driven by a lot of naive, eccentric passion and will power. It’s basically two Ed Woods we’re talking about, to describe them in the easiest way.
