A group of scientists in New Guinea have developed a way to solve the problem of hunger in the third world. They have come up with virus which makes people want to eat human flesh. In other words, let the people feed on each other. Not a wise thing to do, however, the experiment goes out of hand, the virus accidentally leaks out of the factory via a poluted zombie rat and people are turned into flesheating monsters craving a steady supply of fresh meat. Meanwhile a credible SWAT-team is sent to New Guinea where a group of terrorists have taken the American consulate as hostage. The team are eventually ordered to get to the chemical plant and take care of business. On their way they meet up with nude reporter Margie Newton and together they must wade through a country full och flesheating natives.

Originally the film was supposed to be much bigger, more epic, but they always say that. The twisted original script, by partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, had the whole third world being zombiefied with a factory shipping in dead people which are turned into food. As it is, Hell of the Living Dead is nontheless an incredible, no, make that fascinating, piece of cut & paste work. I don't think I have ever before seen a movie which so desperately tries to expand its running time by editing in irrelevant crap (Mattei is after all the proud son of a film-editor). At least a quarter (or so it feels) of it is filled with old archive footage of natives and wild animals and nearly every scene goes on longer than nessessary. And then the soundtrack is a story in itself. The music by pop group Goblin, although very effective here as well, is "licensed" from Dawn of the Dead, Alien Contamination and Beyond the Darkness, though Goblin themselves insists they never gave their permission. There's hardly anything original in the film, everything is lifted almost directly from other films. On top of everything it also has what must be the most unlikeliest SWAT-team ever seen. The four actors look and behave like they've never even seen a weapon before. Especially Frank Garfield (also in Mattei's The Other Hell) is overacting so awfully that it's a relief when he's eaten. Only then he comes back as an even more annoying zombie. Garfield is said, though, to have improvised his part constantly. Actually a little bit of everything in the movie feels improvised and made up as the filmmakers went along. And when they couldn't come up with something, well, a bit of stock-footage could always fill the gaps later. In interviews made for DVD an honestly embarrased Mattei thankfully makes it clear that he never took the film seriously at all. He even made up his pseudonym "Vincent Dawn" in a nod to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, for Christ sake. Despite all of this, or rather because of it, Hell of the Living Dead is one of the more entertaining zombie films from the period. The zombies are frisky, some of the them are even smiling to the camera, and it all comes complete with plenty of eye-poking, gut-munching and head-blowing splatter effects (by Giuseppe Ferranti). A classic in spite of everything.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.