Movie Review: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

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Synopsis: After the population of New Guinea begins turning into zombies, four commandos and two reporters brave hoards of the undead to find the source. Only distrust threatens to make their journey even more difficult.

Who's in it? The movie stars Margie Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, José Gras and Gabriel Renom.


Review: It's another cold, rainy and now stormy night so we ended up staying home and watching a movie again. Since it has been a while since our last zombie movie, I went with Hell of the Living Dead. After watching it, I immediately wished I had picked a different movie.

As far as the overall plot is concerned, this Italian film is basically your typical zombie movie, borrowing from (ripping off) plenty of other films. There are zombies created by an experiment gone bad, they eat people and anyone who is bitten turns into one. 

It's a proven formula that is hard to mess up. Unfortunately, this movie managed to do just that.

One of the film's biggest problems, in my opinion at least, is a lack of focus. The zombie scenes are passable but there is a whole lot of non-zombie stuff that both tends to drag and, at times, almost seems like it belongs in a completely different film, especially the ridiculously long scene involving a native tribe and a lot of gratuitous nudity.

As I told my wife, with all the stock footage spliced in, it looked like a National Geographic film that happened to have zombies.

I also have to say, for a team of highly trained military men, those commandos didn't exactly seem elite. I mean, how many times did they need to be told to shoot the zombies in the head? There were so many wasted bullets and every one of them who was killed absolutely deserved it and sadly, that just made it hard to be invested or care if they lived or died.

Final Opinion: It's a film that proves not all zombie movies are the same and I don't mean that in a good way. This was not worth watching.

My Grade: F

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Here are some reviews of other zombie movies: 

Movie Review: Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2018)

Movie Review: Zombie Hunter (2013)

Movie Review: Revenge of the Zombies (1943)

Movie Review: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

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