The Duck Speaks

Um, why did I agree to this?

Normally I like a short introduction at the head of my reviews, a warm-up session to get my head in the right place. Friends, this is all the segue I’m can manage:

Scott, ole buddy ole pal, I’m praying to god whatever you got in this insane group Russian Roulette makes you suffer as I have suffered. Cause if it doesn’t, you’re going to have some serious negative karma stored up. We’re talking vehicular homicide bad. We’re talking lightning on a sunny day bad. We’re talking marathons of “Full House” bad.

Aw man, I need to talk about the movie? Stupid union rules.

Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence
Starring a bunch people you’ve never heard of who’ll be working in gas stations the rest of their lives if there’s any justice in the world.
Written and directed by Andress Schnaus

A plot summary of this tripe is ridiculousness on a truly existential level, like finding narrative structure in roadkill, but I’m going to try anyway. Bear with me, as the credits don’t list any character names (Why the hell would they? That would indicate actual characters), and I don’t have the strength of will to try and attach names to faces, mainly because that would mean watching the movie again.

There’s a short “Warning” displayed on the screen and read aloud:

Extremes scenes of gore to follow, not for the weak-hearted or young,
you must be this tall to ride the ride, etc.

It’s not actively offensive or inept, so that’s nice. Although a more accurate warning might have been:

Take heed- pointless mess about to eat up an hour and twenty minutes
of your life.

A plane takes off, and a narrator explains that the plane is carrying dangerous biological weaponry. It crashes over a huge forest. Already I’m getting some phantom pains, because a.)we don’t see the plane crash, just hear about it, and b.) the narrator sounds exactly like I did when I made my voice all deep in the fourth grade.

An establishing shot of what I take to be a hospital, than some confusing camera work as a group (gaggle?) of reporters assault a young doctor. They ask him some vague questions about zombies and people dying, which I’m sure is supposed to be exposition or foreshadowing but fails on all accounts. Mainly because we’re subjected to some of the worst dubbing anywhere, ever. The movie was made in Germany, and for the English version apparently someone hired a bunch of drunken frat boys. Lip movements don’t match up, of course, but the dubbed in voices often keep talking long after the character they are speaking for has closed his mouth, most times in an attempt to be funny. It’s like watching an incredibly awful version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”- worse than the real one, even.

We’re barely five minutes in, and already my lungs are bursting for air.

The Doc, who is dubbed by someone doing an awful Dolemite impression, goes to an autopsy, and here’s where we got our first taste (ew) of the awful, awful gore that will haunt us through the rest of the picture. Bad prosthetics and animal intestines. Yup, that’s class right there. I’m honestly grateful that the movie is filmed/edited/shot as bad it is, because otherwise this could have been almost unbearable.

We meet our other hero, (hero here is used only in the loosest sense, like the words “musician” or “singer” for Britney Spears) Dr. Simon, or as I call him, Dr. Whiny or Dr. Pain In My Ass. Think of the most annoying person you’ve ever met. The guy whose voice made your eardrums bleed. That’s about right.

The corpse comes back to life in a shockingly unexciting scene. The First Doc (or Hip White Guy) says, “I know how to deal with this,” pulls out a gun and shots the revived corpse in the head. Or the unnaturally blonde wig. Much blood ensues.

Credits.

Already starting to have flashbacks here, and I haven’t even hit the quarter hour mark. The things I do for my- what, exactly? Art? Sigh.

After the credits, there’s another long establishing shot of the hospital- for no reason, since as soon as we’ve finished setting-up ad nauseum that yes, the building we were in before the credits started is still there, Dr. PIMA and Dr. HWG come out the front doors and we never see the hospital again.

HWG explains about the zombies, gives us the method for killing them in this movie (head-shot, how creative), and then we cut to a guy driving his car down a muddy dirt road. The car stalls. The guy gets out, wanders a bit, and is killed by a zombie with a chainsaw.

The zombies in this movie are some of the most inconsistent dead I’ve seen in my life. Some are blue-skinned like in Romero pictures, some have what looks like broken pottery glued to their faces, and this first guy is wearing a bad mask. You could make a case that the filmmakers (again, word used in loosest possible sense) were trying to reference earlier zombie flicks, but why you’d want to defend these people is beyond me. Have you considered seeing a therapist? I know a grumpy goldfish who could help you out.

So here’s the rest of the film for you: zombies attack and kill innocent passerbys. HWG and PIMA investigate the plane crash, with gas masks and Geiger counters no less (?), before getting attacked by other zombies. More innocent people die. HWG rushes PIMA to the hospital to keep him from bleeding to death, stopping only twice to investigate other zombie attacks.

And it’s at one of those stops that we get our most tasteless scene. I mean tasteless beyond the essential bland incomprehensibility of this movie. HWG finds a zombie gal, shall we say, orally pleasuring a zombie guy- only because they’re zombies, there’s a lot of biting and blood going on. HWG pulls the zombie girl off her mate and starts ineffectually trying to kill her. Her boyfriend, his member still floating in the breeze, ditches both of them, instead going after PIMA, whose patiently bleeding to death in the car. HWG finishes the girl, and goes after the guy, finally- gulp- ripping off his manhood and throwing it out into the highway. And yes, he makes a special point of driving over the thing as he backs out.

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Thankfully, the organ in question is blatantly fake. And we were given a full package shot of the autopsy guy earlier in the film, so we can tell.

Let’s get this over with, shall we? Dr. Simon eventually goes zombie, and HWG (whose real name is Dr. Burns, in case you care- and if you do, remember what I said about the goldfish) cuts his head off. More zombies killing ineffectual strangers. One of them has a Ghosbusters sweatshirt on, and I started thinking about how much I love Ghostbusters, and how great Bill Murray is, and how I wish the sequel had been a little bit better, but it was still decent- Oh, right. Back to our (shudder) story.

Apparently, HWG goes home for the night after helping get his assistant killed, because the next we see he’s in bed, getting a phone call about zombies overrunning the hospital. This is fifty minutes in (I think- my notes start getting a bit shaky at this point), and since we still haven’t had any plot to speak of, I assumed protecting the hospital would be it.

Nope. HWG walks to the hospital (?), attacks a few zombies, and then falls down a hill for no reason and goes unconscious. (My notes say: “One hour. I’m in hell. Help me.”)

Then he’s in a house. He wanders around, sees himself as a zombie, kills some more undead, breaks a whole lot of mirrors, and then wakes up just in time to get et. You heard right: the last ten minutes of this movie are spent on a dream sequence THAT HAS NO PURPOSE, other than to keep us from getting to the corpse ridden hospital that might have possibly been a little interesting.

We see zombies walking down a street. The narrator comes back, explains that zombies are running everything, terror everywhere, the center isn’t holding, etc., and frankly, I don’t care at all, I’m not even listening, because the Ghostbusters sweatshirt is back and I just keep my eyes on it until the credits begin to roll.

Phew. This is a bad movie, folks. Hell, this isn’t a movie, it’s an idiot with a video camera gone horribly, horribly wrong. I haven’t even hit all of what sucks; there’s the music that manages to rip off “Twin Peaks,” the shaky camera angles, the acting which makes the folks in Waiting for Guffman look Broadway bound. There’s no reason anyone should ever watch this. It’s not funny bad. It’s just bad. I never thought I could be so not scared of zombies in my life.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch Theater of Blood again. No zombies. Just Vincent Price, Shakespeare, and a bra-less Diana Rigg. Aaaaaaah.