(1988)
aka: Revenge of the Living Zombies; Zombie Nosh
Produced and Directed by Bill Hinzman
Starring Bill Hinzman, John Mowod, Leslie Ann Wick, Kevin Kindlin, Rik Billock
Reviewed by Michael Bolvary
Nothing makes my day like a great zombie movie, and while Flesheater is hardly a great zombie movie, it made my day anyway. There's nothing new or original here, but there's hardly ever anything new in modern zombie cinema, so I'm happy just to see the familiar done well.
Actually, Flesheater isn't very well done at all: the acting is abysmal, the photography is perfunctory, the sound is shit, and the most explicit thing about the gore is its cheap phoniness. But all of these deficiencies actually work in the film's favour. Like Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead, this film is enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. Its "quality" derives solely from its geek value, which teeters on the brink, but never goes off the edge into the pits of moronic stupidity. Despite being realized with hardly any style, atmosphere or vision, Flesheater remains an passable experience for diehard zombie fans.
First and foremost, this is a Bill Hinzman vanity production. You remember Bill Hinzman--he played the cemetery ghoul who attacked Johnny and Barbara in the opening sequence of Romero's original Night of the Living Dead. That brief but unforgettable movie role created a minor but definitive cult status, so Hinzman decided to rob his own grave with this blatant rip-off of Romero's movie, playing practically the same character twenty years later. My initial feelings were rather ambivalent. On one hand, it's pretty pathetic to see a middle-aged man lumbering around like an idiot, eating the guts of people half his age and groping naked young women. On the other hand, "it's rather endearing to see old man Hinzman with a chunk of bloodied flesh clamped between his teeth or else gnoshing on a freshly yanked-out, still-beating heart while others his age are safely ensconced in their La-Z-Boys, playing remote control roulette with their satellite TVs," Chas. Balun writes in Gore Score 2001 (pg. 227). Ultimately, however, what's really dispiriting about this film is the fact that Hinzman couldn't turn out a living dead movie that's any more coherent, polished or professional than the work of over-eager fans of Romero's movies; the only thing that distinguishes Flesheater from such other living dead dreck like Meat Market or Zombie Bloodbath is the fact that it's shot on celluloid film and not on video.
The story is non-stop cliches from beginning to end: your standard bunch of idiotic kids goes on a hayride in the Pennsylvania woods on Halloween. A stump puller accidentally uncovers a coffin inscribed with a pentagram and the statement "This evil which will take flesh and blood from thee and turn all ye unto evil." The coffin is opened to reveal Hinzman, who prompty rises and sparks off the zombiegeddon. (Later on it's revealed that he was the victim of a Satanic cult murder, but this explanation is so throwaway that it hardly matters.) The Flesheater's victims, predictably, become zombies themselves, attacking the kids and various locals before they all get blown away by a posse of gung-ho rednecks the next day.
The standard-issue storyline is just a frayed shoestring that barely ties together the various zombie-attack sequences, which are often so poorly realized that they have no impact. (I hate the way the corpses only become reanimated the instant they are discovered by the living people; so much more impact couldn have been produced by having the zombies attack people by surprise, completely out of the blue.) The more competent sequences are undermined by inserting ludicrous dialogue and behaviour: In a large, isolated mansion in the country, we see a family shelling out candy. The Flesheater knocks on the door, and a little girl dressed as an angel answers. "Wow!" she says, marvelling at the realistic costume. "You're supposed to say 'Trick or treat!'" He then picks her up and takes a bite out of her, with a Krunch bar falling on the ground. Innovative. (The fact that this little girl is played by Hinzman's own daughter, Heidi, is even more depressing.) When two teens, Bob (John Mowod) and Carrie (Leslie Ann Wick) crash a costume party and tell the dancing teens that they're being pursued by the living dead, one drunk kid remarks, "I think you've seen one too many cheesy zombie movies, pal!" Yeah, and this one is it. Flesheater even reminds us, once again, that to destroy a zombie, "Ya gotta shoot 'em in the head!" Somebody get me a gun!
Special effects artist Gerry Gergely is no Tom Savini (although he teaches at Savini's makeup school), but he does manage to create some memorable gore scenes in spite of the budgetary restrictions. There are shootings aplenty, along with impalings, a heart-munching, and a good hatchet-in-the-head effect. The scene of a mutilated cop is particularly gross: it looks like just a pile of chewed meat in clothes. Also effective is the musical score by Erica Portnoy--a chilling, rhythmic, piano-driven melody that works for both the autumnal landscape scenes as well as for the zombie-attack sequences. If only there were some variation in the theme.
In the end, this is a film I liked almost in spite of myself. Cheap, unpolished, careless, amateurish and regressive, it nevertheless delivers the goods in the gore department and creates a modicum of suspense and tension. Had the actors done a better job of creating more memorable characters, had the technical aspects been more polished, had the story been more coherent and driving, and had Hinzman tried a little harder to make a movie worthy of the film that made him a minor horror icon, Flesheater could have been something. Unfortunately, it's not.
The 2003 Media Blasters/Shriek Show DVD re-release of the film is nicely letterboxed at 1.85:1, but the transfer could have been better: the dark scenes are too grainy and the bright scenes are too grimy. But considering that the film was originally shot in 16mm, this is forgiveable.
Besides an extensive still-photo gallery, this disc features an excellent, 35-minute interview/making-of documentary "Back Into the Woods". Directed by William Hellfire, this film is informative, enjoyable and more entertaining than the feature itself, and is really better than the movie deserves. Hinzman, Gerry Gergely and executive producer Andy Sands are interviewed, and each offer funny and insightful anecdotes about making the movie. My personal favourite part is Gergely's recollections of working with an incompetent assistant: On his way to the first setup on the first production day, Gergely's driving his brand-new car on an icy street and has to brake suddenly to avoid hitting a car stopped at an intersection ahead. He stops just in time, then--crash!--he gets rear-ended by a guy and all the vehicles slide out into the intersection. Who's the idiot responsible? Gergely's new makeup assisant, driving his father's pickup truck. Not the best way to start a working relationship. Things don't get much better when Gergely gets bagful of pig guts and tells his assistant to find the heart. Hours later, Gergely finds his assistant sifting through the entrails in blood-drenched rubber boots, apron, gloves and gas mask (which doesn't even have the filtres in, so it's useless). "Uh ... what does a heart look like?" the assistant asks. They eventually find it, but they're so late that they can't make a mould of it for the required scene and end up using the real pig heart for the heart-eating scene--without telling Hinzman.
The only gratuitous element of the documentary shows Gergely making up Hinzman in the Flesheater makeup and having him pose for pictures as he's terrorizing a young girl; it's fun, but a bit unnecessary and self-indulgent on the part of the people making the film.
My personal favourite bonus feature on the disc is Bill Hinzman's zombie pizza commercial. We see stark b/w footage of a geeky delivery boy arriving in a cemetery with a box of "GoodFellas Brick Oven Pizza." He is stalked and attacked by Hinzman and a bunch of ravenous zombies--they take him to the ground and animalistically tear, rip, chew and eat--the pizza. Man, why don't they make more commercials like that?
STORY: 2 bitch-slaps
PICTURE/AUDIO: 3 bitch-slaps
EXTRAS: 4.5 bitch-slaps
OVERALL: 3.5 bitch-slaps
