THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Bottom of the Barrel Movie Reviews: Zombie Flesh Eaters

Bottom of the Barrel Movie Reviews: Zombie Flesh Eaters

In the last Bottom of the Barrel Movie Review I promised a very special one in the near future. And that is true. It is coming in the future – just not now. I was going to review the Big Daddy of video nasties but I have actually acquired some more so would rather do those first.

And today’s is Zombie Flesh Eaters, (AKA Zombi 2 and Zombie) directed by one of the greats of Italian gore – Lucio Fulci.

Let me start by saying once again those in Australia are getting fucked over by dvd companies. A lovely 2 disc 25th Anniversary Edition was released in the US. No sign of it in Australia. One disc.

And even that one disc is fucked. Despite the box and on-line retailers proclaiming the film having a 5.1 soundtrack, there is no sign of it on the disc. A TOTALLY AWESOME 2.0 stereo!!! Oh yeah. Who needs 5.1? So we miss out on the second disc and the remastered soundtrack. But if you think that is the end of the fucking over by the dvd company you are sorely mistaken.

The box proclaims it to be a 2.35:1 aspect ratio and it is…. sort of. It is more of a 2.35:1 ratio inside a standard 4:3 picture. Yes it is fucked somehow (again completely unlike the glorious transfer on the US disc). My widescreen tv has numerous settings for different broadcast ratios. All dvds (whether 1.85:1 or 2.35, 2.40:1 et al) require the Full setting, standard tv and 4:3 aspect ratio films get set to the Normal setting. The Full setting both squashed and stretched the image terribly and the Normal setting left my screen with more black space than actual picture. One of the other three or fours settings on the tv gave me a picture that used up more of the screen area without distorting the image too badly.

So my advice – DO NOT BUY THIS DISC IN AUSTRALIA. If local dvd companies are going to fuck us over, then let’s fuck them over. Import the 25th Anniversary disc. Import a copy of this movie. Download it. Burn it. Whatever. Just don’t fucking buy it.

Ok. On to the film. This is a movie about zombies that eat flesh.

A small deserted boat is found in drifting into New York harbour with a zombie on board. A young woman (whose father owned the boat) and a British newspaper reporter travel to the Antilles Islands in order to locate her father. When they get there, they find out that a mysterious disease has killed him, along with many others. However they won’t stay dead. Voodoo curses, a semi-mad doctor, and hoards of flesh-eating zombies abound.

With a title like Zombie Flesh Eaters (and knowing it is an Italian film) you basically watch it for two reasons – tits and gore.

Tits!

More tits!

And the only good thing I can say about this shitty disc, is the one truthful thing that the box says – this is an uncut version.

I remember seeing the Infinity Video version (once again kudos to the excellent Refused Classification site) many years ago and yeah – the censors butchered it. The big “controversy” about this film was the ‘splinter in the eye’ scene and this uncut scene is definitely not like I remember it. It is much, much better…..

The synthesised soundtrack is surprisingly effective giving many scenes are creepy surrealism (because let’s face it – does it get more creepily surreal than zombies arising from the grave because of voodoo?)

And speaking of the zombies, these zombies look awesome. They do look like they have been decaying underground for differing lengths of time, and the way they slowly crawl out of the ground is great. And the gore it pretty damn good as well. There is some superb make up work here and it is much better than your usual shitty Italian fare.

And that pretty much sums up my opinion of this film. Though there is only a flicker of plot/story and the characters are entirely forgettable, it has atmosphere – and that is something that is typically lacking from most Italian films (and most modern horror remakes).

If you like your gore gratuitous with wet and wild shark on zombie action, then you will enjoy Zombie Flesh Eaters.

1 comment:

AnonymousJune 15, 2007 at 5:39 AM
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Background

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights