Every now and then, a film comes along that has been made on a shoestring budget yet captures the cinema-going public’s attention. Think ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Think ‘Paranormal Activity’. Both made for less than $500,000, both staggeringly successful. So, it stands to reason there must be several other undiscovered micro-budget gems out there waiting to be discovered, right?
To save all you film fans some time – ‘Zombie Women of Satan’ isn’t one of them.
The premise of ‘Zombie Women of Satan’ is that of a lunatic (and incestuous) family who run some sort of lady cult so their patriarch can source an infinite supply of bodies to experiment on in order to achieve his goal of a Nobel Prize. From his shed. In a forest off the M6. Anyway, things go predictably awry when a bowl of punch gets contaminated with corpse juice and is drunk by the cult members, turning the nubile young women into… you can probably guess from the title. Stumbling into the midst of this insanity is a circus troupe of freaks who are humanity’s only hope of stopping the rampage from spreading outside of the North East. It thinks it’s anarchic and funny, it thinks it’s ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and it isn’t; it just isn’t.
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| Ship of tools... |
Where to begin? The acting is appalling – check out the trailer and you’ll see a silent blonde ponytailed young woman. There’s a reason she’s silent in the trailer, it’s so you don’t realise until it’s too late that she says every line as though she’s a reception class teacher reading a picture book to her class. When you couple this with a script packed with such witticisms as ‘Daddy, her titties are bleeding!’ it just pours salt on an already gaping, pus-filled wound.
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| 'But they are, Daddy! Look!' |
Oh yes. The script. The whole story is based on a woefully shaky premise, the one-liners are ridiculously bad and it manages the awesome feat of including painfully clunky exposition that still doesn’t leave you any wiser as to the plot. There’s a great moment where the enjoyably kick-ass rock singer forced to join forces with the hapless circus troupe answers a request for information with a terse, ‘There’s no time to explain!’… only to spend the next five minutes waffling on about how she and her sisters used to play by a lake. I mentioned how this film thinks it’s ‘Shaun of the Dead’ - it’s trying to be a comedy horror and boy does it try. A few hints, aspiring film makers; maybe a dwarf taking a dump in the woods is funny. I can assure you it isn’t funny when it goes on for fifteen minutes and has zero payoff. Maybe an hour of chopping demented naked women up with a variety of implements while finding different ways of yelling, ‘Die you zombie bitch!’ is funny; you know, if you’re Ted Bundy.
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| Zombie Women of Satan - A bloody mess. And the zombie women could do with a shower, too. |
The sad thing is, I kind of wanted to like this. It’s so delightfully stupid and they clearly cared about the film they were making. Its £40,000 budget is reasonably well spent – it looks very low budget but £40,000 is nothing in film production and it manages to appear as though more (albeit not much more) was spent on it. They have a character called Pervo the Clown, and his antagonistic relationship with the circus troupe ringmaster is given some depth. Well, okay, we find old Pervo masturbating to the ringmaster’s photo in the woods and demonstrating grief at accidentally decapitating him with a chainsaw with the touching yet brief utterance, ‘I’m such a nobhead!’, but in a film with the tagline ‘It really was the wrong time of the month!’ my expectations slide so low they’re effectively subterranean.
Unfortunately, the film is just awful. There is no way I can even recommend it as a ‘so bad it’s good’ watch as it’s just bad. Still, on a late night in a Portuguese villa where the rest of our party had gone to bed, it provided myself and another unfortunate witness with a catchphrase that lasted for weeks: ‘Daddy, her titties are bleeding!’ What other film can say that?
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