Earth Day Fun!: Toxic Zombies

In celebration of the day that we celebrate our Earth, I clubbed a baby seal, burned some plastic and decided to review this movie.  Today's film is a sub-par, horror movie from 1980.  Does 30 years of video infamy make this movie look good?  Well, let me put it this way: it's director is also its star.  The same guy (Charles McCrann) is also the Producer, Writer and Editor.  Want to know how many other credits he has?  Zero.  Of course, he's been dead since 2001, so I'm safely able to mock his sole, cinematic achievement.  On the plus side, this film was banned in Britain for its gore.  Is that enough?  Find out in my review of...

The film begins with a group of hippies growing some weed out in the woods.  A pair of federal investigators show up...for some reason, but get killed by the people.  A pair of them are not bothered by this felony, while the others insist that they flee.  Ultimately, their leader tells them that they can't leave the crop behind and need to risk it.  Over at the nearby government building, one of the men decides to test a new form of DDT on the crops.  Of course, he has no idea that there are hairy guys and gals out there.  Good job killing the people that could have warned them, idiots!  As time goes by, these guys turn violent and their skin starts to get all blistered.  As this is going on, we get a silly plot involving a bureaucrat (our quintuple threat star) being pestered by his lady about not spending enough time with her.  Since all men in these films have spines made out of Nerf, they go out...to the same woods.  Dun dun...obvious.

I would be remiss without mentioning the whole sub-plot involving the crop duster.  It's all silly and random.  The hippies have turned into full, flesh-eating zombies and turn their attention to the nearby area.  To that end, we are introduced to a nice, annoying family.  Their is the mother, the father and the two kids- one boy and one girl.  How alarmingly-generic, movie.  They are not around long though, as the movie chooses to kill the adults off quickly.  Oh no, not them- I was so attached to them.  The kids run off and eventually run into our heroes.  By the way, for the couple's date weekend, our hero invited their friend too.  Yeah, you're new to this whole 'romance' thing, aren't you?  Of course, he is killed too, making the whole point of his character what again?  You just wanted to cast your buddy in the movie and had to find a pretense, huh?  Good for you.

The thing turns into a bit of 'zombies show up, run away and zombies show up again.'  The people end up at a cottage owned by a crazy hunter.  The guy is one of those 'the government is going to get us' guys who locks himself away with a bunch of guns.  Of course, this proves to be helpful when stuff like this happens, although the guy is not too smart.  He lets our heroes in and does not exactly survive to see this thing through.  That's what you get for being a jerk...and prepared for emergencies like that.  At least the crazy gun nuts from Tremors got to survive by being nice guys...and famous.  The film also makes sure to cut the tension it established by randomly cutting back to the government office.  Gee, that sure distracts me from the impending death.  Wrapping this up, the corrupt government guys send themselves out to kill any survivors and nip this whole thing in the bud.  How does that turn out?  Well, they die and we're all not sad.  The End.

Yeah, this is not a good movie.  The whole thing is far less interesting than it would make you sound.  Hippies turn into zombies & wreak havoc- I'm in.  Boring movie involving a bunch of hairy guys with fake legions on their faces- I'll pass.  The production values are minimal, the acting is pretty bad and the gore is pretty 'eh.'  I get what they were going for, but it's just not good.  The premise is simple enough, although they chose to mire it down with the kid element, the relationship sup-plot and the whole crop duster part.  I just don't care about that stuff- kill people already.  Ultimately, we have to just be honest with ourselves: the movies with silly titles like that almost never live up to themselves.  You're safer just going 'Ha, they made a film called Toxic Zombies' and moving on.  Let's close this up with a look at a good zombie film, just to cleanse our pallet. 

Up next, I take a look at a Japanese film that proved to be even too weird for me.  Would a second viewing help?  Stay tuned...