Zombie Bloodbath 2: Rage of the Undead (1995)

• Directed by Todd Sheets
• Written by Dwen Doggett and Todd Sheets
• Starring
  • Dave Miller
  • Kathleen McSweeney
  • Byron Nichodemus
  • Jennifer Geigel
  • Jerry Angell

So let’s imagine that you’re the one-man shot-on-video horror film factory Todd Sheets. (If it helps your imagination, put on your mullet wig and make the devil horns to get into the appropriate metal mindset.) You’ve completed your magnum opus, Zombie Bloodbath (1993) after a bazillion horror shorts. It is, in fact, a piece of utter crap. But you know enough to play to your strengths, right? And anyway, corporate horror and the Hollywood mentality aren’t playing enough to the utter-crap-seeking demographic in the American Heartland. So you raise/lower your bar for the sequel that no one requested. “I know,” you say in your heart of hearts, “that I can make the sequel even worse!”

And you succeed, for is not America the land of success? You include all of the hallmarks of your first Zombie Bloodbath movie — a witless story, whatever free shooting locations are available, minute after minute of zombie extras in T-shirts fondling and chewing rubbery entrails, a script with dialog so stilted that stilts have to change their name, and actors whose sole qualification is their willingness to work for you. You randomly switch between normal videotape, a jerky poor-man’s-slo-mo effect, and black and white footage for absolutely no reason. But to all that, you add your secret ingredient: unnecessary cruelty and sadism. And presto! You have outdone yourself!

“You wouldn’t imagine the stares I get on the way to the weekly coven meeting.”

If anyone playing either the original tape or the new, improved DVD release didn’t know the caliber of the production they had committed to watch, they get a good idea in the first shots: Under a screen legend that reads “Topeka, Kansas 1945, an older woman with a distinctly non-period haircut and distinctly non-period clothing carries a distinctly non-period flashlight into the barn to investigate a noise and is jumped by two ruffians in distinctly non-period garb themselves. For story purposes, could this have been set in the ’60s, a period for which appropriate costuming would have been much easier to obtain? Certainly. Is there any reasons this had to be set in 1945? None whatever. How much thought would have been required to make the change and have the movie look ridiculous in the opening scene? About twenty seconds’ worth. Is there evidence that that twenty seconds’ worth of thought was instead apportioned for another part of the movie? None whatsoever.

The farmer comes out to find out why his wife is screaming, and the two ruffians grab him and demand the gold that he’s rumored to have in a nearby mine. They even cut off her finger to show they’re serious. But then the tables are turned — the farmer and his wife are Satanists, and their whole robed coven shows up and says spooky ominous things! One hoodlum gets eviscerated by the mob’s bare hands (and you thought only zombies fondled intestines!); the other is caught and nailed to a cross, his viscera is replaced with straw, and a burlap sack is sewn onto his head. Congrats, he’s a scarecrow!

Fast-forward to the present, where three prisoners escape over the barbed wire of a “Municipal Correctional Institute.” They are, according to the warden, extreme hardcases, which leaves one wondering why exactly they were in the municipal facility. We’ll see a lot more of them later. But first…

…Witless college-age fodder! Yes, it’s a vanload of kids with crummy attitudes, two guys and three girls, and you really don’t need to know about their names and personalities, because they’re fairly interchangeable victims, although we do get a misplaced chunk of exposition as Jimmy (Dave Miller) launches into a story about how his drunkard dad cut his long hair off with a straight razor in the middle of the night. I guess if the entire audience for your movie is misunderstood headbangers, then this is the kind of anecdote that engenders sympathy from the audience. (Oh, and there’s point reference to the foundless and unfair rumors that one of the other girls is a slut. Does it matter which of the other girls? No.)

“Behold, foolish mortals, the hokey-pokey really IS what it’s all about!”

So their van breaks down in the middle of the night in rural Kansas, so they walk until they find an unlit farmhouse. Jimmy opines that nobody lives there, because of the musty smell when he opens the door. He’s proven wrong in about twenty seconds, as this proves to be the house of three teenaged girls and their parents — parents who have just been killed by the escaped convicts! (So what was with the musty, unused smell? My guess is that it’s not just a piss-poor script, it’s a piss-poor first draft script in which things were made up as it went along, and nobody bothered to edit it; they just filmed it as written.)

And who, exactly, are the convicts? We find that out when the warden calls on her secret weapon: Connor Bradley (Harry Rose), ex-military bruiser, the guy they call on when no one else can do the jobs. Because local authorities, county deputies, and state troopers pale in sheer crime-stopping power to a single guy in a camo muscle-tee who has to ask the warden for some weapons! Anyway, the escapees are Slade (Byron Nichodemus), a habitual murderer; Rex (Rod Will), armed robber and pimp; and Billy (Mark Glover), manslaughtering drunk driver who’s just along for the ride.

There is, naturally, some fighting as the two college guys try to demonstrate they’re tough (they’re not), and much whining and screaming from our full complement of six womenfolk. And if the point here was to wish that zombies would rise and kill them all, mission accomplished! And how, exactly do the dead come to rise? Through witless means, naturally. Slade and Rex have ditched their prison duds in favor of what they found in the closets of the house, but there are none left for Billy. (That’s right, the dad only had two shirts and two pair of pants.) Billy has no recourse but to go strip the jacket off that scarecrow hanging out back. This would be a jacket that has been sitting out in the weather for four decades now. Billy does so, and we find that scarecrows that are actually human corpses really dislike losing their duds! Once Billy’s back inside, the scarecrow opens his eyes and calls on the Children of Lucifer to rise!

