Death Metal Zombies (1995)

The zombie marathon continues rolling along. Eventually I was going to have to watch and review one of the horrible nineties made on video zombie movies. In spite of coming highly recommended I had my suspicions that this was going to be a crapfest. I wasn’t wrong.

The plot, or what there is of it, follows a metal head named Brad. He loves a band called Living Corpse and wins a contest for a very special song. He will own the only copy of the song and can keep it to himself or share it with other fans. The tape arrives and when he plays it everyone listening turns into zombies that are under the control of Shengar, lead singer of the band. He has some evil idea about ruling the world or unleashing hell. Something appropriately horrible.

One of the friends, Angel (Ha… get it Angel is the heroine!) isn’t there when he plays the tape. She figures out the only way to save her friends is to play the tape backwards, or actually I think one of the zombies tells her. Had something to do with playing country music. Of course, some jerk stole the tape because you know Living Corpse is awesome and everyone would want the song. She has to avoid the zombies, dub the tape to a machine that can play it backwards, and do so before she is killed and becomes a servant of Shengar.

This is a terrible movie. In fact, I have difficulty even calling it a movie. This is more a series of attack scenes that are loosely connected together by the Shengar/zombie plot. Hell, the opening and ending of the movie feature a random killer wearing a Richard Nixon mask that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. They talk about the serial killer, but zero connection to the plot. So why is it included? To flesh out the flick and add more crappy gore is my best guess. There is a real introduce random character, kill random character, vibe here. Death Metal Zombies gets repetitive and boring quickly. Not much more to say about that.

ER MER GERD A ZOMBIE! 

I normally don’t talk about editing much in these reviews. It’s so bad here that I have to mention it. I get you don’t have a lot of money and have to cut corners. I watch a lot of low budget movies and that doesn’t bother me. What isn’t dictated by budget is your script, which is terrible here, and putting the movie together, aka the editing. Scenes are put together in such a way that it is clear the character isn’t even looking at the person he is supposed to be speaking too. Characters seem to jump from one spot in the scene to another, and we even get the magical zombie that is locked in a room and appears immediately after outside in a mob of them. Dude you had like twenty extras to keep track of! How does that happen?

You get some gut munching, but overall the gore is bad. Most of the time you have hands covering the “wounds” with liberal amounts of blood being pumped between the fingers. No latex work or tearing of flesh. It really isn’t that hard to toss a couple gags in for fun, even cheap looking rubber is better than nothing. The zombies consist of white makeup with black eyeliner. Nothing to get excited about.

Lousy story, crap for gore, and a soundtrack filled with shitty Death Metal. There is nothing here to see and I’m annoyed that I spent my time on it. I recommend giving Death Metal Zombies a hard pass.

© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer