"Oasis of the Zombies" might be the most boring zombie flick I have ever seen. It's one of those movies which feels like nothing happens in the entire runtime. It's boring, due to a simple plot told in a confusing way (with a completely unnecessary flashback sequence), it's paced like watching molasses move up hill in January, and it has no characters that make any impression whatsoever. Scratch that: it has no characters in general, just people moving across the screen.But if you are a Franco fan, you don't much care about the above. You want to know about the sex and violence, of which, unbelievably, there is hardly any. The nudity in the movie is negligible - literally. It is generally shown from such a distance that you're not sure what you're seeing. Later I think you might briefly see a woman's nipples while she is supposedly being snacked on by zombies.In this movie, when zombies bite people, it looks less like a violent attack than an old friend resting his head on someone's shoulder for moral support. You can tell they're not really biting anything. There is a bit of blood here and there, but that's about it for the violent effects. Watching this double-billed with one of the Romero horror flicks from the same era would be like comparing a kindergarten drawing to a Rembrandt.The plot is something to do with nazi zombies, like in the similarly awful but much more enjoyable Franco flick "Zombie Lake". You see, a nazi platoon was travelling with gold across the North African desert during World War II, but they were ambushed by allied soldiers. In the resulting fracas only one man survived, who is now elderly, but still harbours a desire to go back to the desert and take the gold... though how does he know it's still there?At the beginning of the story, another old man (with an improbably hot young girlfriend), visits this sole survivor, and foolishly tells him his tale about the gold. The other old man shoots him dead and goes off to claim the gold.Are you with me so far?The sole survivor (who couldn't survive the bullet) has a son who is at university with a bunch of sexy young friends, and hearing about his dad's death, the son decides to travel to the desert with his pals and pick up the gold.Somewhere around this point there is an unnecessary flashback scene showing the sole survivor's rescue after the fracas in the desert at the hands of a sheik and him falling in love with the sheik's daughter. This part adds absolutely nothing to the movie and really made it grind to a halt. They couldn't even get any nudity out of it.Anyway, all these people go to the desert to find the gold, of which I'm not sure there is any. At least, I don't remember any gold in the movie. What they do find, as I'm sure you've guessed, are zombies.Think about this for a second: this movie is presumably set around the time it came out. These are the zombies of people who died in World War II. That means they've been dead for roughly forty years. So why, when we finally get a good look at them, do they look like they've only been dead about a month?Admittedly, practically all zombie movies do this: the walking corpses are always at the exact same rate of decomposition. But these ones have been dead for forty years. The make up crew doesn't skimp on showing worms crawling around on the zombie's faces, presumably eating the rotten flesh. After forty years of decomposition, there would be nothing for the worms to eat! These should be walking skeletons.The fact that I was thinking about that while watching "Oasis of the Zombies" shows how inept and boring it is. I hope it's Franco's worst film; if he has worse out there, I don't want to know about it.

After hearing of his father's death, a group of friends leaves for Africa to the location of a long lost secret Nazi gold convoy, yet when a horde of zombies arise from the sand and launch an assault on the group it ends up forcing them to defend themselves against the voracious creatures.This isn't as bad as many make it out to be. One of the better elements of the film is the rather nice amount of action scenes here, even if they're not all zombie battles. The fire-fight sequence back in the war is a fun action sequence that is far better than what's been said as it's main strength is the fact that it lasts as long as it does. This one wisely features a close-quarters battle rather than just being a singular round of gunfire and then it's over, going back and forth and featuring some really nice moments. Naturally, though, the zombies are the main part of the film's action and come off rather nicely. The fact that they have several creepy moments throughout is rather enjoyable, with the opening attack being the most creepy with off-screen noises and the general sense of the unknown really hammering it home. Their resurrection at the end through the slowly-shifting sand dunes with the hands slowly crawling out is incredibly atmospheric and goes a long way to giving them a menacing appearance. The assault on the campsite that follows is full-on action and burning bodies, and as the zombies score as well the overall scene is a general highlight. The other really nice part here is that the zombies do look suitably creepy, featuring suitably rotting faces and sand-encrusted features complete with charred Nazi uniforms. Several of them have a really rotted out eye-hole with one eye missing, and there's another which has the skin rotted away and giving the impression that its eyes are bugging out. It's a memorable look, especially with the sandy features not being a bad thing since some of them are pretty decent looking in their execution. There is surprisingly very little wrong about this one. The main issue is that the zombies don't have a whole lot of screen-time in here which is a big disappointment seeing as that limits the fact that there's no real gore on display other than some really bloody wounds on bodies that would really be more enjoyable if it was shown how they were made. The fact that Franco is also toned down a lot in the exploitation angle with the violence and sleaze is also noticeable as this really could've had more of both, and only features a fraction of what is usually in his films. The slow pace is the last major problem, and really hampers the film a lot more than it should. It takes a long time to get rolling, and the zombies being in it so little and without the usual Franco exploits this meanders around for a while until it gets going. This is filled with lots of scenes of people talking and other such activities, featuring flashbacks to the father's life back in the day or just ambling around the desert that this one never really seems to drive forward with any sense of urgency all that much. That hurts the film the most.Rated R: Violence, Language, Nudity and a mild sex scene.

