MICROBUDGET MASSACRE 5:
Hysteric Eric talks zombie movies
... and R. Kelly? WTF?

Ghoul School comes out of Camp Motion Pictures “Retro 80s Horror Collection,” a 1990 indie zombie flick directed by Timothy O’Rawe and filmed in New Jersey.
A gas that turns people into zombies is mistakenly freed in a high school populated with the usual twenty-something actors in stonewashed jeans. Yikes! 15 minutes in, and a cameo from talk show icon Joe Franklin and Jackie The Joke Man Martling is the high point so far. Cast is pretty forgettable otherwise, except maybe the lead singer for the cheesy butt rock band (is there any other kind?) practicing for the school dance, who reminds me of a hair metal Jerry Seinfeld.
The principal seems to be reading his lines when he says, “Whatever happened to romance and slow dancing? Now all they wanna do is grunt, groan and flamdance.” Yes, he actually said flamdance with an F. If the dialogue is bad, at least the film’s not underlit, one of my indie film pet peeves.
The spider-veined Zombie swim team looks good in the opening scene and in parts throughout, but otherwise the zombies look silly-too much blue makeup. Zombies attack coaches and mullet-sporting basketball players alike. The gore is phony looking, with obvious gut packs, and limbs torn off that have duct tape and string showing. You can almost smell the Caro Syrup. The film has one or two continuity problems, like the coach telling a player to get a runaway ball just as someone out of frame rolls it back. Dudes wearing Jackie Martling shirts get attacked (karma?).
Death and Violence (sounds a bit like The Exploited’s song Sex and Violence) gets a workout on the soundtrack, being as it’s the best song on it, so you want to play it a bunch. And some very period 80s synth soundtrack music plays on and on.
All this adds up to mildly entertaining blatant crap, like a Troma take on Return of the Living Dead, or a Weird Al version of Class of 1984, with blue zombies. With a short and the usual extras.
Available from www.CampMotionPictures.com.

Several radio in-jokes are presented in Deadlands: The Rising, a no-budget zombie video made by Wet and Wild Radio’s Gary Ugarek and distributed by Splatter Rampage, yet another division of Tempe. Someone acts surprised at the radio getting the news out, even with the TV signal out.
The movie uses zombies sparingly, and focuses on the human reaction to sudden zombie infestation. 28 Days Later comes to mind. The movie utilizes both fast and slow zombies. It doesn’t linger on close-ups of the zombies and relies on smooth editing to obscure any flaws.
The acting is no worse than any other microbudget movie, and some’s even decent. Doesn’t try to cram a bunch of “edgy” comic relief at us, it’s just a straightforward realistic drama about the survivors as they make their way to a “secure” shelter to become undead appetizers.
Several good set pieces stick out. The traffic jam on the road was well done, and I liked the scene where the mom runs over a zombie while she tries to reassure her little boy that everything is OK, and towards the end, when the two dudes have to escape the undead.
Thank God it moves fast and dirty, and is actually fairly interesting for a no-budgeter. Effective creepy music is used throughout to create tension, but I was hoping the foreboding music was leading for a bigger dramatic payoff. I guess they had to re-write the script due to money and location problems. I enjoyed the film, yet it felt unfinished. Here’s hoping you find more money next time, guys! For video check out www.tempevideo.com.

