I was loitering around the horror section of my local video store back in 1988 or 1989 when my not-so-jaded eyes fell upon a tape called Revenge of the Living Zombies. Of course I picked it up and of course it accompanied me to my house where I immediately plugged it into my trusty old Goldstar VCR.

I remember laughing to myself about how filmmakers would rearrange Night, Dawn, and Return as long as the money kept coming in.

Revenge of the Living Zombies was made by the venerable First Zombie from Night of the Living Dead himself, Bill Hinzman. Bill also plays the honcho zombie flesheater. How could I lose?

I did like Revenge of the Living Zombies, but I was aware of its shortcomings. This wasn't a movie like Night of the Creeps or House on the Edge of the Park where I had to alert all my friends to watch. No, Revenge of the Living Zombies was cheap, crude, but entertaining enough.

Fast forward thirty-five years. Now I know that Revenge of the Living Zombies was re-titled from the original title of Flesheater. not terribly original, but the title certainly caught my eye. Then again I would have gotten around to renting a movie called Flesheater sooner or later.

I watched Flesheater this morning, and I am no longer a dewy-eyed pup in my twenties. Flesheater isn't as entertaining today as it was back then. Perhaps to some it will be, but sadly not to me.

Oh, Flesheater goes for broke. There is copious violence, gore, and nudity. The effects are rough, but effective.

However, Flesheater is shot in a graceless manner, with minimum attempt at artistic style. There are numerous stationary camera shots and curiously odd choices in post-production editing.

The acting is really awkward. One girl shouts out "Oh my Gow-od!" repeatedly. There is little attempt at genuine character development and the story is strictly recycled material.

Let's look at the plot. Some braindead young adults are on a campout in rural Pennsylvania. It's, ooo, Halloween night. Meanwhile this guy on a tractor pulls up a tree stump and unveils a coffin with some creepy occult writing on the lid. The stump has no roots and looks like it was precariously balanced on the ground. Flesheater Bill rises from the casket, dispatches the workman, and a zombie spree is underway.

The group finds an abandoned farmhouse and board up the windows and doors. A young girl is shockingly killed and becomes a little zombette. Rednecks drink Iron City Beer and enjoy shooting the ghouls in the head. A couple of heroes get shot accidentally-on-purpose at the end.

Worst of all, Flesheater runs a long, long eighty-eight minutes. This should be a seventy-minute quicky. Despite all the action, the films seems longer than The Ten Commandments and is even more boring.

Not truly bad enough for laughs and not good enough to enjoy, Flesheater is a cinematic corpse that should have stayed dead.

I guess I'm just being a spoilsport. If I had some of my old friends around and we had a refrigerator full of beer and a sack of green bud I bet we'd have had a blast. All that is behind me now and I have to rely on the movie itself to entertain me.

All that said, I still sort of like Flesheater. It's amateur hour horror, but it's also a throwback to more innocent days for me and for the genre. I like the shot-on-film realism and the hinky acting and photography have a kind of sleazy charm. I watched the whole thing, which is more than I can say about some of the crap I enjoyed back in the heyday of VHS.

Bill Hinzman, Russell Steiner, John Russo, and other crewmembers milked the Living Dead cow for all it was worth, and who can blame them? Night of the Living Dead is one of the most influential movies of all time. I feel affection toward grimy little opuses the gang did, like Midnight, The Majorettes, and Heartstopper.

I met and had a few conversations with some of these people at horror conventions. They even put a drink for me on their tab one night. I liked them. For all their lack of filmmaking talent, they appeared to have no illusions about themselves and were just having fun and celebrating their accidental involvement in a motion picture milestone. God bless them, every one.

Written by Mark Sieber

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