With it’s oh so lurid title and generic, high concept promise of the best of both worlds, Marino Giromlami’s Zombie Holocaust should, by rights, really be a bit of a VTSS no brainer (pardoning the pun)– a morti viventi, matter of fact.
In truth it’s a nightmare to write about. Mainly because it is so shit. But Zombie Holocaust is also difficult because it involves resisting the urge to talk about the directors (much, much!) finer moments elsewhere. Moments that have no need to occupy the same wasteland as this decidedly cynical (and meaningless) genre cash in.
There is plenty to resist with Zombie… There’s the godawful acting (to which even the ordinarily incapable talent of Ian McCulloch seems to struggle with); an ultimately insincere fusion of two genres that has all the integrity of a cold calling, double glazed window company and, above all, the decidedly uninterested direction of a man clearly pre-occupied with paying his latest gas bill. In fact, the only fun that can be had from Zombie Holocaust is in it’s relentless quest for grue for the empty sake of grue which, in the best case scenario, makes it irresistible shit .
If themes relating to the end of the world as we know it (certainly prevalent in the best that the spaghetti blood and guts cycle had to offer) are in residence, they are fully suppressed by an unrelenting (irresistible) urge to shock, offend and generally, bloodily, defecate all over the place instead. Which puts Enzo’s papa’s film as far away from the subtle realism of Roma Violenta or the whacked out moralism of Italia a mano armata as could be possible. And in any case, what the fuck is a man in his late 60s doing making dodgy cannibal, brain chomping, fluffy sex movies anyway?!
The overwhelming feeling here then, is that Girolami’s time and effort has been criminally misplaced. Had he opted to play with blood and guts within the poliziotteschi format for instance, we might be talking about a picture able to take on the nihilism of, say, Deodato’s Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man… and instead, we get a full frontal Alexandra Delli Conti scene (and that’s not the complaint!) with a maggot infested head in the bed (that is!). For laughs…
Which all sadly leads to the crushing conclusion that Zombie Holocaust is actually less irresistible shit, after all, and more a completely and utterly depressing (if not avoidable) shame…
