ZombieJamboree

Zombie Jamboree (1993)

The Zombie Jamboree DVD is a look back at the 1993 convention of the same name that was held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead. The documentary is narrated by John Russo, who wrote the original screenplay and was involved in the production of Night of the Living Dead. Clocking in at only 57 minutes the documentary is a mixed bag of the interesting and the annoying.

I was really disappointed by the lack of interviews with any of the stars from Night of the Living Dead. We do get a few minutes of footages from the panel where they all participated, but even then I felt like that had to be more material there and it left me disappointed. While this isn’t the fault of the documentary, everything that they do mention has been covered much better in later documentaries that came after this. I don’t know if the documentary was an afterthought, but they had access to everyone except Judith Ridley (family commitment) and Duane Jones who had already passed away. They do get Judith O’Dea on camera, but only manage to ask her a couple of generic questions.

One of the things I did enjoy about the documentary are the examples of commercials that the Latent Image (their film company) did before and after they shot Night of the Living dead. There was even an Iron City Beer commercial (Pittsburgh thing) that brought a smile to my face. But I have a feeling unless you are a huge Night of the Living Dead nerd this might not be very interesting. There is also some stuff from a Makeup panel with Tom Savini that looks really cool, as well as Savini leading a tour thru the Monroeville mall. But as is the case with the Night panel both of these are way too short and would have interested me more than what we do get.

So what do we get? This documentary on Night of the Living Dead and all things zombie spends way too much time promoting John Russo’s other projects. These aren’t even zombie related. We see trailers and clips from his other movies like Midnight, and the Majorettes. While these are both horror movies I don’t understand why they are even in this documentary. Well actually I do but I’m going to be nice to Russo here. He even has the balls to put a Q and A with Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens in the documentary. Quigley has some zombie “cred” and mentions her role in Return briefly, but spends most of the time pimping a magazine called Scream Queens, which of course is another John Russo project.

There are some interesting things here in Zombie Jamboree and it is only 57 minutes long, so there isn’t a big time commitment involved in checking it out. But I was really annoyed and felt like I was promised a zombie documentary and ended up seeing an hour-long infomercial for everything John Russo. That isn’t’ cool at all. Still I would be lying if I said I didn’t have some fun with this, just don’t expect too much. This DVD is released by SRS Cinema (http://srscinema.com/) and can be found for sale online.

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer