|
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the one and only
Collectors Times circus tent of gore, dismemberment, extreme
sex and violence and most important of all, a non- existent
budget. I will be writing for this magazine monthly about my b-
movie experiences, let it be a visit to the local repertoire theater
or a weekend of masochist video renting.
Redneck Zombies
Before I write about this flick I gotta say, I'm a
big Troma fan, I love Lloyd Kaufmans and
Micheal Hurtz's work. I first saw Toxic Avenger
when I was a mere lad, about the age of 8, let's say.
The only reason I'd heard of it is because of the hit
tv show "Toxic Crusaders" which was actually
aimed towards kids. So I saw these gory flicks at a
very young age, being desensitized at a very young
age to gore. I've never been a big fan of the movies
Troma picks up though, such as Stuff Stephanie in
the Incinerator, Surf Nazi's Must Die and Igor and
the Lunatics. There have only been a few
exceptions such as Killer Condom and today's
movie Redneck Zombies.. I first heard of this
movie when I got into Troma, but none of the video
stores around where I live carried a copy, let alone
heard of it before, so I looked into the movie, and
got the story behind it. It turns out the film was shot
by a guy in his spare time with a video camera. This
movie actually broke a record as being the first full
length feature film that was shot completely on a
video camera, I had to see this movie. I kept doing
research on it, don't ask why... and found out the
director wanted to make a Night of the Living Dead
movie, but he realized he didn't have the budget to
compete. He decided that instead of making a scary
zombie movie, he'd make a b-movie but at the same
time try to make it bloodier than any other zombie
flick out.
I'd finally had enough, I couldn't take it anymore, I
directed my browser to the internet shop I go to the
most and checked if they had it, and to my surprise,
they did and it only took 2 days to ship. They
actually had it in their warehouse. So the night I got
it, I ripped open the package, slipped it into my
DVD player, thats right... I ordered it on DVD,
(Troma put together some of the best DVDs in the
world) and sat down with my remote. The usual
Troma stuff started up with the shot of Tromaville
and the cheesy music, then a closeup of Toxie's
face, then it went to the menu: lots of extras,
interviews with the director, audio commentary,
interview with Ron Jeremy, previews for several
other Troma films, the Troma intelligence test and a
lot more, but this review is about the movie, so let's
just cut to that.
The movie starts off in a mental asylum with a dude
acting all wacked out of his head, bonkers if you
like, and just to show how crazy he is, he puts his
cigarette out on his arm, because you know... all
mental asylums give out free cigarettes to raving
lunatics. Then two doctors come by and start
talking about his condition and what happened to
him, it then cuts to a flashback... the flashback has
nothing to do with the dude on the wheelchair. The
story revolves around a family of rednecks who are
given a barrel of radioactive waste by some other
obese redneck who stole it from the army. He gives
it to them because they threaten to shoot him for
shooting up their old Moonshine still, so he offers
then the barrel of toxic waste as a new still. They
accept the offer and cook up a fresh batch of
moonshine, only this moonshine is green! You
know youre in trouble when your booze is bright
green. Over on the other side of the woods, an old
man is taking a group of college students to "a great
spot with a pond to piss in." They all complain until
they get there and then they're all relieved and
happy, they party, get high and make jokes. At this
point their fate is pretty obvious.
Back to the rednecks. The gay redneck son who
makes everyone call him Elly May, is put in charge
of delivering the moonshine to all the customers. So
to his dismay, he takes off in his truck as his
brothers unscrew a fresh lid of toxic moonshine,
take a sip and cough their guts out. This followed
by choking and coughing and 2 straight minutes of
built in camera effects as they "transform" into
zombies. The next little bit of the movie just shows
"Elly May" delivering moonshine to residents of this
great town, including 2 retarded looking guys
watching "knockers," as they call it. Obviously,
someone offered to show some skin for the movie
and they use it here with the silliest circus music
playing in the background, a mother who serves the
moonshine to her baby boy, 2 kids, a crazy dude
with a razor and these two dudes watching chicken
torture on TV with a Green Peace girl tied up to
their chair, right. So by now the whole town is
being transformed into these zombies and the sun is
coming up... so back at the camp site, one of the
campers gets up, grabs a roll of toilet paper and
takes off. She finds herself on the rednecks camp
site who then go on to rip her apart and eat her
guts. For a low budget movie, the bloody special
effects were pretty good. Another one of the
camper girls gets up before everyone else and
decides to go look for her missing friend. She goes
in another direction though, towards the corn fields
and bumps into the fat redneck, (we'll call him Billy
Bob) from the beginning who gave the barrel to the
family. He tries to sweet talk her into following him,
but Elly May's brother shows up and tears her in
half as Billy Bob runs for it. The campers finally all
wake up and wonder where the two have gone, so
they decide to go look.. they walk along the
cornfield and the "scoutmaster" bumps into the
remaining legs of their dearly departed and tries to
block the others from seeing it. They all see it and
freak out, thinking it's a wild bear of some sort.
They get worried and try to look for help. They
stumble upon the campsite where some moonshine
jars remain, so one of the overly intelligent campers
comes to the realization that the moonshine is
causing everyone to go crazy and kill people, even
though they haven't seen any zombies yet. They
then stumble upon dead camper chick #2 and more
freaking out ensues. You then find out through a cut
scene that Elly May is also a zombie and so is his
mother, who had a pet pig who she mutilates in a
very gruesome matter. Back at the redneck camp
site, the campers are all going crazy, blaming each
other for their misdoings when out of nowhere a
zombie pops up and takes out another one of their
friends. Out of being scared, one of the girls sprays
the zombie with... deodorant?... yes folks! zombies
are allergic to deodorant, but through an acid
tripped autopsy in the cave, they come to the basic
fact that only deodorant with silver oxide in it kills
zombies, so they stock up on the goods and go
hunting. At this point and time, the army come back
to reclaim the barrel, armed with a black guy who
loves to say the "F" word, a white guy who agrees
with everything the black guy says and a
stereotypical sitcom gay guy. This is what the army
sends to reclaim some highly toxic crap that can
destroy the planet. So they come to a stop when
they think they see a local, the local takes out the
ever so agreeing white guy with his zombie grip and
bite kung fu skills. The gay guy tries to talk reason
and gets it also and the black guy makes a run for it,
only to crash into the remaining 4 campers, but he
doesn't last long because as he's telling them what
the real story is behind the zombies, a zombie
sneaks up on him and gives him the bite. Stealthy
zombies they are, those rednecks. Anyway, to put
this fiasco of a movie to an end, the campers go
eye to eye with the zombies, spraying them with the
deodorant, 2 of them get taken out and two survive,
some guts splash all over the place... they both end
up in a mental institution, one of them who's
pregnant with a zombies baby and one who's just
sitting there drinking vodka and reading Fangoria.
The end! I enjoyed this film, it was a lot more low
budget then I thought it'd be, but the blood is a lot
cooler then I thought it'd be. This movie would
have tried to take itself seriously, it would have been
terrible, but since they knew it'd be a budget flick
they threw in a whole lot of gags and the like. Now
for my little table of B-movie ratings with a little
explaining for the first time:
Gore: 8.5/10 (gore is a necessity in a b-movie, the more blood, the better)
Acting: 9/10 (the higher the acting is on this scale, the cruddier it is, bad acting helps rank b-movies as cult classics)
Plot Holes 7/10 (same as above, troublesome plotholes add to the humor of a film)
Overall Experience 7.5/10 (just how much I enjoyed the movie, not an overall total of the scores)
Jon Morrell
|