This is a terrible film that had the opportunity to have been considerably better. It has an admirable start with Goblin's electronic music mixed in with story narrative, this gives it a modern feel. As the movie begins we are at a chemical plant that is not as secure as they thought. A rat is found in one of the rooms, though it's not dead as the workmen first think. It attacks one of the workmen killing him, unfortunately, he doesn't stay dead. As the trouble progresses the noxious gas starts to leak out of the facility and infects the air... bringing on an extinction event.From here on it should have been an awesome film but the Directors, Bruno Mattei (who used the name Vincent Dawn) - this action speaks volumes - and Claudio Fragasso (who also co-wrote the story with Jose Maria Cunilles) decided to go an entirely different route than you would ever imagine.The viewer is then subjected to some really bad over-the-top acting (more than usual for an Italian horror) as we are introduced to a crack army assault team who stop a siege at an embassy. This ten minutes is a waste of time as it's really bad and is only there to let the audience know their next mission is in New Guinea.It appears the location was only introduced into the story so the director could hop onto the tribe and animal cruelty bandwagon, as they weave stock film of death rituals into the movie. Once again, these are not actually required and are not relevant to the film. However, it does mean the lead lady can get her boobs out and they are nice boobs.Another handicap is the speed of the Zombies, these are your old-time shambling dead. Even Richard Briars on a Zimmer-frame could out run these stiffs (Cockney's V's Zombies). It's even played up in the film. Even the zombie make-up is poor most are just covered in light blue powder and any other embellishments are large, bulky, and unrealistic.The twist at the end is a nice one and again if they hadn't gone the wrong direction with the story then, it could have been an outstanding Zombie movie.I wouldn't recommend this one to anybody as there are much better Zombie flicks about, my favourite being Return Of The Living Dead... "Brains... We Need More BRAINS!!!"

I first watched Hell of the Living Dead on BETA tape in the 1980's and I always thought of it as a kind of snuff movie because of the gritty video and realistic gore effects (i.e. bullet wounds). Plus, experiencing this movie on a poor quality tape only adds to that effect. Watching it on streaming channels in much higher quality doesn't really eliminate the snuff aura, at least when it comes to viewing the gore in higher detail. I am very impressed with it and I'm not even that much of a gore hound. A horror movie has to entertain me on the eerie level before anything and HOTLD delivers there, especially when the focus is on a small jungle village and what is revealed to be hiding inside an abandoned laboratory. Let's just say, a certain professor knows it's lunch time. I also very much liked the scene where a little boy who was bitten by a zombie dies and comes back to life, then is shot down by heroic commandos after taking a bite out of his exhausted papa. Not many horror films are gutsy enough to mix children and violence in this manner. Also interesting is when we meet a Barbara Bush look-alike grandma ghoul and her undead kitty kat, burrowing inside of her tummy until kitty's rest is disturbed by our uniformed heroes. Very original and just plain creepy. Sure, the acting is laughable, but I think it's mostly due to the awful voice-overs. The funniest character has to be the Yanni look-alike cameraman, he alone is worth the price of admission! These characters are a hoot to observe, one must admit. So basically, this is an entertaining Italian "date night" zombie movie for those who appreciate the trashy side of horror. An underrated gross out gem that will curb your appetite for anything red and squishy.

A chemical plant in New Guinea accidentally releases a deadly virus that turns everyone that it comes in contact with into the living dead. Supposedly a SWAT team is called to the location to take care of the problem. A Reporter (Newton) and her photographer tag along to the island and cannibal zombies munch natives and everything else eventually ending up back at the chemical plant. Where do you start with such a notoriously bad movie? The plot and story makes little to no sense. The characters act stupid from start to finish and Director Bruno Mattei doesn't seem to care. He fills this movie with stock film footage of natives on the island. The problem is he's cutting back and forth with the actors and the film stock isn't even close to matching, apparently no one cares. The elite SWAT team is made up of four clowns who are more interested in getting tail than doing their jobs. The dubbing is the worst, the music is by Goblin and tracks are stolen directly from "Dawn of the Dead". This is truly lazy film making at its worst. Director Mattei started in adult films and it shows. The compositions are boring and stale and everything feels sleazy even when it shouldn't. Yes there is some cheesy gore shown in disgusting well lit close ups. Intestines are splattered and a tongue is ripped out and shoved up inside until the victim's eyeballs pop out. The gore and everything else involved in this Italian Zombie flick is unconvincing and extremely poor, it's not even worth watching for laughs.

I'm not super-familiar with the work of famed exploitation director Bruno Mattei (here credited under an alias), but I know a little bit about him and I've seen a few of his other films. My best friend is an enormous fan of his work (in an ironic, so-bad-it's-good way), and this past weekend brought over the DVD of this film... the oddly-titled "Hell of the Living Dead." It was an experience, I will give it that.There is no real plot to speak of. Everything seems to mush together unnaturally. In the beginning, at a military center called "Hope Center", an experimental chemical is leaked, turning the staff into zombies. Elsewhere, a crack team of commandos infiltrates a building where activists protesting the Hope Center have taken hostages, and kill them all. Sometime later, in Papua New Guinea, the commandos encounter a gorgeous reporter and her cameraman/pseudo-boyfriend, who are being chased by zombies. The commandos and the reporter team up to escape alive.From there on, the film is a messy series of skits, essentially. The characters talk a little bit, go to a new location, zombies show up, they flee. This is repeated several times until the end of the film, which without spoiling anything, is outlandishly hilarious and ludicrous as the script tries vainly to tie the plot together by book-ending the story. It's a very random, funny climax.I haven't heard of any of the actors before the film, and after seeing it, I can see why. The acting is very hammy. Despite seeing a dubbed version, you can tell from the physical performances that the actors were all going over-the-top, and they never seemed to react naturally to anything. The English voice dubbing is pretty atrocious as well.Gore effects are a mixed bag. Some of the shots are fantastic, while others are laughably bad. The zombies themselves look halfway decent at times, however, they too-often fall back on that gray "Dawn of the Dead" look.Direction is pretty sub-par, and cheap. Mattei really dropped the ball here. And the insane over-use of stock footage got grating. As did the script, which as I mentioned above is the same "rinse and repeat" series of scenes over and over again. Finally, I must complain about one thing- for a movie about zombies, there certainly aren't many zombies in it. They are there for the first few scenes, before suddenly disappearing for what seemed to be a good 30-40 minutes, during which Bruno padded the film with excessive stock-footage of native tribes, and goody, unneeded scenes of the commandos interacting with said tribes. For a while, I forgot there were even zombies."Hell of the Living Dead" is fairly entertaining at times, but it's just too basic for its own good. It isn't good enough to be watchable as a good film, not is it bad enough to qualify for "so bad, it's good!" territory. As it stands, it's just a bland, boring, crummy movie with a few unintentional laughs. I give it a 3 out of 10. If you want to see a good (or rather, so-bad-it's-good) Mattei film, look elsewhere.