aka Zombie Gang Bangers, aka Zombie Ninja Gangbangers

• Written and directed by Walter Webster
• Starring
  • Stephanie Beaton
  • James Morrison
  • James Riley
  • Kit Natividad
  • Suzanne Powell

My good friend Allen Richards of B-independent.com loaned me a stack of movies from his private collection for Month of the Living Dead 3: micro-budget screeners, bootlegs, and others that I wasn’t likely to find at my local Hollywood Video. In doing so, he made special mention of the sucktacular crapfest that is Bangers. It’s funny how, in the B-movie community, one can still be considered a “good friend” while inflicting this kind of stuff on one another.

No problem, I thought. I can take down the worst crap that people can commit to celluloid or video, be they American or French.

But then he issued the challenge: Review Bangers without using the term “monkey turd” to describe it.

Having now seen Bangers, I can accept that challenge. Because characterizing it as a “monkey turd” is an insult to simian digestive tracts everywhere.

It honestly astounds me how such a movie can be made, one which so perversely avoids the inclusion of even the smallest worthwhile element. Most filmmakers would have to try damned hard to deliberately make a movie this bad, and even then all but a few would be unable to do so. It’s like asking a grown adult to poop his pants. Most just can’t bring themselves to go through with it.

A plot synopsis would prove difficult, as most shooting days the plot failed to show up on set, the crew was apparently left to shooting pointless footage. So let’s start reviewing pointless footage!

Apparently, they’ve been shopping at the Empress’ New Clothes Boutique.

We start with really crummy video footage of a rave. The really crummy video footage is going to be a constant, both in terms of equipment quality and in terms of the coordination and physical dexterity of the person holding it. I know high-school filmmakers who would be embarrassed to use footage this poorly shot. But one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling, I suppose.

Anyway. The rave. While the footage quality is a constant, the rave only seems like it’s going to go on forever. We’ve got footage of a huge crowd of people, intercut with rave chicks in their slutty white lingerie strutting all of their mock-lesbian moves with each other, intercut with a stripper on a stage (Stephanie Beaton), doing what I will admit to be a passable stripper routine. (Not that I’m an expert.)

Wanna see that again? Okay — here’s more footage (or, partially, the same footage) of the big rave, the slutty chicks, and the stripper. And here’s some more footage of all three. The stripper gets progressively less clothed, and starts dryhumping the pole, but if it weren’t that clue of chronological progress, I would have suspected I was in some sort of weird Star Trek-y temporal loop.

Then, while still seeing more of that same footage, we’ve got a new element intercut: It’s hard to tell what’s going on, but it looks like two guys are walking down a dark alley, and two zombies come up to them and beat the hell out of them. Oh, and look! The rave sluts again! And the stripper!

After a full ten minutes of this, there’s a change: The stripper goes and takes a shower. Meanwhile the slut chicks etc. and the guys and the zombies in the alley etc.

Okay. After quite possibly the longest twelve and a half minutes of cinematic history, we get as far as some dialogue. The stripper chick sits at the bar, and a rumpled-looking guy (James Riley) sits down next to her and tries to get to know her by telling her what a loser he is — he lost his job and could only get work at a video store, etc. She promptly rebuffs him, but more because he doesn’t have the money to rent her by the hour than because he’s a jerk. So then he finds another floozie named Maureen and leaves the bar.

Sometimes,having high self-esteem just isn’t enough.

Maureen made the wrong choice, because the bar nut takes her back to his place, pays her to wear a pink dress, and leaves her in a room with a corpulent baby-regressive type (think of Stephen Furst’s role in The Unseen, but without the savoir faire) who promptly strangles her to death at the bar dude’s urging. Then the bar dude strips her and has sex with a corpse.

Wanna know what’s worse than the foregoing? It has absolutely nothing to do with whatever you might wish to label as the plot. (Unless that was the plot right there, and everything else is a really long and pointless digression. Given the way things go here, it’s at least a marginally supportable thesis.) Neither does this next scene: A guy playing a guitar in his apartment gets mad at his girlfriend because she’s on the phone, swears at her, flips her the bird, and leaves. Which is good, because she was going to go out and cheat on him tonight anyway. But then the same two zombies come into the apartment (presaged by their omnipresent fog machine) and kill her. And when the guy comes back in, they kill him too. (I wonder, was he coming back to apologize, or to use some more curse words on her that he just barely thought of? Oh, wait — I don’t care.)

So. That wasn’t the plot, either. No, this is the plot: Stripper girl takes some pills and goes back out to the bar. She gets hit on by a guy who’s a lot less weird-looking than the previous guy, but rejects him too, and after watching the bartenders rearrange things behind the bar for far too long, she goes out to her car.

Which is where the same two zombies find her, and… well, did you notice that one of the alternate titles I listed was “Zombie Gang Bangers“? Yeah. They take turns on her as she screams and screams and screams. Really fulfilling cinema here, folks. And here’s the worst part: It’s so ineptly done that it isn’t disturbing. We’re seeing a real-time rape on screen here, folks! It’s bad enough that it’s only in the movie for prurient reasons, but it’s also lukewarm! I was more disturbed by the fact that I was watching a non-disturbing rape than by anything I actually saw on screen.

Then they drag her out onto the pavement, pick up a stick, and beat her savagely with it, for about as long as they took to rape her in the first place. Then they wander away, leaving her bleeding and bruised — but alive. (Zombies that leave people alive? Yup –they did it with the two guys they met earlier, too.)

We are now thirty minutes into this movie, out of a listed running time of eighty-five minutes. Here I am, thinking I’m in Movie Hell, and not realizing yet that I’m only in one of the outer circles.

The stripper girl (whose name, we finally find out in this scene, is Alice) drags herself to the police station, and ends up with the least trustworthy law enforcement officer of all time (Zachary Hahn). Not only does he poo-pooh her whole rape-and-assault story (despite being literally covered with blood and bruises) and verbally abuse her, he then decides to lock the door and rape her himself. Great. I’ve seen this woman get raped three times in what, seven minutes? I sure hope that remains a personal record for a long, long time.

“No, the zombies didn’t turn my skin green! That’s the stupid videocamera!”

So then, Alice wanders away from the police station and calls her friend Betty (Suzanne Powell) for support. Betty looks an awful lot like Margaret Cho, but with less talent. (Aw hell, make up your own damned joke.) They meet at a cafe, and — get this — Betty gives her the same treatment as the cop! Well, minus the rape. But despite the fact that Alice looks like roadkill, Betty simply natters on about how Alice is “in denial” about her semi-prostitute lifestyle and needs to pull herself together. Now, granted, people would probably take Alice a little more seriously if she didn’t feel the need to tell everyone that not only was she raped, but she was raped by zombies. (“You don’t know what it’s like to be raped by zombies!”) Especially because the zombies in question simply had black dirty gack on their faces. Coulda been a couple of homeless guys, if you ask me.

So she goes back to the strip bar where she works (which, by the way, has apparently no connection to the location of the rave from the beginning of the movie, so your guess is as good as mine as to why that footage was even included), and gets a pep talk from the bar’s owner, legendary stripper Kit Natividad playing herself.

All right, I need to stop and warn you here. Kit Natividad was legendary in her heyday because she had breasts roughly the size of Phobos and Deimos. If you’re one of those absolutists who believes that bigger is always necessarily better, this is your woman. If, on the other hand, you’re one of those people (like me) who has heard of a little thing called “proportion,” you’ll just find her grotesque. Also, she was also born in 1948; her Miss Nude Universe titles were for 1970 and 1971 (the latter being the year I was born). That means that, when they were shooting this movie, she was 59 years old, and the years had not been kind; I would have guessed ten years beyond that. All of which means that this is not a woman who should still be doing stripteases. But she does. In the course of telling Alice that being a stripper’s actually a cool and fun profession, she gets up on stage for old time’s sake and –

– MY EYES! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, MY EYES!

Imagine your grandmother nude. Now imagine her with huge lumps of bread dough flopping around on her chest. And stop yer bellyaching — you only had to imagine it. I had to see it!

(This is also one of the scenes in which filmmaking ineptitude comes to the fore, as you can clearly hear the director/cameraman/whoever instructing Ms. Natividad in her moves.)

It was at this point, 43 minutes into the movie, that I pressed “pause,” went into the other room, and emailed Allen: “I am so going to get you for this.”

Wrong. Just wrong. Wrong beyond all previous conceptions of wrongness.

Okay. Back to hell. Once Kit’s Striptease Horror Show is over, yet another guy hits on Alice at the bar, she goes into her whole story about being raped by zombies (this time she throws in, “they must have been from outer space or something!”), and he tosses her out. See, he’s the bouncer, and he tells her not to come back again.

What the hell? Why would she not know the bouncer? Why would he have the authority to fire her for talking about zombies? He can hit on the help, but she can’t tell him about gang-raping zombies from outer space? (And by the way, she tells him that there were three of them. There have only been two, at any point during this movie.)

So she goes out to her car, and… are you ready? The zombies come and gang-rape her again! (Oh, and this time, there ARE three of them. Continuity!) Just as long, just as inept… the only distinguishing feature this time is a Japanese tourist in the parking lot who starts gleefully snapping pictures until he gets eaten.

So Alice drags herself home… and calls Betty again. Just because she needed to hear someone dismiss her pain and violation one more time, I guess. Look, this movie has already won the “Pissed Me Off Mightily” prize for the year, okay? You can stop trying!

(I apologize for overusing the bold type. What i really want to do is bitchslap the writer/director, and I can’t, and the bold type is the only outlet I have.)

So. While wandering around the neighborhood, Alice runs into — one of the guys (Adam Carter) who got beat up by the zombies in the first ten minutes! They compare bruises, find out that they both have the poor instincts to tell complete strangers, “It was zombies that done it!”, and get into her car to go find the guy’s other friend. But then in the car, the guy (no, I never heard his name) finds that Alice has a magazine which just happens to have an article about a Dr. Mondo, a scientist who was fired from his job for his repeated attempts to reanimate human flesh — and who now owns Mondo Madness Video Store! It’s the rumpled guy from way back! Dead lord, it all fits together! (Except the part about the fat infantile adult in Mondo’s basement. We’re out of luck on that part.)

Not being the types who clue in very well, they decide to go to Mondo to have him make them a zombie who can fight back, not ever stopping to think that maybe Mondo is the guy who made the gangbanging zombies in the first place. (How many avocational reanimators are there in your neighborhood?) He’s twitchy and wacky, but he agrees to help them, so they come back the next day to see what they’ve created.

It’s not exactly the zombie ninja they requested. First clue? The jester’s cap attached to his skull. And when Dr. Mondo sparks him up…

Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE happening here!

He tries to be funny. Yup, it’s a motormouth comedian zombie who combines the worst parts of Robin Williams and Adam Sandler (not that I’m implying that there’s a less-than-worst part to Adam Sandler) into one tiresome, caffeinated ad lib monologue. Then he chases Alice around the operating table, and…

Hell, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what happens next. Something about Alice suddenly being in a lumberyard, dressed differently, being chased by a dozen or so zombies, and then something about her being strapped down to a bed in a psych ward, with Dr. Mondo as her doctor.

All I know is that there are credits. That means the movie’s over.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie that fails so completely on all levels. The camera work is amateurish, the editing is haphazard, the acting stretches to reach sub-par, the story is non-existent, the script is laughable without being funny, and the whole idea that repeated drawn-out rapes are good ol’-fashioned entertainment is so reprehensible it makes me want to spew. This movie has managed the almost-miraculous feat of avoiding even marginal competence in any area. Except, perhaps, the initial striptease — but if that’s what you’re looking for, let me tell you about this invention called the “Internet” and this concept called “porn”…

So. I made it through the entire review, and didn’t once compare the movie to a monkey turd. Fine. But I made no promises on behalf of the Hieratic Head.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 6
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• justification for existing: absolutely none