ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE
WORSE than Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things
A movie so bad it could only star Adam West, Zombie Nightmare is the worst zombie movie I've ever seen, and earns a place of honor amongst the Evil Eleven, which I suppose is now the Terrible Twelve. Twelve films with no merit of ANY kind. This one further cements my belief that nothing scary ever came out of Quebec.
We're given Jon Mikl Thor, who looks like the unholy spawn of Thor and Eddie Van Halen, leading us to believe that Thor isn't his real name. Most of the time in his heyday, Thor was the lead singer for the rock band, uh, Thor, who apparently amused their audience by having bricks broken on Thor's chest. Anyway, here, he's the star (and music director, and soundtrack contributor), playing Tony, a good-natured baseball-playing hulk who's struck down in his prime by a carload of wild teenagers. His mother, distraught, gets the local voodoo priestess (yeah, every little Quebec town has one of those) to bring him back to wreak vengeance.
Tony had long hair when he was alive, but it's inexplicably short when he's a zombie. Blood spurts from wounds before they're inflicted. And in one scene, where West chews out an officer under his command for getting him up at this hour of night, West apparently put on a tie to go to work in the middle of the night during his off-hours. (okay, small potatoes, but West in a tie really irritates me) All this should give you an idea of the intense commitment director Jack Bravman had in making this a fine piece of cinema.
The script gives us some unbelievably bad lines, like when a waitress rebuffs the romantic advances of a bloodthirsty punk with really bad 80's new-wave hair:
"I'm old enough to be your older sister!"
The back of the box actually says "...in the darkest recesses of Tony's backyard". And amazingly, the film actually manages to give the term "heavy metal soundtrack" a bad name, loading up with never-weres and thankfully nowhere bands that never got anywhere. (the only exceptions are Motorhead, but you should already have your copy of "Ace Of Spades", and a pre- "Cowboys From Hell" Pantera, singing "Midnite Man". Exactly where in the film this was, I don't know, but believe me, I'm not going back through it looking for that song. It just ain't worth it.)
Tia Carerre's career has seen better days than today, but she'll need to get a lot more desperate than this to put this movie back on her resume.
Worst zombie movie I've ever seen, people, and one of the twelve worst of ANY KIND. Yes, it's WORSE than Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. And that's saying a lot.