There are rip-offs, there are homages, and then there’s Hell of the Living Dead. In 1980 some shady Italian movie execs saw George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and like Jez and Super Hans from Peep Show, were all like “HE’S NICKED OUR IDEA AND THEN DONE IT BACK TO US”. Released under more aliases than most people have had hot dinners – including Virus, Zombie Creeping Flesh, and Night of the Zombies – Bruno Mattei’s notorious Italian zombie film is about as subtle as a brick through a window.
And I fucking love it. Not because it’s good. It really isn’t. Hell of the Living Dead is cheap, derivative, badly acted, poorly dubbed, and frequently held together with stock footage and wishful thinking. But it’s also one of those gloriously fucked-up pieces of Italian exploitation where every attempt to make a sensible film seems to have been abandoned somewhere around the halfway point. The result is a bizarre mixture of zombie horror, military action, jungle adventure, cannibal movie, and accidental comedy that somehow becomes considerably more entertaining the worse it gets.
The film wastes absolutely no time getting down to business. At a top-secret chemical research facility somewhere in Papua New Guinea, a rat causes a chemical leak, promptly dies, then decides that death is merely a minor inconvenience and comes back to life. It kills one of the workers, who promptly gets back up and attacks somebody else, and before long the entire facility has turned into a buffet of flesh-eating zombies. And all of this is accompanied by a groovy Goblin soundtrack. Well, sort of. The music is entirely made up of recycled Goblin material from previous scores and albums, so it sounds fantastic while also making the whole thing feel like someone has broken into a record collection and decided to score a zombie film with whatever they could find.
The action then switches to Spain, where we see a hostage situation by eco-terrorists being dealt with by a squad of heavily armed commandos, led by Lieutenant Mike London (José Gras) and accompanied by the increasingly unhinged Zantoro (Franco Garofalo). They look like they’ve wandered straight out of Dawn of the Dead, right down to the matching uniforms, and that’s because Hell of the Living Dead was explicitly conceived as a lighter-toned film inspired by Romero’s classic. And you know how the opening of Dawn depicts the harrowing downfall of society, as the authorities struggle against the tidal wave of human incompetence, superstition, and breakdown of the social contract, whilst themselves succumbing to madness? Well, here, it just plays out like a far shittier version of Predator’s first act.
Meanwhile, back in Papua New Guinea, French television reporter Lia Rousseau (Margit Evelyn Newton) and her cameraman Max (Gabriel Renom) are dispatched to investigate the strange outbreak caused by the leak at the chemical research, eventually crossing paths with London’s commandos. Before long, the two groups are thrown together and forced to make their way through a landscape filled with the undead, while trying to figure out exactly what the fuck has happened.
The plot then becomes a fairly loose excuse to drag everyone from one zombie encounter to the next. They stumble across villages overrun by the dead, encounter local tribes, hide out in houses and generally spend an astonishing amount of time shooting zombies. Not very effectively, mind you; watching these soldiers fire at the undead is like watching your mate who exclusively plays console FPS games finally try to make the jump to PC. The film also occasionally attempts to tackle ecological themes and the exploitation of the developing world by richer nations, which is a bit like the class clown suddenly deciding he’s going to make a serious point about geopolitics.
Being an Italian horror film, things inevitably take a bleak turn, with pretty much the entire cast eventually meeting their end at the hands of the zombies and the outbreak spreading towards the civilised world. It’s the sort of ending that sounds suitably apocalyptic until you spend more than five seconds thinking about how the fuck a load of zombies in Papua New Guinea are supposed to reach Europe. Unless they’re getting on a plane or commandeering a cruise ship, the logistics don’t exactly hold up. But this is Hell of the Living Dead, so it’s probably best not to start applying too much logic to proceedings, because you’ll only give yourself a headache.
Mattei reportedly wanted to make something like Dawn of the Dead but lighter, and you can certainly see that intention in the finished product. There’s an almost surreal looseness to the whole thing, with characters behaving in ways that would be completely unacceptable in any remotely competent zombie movie. The soldiers repeatedly unload entire magazines into zombies despite knowing perfectly well that shooting them in the head is what actually works, while Zantoro spends much of the film behaving like a man who’s been told he’s starring in a completely different movie.
Franco Garofalo is fucking magnificent. As Zantoro, he’s easily the most entertaining person in the film. He spends the movie looking increasingly deranged, screaming at everyone, making terrible decisions and generally appearing as though he’s about three seconds away from biting somebody himself. There are performances where you can tell an actor knows they’re in a bad film and decides to have fun with it. Garofalo seems to have gone one step further and decided he was going to personally carry the fucking thing over the finish line.
