Zombie Self-Defense Force

Zombie Self-Defense Force is the first of Naoyuki Tomomatsu's trio of zombie productions. I've had this movie for probably six months before I actually got around to watching it, but now that I have I think I just might be intrigued enough to look into those other two. That's not to say that it's a great film (it's not), but in this case I think that this trainwreck turned out to be hilarious enough for repeat viewings, from several angles.

The movie starts out with a ridiculous CGI spaceship being seen over Fujiyama, Japan. After a drawn out display of every single Japanese citizen's reactions to the U.F.O. the thing crashes, bathing the surrounding landscape in an electric green light.


As luck would have it, the Kibara platoon of the Japanese Self-Defense Force is in the forest already, on a "routine mission."

When we meet them they're just arriving at a corpse hanging from a tree. They see the spaceship, but decide to take care of the body before heading out to the crash site. While they're digging a grave for her, the dead woman suddenly springs back to life as a green-skinned zombie.

Also we find out the forest is haunted by ghost soldiers...

Wow. Things are really picking up fast now, and it hardly ever slows down again. We get one ridiculously gory gag after another as we plod along a truly skeletal plot. Essentially if you were to take zombies, aliens, ghosts, robots, and volcano eruptions (and the rest of this post's tag list), and come up with some ridiculous way to string them all together and throw them on screen in the span of 45 minutes or so, then you'd pretty much have the plot of Zombie Self-Defense Force... so long as you sprinkled in a healthy dose of sword fighting and arterial spray. With that being said, this isn't exactly a plot-driven movie anyway. As a cheap romp through a sequence of sight-gags and gore effects, this is actually pretty entertaining.

It's most easily compared to the scores of Troma films that follow about the same formula. While I personally don't mind some of Troma's more self-indulgent melon-crushing escapades, the quality bar's not set very high on a lot of those, and that's about what I was expecting going into Zombie Self-Defense Force. To my surprise, this actually turned out to actually be better than a lot of the Troma stuff.

Here are some of the high points:

Long, weird, but interesting opening propaganda spiel about why the U.S. government and its military actions are bad, but hamburgers and George Romero are good.

A flying zombie fetus that explodes from the womb of a dead, but pregnant, zombie...

... which then immediately lassos the innkeeper with his umbilical cord and goes Blanka on the innkeeper's face.

We eventually meet the aliens that are causing all of these problems... this is what they look like. As it turns out they're not built for dealing with robots + swords.

The final showdown between robot-lady and ghost-man. Same as all the other fights, but with even more sparks and hilariously inappropriate sound-effects than usual to indicate how epic it is.

Zombie Nightmare

Alright, so we've got a horror movie about baseball, heavy metal, and Canadian voodoo... I think we're in for a real treat.

The story starts, eventually, with one large guy getting run over by a bunch of kids speeding through town. The guy's mom shows up pretty much immediately, is understandably distraught, and immediately takes him right to the hospital... and by hospital I mean the local Canadian voodoo priestess, Molly Mokembe.

Fact: Canadian clowns are much scarier than American clowns.

The voodoo priestess reanimates his corpse, with a quick mention that he'll be looking for some sort of revenge later.

Soon enough, the zombie kills one of the random kids from the speeding car after we watch them play tennis for a painful two or three minutes.

97 to 134. Approximately halfway through the game.

When the police arrive, we're introduced to the captain (Adam West) and a couple of investigators.

Wait a few minutes and I'll call someone "Batty." Seriously.

The older investigator talks sort of like a duck and teaches the younger guy (Frank Dietz of The Lost Skeleton Returns Again) the ways of being a bad investigator: ignoring evidence, pinning crimes on convenient bystanders, etc. The younger guy doesn't really seem to like this method of policework, so he goes off to his house to brood and leaves us to watch Adam West have a very cryptic audio-only flashback. I can't imagine who thought this was a good idea to stick in the film, but it wasn't.

Around this time we meet another couple from the car that hit the zombified kid. Amy (Tia Carrere of Wayne's World) opens the scene by calling her boyfriend and telling him that she's worried that the guy they hit is trying for revenge and they'll be next. Her boyfriend hangs up and she goes back to clutching her teddy bear.


She and her boyfriend meet up and start running around to get away, but they don't end up getting very far.

Even with such evasive maneuvers as... standing still, hiding behind glass.

Adam West goes after Molly Mokembe to find out what to do. And pretty soon the Frank Dietz, Adam West, the voodoo priestess, and the zombie all end up at the cemetary. Adam West tries to shoot everyone, gets everyone but Frank Dietz, and then... Twist Ending!!


Another zombie pops up and pulls him into its grave to mercifully end the Zombie Nightmare experience.

Unless you're some sort of Adam West completest, you should steer clear of this one. It's almost never bad enough to be funny, and almost always bad enough to be painful.

To end on a positive note... In that last minute or so of the film, we did finally get one of our first good looks at the zombie and I was actually surprised at how good the two zombies looked relative to the rest of the movie.

While they're not excellent, they're certainly not Zombie Lake-bad.

Flesh Eating Mothers

When the cover to a movie is a picture of a person who's not actually in the film and the case shows no screenshots, there's a good chance that there just wasn't actually anything in there exciting enough to put anywhere on the case.

This is one of those. And as usual with these sorts of things, the movie's cover is the best part about this one.

In this movie, a weird STD turns every adulterous mom into a crazed cannibal. A group of highschool kids head out to solve the mystery, and to our dismay, after too few cases of infanticide and little kid eating, the movie's over.

This movie has some of the worst production you'll find. The acting is painfully awful, there's barely a plot, even the lighting is terrible... These things cause a perfectly good horror movie idea to go to waste.

Actually, the amount of terrible in this movie is the only thing that makes it significant at all, so if you feel like putting yourself through agonies to see that for yourself, go ahead, otherwise, I'd just give this one a pass.

Zombie Lake

Here, the zombie make-up consists of actors whose faces are painted green with latex paint. Since several are seen in the lake itself, a lot of the paint is, at all times, washing or falling off in pieces...

And the paint only extends to their faces. Their hands are usually still fleshtone.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the zombie attacks are even worse. The victims scream half-heartedly for a few seconds, then just look bored and look around absent-mindedly while they're being chewed on by the zombies.

At one point, a man's explanation of the lake and how it came to be filled with nazi zombies lasts about 1/3 of the movie.

This one is just painful to sit through on all levels.