Of course, you wouldn't expect this Jess Franco directed film to have a simple history. After rejecting the earlier 'Zombie Lake (1981)' (which was handed to the masterly Jean Rollin) for reasons unknown, Franco helmed this under the pseudonym AM Frank, and produced Spanish and French versions. The film has been released under several titles – 'L'Abîme des Morts-Vivants', 'The Abyss of the Living Dead', 'Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies', 'El desierto de los zombies', 'The Grave of the Living Dead', and 'The Treasure of the Living Dead'.The zombies themselves are seldom seen, and when they are, they are often viewed from behind. Their faces, featured mainly in close-ups, are impressively embroidered with convincingly rotting flesh, popping eyeballs, the occasional wriggling worm and mummified, slack open jaws.The story – as I understand it - involves Robert (Manuel Gélin) telling, in a lengthy flashback liberally interspersed with footage from higher budgeted films, how a squadron carrying a shipment of Nazi gold is ambushed across the African desert. Robert is telling his story to bounty hunter Kurt (Henri Lambert), who then kills him. Robert's son then vows to locate the treasure, but his expedition finds that a group of Nazi zombies are guarding it.Meeting with a generally negative reception, the lack of Franco's best friends sex and gore (for the most part) helps to make 'Oasis of the Zombies' a fairly dull affair. The cadaverous antagonists are not featured often enough, and the other characters are by and large, negligible. There are, however, some incredibly picturesque locations, and full advantage is made of them. Scenes of zombies shuffling around the dunes of a desert environment, sometimes very effectively in silhouette, look great.The ending, as is the case with quite a few Franco films, is so abrupt that it comes from nowhere. Such is the slowness of the film (not always a bad thing, and here conjurs up some occasionally hypnotising moments) hardly commands rapt attention, and 'The End' credit is suddenly there, a deeply inauspicious end to a film I nevertheless quite enjoyed, given its flaws. Mind you, I enjoy 'Zombie Lake' too!

The base premise for nearly any trash film is that, before anything else, it was made in order... to be made. Passion for making a film drives these makers into it. And that can perfectly be the end of the story. The film may pay off in the box office or the public's appeal, or it can even become an interesting piece of film. But underneath its more superficial layers, there lies always a profound passion for making the film. What else would drive filmmakers and respective cast and crews into making such silliness if not fo the sake of making it?Franco, d'Amato, Ossorio, work like this. It's fun to gather a crew to film, so they film. With Franco, we probably get the wildest process. The films are cheap, the photography lame by any measure or time you time, and the story is absurd and skips almost every conventional rule of visual storytelling, sometimes even Kuleshov gets somehow trashed! So if take your conventional film values, taken from Hollywood, from french new wave, from Italian neo- realism, even from jarman or meliès, you'll feel cheated. That's not how one's supposed to watch films. But you take the film as a passionate personal statement from someone who wanted to pick up a camera, than you may use the film as a vehicle to reach to guy behind it. Franco is capable of doing it. If you watch him speak, he's as derivative and trashy in his speech as in his films. So you're not seeing some story told by some guy. You're seeing a kind of meta-selfportrait of the guy. Worth the shot isn't it?Having said this, this specific version of Franco's obsessions is pretty dull, even by his standards. New phase, beginning of the 80's, i suppose his interests shifted towards less graphical depictions (i think this is the newest film of his i've seen!). Two things worth noting:-how he shoots the very few shots where his lover shows up. One of them has her wearing her panties, sitting on a sand floor while smoking a cigar and teasing two mugs just before being brutalized by the macho German who takes her to a tent. A little later, we cut to the inside of the tent, and have her laying belly down, making an effort to emphasize her butt. There's enough passion in these scenes to push a little bit further the boundaries of the pin- up object that every woman usually is in his films. that's nice,-there's a filmmaker in the story, a guy who spends little time on screen, i suppose Franco didn't quite know what he'd make of the character. He tries (until he's killed) to make the film of the expedition. making a film where someone is making a film, always a nice (and very 70' though) thing to do;my opinion: 1/5