Oasis of the Zombies (1982) – Depressingly shoddy project directed and co-written by workhorse Jesus Franco (directing as “A.M. Frank”). Franco helmed over 200 movies — and some of them were even good! — so what appears here can only be attributed to extreme apathy. We’ve got:
- Age makeup so light that twenty or thirty years only results in some cornstarch in the hair.
- Camera work about as smooth as someone’s Android phone at a birthday party.
- Editing that seem determined to economize by using every inch shot, no matter how long before or after the scene the cameras started rolling.
- Nazi zombies from World War II with shag haircuts, their zombie “makeup” largely consisting of scrambled eggs and snot.
- A script that forgets to be good when it isn’t actively avoiding it.
- A score (also by Franco) that was probably composed by letting his cat stumble across his Casio keyboard.
This isn’t even fun-bad, because a fun-bad movie requires passion in inverse proportion to skill. Here, the badness is the result of a complete absence of give-a-craps.
Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989) – Watchable but uneven horror-comedy: A modern Western town is entirely populated by vampires trying to stay out of trouble by wearing SPF 100 sunscreen and UV sunglasses, and perfecting a formula for artificial blood, but a sizable faction of the town wants to get back to the old days of preying on humans.
It seems like there are several competing movies crammed into this one. Is it a romantic comedy? A family-friendly adventure? A soap opera? A Western parody? You can put Bruce Campbell and David Carradine into the same frame, but it still doesn’t seem like they inhabit the same story.
The Rescue (1988) – When a SEAL team is captured off the coast of North Korea, their teenage kids on the US base in South Korea take the plans that the government balked at implementing and mount the rescue themselves.
Definitely made in the shadow of 1986’s Iron Eagle (“Only this time, it’s Navy instead of Air Force and North Korea instead of the Middle East!”), this Touchstone Pictures release is surprisingly decent; there are fewer-than-expected aw come ON moments when kids outwit hostile adults, owing to the fact that (a) these are the kids of SEALs, (b) they only have to get just across the border instead of halfway around the world, and (c) the canceled rescue mission plans lay the route all out. Now if only the one kid with the flaming red hair would WEAR A HAT or something…
(Question: Why was Matt Dillon cast as the bad-boy hardcase all through his teens? He always looked to me like an emo snowflake on the edge of tears…)
Huh, Sundown is a Bruce Campbell movie I’ve never heard of. With David Carradine, no less. How’d I miss that one?
It’s really been under the radar for these few decades.
Are you trying to say that ZOMBIE LAKE is better than OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES?
Yes. Yes, I am. ZOMBIE LAKE is at least fun to laugh at.