Night of the Zombies (1981)
* (out of 4)
Nick Monroe (Jamie Gillis) leads up a team of investigators who are looking for some missing soldiers. They end up finding a group of WWII zombies that were apparently brought back by a deadly gas and soon the team are fighting for their lives.
This here was director Joel M. Reed's follow-up to BLOODSUCKING FREAKS and it seems as if the director wanted to get as far away from that film's subject matter as he could. The film shares some similarities with THE FROZEN DEAD but if you're expecting any type of blood, gore, violence or shock matter then you're going to be mighty disappointed. In fact, this falls well below other zombie-war films from this period like SHOCK WAVES and ZOMBIE LAKE but it was still slightly better than Jess Franco's OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES.
There are all sorts of problems with this film but it's obvious that they weren't working with too much money. I say this because the zombies don't even turn up until the forty minute mark and when they do show up their make-up is less than stellar. The make-up might have been okay in the early 70s but after the work of Tom Savini and what was being seen in the Italian horror market, what's here is just lame. There's also not any gore to be found and in fact the one major attack sequence happens in a long shot so that you can't see anything! The performances are pretty much what you'd expect and nearly every scene appears to be shot on the same set. The lighting is extremely dark as I'm guessing this was done to hide how cheap everything was. The only thing that keeps NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES from being a complete bomb is the fact that, somehow, director Reed manages to build up a rather strange atmosphere. Yes, that same low-budget and nasty atmosphere that he brought to BLOODSUCKING FREAKS can also be found here.
NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES has pretty much been forgotten through time, although it never really got a good release anywhere. It's been listed under at least six different titles but without the shock value of Reed's previous film there's really no point in searching it out.