Margit Evelyn Newton is perfectly adequate as Lia, although the material doesn’t give her much opportunity to do anything beyond looking concerned, screaming, and occasionally taking her clothes off. José Gras is similarly straight-faced as Mike, playing the role of the stoic action hero while the film around him gradually collapses into complete fucking nonsense.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the zombies. This isn’t the polished, photogenic undead we’re used to seeing in modern productions. These zombies look like they’ve been dragged out of a ditch, left in the sun for several days and then told to report for work. The make-up is crude but effective, and Mattei is more than happy to cover the screen in blood, guts, and decomposing flesh. Heads explode under gunfire, zombies tear into victims and bodies are ripped apart with the sort of enthusiasm that makes you wonder whether the effects department had been promised a bonus for every litre of fake blood they used.
There’s also a particularly memorable bit involving a dead old woman and her missing cat, which eventually turns into exactly the sort of grimy, tasteless nonsense you want from an Italian zombie film. It’s not sophisticated, but sophistication would arguably ruin the fucking thing.
The film’s biggest problem is that it spends an extraordinary amount of time showing us things that aren’t actually part of the story. Large chunks of the Papua New Guinea setting are constructed from stock footage, including material from documentaries, which gives the film a bizarre National Geographic quality. One minute you’re watching Franco Garofalo mow down a group of zombies, the next you’re watching wildlife footage or scenes of indigenous communities. It makes Hell of the Living Dead feel less like a coherent movie and more like somebody has been frantically sticking pieces of film together in an editing suite. Which, lets face it, is how this film was made.
The soundtrack is arguably even more shameless. Rather than commissioning an entirely new score, the production used existing Goblin material, including music associated with Dawn of the Dead and Contamination. This means you’re occasionally watching an Italian zombie film while hearing music that your brain already associates with George A. Romero’s masterpiece. It’s basically the cinematic equivalent of buying a knock-off Rolex and having someone write “Rolex” on it with a Sharpie.
Goblin’s music is fucking fantastic regardless of where it came from, and its presence gives the film a sense of atmosphere that the direction frequently struggles to create by itself. There’s something wonderfully surreal about hearing that familiar prog-rock soundtrack while a bunch of bargain-bin commandos run around a jungle shooting zombies.
The film’s relationship with Dawn of the Dead is impossible to ignore. It doesn’t merely borrow the basic premise; it steals visual ideas, character archetypes, music, and even elements of the opening sequence. The producers specifically wanted a film inspired by Romero’s movie, and Mattei wasn’t exactly pretending otherwise. But I don’t think you watch Hell of the Living Dead expecting originality. You watch it because it’s fucking Hell of the Living Dead.
It’s one of those films where the flaws become the entertainment. The English dialogue is frequently hilarious, with characters delivering lines that sound as though they’ve been translated through three different languages before somebody shouted them at an actor. The dubbing only adds to the effect. People don’t so much converse as announce the next piece of information required by the plot. The film can go from genuine gore to broad comedy without warning. One moment you’re watching zombies tear someone apart, the next you’ve got a soldier doing something completely fucking ridiculous. There’s even a sequence where a character starts dancing around in a bizarre costume, because apparently the zombie apocalypse is no excuse to neglect one’s hobbies.
This is probably where your enjoyment of the film will depend entirely on what you’re looking for. If you want a serious, atmospheric zombie film, Hell of the Living Dead is likely to make you want to put your head through the television. If you’re approaching it as a piece of trashy Italian exploitation, however, it’s a fucking treasure trove. There’s something genuinely charming about the sheer lack of restraint. Nobody seems to have told Mattei that the movie needs to make sense, so he just keeps throwing shit at the screen. Zombies? Obviously. Terrorists? Why not. Cannibals? Sure. Wildlife documentary footage? Get it in there. Goblin soundtrack? Absolutely. A soldier behaving like an escaped lunatic? Fucking essential.
Hell of the Living Dead is therefore a difficult film to recommend in the traditional sense. It’s not particularly well made, it’s wildly derivative and the pacing can be absolutely fucking glacial between the good bits. But those good bits are exactly why I kept watching. The gore is fun, the zombies are suitably disgusting, Garofalo is a fucking lunatic, the Goblin soundtrack is fantastic and the sheer audacity of the whole production is difficult to resist. It’s basically the cinematic equivalent of ordering a pizza at 3am and receiving something that is technically food but contains ingredients that have no business being anywhere near one another. And somehow you eat the entire fucking thing.
If you’re a fan of Italian exploitation, Hell of the Living Dead is essential viewing. It’s such a perfect example of the anything-goes mentality that made this period of European genre cinema so entertaining. It’s a Dawn of the Dead knock-off, a jungle adventure, a zombie splatter film, and an accidental comedy all fighting for control of the same hundred minutes.
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