Killer B's on DVD: Zombie Bloodbath Trilogy

by Matt Bradshaw Jun 4th 2007 // 6:03PM

Filed under: Horror, Independent, Killer B's on DVD




I know my horror movies pretty well, and I know my grade-z schlock, but even I had never heard of Zombie Bloodbath, let alone its two sequels. All three films are ultra gory shot-on-video zombie films written and directed by Todd Sheets, and the trilogy will be available on June 12 in a two DVD set from Camp Motion Pictures. Although hailing mostly from the 1990's these three films are right at home amongst Camp's Retro 80's Horror Collection, through which they've been resurrecting direct to video horror flicks from the early days of home video. Does the world really need three Zombie Bloodbaths? In a nutshell, no. While it was interesting to see Sheets' skill and style as a filmmaker evolve over the course of the three movies -- and he improves remarkably -- the films are too amateurish to be drawn into.

Being the first of the "trilogy" (other than the presence of flesh eating ghouls the films have no connection to one another) 1993's Zombie Bloodbath is the rawest. The audio is tinny, lighting varies from decent to dingy, and the acting is downright painful, with performers who often have trouble keeping themselves from laughing on camera. A cluster of suburban homes is built on the same spot where a nuclear power plant melted down years ago (yes, you read that right), turning lots of folks into flesh eating zombies. This may or may not have something to do with the Indian burial ground on top of which the plant was constructed. In a move that would have even the staunchest conspiracy theorist laughing himself silly, the facility, reactor and all, was buried and the land sold. A pair of teenagers become trapped in a subterranean tunnel and are quickly rescued, but their presence has somehow released the zombies imprisoned in the facility below. A band of humans enter the nuclear facility, which according to the logos on the walls and doors is actually the offices of the local Rotary Club. There's also a pair of rival all-girl street gangs whose leaders must join forces to survive the zombie scourge.

The film is obviously made for gore fans. Director Sheets doesn't skimp on the red stuff, or the entrails for that matter, and the zombie attacks are plentiful. Unfortunately they tend to be badly choreographed affairs that amount to little more than rough-housing with the walking dead, and they occur so frequently that the story, such as it is, stops dead in its tracks so these alleged action scenes can play out. Sheets makes the same error that a lot of newbie horror filmmakers make: the violence isn't the only remarkable thing about George Romero's zombie films, but it's the most obvious so Sheets focuses on emulating that. The gore loses its shock value early on, and the film has no other strengths to fall back on.

Zombie Bloodbath 2: Rage of the Undead is from 1995 and a handful of performers from the first film return playing different characters. A lot of the acting is still cringe-inducing, but overall there is a marked improvement. The story begins with a flashback to 1945. Two criminals attack a farming couple looking for the gold they supposedly have stashed around the place. There's no gold, but the couple are affiliated with a satanic cult that kills the two would-be thieves, disemboweling one of them and turning him into the farm's new scarecrow. The film shifts to modern times where a van full of college kids who are too old to be college kids have car trouble and find themselves seeking help at that same farm house. As luck would have it, three escaped convicts have also found their way there, and when one of them steals the coat from the scarecrow, the straw-stuffed man returns to life and looses a swarm of the walking dead upon the world. Much like the first film, this one quickly degenerates into a tedious series of zombie attacks, dwindling our heroes numbers each time, until a mind bogglingly convenient flesh-eating bacteria serves to even the odds.

Sheets takes on a somewhat more stylish approach this time, using occasional black and white inserts and slow motion. The sequel also becomes more mean spirited. Evisceration at the hands of the living dead is one thing, but scenes in which hold-up men force a man to eat broken glass and a woman is shot in the groin seem jarringly out of place in a film whose purpose is campy thrills. These scenes seem to draw from the spirit of 1980's House on the Edge of the Park, going so far as to making one of the hold up men resemble actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice as he appeared in that film. There's lots of zombie gore here, and it's competently executed for the most part, but as with the original it proves tiresome.

Zombie Bloodbath 3: Zombie Armageddon from 2000 culls the storyline for its apocalyptic zombie tale from an unlikely pair of sources: Sphere and The Breakfast Club. In the year 2070, zombies created by the U.S. government to fight a war are loaded aboard a space shuttle and fired into space for disposal (yes, it makes almost as much sense as burying a nuclear power plant in the suburbs in the first film). The separated cargo bay full of zombies falls through a black hole, and through a continuity glitch of epic proportions, the entire ship is transported to a high school basement in present day Kansas. A group of students are serving detention in the library, re-enacting scenes almost word for word from the aforementioned John Hughes film. A pair of AV geeks track a homing signal to the school's basement where they discover a space shuttle full of the walking dead. Much goriness ensues.

The space scenes are made from the crudest of video animation, and the nose cone of the shuttle in the school basement is represented by what appears to be a large cardboard cutout. Again, Sheets has evolved as a film maker in the five years since the previous entry. His use of lighting has come a long way, particularly in the scenes aboard the shuttle (though I'm fairly certain there are no brick walls in most NASA vehicles), and he's finally got a group of thespians who are reasonably convincing on-screen. The instances of zombies chowing down, while still plentiful, are mercifully fewer than in the previous installments. Sheets almost had me with this one, and I might have found it enjoyable on some schlocky level if I hadn't had to wade through his first two zombie epics to get this far. I'd be interested to see movies he's made since (though I'd prefer to see him do something that hasn't been as overdone as zombies), but as far as this DVD set is concerned, Zombie Bloodbath 3 counts as a third strike.

The set contains audio commentaries for the first two features. The commentary track for Zombie Bloodbath features Sheets and his son who was born while the film was shooting, and the director felt his son might have some of the same questions as the viewers. Fair enough, but since the kid was off-mike his questions were barely audible. Sheets flies solo for the commentary on Zombie Bloodbath 2. Other extras include lots of behind the scenes stuff, video from the Zombie Bloodbath 2 world premiere, one of the director's short films.

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