Zombie Cult Massacre (1997)

Reviewed on Oct 01, 2003 under Horror |

Written and directed by Jeff Dunn
Starring
- Bob Elkins
- Lonzo Jones
- Mike Botouchis
- Lani Ford
- Randy Rupp

Let’s get it out of the way right up front: this isn’t an original zombie flick. But that’s okay. Very few zombie flicks are original, actually, especially among low-budget indies; most of them are very consciously intended to recapture some of the excitement of the the formative granddaddies of the genre, i.e., the Romero trilogy and those few EuroHorror entries in the field which rose above the level of unexceptional crud. It’s a lot like Elvis impersonators; there are a lot of variations — black Elvis impersonators, female Elvis impersonators, midget Elvis impersonators, conjoined twin Elvis impersonators — but the point isn’t to be wholly original, it’s to combine the expected elements with a little bit of a twist to distinguish this impersonator from that one.

Thus, a film like Zombie Cult Massacre can be considered a pretty good one, even if every single scene seems familiar from somewhere else. It’s okay. That’s how it was meant to be.

“It’s okay, son. You feel the Spirit better when you’re strapped down.”

As with The Dead Next Door a decade before, Zombie Cult Massacre focuses on religion, specifically, extremely militant fundamentalist Christians, the kind who have stepped over the line into caricature. The first scene, set in 1979, shows us young Marvin, whose trailer-trash father believes every word coming from the televangelist on his screen, especially the parts about driving out the devil by corporal punishment. It’s not surprising that Marvin grows up with some deeprooted and conflicted feelings about religion.

Twenty years later, Marvin (Mike Botouchis) is on a road trip with girlfriend Sally (Lani Ford) back to the hometown he left years ago when his father died. Amy is, bluntly, a bitch who can’t stop lambasting Marvin for every wrong turn in the godforsaken road. The shopkeeper where they stop for directions warns them against the area they’re heading for — “strange things” have been happening — but Sally just can’t wait to get back to harping on Marvin. In fact, the only thing that shuts her up is accidentally mowing someone down in the middle of the road. (If you’re feeling deja vu through this part, you’re probably remembering the first Children of the Corn movie, or even more likely, the original Stephen King short story.)

But not just a someone — a zombie! (We, the audience, have already seen zombies in a throwaway scene of a blonde running through the woods from the living dead, so it’s not nearly the surprise to us as it is to Sally and Marvin. Plus, well, we know the title of the movie.) They’re too shocked to get away when the corpse lumbers to its feet again and attacks them; the only thing that saves them is another couple who just happen to drive along right then, armed to the teeth. They’re George (Randy Rupp) and his pregnant wife Billie (Bridget Otto), residents and adherents of the New Kingdom religious community just down the road, where they invite the shaken travelers to get some medical attention for the nasty zombie bite on Marvin’s arm.

If “the reward of the faithful” doesn’t include a hot tub, well…

The drive through the guarded front gate takes them past a horde of zombies milling against the chainlink fence — a sign, George points out, of the coming apocalypse: The dead are rising from their graves. Inside, they meet the New Kingdom’s founder and leader, the charismatic Jeffrey (Bob Elkins), who alternates his considerable charm with his bombastic command of his followers. (To the movie’s credit, Elkins actually has the strength of charisma to pull the role off, unlike so many other broadly anti-religious genre movies which fill the religious leader role with a slimy nebbish milksop.) Sally, in a move which marks an abrupt change to her personality, seems utterly taken with the whole idea of living a strictured religious life. Marvin, on the other hand, is (understandably) extremely leery of the whole idea of a faith-based lifestyle. Plus, he’s still got blood dripping down his arm from the zombie attack.

Marvin’s fears are substantiated when he’s “invited” to visit their resident “doctor,” Lenny, who spends his time torturing a caged zombie with a cattle prod and dreaming up fiendish new ways to use power tools on those whose faithfulness is wavering. Together, Lennie and Jeffrey start injecting Marvin with mind-altering drugs. Better spirituality through chemicals! Unfortunately, it also puts him into a hallucination of wandering computer-generated catacombs until meeting up with Satan (Steve Losey), who looks (most of the time) just like the preacher who inspired Marvin’s fathers to his excesses of corporal punishment. And what the hey, Marvin goes ahead and signs some documents…

All right, her complexion’s not the greatest, but you gotta love those eyes.

And the zombies mill outside…

Jeffrey, meanwhile, is demonstrating the standard hypocrisy of spiritual leaders in movies like this — while demanding complete righteousness and rejection of worldliness of his followers, he’s got a private little sanctum where he keeps a stash of alcohol and cavorts with a couple of bunnies in a hottub. As he terms it, he’s “crucified on the cross of sin for the good of my people.” (Gosh, the selfless sacrifices some people can make…) And he’s got his eye on Sally to join in his little festivities and “accept his seed.”

Fact is, Jeffrey’s been doing more than a little seed-spreading; Billie’s pregnancy is his, and George, fully cognizant of it, is trying to follow Jeffrey’s instructions to keep apart from her (according to Jeffrey’s tortured logic, it would be adultery), and the tensions inside him are getting him a little edgy. He mostly takes it out on the zombies around the perimeter, using them for target practice.

“Zima, of course. What else would I drink?”

Which I suppose is good — otherwise, the zombies wouldn’t have much use in the story at all. They remain on the periphery (milling around) for all but the last twenty minutes of the movie, acting as set dressing. And that ending, when it comes, is almost entirely set in motion by events other than those involving the major characters. See, waaay back when Marvin and Sally were asking for directions at the country store, there were two blondes from the church compound handing out fliers and trying to convince a biker named Roach (Lonzo Jones) to join them for some good times. Eventually, after much of the movie has played out, he shows up with one of them and ends up one of Lenny’s experimental subjects. Then he escapes, leaving a trail of bodies behind him, and rallies all of his biker buddies in an attack on the compound. So the last twenty minutes is a big free-for-all shootout between the bikers and the believers, and its just about then that the zombies decide to push over the fence and wander in, eating the living of both parties.

The good points, then, are the acting (just about everybody turns in a credible performance) and a story which is creative and energetic enough to disguise the fact that it makes very little sense. (Why are there only zombies right outside the compound, not anywhere else in the world? And why does it look like Jeffrey is involved in creating the zombies in the first place?) And, of course, there’s plenty of beheading, gut-munching, head-shotgunning, fetus-eating, and other necessary gore in the big finale.

Oh yeah. Zombies. Almost forgot about them.

The biggest minus is that there’s really no protagonist to root for. Marvin starts out sympathetic, but then he goes into his religious coma, and comes out the other side the truest of true believers, to the point of actually deposing Jeffrey at one point and chanting nonsensical scriptural nonsequiturs into a megaphone during the big finale. Sally starts out as a bitch, and when her big change comes, she suddenly turns into a ninny who lets herself fall for a pathetic line of spiritual bull. George starts shaping up to be a man who breaks free of a bad religious choice, but instead he stays devoted to Jeffrey to the bitter end (in this case, that end being crucifixion in a crowd of hungry zombies). Just about everybody ends up dead in the end; not only is there no obvious “final girl,” there’s also no one whom we’d really care to see live through the closing credits.

All of which simply means that this doesn’t end up in the upper circle of zombie films. But it’s still a respectable little entry in the genre, relying on more than simple fanboy grue or videogame inspiration to sustain interest. As usual, you could do much, much worse.