Customer Reviews

Zombie Nightmare [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

One of the horror world's most loved creatures have have been knocked down to a new level of B with the 1986 straight to video gem known as Zombie Nightmare. Naturally this 5 star rating would be puzzling to the other reviewers since the film on it's own must be horrendous. See we're smart (unlike someone we know) and choose to take the guaranteed enjoyment route with our beloved Mystery Science Theater crew...assuring us a great time. Not only having the comfort of MST laughs was the highlight here though. The real story was the Super Sid Brothers getting to see Adam West as one of the films main characters. We're guessing this was before the fact West realized he was more of a walking punchline then actual actor because he acted his life out in this one. He even took things to a new level sporting a sweet mustache catapulting himself to a DMF times 10!

Zombie Nightmare opens up with a voodoo priestess resurrecting a dead meat-head followed by the full playing of Ace of Spades by Motorhead. Yeah Yeah Fire Fire! From there we're introduced to a car packed with street toughs led by Joey Lawrence's cousin and Eddie Haskle's brother...yeah that sounds like one tough crew huh? Eddie's brothers main squeeze just happens to be a young poorly acted Tia Carrere long before Wayne Campbell met her in a little sweet shop at the edge of town. The crew winds up doing a little hit and run action giving us our main zombie of the evening. Once he's brought back to like he exacts revenge, very laughably, snapping 2 necks and racking up a body count of 5 including the mustached Adam West.

What a beauty the MST3K version of Zombie Nightmare was. They added so much charm to the already hilarious acting, awful fight scenes, zombie murders, and all around terribly written plot. For the true Zombie fans out there this would be a complete nightmare, which is probably why they titled it what they did, but for us it was absolutely perfect. In no way does the movie have any sense of direction or purpose but delivers on all B cylinders with more then a handful of laughs. It will leave you in tears and sheer disillusion which just happens to be a perfect combo platter. It even has to be closed out the only classic way we know...yeah Drive In Totals, you got that straight!

Hilarious soundtrack

Meat head hit and run

Food throwing league infraction...with a huge fine coming

awful 7-11 fight with thug that looks like Don Mattingly after Burns made him cut his sideburns

Mom pegged in face with handful of cold angel hair pasta

Chubby guy fight and stabbing...possible Knights of the Round table shirt in big boy size

Completely out of place tennis scene 38 minutes in...very trippy

2 Zombie Neck snaps

Mullet Count of 6

DMF of 7

Detective Columbo's brother

hot tub scene with wet tidy whitties

Zombie Nightmare is basically about a Zombie (John Milk Thor) who gets revenge on a group of young party happy teenagers( including Tia Carrere) who run him over while going grocery shopping for his mother.
There is actually a whole lot more to this story where it includes a cop Capt. Tom Churchman (Adam West of all people) his Lt. Frank Sorrell (Frank Dietz) Molly Mokembe (Manuska Rigaud) with a past history some 20+ years earlier.
Im not going to play spoiler but the Zombie goes out to get revenge on the teenagers and some other lucky victims as well. Molly Mokembe is a voodoo woman who creates the Zombie.
What does Adam West have to do with this ? Watch it and see !
It is not too terribly gory, save for one scene and no real nudity. I would call it a PG-13 type of movie.
This movie used to play on USA pretty frequently back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It has a great metal soundtrack (Motorhead, Fist,etc)
This movie is no classic, but it has a decent script, pretty crummy acting but the Zombie was pretty neat and Adam West brings his name value & talent to the movie.
I cant really recommend it to everyone since its not a classic, but if you liked movies such as the Gate, Night of the Creeps, Octaman, Forbidden World, Incredible Melting Man , Slithis or well, even worse or even more obscure cult films than that Id give it a try.
Yes it might be schlock to some, gold to others..
Personally speaking I love this film and is one of my guilty pleasures..
Code Red was supposed to have released this on DVD some 18 months ago & there was a long silence until a few of us started emailing them, asking them whats up with Zombie Nightmare. They replied saying it would be out by Halloween, and it is, but not from Code Red.
So now, the owner of Code Red, went to the owner of Scorpion releasing (they are brothers from what I just heard) and now Zombie Nightmare is coming out.
So far the DVD specs from what I was told is that Scorpion will be porting over the audio commentary Code Red did with John Fasano, Frank Dietz and John Mikl Thor And it will also include a featurette with all three plus director Jack Bravman.
Also it will be anamorphic widescreen..
All in all this will be a probably the one and only definitive release (unless you count the MST3K version) for Zombie Nightmare..
Finally its time to get rid of those VHS tapes of it ! The DVD is finally coming ! :)

This movie is all about perspective. What do I mean? Well...
as a horror movie this movie is CRAP! But as a comedy! IT ROCKS!!!!
Think about it man! The "hero" gets hit by a car and NO ONE!!! NO ONE!!! even thinks to call 911! Whats up with that? Not even his mom calls for an ambulance! SHE CALLS A VOODOO WITCHDOCTOR!!! Thanks mom! You win parent of the year!
This movie is one of the BEST B-movies I've seen! This is a rare gem! It proves that you can polish sh.... :>
What one should do is get a bunch of friends together and watch it MST3K style! Mock the horrible acting, editing, lack of plot, lack of anything that makes this film remotely horrific or engaging as anything other than a comedy.
Where comedies have failed (to make me laugh) this film has made me laugh so hard I cried and my gut hurt! The thwarted robbery of "Mr. Peterson" the Italian grocer had me in stitches for 15 minutes alone!
Ok...I gotta stop. I'm cracking up again! Watch the film! Laugh! Enjoy yourself!

