There’s bad horror, there’s so-bad-it’s-good horror, and then there’s Hell of the Living Dead, a movie so desperately trying to be Dawn of the Dead that it forgets to be a movie. Directed by Bruno Mattei under the pseudonym Vincent Dawn—because even he didn’t want his real name on this—I can only describe this as a cinematic stew made of stock footage, gobbled-up Goblin tracks, and the kind of acting you usually see in detergent commercials. And that’s being generous.
Plot? If You Can Call It That
We open in a top-secret chemical plant called Hope Center #1, which sounds like the kind of fake facility name a child would give when playing with LEGOs. The cause of our apocalypse? A rat. Not a genetically engineered supersoldier rat. Not a telekinetic mind-control rat. Just… a rat. It gets into some goo, dies, comes back to life, and attacks workers. One bite later, and the zombies start multiplying faster than this movie’s bad dialogue.
Cut to a team of Interpol commandos led by Lt. Mike London (played with all the charisma of a damp towel) being sent to stop eco-terrorists in Spain. Why? Because the scriptwriter clearly thought, “We’ve got 20 minutes before we show a zombie. Let’s just toss in a random hostage situation.” After gassing the terrorists and turning them into bullet-riddled colanders, the team loses contact with the Hope Center and jets off to Papua New Guinea.
Here they meet Lia Rousseau, a French journalist played by Margit Evelyn Newton, who inexplicably thinks it’s a good idea to wander a zombie-infested jungle while dressed for an erotic shampoo commercial. Together, they slog through the jungle, occasionally stopping to battle zombies, deliver exposition about “Operation Sweet Death,” and awkwardly insert National Geographic stock footage of indigenous tribes—footage so unrelated it might as well have been from a travel documentary titled Papua New Guinea: Now With Extra Gore.
The group holes up in an abandoned plantation house, which of course is also full of zombies. People die. Some more stock footage rolls. A commando named Osborne gets eaten, which is sad mostly because it means fewer bad one-liners. They finally reach the Hope Center, learn that the chemical was meant to control overpopulation, and then die in ways that range from “graphic” to “please just end already.” The film closes with zombies eating people in a park, confirming the apocalypse has gone global, and reminding the viewer that time is the one thing they will never get back.
Acting: Cardboard Comes Alive (But Only Barely)
Margit Evelyn Newton does her best, and by “best” I mean she doesn’t trip over the scenery while delivering lines. The commandos—London, Osborne, Zantoro, and Vincent—are a fascinating study in macho overacting. Special mention goes to Franco Garofalo as Zantoro, who plays the role like he’s auditioning for an Italian Full Metal Jacket remake while hopped up on espresso and raw onions.
Dialogue scenes are punctuated with long stares, slow zooms, and line deliveries so stilted you could build a gazebo out of them. The zombie extras, meanwhile, clearly just came from a pasta lunch and were told to “walk like you’ve eaten too much bread.”
Direction: Mattei by Numbers
Bruno Mattei, bless his soul, is a man who knew how to stretch a budget—and by stretch, I mean duct-tape random clips together until you can call it a movie. This was shot in five weeks in Spain, but thanks to generous helpings of stock footage, you’d think half the film was shot by a nature documentarian in the ’60s.
And those Goblin tracks? They’re good. Too good. Which is why they stand out like gourmet cheese on a gas station nacho. The music is recycled from Dawn of the Dead, Contamination, and even Goblin’s Roller album. It’s like watching a school play while an orchestra accidentally wanders in from the Vienna Philharmonic.
Special Effects: More Red Paint Than Home Depot
The gore here alternates between charmingly cheap and insultingly lazy. Heads get chewed, guts get pulled, and the blood looks like tomato soup that’s been sitting out in the sun too long. The zombies’ makeup consists mostly of white face paint, dark under-eye smudges, and the occasional latex wound that looks like it was glued on during a coffee break.
One standout gag involves a zombie priest—because why not?—and another where a woman is eaten in a way that suggests the makeup department ran out of fake intestines and just grabbed leftover lasagna.
Pacing: Like a Drunk Marathon Runner
The movie can’t decide if it’s an action flick, a horror movie, or a political allegory about overpopulation. As a result, the pacing is schizophrenic: five minutes of soldiers shooting, ten minutes of jungle footage, two minutes of Lia delivering awkward exposition, and then a zombie attack where half the gore happens off-screen.
Every time the plot starts to move forward, it slams face-first into another stock-footage montage of birds, rivers, or tribal dances. This is probably the only zombie film where you’ll come away knowing more about traditional Papua New Guinea body paint than about any of the main characters.
Political Commentary: About as Subtle as a Brick to the Face
“Operation Sweet Death” is supposedly a secret plan to curb the Third World population by turning them into cannibals. Which is… a premise. Whether it’s a good one is debatable, but the movie’s execution makes it feel like the filmmakers wanted to make Soylent Green, got drunk, watched Dawn of the Dead, and then tried to merge them.
The message, if you can call it that, is muddled somewhere between “Zombies are bad” and “Governments are worse,” but it’s drowned out by all the bad acting and travelogue filler.
Final Verdict: A Dead Brain Cell Double Feature
Hell of the Living Dead is a film that’s less about zombies and more about the hazards of giving Bruno Mattei a camera, some Goblin records, and access to a stock-footage library. If you want to see an unholy marriage of Italian exploitation cinema and leftover B-roll from an anthropology documentary, this is your jam.
For the rest of us, it’s a fascinating disaster—worth watching only if you enjoy cinematic train wrecks where the wreckage is held together with Elmer’s glue and misplaced ambition. At its best, it’s goofy fun with some genuinely funny moments (intentional or not). At its worst, it’s a padded, derivative slog that proves even zombie movies can be dead on arrival.
