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Year: 2009
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Country: United States
Language: English
Starring: Victoria Hopkins, Warren Speed, Christian Steel, Victoria Broom, Peter Bonner, Marysia Kay, Bill Fellows, Gillian Settle, Kate Soulsby, Joe Nicholson
Eye candy: Hopkins
, Broom
, Kay
, Settle
, Soulsby
, Natasha Adams
, Nicola Michelle Airey
, tons of other naked girls mostly covered in zombie gore ![]()
Directors: Steve O’Brien, Warren Speed
Run time: 88 minutes
DVD distributor: Alliance Films
When I watch silly, schlocky B-movies like Zombie Women of Satan, out March 29th on DVD from Alliance Films, there is one thing I look for. And one thing only. Glee. And I don’t mean musical montages set to today’s campy pop hits. I mean a sense of gleeful, frenetic lunacy that hopefully will permeate each and every scene in the film. I want to get the sense that the film makers were having an absolute blast making the movie, coming up with insane ideas, realizing they are insane, and using them anyway.
And I DID get this with Zombie Women of Satan. About half the time. In a horror movie, it’s (usually) essential that the good guys are fairly average people. Usually hot young teenagers (possibly up to no good) who stumble into the depraved house of murderous lunatics and undergo torture while trying to escape. This movie actually makes the “heroes” even weirder and creepier than the family that traps them. That’s a welcome change to the horror movie convention…sort of.
The “glee” I look for in this movie comes in a few bonkers scenes. One where a dwarf strong-man (Peter Bonner) takes a crap in the woods. This could have been an awful, cheesy, unfunny scene. Obviously some zombie woman is going to attack him while he’s crapping. And at first, the scene is powerfully unfunny. But it goes on for SO LONG, that it somehow becomes gleefully hilarious. It has been nine minutes of movie time. And he’s STILL pooping? And he STILL hasn’t been attacked? Solid.
Another is the scene that seems to be entirely made up of throwaway lines, where the father of the family asks his son to have sex with a mutilated zombie corpse, and films it so his mother can watch it later. It’s a very brief scene (much shorter than the crap-in-the-woods), but manages to get necrophilia, porn, torture, murder and incest all into one moment, and does so in such an offhand manner that it really works.
What doesn’t work in the film is the zombies themselves. Just covering naked women in gross makeup and throwing them at the equally-creepy stars (who have names like Pervo the Clown) isn’t good enough for me. I want to see inventive killings! Yeah, it’s unusual to see one of the zombies coming at us in a wheelchair. Weird. But do more than just shoot them in the head and hit them with golf clubs! That’s old and easy. Part of the gleeful lunacy of stupid zombie B-movies is the nudity, the other part is killing zombies with weed-whackers and chainsaws and filing cabinets!
The nudity in Zombie Women of Satan is not at all titillating, it’s mostly played for cheap laughs and doesn’t work well. The kills aren’t terribly interesting, with the exception of one funny scene where Pervo the Clown teaches his female assistant how to hit a zombie corpse like a MAN, not a GIRL. Half the time, this is a wild, entertaining ride. For some, that’s good enough.