• Produced and directed by Todd Sheets
• Written by Todd Sheets and Jerry Angell
• Starring
  • Chris Harris
  • Auggi Alvarez
  • Frank Dunlay
  • Jerry Angell
  • Jerry Angell’s mullet

A dozen years ago, in the nascent days of the Internet, director Todd Sheets was a minor celebrity in the world of ultra-low-budget B-movies, second only to J.R. Bookwalter. (At least in that small community which cared about such things.) Partly it was timing; both had been active starting in the mid-’80s, and had a catalog of titles to their name by the next decade. But more importantly, the do-it-yourself ethic of the shot-on-video director meshed well with the democratizing ideals of the early World Wide Web; after all, both models proposed to break away from the old models of media sponsorship and distribution, and put the apparatus for the publication of creative works into the hands of the common man. Sheets, with his splattery no-budget “extreme” horror, stuck it to the watered-down mainstream horror features mandated by The Man in Hollywood.

Most of this praise and regard, mind you, was tossed around by people who admired Sheets in the abstract, never having seen his movies. I have now seen my first Todd Sheets feature, and I can very passionately declaim that this is the movie for you if you want to see long, squishy scenes full of rubbery viscera being gnawed and fondled by hordes of cheap zombies.

In all other regards, i.e, by any of the parameters by which we presume to assess any example of the artform known as “cinema,” it’s utter crap.

The movie seems to start right off with a bang, the kind you don’t want to hear: A meltdown in a nuclear facility (as represented by a board room, and a parking garage full of air conditioner fans). Things break down too quickly for an evacuation, and we get to see various employees melting like a hot creamsicle due to exposure. And those who don’t get liquified, well — zombies! Groups and clumps of them, leaping out of doorways and dragging people away to masticate them.

Ten years later, the area that once housed the reactor is now a housing development. A trio of teens, brother and sister Joey and Beth (Chris Harris and Cheryl Metz) and their new neighbor Mike (Auggi Alvarez) wander out to explore a cave that looks more like a viaduct to me; in the dark, Beth and Mike fall down a hole to a lower level. Joey runs back home for help –

– and we need to stop the movie entirely, because Jerry Angell, playing Joey’s dad Larry, has what I think might well be the ugliest mullet ever to profane the human skull. And I’ve seen my share of mullets. (Still see them, actually, most pathetically on the heads of some of my son’s soccer teammates. Want to make kid look like he needs to be in Special Ed? Saddle the poor tyke with a bad mullet.) It’s a distracting and fascinating abomination; when it’s on screen, you can’t drag your eyes from it. In fact, I declare the mullet to be the best performer in this film. Which isn’t much of a stretch; the cast was assembled by the Friends ‘n’ Family method, and overall, the acting ranges between “adequate if you squint right” to “why are my gums bleeding?”.

So. Joey’s parents call Mike’ dad Ralph (Frank Dunley), a hefty older ex-special forces guy who keeps a fifty foot length of climbing rope in his trunk, because he’s just that prepared. They all go into the cave — which is strangely well-lit this time, in comparison to the darkness before — and easily haul the two trapped teens up.

Well! Crisis averted! Movie’s over, right? No? Oh.

So later, Joey and Mike and Joey’s little brother or somebody are watching a movie at Joey’s house while the parents hang out with Ralph (the feature, incidentally, is Sheets’ earlier film Zombie Rampage) when — there are zombies at the door! And coming up the basement steps! And generally all over! For no stated reason! Note: When dealing with our heroes, the zombies in this movie generally are pretty wimpy; pawing and grabbing but doing no damage. That’s why, after the boys call their parents, Ralph and the other two can easily push their way through into the house. (Gem of dialog from Ralph: “Sure is something weird going on around here, isn’t it?”)

In other instances, a person we’ve never seen before (and is thus expendable) will be minding his/her own business when — suddenly there are zombies! The chase lasts about five seconds, and then we’ve got a circle of zombies around the victim, pulling and gnawing on bloody rubber entrails. In fact, if you simply assume that a scene like this occurs between every paragraph break, I can cut my plot review in half.

One random person who encounters zombies and escapes to Joey’s house is Daria (Kasey Rausch), otherwise known as Exposition Girl. She knows all about the nuclear plant implosion, which sank the complex into the ground and was simply covered over by the government. A literal cover-up! Also, that the cave they were at earlier is the remaining entrance to the lower levels, which were never sealed up. Ralph decides that both families should go seal it up themselves, because Ralph’s the kind of guy who keeps dynamite around for just such an occasion.

Somewhere around here, I should tell you there was also what one might generously call a “subplot.” There was a gang of girls in the city (about four of them) who were mad at another similar-sized girl gang for “invading their turf.” Then there was apparently a “gang war” that took place off-screen. Then bodies get dumped in the hole in the tunnel. Then the surviving leaders of both gangs had to team up when they got attacked by — zombies! Then they died! I take it back; even generously, one couldn’t call that a subplot.

Anyway. Our survivors go first to Ralph’s house for supplies and armaments, then through the woods to the tunnel entrance. Along the way, they lose Larry and his Fascinating Mullet — it’s hard to tell with the crummy editing, but I think the zombies grab him and pull his guts out through his ass.

Then they go into the complex, which look like the corridors of a school or some other bureaucratic building, meeting groups of zombies that leap out ineffectually…

…and through the building some more, meeting more zombies…

…eventually to a bored room excuse me, a boardroom, where Exposition Girl finds documentation sitting on a table to supplement her supply of exposition. The power plant was built over the site of an Indian burial ground! And when the government refused to relocate, the Indians (the live ones above ground, I mean) gave the place a five-year curse, which is why it melted down exactly five years later! As defined in the Jabootu glossary, this would be an instance of “misdirected answering.” Unless, unlike myself, most viewers would be saying, “Yes, the inability of the government to seal up the entrance themselves is plausible, and of course there’s nothing unbelievable about the contaminated land being used immediately thereafter for a housing subdivision, and I naturally have no problem with scores of zombies choosing exactly this moment to start leaping out and fondling the internal organs of the living… but will somebody PLEASE address the question of what caused the initial meltdown? It inhibits the suspension of my disbelief!”

From there, they head back to the entrance, which is where Ralph wants to set the explosive charges. (Which means we went through the entire [cough] underground complex, hemorrhaging expedition members, exactly why?) The explosion is accomplished by rocking the camera along with some sound effects. And presto! Some old ex-military guy with a few sticks of outdated TNT has accomplished what the Army Corps of Engineers could not! Except that more zombies immediately leap out of the bushes and kill them. The end. Except for more chewing.

So, so many things wrong here. It’s pretty clear that all Sheets really wanted to shoot was a string of scenes with a horde of zombies chewing on guts; the rest of it is just the obligatories to hold it together so sketchily that a medical professional could reasonably prescribe attention-deficit treatment based solely on the evidence presented in the movie. Whole chunks of what could have been plot are simply left out; for instance, I think we may possibly have been expected to perceive that the zombie uprising was triggered by the initial two teens falling down the hole. But that just may be my order-loving mind, trying to construct a plot from the images on the screen in the same manner that I see bunny rabbits in cumulus clouds.

But even in a movie whose entire raison d’etre is zombie attacks, you’d expect there to be more effort put into the zombies themselves: a bunch of latex- and grease-paint smeared extras (with healthy arms and legs), adult and child, dressed in whatever casual street clothes they brough with them (as the initial crop of zombies is supposed to have sprung from the radioactive hole, I can only assume that they had a really, really lax dress code at this particular nuclear facility), stumbling around and grabbing at people. In almost every such scene, there’s at least one zombie extra wearing a huge grin that says, “Boy, this is sure a fun way to spend my Saturday!” And absolutely priceless is the scene of a horde of zombies shambling along a grassy knoll in this city which is supposedly “completely overrun” by the living dead — and right behind them, the commuters visible on the interstate are simply going about their business.

Now, if this were a first garage-level production by people who thought it would be totally metal to make their own zombie film, it might be marginally forgivable, if you were yourself the spiritual lovechild of Mother Theresa and Gandhi. However, Mr. Todd Sheets had already produced sixteen feature-length camcorder epics and a handful of shorts prior to Zombie Bloodbath. This is a man at the pinnacle of his craft, as it were. And that’s almost enough to make you despair for humanity as a whole.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 23
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1 (implied)
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• cars that won’t start for no good reason: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0