Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence (1991)

This very low budget German zombie movie, although not a Troma movie, combines elements of my two favorite Troma videos. It takes the cheese and over the top gore of Redneck Zombies and pairs it with the side-splitting dubbing style of Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters. What results is a fun, cheap, intensely gory and sophomorically hilarious zombie romp.

The story, well sir, I guess there was a story. Okay, a military plane that is transporting an experimental AIDS cure crashes and the spilled chemicals turn everyone exposed to them into gut-munching zombies and, as per usual, everyone they kill also becomes a walking corpse with a taste for human flesh. It might sound like I'm rushing through the plot, but that is really about all there is to it. The film hurries through this setup in about 10 minutes and the remainder of the movie is a series of people walking on camera, doing various stuff and then being torn apart by zombies.

Aside from a tremendous amount of gore, even way beyond that of Redneck Zombies, what makes this really dumb movie so much fun is the dubbing. Instead of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, they decided to go for laughs. This was a very good idea and it probably saves this movie. The two main characters are a couple of doctors who run around dispatching zombies and generally trying to save mankind. One, a very white German, has the dubbed voice of a Jive-talking 1970s blacksploitation pimp and the other has a very over the top effeminate lisp. Like I said, the jokes here are pretty sophomoric.

Most of the stuff here sounds like it was made up on the spot. In one scene a man, who is supposed to be alone in the woods, makes some comment about using the bathroom outside and you can actually hear people laughing in the background. In an earlier scene, a woman enters the shower room of a spa only to find her companion being devoured by a couple zombies. Now, the picture clearly shows us the woman clutching the sides of her head and screaming bloody murder, but what we hear coming from her mouth is a quite calm and almost deadpan "holy s***".

Funny dubbing aside, this movie might offend some. Its scenes of breast eating, genital mutilation, people being graphically hacked up with chainsaws, incessant intestine pulling and much more, may be a bit much for casual viewers. The effects are pretty bad and this makes what would be overwhelming seem not so terrible. A scene where a baby is torn apart by a ravenous zombie would be hard to watch if it wasn't so obviously a plastic doll.

If you are a real gorehound with a slightly bent sense of humor and a taste for some really low budget, shot-on-video dumbness, you should check it out. I've compared this to Redneck Zombies and I think it is safe to say that if you liked that, you'll probably like this. Unlike RZ, however, this movie has never had a legitimate North American release and you'll probably have to track down a gray-market dub if you want to check it out.