HNUM²

Or Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 as my DVD is known.

Trying to find a way to cheat death, some scientists piss off a voodoo man by not saving his daughter from cancer. Using his magic he opens the third door to hell in order to start a plague of zombies to extract his revenge.
After the holy-man is killed, one of the demons from Bava’s Demons flies out of the ground and dispatches the scientists in gruesome ways.
Fortunately for the movie a couple of them escape for long enough to get their daughter (who was seemingly dubbed by a guy putting on a little girl voice) away from there. The ninja-zombies manage to kill the parents, though, and the daughter runs off into the sunset. Or something.

Conveniently her and her friend hook up with a bunch of Soldiers of Fortune. Mercenaries. But only on the side of the good guys. Even more conveniently their boat happens to have engine problems right at the island.
They soon discover that it’s a hostile environment when one of their number, in a move befitting the terribly inept band of mercenaries they actually are, runs off by himself after an unknown figure.

Coming across and abandoned hospital/armory/door of hell, they hole up to take care of the injured man.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the island a trio of scientists are searching for sciency things. Answers, or something.
Finding and reading from a book, they seem to release the hordes of hell (although there’s a zombie that has already been bitey elsewhere so I guess he must’ve snuck out for a snack or something.)
And then, in typical horror movie fashion, the porn stars shirt gets all torn and bloody. I guess the producers heard that topless porn stars’ll help sell tickets to your movie. Someone should probably have told them it only really works if you use women.

Anyway, he meets up with the mercs and they join forces to send the zombies back to hell with a lot of death, green and black slime and inconsistent zombies along the way.

What can I say about this movie? Well, it’s bad. Really bad. And not that funny kind of really bad that you sometimes get. Like Troll 2, from the same director. Or Burial Ground, another Italian zombie flick from the same era. Sure, there are some moments that are very funny, but they are sparse. Most of the running time is dull.

Criticizing the acting in the Italian films of this period is a bit unfair. Most of the people spoke their native language, having the dialogue dubbed into whatever language necessary for the release at a later time. As long as the dubbing is done well, the emotions and feelings most often come across as intended.
However, even the bad dubbing aside here, there seemed to be some really bad acting going on from at least half of the cast. Well, maybe overacting is more appropriate. There was a lot of overemphasizing emotions and unconvincing shows of anger, pain, fear, aggression.

The rest of the movie isn’t much better. The basic plot is satisfactory, but the movie is handled poorly.

The zombies, while not terrible to look at act different from one scene to the next. They’re one moment acrobatic ninjas, the next shuffling corpses. They’ll stay buried right until the opportune moment for them to arise. They’ll disappear and reappear. They’ll give the humans time for a good nights sleep. They’ll wait for stage direction before attacking. And when they do attack it’ll likely be at snails pace, giving time for the secondary characters to escape or destroy. Unless they’re attacking the heroes. Then they’ll come at ‘em like speed freaks, giving the chance to show off how awesome the hero is.

As for the mercenaries… Well, they’re about the worst bunch of mercenaries ever. Completely unobservant, unaware of their surroundings and unlikely to have ever survived any mission they’ve been on. They’ll let zombies walk right up to them. They’ll react slowly to danger. They’ll walk off on their own to investigate a taunting zombie. They seem to have more skill after becoming zombies.

The gore’s mostly shitty. Black or green slime, rubbery looking makeup, oatmeal and gray paint for the zombie skin. I do like the look of the classic Italian zombie type. The “wrapped in funeral shroud” look, and the shambling crowds of zombies here do have that creepy look about them. Shame all the featured zombies look so bad.

The music is bad. There’s two pieces of music that seem to score the whole movie. And both get on your nerves by the third or forth time you hear them.

On the good side, the camera man is competent. The framing of the shots is decent. The locations work. That’s as complimentary as I can get. Can’t recommend this one.