Wait — why would the robber who was put to death by the Satanists summon the Satanists? Why would the Satanists be lying dead in the field all around him under a thin covering of leaves? Why would they be wearing contemporary casual clothes, including a Lakers shirt? Is twenty seconds’ worth of thought really that hard to come by?

“Now tell me you like my cologne.”

And so the zombies attack the house. Whee. And of course, since we like exactly nobody in the house, we don’t give a rat’s ass if they get in. We also don’t care if the living characters kills each other fighting among themselves, or whether the undead get them.

And guess who should show up at the house? Connor Bradley, one-man ass-kicking force! He makes it through the zombies into the house, organizes everyone to grab a weapon, and leads them all back through the zombies to jog off down the road and find a safe place. Safer than, say, a house which they could barricade.

Now, I’ve only been telling you about one storyline. There’s also a completely separate storyline going on, with characters just as lame and unlikeable. In a small late-night deli, we’re introduced to Midnight (Jennifer Geigel), the emo goth chick behind the counter, and Zeke (Steve Wilcox), the janitor. Their characterization? Well, Zeke talks about how he could have had it all if he’d stuck with his music, but it was hard to do with a family. And Midnight’s boyfriend breaks up with her (by hand-delivered note) because she’s spending too much time with her band. Again, I guess if the entire audience for your movie is misunderstood headbangers, then this is the kind of anecdote that engenders sympathy from the audience. Then, while Midnight and Zeke and Midnight’s galpal (never caught her name) are hanging around, their deli is invaded by two maddog redneck killers: J.B. (Jerry Angell, he of the transcendent mullet from the first Zombie Bloodbath, though this time it’s gathered in a ponytail) and Shiner (Matt Walsh of Kingdom of the Vampire (1991)). Remember how I said that the only way this sequel “improves” upon the first film is in the department of senseless cruelty? Here’s where we get it. They swear, berate, and terrorize their three victims for several scenes (intercut with the “thrilling” convict-vs.-zombie action going on in the farmhouse); they shoot the galpal to death in the crotch, they make Zeke swallow a mouthful of broken glass, and they make Midnight dance naked on broken bottles. In other words, you just can’t wait until a crowd of zombies gathers for no reason outside the plate glass windows, just so we can have some relief from the sadism on display as entertainment.

“The buffet is now open!“

And now, just guess — just try and guess! — where the convoy of escapees from the farmhouse ends up. No, seriously, guess. Even though the farmhouse was clear out in B.F.E. and the deli’s on a city street, even they must have passed plenty of defensible places along the way, even though they have to push their way through a crowd of zombies to get into the deli, the two groups end up coming together. And we’re only just past halfway through the movie!

What follows is mostly attrition; people we don’t care about get picked off one-by-one by zombies hiding in improbable doorways while the survivors scream and whine and yell at each other. And in between, there are plenty of scenes of zombies fondling intestines, which would probably be a better title for this series than Zombie Bloodbath. And while I don’t understand where the initial zombies came from, they’re pretty Romeroesque in their propagation; anyone who dies, from a zombie wound or otherwise, comes back as a zombie. Which shouldn’t be as common as it is, since every time we see the zombie mob kill one of the living, they pretty much reduce him or her to his/her constituent parts; there shouldn’t be enough corpse to reanimate.

Because nothing says “respect for the audience” like an out-of-left-field improbability late in the game, our dwindling stock of survivors finally makes it out of the deli at daylight and finds a crashed truck — with a crateful of flesh-eating bacteria in stoppered test tubes on the front seat.

No, really.

And yes, that’s where I can’t bring myself to continue with even this rudimentary plot summary.

However, I do have two postscripts:

Postscript #1: Sprinkled in amongst the other scenes, we’ve had a couple of cutaways to radio announcers or TV reporters (all of whom seem to be honest-to-Betsy radio or TV people from the Kansas City area) commenting on the mayhem by Satanist or zombies or whatever. At the end of the movie — or where the end of the movie should be, given that we’ve run out of characters — we then get another ten minutes of radio and television studio footage, as the on-air personalities give ongoing bulletins about the zombie apocalypse on the Kansas/Missouri border. One starts to wonder if maybe the movie can only end once every damned living soul in the area gets gutmunched.

Somebody’s not getting their Field Dressing Merit Badge.

Postscript #2: When the closing credits are finally ready to roll, we are first treated to the edifying moral of what we just saw:

“This feature is produced with the hope that we have left you with a thought or two about the state of the human race. In many ways we are already ZOMBIES and the characters and situations depicted in this feature are based on real people and real incidents that have happened in Missouri. The message is clear: As a race, we humans always try and blame something else for our problems when in reality, it is a fact that WE are killing OURSELVES. We as a race are killing our forests and natural resources, but far worse, we are destroying US. Think about it.”

Yes, Todd. I will. I will think about it. I will even give it twenty seconds’ worth of thought. After all, it doesn’t look like anyone else is going to.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 22 (plus all that off-screen collateral damage)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0