Camp Motion Pictures also sent us a copy of the Zombie Bloodbath Trilogy, another of their series of l980s low-budget indie horror re-issues. Todd Sheets of Missouri is the culprit behind these videos. All 3 shot-on-video epics are here on 2 discs, which are stuffed with behind the scenes junk and hilarious clips of coverage by local TV stations hurting for content. He says he’s a Christian person in one interview; the films are very gory, but I don’t remember boobage. (And I usually recall that sort of thing.) Pts 1 and 2 seem to be strangely free of swear words, while Pt. 3 is positively riddled with f-bombs. You can see the videos’ progression of technology, directorial choices, and hairstyles (one of the more memorable actors has a most righteous mullet!) in the 3 flicks, made respectively in 1990, 1995, and 2000.
I didn’t notice any continuing story or characters, the only constant being zombies. Pt. 1 is my fave, (more Night of Living Dead-influenced) with a nuke plant leak gimmick. It uses color filters to create a cheap dramatic boost as it follows a group of refugees getting picked off by the zombies. Pt. #2 throws in a seemingly out-of-place, awkward satanic cult angle, with annoying intercuts, black and white segments and too much shakicam. Vicious escaped convicts take hostages who are then surrounded by zombies caused by an invocation by the cult or something. Dusk to Dawn came out after this.
Pt. #3: Has a jumbled Terminator/ Day of the Dead storyline that wastes a good zombie warrior idea that should’ve been developed further, maybe in a different movie. But the most obvious influence in Pt. 3 is not George Romero but John Hughes, as demonstrated in a pointlessly talky Breakfast Club homage (complete with the nerd girl, the jock, the prep, the wiseass, etc.) The ridiculous sci-fi plot and playing with racial stereotypes eats up film time, and unless I blinked (and excluding the prologue), the zombies don’t make their first kill until 42 minutes in, a heinous genre crime. I actually found Parts 1 and 2 to be more entertaining, with more charming idiosynchricities in pt.1 and 2’s amateur actors than part 3’s.
Sheets is upfront about acknowledging his debt to Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei Fangoria and other gorehound faves. Technical shortcomings mean the films don’t rock as hard as they should. Long expository sequences could be better integrated . The acting is fairly bad, but several characters are endearing in their badness. (Must be friends since they keep popping up in the various films.) The harsh lighting often exposes the sins of the make-up, distracting from the illusion. The make-up is of varying quality, as it would be when you have to make 50 zombies in an afternoon with no money. Lots of cheap blood and intestines (or paper towels). The films are unexceptional, but sorta fun if you’re looking for cheap and cheesy zombie heavy metal horror entertainment. Todd Sheets site is www.zombiebloodbath.com. To buy the video go to www.CampMotionPictures.com.

Yeah, yeah, I know, at first glance, R. Kelly’s video series Trapped In The Closet may not seem to belong lumped in with our usual coverage of trash films. Once you watch it, of course, you realize that TITC has more in common with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Shanty Tramp than any lame MTV videos. Like an Ed Wood, Jr. film, it’s a singular vision that smart people probably warned him not to do, and thankfully for our twisted minds he didn’t listen. A self-described hip-hopera, this amazing video (of which Chapters 13-22 just dropped) is one long profanity-laden ghetto soap opera that will make your jaw drop in disbelief. The small but colorful cast of characters (Kellz plays 5 including the narrator), includes a well-endowed midget, a pimp, Rosie the nosy neighbor, various wives and husbands, lesbians, ex-cons, the mafia, and a pastor and his gay lover. The music is minimal, one long song, no, not even, just a backing beat really, with a silly water-dripping sound, repeated throughout the whole damn thing, but maddeningly catchy nonetheless. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger surprise, which is cheesily echoed to fade out, as in “the policeman’s wife Bridget, is pregnant by a midget, (midget, midget, midget).
And remember, Kelly does all the voices, including singing in character as a preacher, a white girl, and the Italian-American “businessmen”. Kelly’s storytelling abilities are used oddly and arbitrarily, sometimes effectively, sometimes not, but always just plain wrong. Is he misogynistic, homophobic, or just plain dumb? The ridiculous plot inevitably leads one to wonder how much of this is based in his real life and how much is his imagination. He describes in minute detail the actions taking place so you could understand things without watching, leading to strange phrasing such as (actual quote) “He walks over to the counter, he puts the gun on the counter, and goes into his pocket and pulls a cigarette lighter out, and then he lights the cigarette, blows smoke, and then says ‘Ladies, it’s very obvious that we have a problem here.”” Brilliant! He also pulls a Lou Reed quite often, rhyming a word with itself, or bad rhymes like dresser with Beretta. And I certainly appreciate the effort made to find a rhyme for the phrase “Oh Shit!” The production values seem to be an uncomfortable mix of high and low (he has some decent actors slumming in this mess, but uses an obvious green screen for the driving scenes) and lead to a video environment totally unique. I could go on forever about this stuff, and no doubt some graduate student is writing his thesis paper about Trapped In The Closet at this moment.
Drag out the usual clichés: So good it’s bad; they all apply.
Do I really need to tell you that he wrote and directed it, too, or had you figured that out by now? You could buy the DVD somewhere, but there’s no need. Catch it on www.ifc.com or youtube. Chapter 12.5 is one to watch to get you up-to-date on the story-so-far, and then you can decide if you want to watch from the beginning. You will curse me, of course, but you will be obsessed, as I am.

-Hysteric Eric