ZombieDeathHouse

Zombie Death House (1987)

Welcome to my review of Zombie Death House, or as I like to call it When Genre Legends go Bad. This turkey was directed by the normally stellar John Saxon and is thankfully his one and only directing credit in his long illustrious career. Before I get to what is painfully bad about this movie lets talk a bit about the plot.

A Vietnam vet named Derek is trying to get a new start in his life. To that end he goes to work for a mobster named Moretti, but only as a chauffer. In addition to driving the car he starts to get naughty with the bosses girl. Moretti finds out and kills her, framing Derek for the crime. Instead of a new start on his life Derek ends up on death row aka the “Death House”. It just so happens that in addition to being the prison where Moretti’s brother is serving his time, it also happens to be where the military is testing some new chemical. The testing goes wrong and before you can yawn (well not really) you have zombies munching on everyone. Now it is up to Derek to get brilliant lady scientist/reporter with bad implants and the children of the warden out of the prison before the evil military man (played by Saxon) can blow the joint up.

I don’t really know where to start. I mean while the opening credits are rolling the movie jumps around the narrative out of order so that the audience starts off confused. Derek is working for the mobster, and then you see him get hired… Really strange way to begin, which then segues right into one of my pet peeves the voice over to try and catch the audience up. Then we see 20 minutes of pointless dialogue and “action” just to get Derek framed and in jail. This really could have been explained away with a few minutes dialogue with the movie rolling right into the prison storyline. But then give the lack of real story in the prison I suppose they needed something to pad out the runtime. The cast is pretty awful with the exception of Saxon, whom I think only appears in this because he directed it. Then again I’ve seen him collect a lot of paychecks. Also I have to admit that Ron O'Neal (Superfly, The Final Countdown) is great in every scene he is in. Unfortunately he gets very little screen time. As I’ve already stated the rest of the cast is pretty bad, including the normally reliable Anthony Franciosa.

I could talk about the behind the scenes and production values, but why bother? Then again I suppose I must. The “exciting” car chases are at best up to the quality of a weekly T.V. series like the A-Team or Knightrider. The little gore we get is terribly executed and the kills forgettable (really I can’t remember any and I just watched the movie). Yeah I’m not kidding a zombie movie with little or no gore. Hell even the boobs in the movie are so painfully fake that I was cringing (more so than with the kills!).

Zombie Death House is one of those movies that is so terribly written, directed, and acted that it becomes almost painful to sit thru it. I’ve seen some pretty bad movies in my day, but this has to rank right up there with the worst of them. I don’t recommend anyone waste there time on this.

½ out of 4 (I gave it a ½ star because Ron O’Neal is such a badass)

reviewed by John Shatzer