2.0 out of 5 stars
Troma-tized!, December 12, 2008
This review is from: Curse of the Cannibal Confederates - Aka Curse of the Screaming Dead (DVD)
Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (1982) During the VHS video boom of the mid to late 80's, a little company called Troma was doing well releasing low budget (or no-budget) flicks direct to video with goofy titles like Surf Nazis Must Die and The Toxic Avenger. In order to keep their output steady, in addition to their in-house productions they also made a habit of buying just about any extremely cheap horror and exploitation movie they could get their hands on and releasing them under goofy "Troma-tized" titles. Case in point, this little horror number, originally called Curse of the Screaming Dead and filmed in 1982 for what looks like a budget that would equal the average couple's bill at Outback, without booze or a Blooming Onion. Troma scooped it up and sent it out on VHS under the above title, which while vaguely wild is nothing compared to stuff like Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator! and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell. The story has a camper full of hippie types out for a weekend of fun in the forest, hunting, and doing whatever else long hairs would do in the boonies. The three couples are pretty interchangeable and non descript, except for the blind girl. Everybody whines and bickers for about the first half of the movie, then things go awry when one guy finds an ancient Civil War soldier's diary hidden in the ruins of an old church the group comes across. He takes it for no particular reason, and about 50 minutes into the running time the dead finally rise from the ancient cemetery outside the church. The next twenty minutes become a running battle between the unusually well armed hippies and the zombies, with the score going hippies 8, zombies 0. At this point the biggest effect has been a series of dummy zombie heads exploding when shot with the oft mentioned "exploding bullets" the rifle is loaded with. Ah, that explains the smoke filled blast each time one of the ghouls' heads is detonated. We throw in a couple of local policemen who show up out of nowhere, and at long last the bloody gut munching begins as the two old geezers and one of the hippies go down, making the score by this time hippies 14, zombies 3. Now, way back in my youth, the original Night of the Living Dead was shown at my senior prom. After the zombies in the movie have claimed a couple of victims and started their icky feast, my friend Tracey Burnett was heard to comment "Man, they're running that eating stuff into the ground!" If only he could have seen the equivalent scene in this movie! While the survivors begin a mad run to escape the horror, the movie screeches to a dead halt for about five minutes to allow the zombies plenty of time to grab, pull, yank, lick, taste , rend and play with long strands of foam rubber guts soaked in blood while LOUD slurping noises are heard on the soundtrack. It is also only after this sequence that the zombies live up to the original title as screams are finally heard over the soundtrack as they lumber about. Prior to that, the original title should have been "Curse of the Completely Silent Dead with Curiously Explosive Heads." The hippies start to die off quickly at this point, since there are only about 10 minutes left to the movie. Finally, we reach our big climax, ripped off from The Fog but without the final jolt. Considering how little happens in this movie and how poorly made it is, I didn't exactly hate this movie. I'm not sure that would be true for anyone else, though. I guess I was expecting it to be more like the worst of Troma's homemade product, which often goes for the gusto in bad taste and becomes mean spirited in the hopes of offending you since there's no other way to get an audience reaction with a movie made on a budget of the change found in Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman's couch cushions any given weekend. Since this movie was sincere in trying to be a real movie, no matter how badly it failed at it, I had a softer reaction to it. Still, not sure anyone else would feel that way, so unless you're a zombie movie completist, you're probably going to want to avoid this one.
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