zombie holocaust (in 2 parts)

[AOD]

yes its been a while but your review king is back with....

       

(1979)Zombie Holocaust aka Dr. Butcher M.D

Directed by "Frank Martin" (Marino Girolami)
Written by Fabrizio De Angelis and Romano Scandariato
Starring:
    Ian McColluch
    "Alexandra Cole" (Alexandra Delli Colli)
    Donald O'Brien

Doctor Butcher's a somewhat rare but over looked zombie/cannibal movie. And the reason being is that there is nothing new here at all to distinguish it from the hoards of other movies in the field.

However, While taking the opportunity to flex my literary genius, this movie does have a nice underlying take on western imperialism.  Im sure Main man "Frank Martin" didn’t intend to do this but, that does not take away from or invalidates the subtext; after all the most honest(and in my opinion best) "deep" meanings in all texts are those which the author couldn’t and wouldn’t  help but put there because they are of both his own psychological makeup and the cultural zeitgeist.

So lets take a look at the plot.  We begin is what seems to me, to be an over elaborate hospital for the time frameand setting(70's Europe). where several body parts have gone missing.  Funnily enough it is a different body part each time. A hand here and an arm there either we’re dealing with, a doc Frankenstein wannabe or a cannibal take out. Soon enough we learn that it is indeed cannibals that are munching up on the missing parts. It is here that totally unconvincing anthropologist/nurse Lori Opines pipes up with some bimbo words of wisdom. "All primitive people practiced [cannibalism], without exception. maybe she should have said "in all Italian horror movies".

The peeps travel to an island where Dr. Obrero has set up practice, blessing the natives with the wonders of western medacine.  When they ask about the island of "Kito" the doctor steams about how the natives of that island are the "most primitive"(e.g. from New York) in that they very seriously reject the western ways (and all of its evil forms) but they seem to have the ability to craft amazing knives from steel :bored:.

As any bunch who have just been warned away from a certain place they head off to Kito, new additions are 3 porters from the local islands, whom everyone seems to treat like especially dumb folks. Each time the porters pipe in with warnings of danger do the ever superior Europeans listen to them? HELL NO.  Even after one of the intrepid and ever alert porters are mutilated and devoured by cannibals do they get an appology?. Nope, just a very unemotional “bury him quickly". Well, we cant very well have a white man bury a “primative", can we?

Finally the not very secret secret is revealed that Doc Obrero has been a very naughty boy, playing god by experimenting on the folks of Kito. Turning them into zombies, so he can learn the secrets of immortality.  As if this wasn’t dumb enough, he promotes the use of the ancient ways of cannibalism to help "keep them in line.”

[AOD]

 So it turns out that these “most primitive” traits were actually caused by the westeners and not by the lack of western commerce. Without the big nose of the white man stuck in there, the natives would not have resorted to the western poison of cannibalism.

I'd like to say more about the actual conclusion -- Lori's  acceptance into the tribe -- but unfortunately, it's such a  fragmentary scene in the movie that I'm not sure what exactly is going on.  (I'd like to believe that the original Zombie Holocaust has a more comprehensible scene, and that the re-editors for Doctor Butcher simply botched it.) However, even if the surface events are unclear, the subtext still leaps out at us: Lori, who had been raised in the area, was reluctant to come back and see the islands with adult (i.e., western) eyes; in the end, however, she submits to being unclothed, painted with native symbols, and placed on the sacrificial table, to be stabbed with her own knife.  (Never did quite figure out how the knife got from her apartment to the island...)

Somewhere in there is a message about the synthesis of the imperialist and the native.  While I still don't understand why they didn't go through with the sacrifice ("Look!  It's She Who Tips The Table Back!"), the natives then rise up against Dr. Obrero, the source of all their "primitive" ways.
Hey, it's not great art, but there's something to be seen if you look closely enough.
However, I have a problem with the entire genre of "jungle zombies" as a whole.  For me, the true horror of the living dead is that they are jes' plain folks, come back without souls.  The most frightening zombie portrayals show a suburbia overrun with the living dead, your friends and neighbors turned into shuffling, soulless monsters.  Taking the western observers to a foreign, "primitive" environment lessens this effect for me because the entire environment is alien rather than familiar.  But that's just me.

One other note: The IMDb notes that the original score was replaced in the re-edit with the cheesy synthesizer score.  I think they actually left bits of the original in -- there are passages with a discordant string ensemble that are lightyears away from the rest of the soundtrack, which sounds like it was composed on an Atari 2600.

Give it about 5 out of 10 for effort