July 1st, 2015 - Zombie Nation (2005)

Really, really, really bad. For some reason (maybe in an attempt to thwart screencappers everywhere) the title is broken up into several parts. This is the one that best sums up my feelings toward the film. The whole thing just felt so cynical - there *clearly* isn't enough in the budget to make a decent movie... so just don't try! But I guess enough suckers (i.e. me) will watch it if you have good (and misleading) enough cover art, so I'm sure this pile turned a profit. Just throw "zombie" in the title and people will watch it. But man, from the bad acting, to the terrible sets (like, the *worst* I've ever seen), and the general "who gives a shit" attitude of the whole thing - it's just kind of a despicable film in every respect.

I mean, everything in here is so, so bad that it's hard to even know where to start. It's tempting to just make a list and call it a day. (And people have, check imdb. It's pretty damned funny. And really long.) But cripes, I may as well try...

Zombie Nation is about a crazy cop named Joe Singer (Gunter Ziegler), who is apparently from Alabama but speaks with an obvious German accent - and then the Alabama thing doesn't even come into play! So *why* make him from Alabama? Arrghh... Sorry to get derailed so quickly. Anyways, Singer is a member of the comically corrupt LAPD police force (precinct 707, to be precise - although I may be a corrupt cop too if I had to work in what is *clearly* just an empty warehouse). His thing is that he to pulls over women driving alone, finds an excuse to "arrest" them, and then takes them to a furniture warehouse (?) where he lives (?) and doing... something to them? Eventually he murders them, and brings them out in a giant duffel bag. Oh, and cut some dumb footage of an abusive insane asylum in there, because why not?

This whole time, his partner Vitalio is just waiting outside in the police car, and isn't too worried about the giant woman-sized duffel bags he's bringing out. I mean, he complains to his pregnant (of course she is) wife at home, but never thinks to ask "hey man, what's in the bag?" Anyways, Singer has killed four girls and buried them all over LA. He goes after a fifth girl, a Romanian immigrant named Romy (ugh...). Because of the strong connection between voodoo and the Romanian people (?), Romy has already been blessed by a group of voodoo priestesses - she will be protected from the serial killer snatching up women off the streets. So, Singer kills her, and she comes back from the dead. And, inexplicably, so do the other four women he's killed. And revenge and whatever. Hence, Zombie Nation.

First off, here are your "zombies":

No Shit... what the zombies look like

Oh, and they can pretty much talk and communicate like normal people. They just walk slow. Bad news, right? But what's most aggravating is that the movie doesn't even try to follow it's own internal logic. There are times where the voodoo priestesses try to explain the shitty makeup by saying (paraphrasing) "you only look how you think you look, but in reality you look like this" and then they show a mirror where they actually put on more than just eye-shadow. And in one scene, a former boyfriend is terrified when one of them shows up at the door. But then, at other times, they can pass as normal people if they put on aviator sunglasses. I can stomach some stupid shit and gaps in logic in movies, but you *have* to be consistent, you know? Shit like this shows that they just don't care.

Also, the sets are terrible, the music is terrible, the acting... well, isn't all that terrible actually. It's probably still pretty bad, but when everything surrounding the actor is a complete and utter failure, and the acting is just plain bad... I'd venture to say the acting is the best part of the film, should such an adjective ever apply to Zombie Nation.

If I had to say something good about Zombie Nation it's that it occasionally flirts with "so bad it's good." There are a couple of scenes where nobody characters show up and have just one scene - and it just works in a laughably bad way. The guy who first notices the two reanimated zombies in the picture above is just the right mix of bad actor and stupid character. He offers to give them a ride back to LA and acts like he's totally going to score (complete with the "oh yeah"-fist pump to himself) despite the fact that they are clearly bad news. And a little later a woman shows up at the furniture store/warehouse where Singer the Killer Cop lives (and works selling furniture apparently) and gets super pissed because "she needs a couch tonight" - and he's not interested in selling her one. I'm trying to think of a situation where that could possibly be true... she acts like she's a meth addict or something, but for couches.

But those moments are fleeting. Zombie Nation is an objectively terrible film. I can better imagine myself needing a couch tonight than ever being able to recommend this film.  I've read a lot of negative things about the films of Ulli Lommel, so I suppose I should have known better. But the bottom line is - he probably made some decent money on this. Which I'm pretty sure was his only goal. So, congratulations on that.

I would   stay far, far away   from this film.