30. A Horror Film Covered in the ShockMarathons Books.

In his book, All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, Troma president Lloyd Kaufman lists this among the five worst films in Troma’s library. Yet another reason for me to say it: Fuck Lloyd Kaufman.

Director Tony Malanowski and star Steve Sandkuhler had already made this movie a year before as Night of Horror. Yet the idea that a bunch of zombie Confederate soldiers could rise up and destroy some hippies in a Winnebego seemed to be too good of an idea to pass up. So they went back and made it again, this time putting six twenty-something teens — Wyatt (Sandkuhler), Mel (Christopher Gummer), Sarah (Rebecca Bach), Bill (Jim Ball), Blind Kiyomi (Mimi Ishikawa) and Lin (Judy Dixon) — up against the South as it rises once again.

Yes, who knew that deer hunting would lead to this? This movie is a lesson for us all. If you stay in an area that has a Confederate graveyard, don’t steal their stuff and don’t read the book they left behind. Nobody — not even the cops — can survive once those zombies come back and want back their stuff. That’s why the other title for this film, Curse of the Cannibal Confederates — is so truthful.

Look, I get that this movie is shot in complete darkness, no one knows how to act and the story has been done before. If that stopped me, I wouldn’t watch anything. There’s a hiss and echo on the bass heavy soundtrack to this movie that makes me convinced that somehow this movie exists on the same collective unconsciousness place as the second wave of black metal. Everything is as dark as it can be, day for night but night for day, and in the same way that some people laugh off corpsepaint and bad production on those albums, they are also filled with moments of drone drug floating out of our reality abilities that this finds and seizes on. I mean, the zombie attacks are legitimately unsettling, the sounds of zombies masticating their prey beyond disgusting. And that church set! In Norway, they would have burned it down. Here, we turn it into the setting for a zombie film.

If this came out today, it would have the tagline “We are going to eat y’all.”

Malanowski went on to edit Dr. Alien and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it.  and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it. I’d love if he made this one more time.