I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Remember the opening segment of DAWN OF THE DEAD, in which the SWAT team storm a building infected by zombie tenants and proceed to blast 'em all away? Well, that ten minute sequence serves as a basis for ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH, a truly awful sub-Romero Italian zombie film with bits of ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS and THE BEYOND thrown in for good measure. Infamous hack director Bruno Mattei (who made up his 'amusing' pseudonym for this movie, Vincent Dawn) isn't content with just borrowing the plot from Romero's shockers either - he actually goes further to rip off classic music from DAWN OF THE DEAD and occasionally lifts entire dialogue from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD! There's definitely a line between a 'homage' and plain 'plagiarism' and it's obvious which camp Mattei's film falls into.The one redeeming factor in this film is that, unlike Romero, Mattei actually has an explanation as to the zombie origins (he probably dreamt it up one drunken night with his partner in crime, Claudio Fragrasso). You see, to combat the over-population problems of the Third World, scientists have devised a gas to wipe out the excess human life - unfortunately for them, it does just that, but brings them back to UN-life afterwards! The opening of the film sees an undead rodent burrowing into the contamination suit of a factory worker and chewing through his stomach, causing much splattering of blood (and where would we be without blood in a so-called "video nasty" anyway?). His co-worker stands nearby, slack-jawed in surprise, until a gang of zombies arrive and chew on his intestines.From here on, the film changes track and introduces us to the would-be 'heroes', a quartet of incompetent SWAT men who spend the rest of the movie blasting their way through the ranks of the undead and desperately trying to avoid getting eaten. Their first trip is to a local village, where they meet a pair of reporters whose family have recently been eaten, and they team up together to infiltrate a native village in their bid to escape. Stumbling from one shoddy action scene to another, ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH offers us the standard downbeat ending, then finishes with an absurd epilogue, a twist ending in which a courting couple scoff at talk of zombies on the television - until they themselves are scoffed by some undead in the local park! It goes without saying that the acting is bad - particularly so on the part of the guys playing the SWAT team, and the zombies are hardly convincing. None of the actors know the meaning of the term "restraint" which makes much of their actions laughable. The dubbing is extraordinarily bad, and gives the film extra unintentional comedy value as you listen to some of the awful dialogue the characters are given ("They could be drunk, or drugged - or maybe a leper colony!" says one of the SWAT guys on spotting an approaching zombie horde). The production values are non-existent and the zombie 'make-up' consists of a small amount of boot polish smeared over the faces of the white actors (in comparison, the black actors playing the native zombies have white paint on their faces). The sets are dull and uninspired and the action sequences lack consistency and are in desperate need of realism.Highlights to watch out for include heroine Margrit Evelyn Newton stripping down and painting herself to enter a native village (apparently aping Alexandra Delli Colli's actions in ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST); mondo-style footage of native rituals, clumsily inserted into the proceedings; far too much slow-motion stock footage of wildlife such as bats and monkeys, inserted for no other reason than to pad out the movie; a SWAT guy putting on a dress and hat and twirling a cane before being munched on by zombies; and the memorably bad overacting of another SWAT guy who loses it and attacks the undead with only a torch. Oh yeah, and before I forget, the funniest scene in the film, which takes place back at headquarters, where a government debate is raging. The bad dubbing just makes it funnier, this is one I had to rewind.The gore content is extreme and over the top at all moments: countless bloody gunshot wounds, exploding heads, tearing flesh, and intestine chewing; a cat clawing its way out of an old woman's stomach; people being ripped apart and spraying blood and all kinds of gruesome mayhem make this one of the bloodiest of the video nasty genre. To make things worse, we get mondo footage of natives smearing themselves with rotting human flesh and a native woman eating maggots out of a (real) rotting human skull. It's enough to turn the stomach, which of course is the point. ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH is a true trash classic of the genre.

"Virus" ("aka Hell of the living dead" or "Zombie Creeping Flesh") is a fun rip-off of "Dawn of the Dead", with also some typical stuff we can find in Italian cannibals movies, but without the cannibalism (there is a tribe in the jungle composed mostly from stock shots of "The Real Cannibal Holocaust" - aka "Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali" - and stock shots of animals from documentaries too). The director is Bruno Mattei so it's not really a big surprise, he used a lot stock shots and work done by others in his movies (for example his "Zombi: La creazione" AND "Shocking Dark" are copies of James Cameron's "Aliens"). I kinda like his movies, because most of them are really fun to watch (the "so bad it's good" kind). But for this one, I think it's just an OK movie. Funny in many scenes, but also boring in many others. There is a nice variety of zombies, some looks like the blue ones from "Dawn of the Dead", others have a more "gory" look, as in "Zombi 2" of Lucio Fulci. The characters from the Swat are fun, lot of crazy men in the team with totally irrational reactions! Unfortunately, the movie is too long, should have been cut by at least 20 minutes.

This movie is not going to win any prizes on good story or clever character development. However if you just want to be entertained by some old school zombie action with quite a bit of gore this is a good movie to pick. It starts quite chaotic with something going wrong in a factory that starts people turning into zombies. Next we have people taken as hostages which leads to a fire fight between army and hostage takers with the army guys winning easily. And we see a family in the jungle ready to leave but some of them are already turning into living dead. The rest of the movie is as the premise says two journalists, a man and a woman, together with the army guys seeking a way through the jungle. Together with some nice animal shots there is lots of zombie action. There are a few nice sequences such as the one with the native tribe where the female journalist goes in topless and body-painted. Even though it might not have been a cannibalistic tribe with Cannibal Holocaust still in mind having zombies in there seemed quite fitting. Another nice surprise was the cat leaving the stomach of the old zombie lady. All in all enjoyable but not one to revisit often.

As with a lot of those classic horror films where chemicals or toxic waste mutates people into evil creations, this one is bad for it. The beginning credits show a chemical factory with a turquoise tint to it, and of course they're trying to make a harmless factory look like NASA's launch site, with the professional-sounding loudspeaker voices and futuristic music, but even worse, the supposed zombie chemical control room, it's obviously a nuclear power plant! The scientists are wearing the most ridiculous outfits, and then one guy just stands there and kills himself by inhaling the "zombie virus". Yes, it was a low-budget fiction film, but they kind of overdid the evil science drama. Next, it introduces a team of men who seem to think of nothing but grabbing at girls and swearing. They are sent to an island (which was mainly stock footage), and there they discover a whole whack of zombies, and they befriend a reporter and her cameraman. They both want the same thing - to find out what's going on.Okay, I'd rate it a 6/10 for the comedic side. The scene with the army man putting on a tutu and dancing in the middle of an apocalypse is pretty funny, but really I think it was never made to be serious.