Each week, Halloween Horror Marathon does some themed posts. We sleep in on Sundays, then watch a zombie flick. We call it Resurrection Sundays. This week, we look at the compilation film Zombiethon
What are the best parts of any horror film, for any teenager? The violence and the nudity. Here’s a Wizard Video collection that functions as a highlight reel of any number of classic zombie flicks from the ’70s and ’80s. The films themselves, if you’ve actually seen them, are almost universally terrible. With the exception of Fulci’s Zombie, all the movies presented here benefit greatly from being truncated and edited. Oasis of the Zombies actually seems interesting and fun (it is not), for example.
I mean, if you reduce the absurdity of The Invisible Dead to a collection of scenes with naked Caroline Munro, it’s obviously going to be something more intriguing than it actually is. The best part of the edited / reduced films is the way A Virgin Among the Living Dead is, essentially, just the added footage Jean Rollin shot for the film’s re-release in 1981, meaning that this is literally nothing like the original picture in any way, shape, or form.
It all peters out at the end, with quite a short blasts from the oldest film here, Astro-Zombies. The flick’s charmingly awful, but after a solid hour of breasts and blood, the cheesy cheapness of this “classic” feels anticlimactic.
The interstitial wrap-around bits are quite fun, pretty funny, and even (in the case of the first one) shot fairly well. You could easily pull these bits and make your own highlight reel — perhaps with stronger films. I’d love to see 10-minute cuts of Bud the Chud and Return of the Living Dead mixed up with Mutant and Messiah Evil.
This is considerably more good-natured than the other Wizard compilation, Filmgore. Even the inclusion of wrap-around segments from Elvira can’t keep that from seeming just a little bit nasty. This, though, is basically a perfect thing to throw on in the background of your Halloween party. Throw on some creepy film scores or funky disco — either way, you can delight in the nakeys and zombies.
You can snag this from Full Moon Features as a three-pack that also features Filmgore and Savage Island.