Very very good release! The picture is a fully remastered. A great transfer! Special features have an interview with the creators. It's great! Good old movie. Fans were waiting for him on DVD for a long time.

Not much to say here except this has to be one of the worst movies ever made. There is no talent present in front of or behind the camera. The only joy is a little schadenfreude watching Adam West sink to a career low as the police captain. At least I hope he hasn't sunk any lower than this. The story, if it matters, a young man is run over and killed by a group of rowdy teenagers. The mother does what any of us would and takes the body to the local voodoo priestess (every small town has one). The boy is reanimated as a zombie and is directed by the priestess to take revenge on his killers one by one. Add in a soundtrack of 80s hair metal songs and you have yourself a movie. Such as it is. Some of the worst dialog you will ever hear spoken by some of the worst actors you will ever see playing out one of the dullest, most cliche-ridden stories you will ever be subjected to.

Ah, the experiences of childhood and the memories we procure from them. Looking back, we can see how they mold and shape us, crafting something from those moments that oftentimes plague our fragile little minds. In the case of our young focal point, for instance, there are the joys of baseball and watching your father coach little league, throwing out pitch after pitch while crafting in you a love for the sport that will never leave you. There are also the heroic moments afterward, like your father rushing in and saving a poor Haitian girl from the press of two thugs and their sexual exploits. And there are also those with darker tenses, like the hero finding himself shattered, folded into a ball with a knife wound ending his life. Still, these experiences sometimes make us indignant to the vile, keeping us on a path of the tried and true. Unfortunately, when that life is cut short as well, revenge and a debt from the past can be used as a calling card for those that are left to pick up the pieces, and the images in the mind can sometimes be used to recall the transgressions leading to our passing.

Within Zombie Nightmare, there are some portions that are unintentionally funny, some that are stomachable, and some that are downright terrible. This makes a mesh of ideas and loosely contrived notions that are, in two words, tiring and worn-out. The plot, with its voodoo roots, is nothing groundbreaking and creates many a loophole within its questionable delivery system, leaving the viewer sometimes holding the always burdensome question "why." The camera play leaves much to be desired as well, accenting the fact that the storyline isn't the best by mesmerizing its audience with a collage of blurs and ocular metaphors that seem to puzzle even the most trained of eyes. Also added to this is the fact that the actors, aside from one of the supposed "bad guys," are extremely terrible and its hard to find a side to root for. Dice a little cheapness into your zombie creation, mixing the fact that it is undead with its need to cradle a bat and same things, and you have an equation of the unwatchable sort.

I am not going to even waste my time by telling you how bad this movie is.
Here are a few things though:
Gore- None
Zombies- one until the last 30 seconds of the movie
Acting- the worst i have ever seen..Tia Carrera is the lead actress...need i say more
Editing- please....
Do not buy this movie...fan of Zombie movies or not.
You have been warned

I like to think myself pretty well immersed in the glory that is horror, yet the one type of monster I've never really come to like is a zombie. Maybe it's because zombies - well, they're ugly, first of all; who wants to see a zombie when we could just as easily watch a luscious brunette vampire? Second, they don't really do anything but stumble around. Third, I can't remember the last time I saw a zombie actually eating someone's brain - that's pretty much their only selling point, and they never do it anymore. Of course, another reason I don't particularly like zombies is all the irredeemably bad movies such as Zombie Nightmare I've seen. Yes, Zombie Nightmare is just another great big clump on the compost heap of lousy zombie films. Still, this one does have a couple of things its counterparts do not - a pre-star Tia Carrere and a post-star Adam West operating in complete "crash and burn what is left of my career" mode. If there were ever a time Adam West should have been wearing a mask, it was in this laugher.

Zombie Nightmare starts out with a shameless attempt to win the viewer's sympathy by showing us a bunch of kids playing baseball. When it becomes obvious that this ploy is not going to work, the filmmakers take their frustration out on the poor old baseball coach, having him save a Haitian girl's life and get himself killed in the process. Then we come back to the present, where the dead man's son, a hippie baseball star in his own mind, goes to the market, foils a robbery, and then gets run over by a gang of teenaged hooligans. Mom is not amused, and she calls in the help of Molly Mokembe, the town's local voodoo priestess. Molly is so upset that she starts in with the mumbo-jumbo immediately; most voodoo priestesses wait until they start chanting before speaking unintelligibly, but not our Molly. I didn't understand a single word she said in this entire movie. She must know what's she doing, though, because Mr. Baseball ends up being reanimated (as a zombie, of course) and sets out to exact revenge on the useless juvenile delinquents who ended his baseball career before he even made it to the farm league. A bad movie gets even worse when an obviously bitter Adam West pops up as the world's worst police captain. Oh, there's a little bit of a plot twist toward the end, but it's a case of way too little way too late. The soundtrack of forgettable mid-1980s heavy metal doesn't help things, either.

Anybody out there who despises Adam West will probably love Zombie Nightmare, as will those who can't get enough of coroners with ridiculous voices. Everyone else may well find themselves writhing around on the floor in pain within the first ten minutes of the "action." You don't watch Zombie Nightmare; you suffer through it, hoping to retain a thread of sanity after it's finally over. I don't particularly like zombies, but I'll be the first to say that the shambling, rotting, ambulatory, walking undead deserve much better than this.