Flick opens with a genetically tampered with feline escaping from a genetic facility and leaving a bloody body count in its wake. Meanwhile, party girls Bobbi (Clare Carey) and Suzanne (Shari Shattuck) charm their way onto shady millionaire Walter Graham’s (Alex Cord) yacht along with three guys, Lance, Corey and Martin (Beau Dremann, Rob Estes and Eric Larson respectively). The cat creature finds its way onto the craft, too, and soon a party trip to the Cayman Islands becomes a fight to survive, as the genetic mutation with poisonous venom in its fangs starts to decimate guest and crew alike.
Cheesy fun 80s flick is written and directed by Greydon Clark (Without Warning, Satan’s Cheerleaders) who made a career of these kind of movies. There is plenty of bloodshed, and the killer kitty is delightfully rubber prosthetics. Director and cast play it straight, despite the silly story, and let the looney material provide the fun. It’s unintentionally (or is it?) hilarious each time the rubber monster crawls out of its adorable feline host and gruesomely dispatches folks a good twenty times, it’s size. The effect of its poisonous bite gives the FX crew plenty of opportunity to showoff lots of rubber and red stuff. The pace moves fairly quick, and Clark has fun with his isolated-at-sea yacht setting. The gore and make-up FX are all cheesy, as the young partiers are all attractive youths, with veterans like Cord, George Kennedy and Clu Gulager adding a little star power to the amusing proceedings. This is a good example of the type of silly, cheesy and colorful horror flicks that came out in the later part of the 80s, when the decade moved away from the more somber and serious slashers that populated the first half of that era.
Sure, this technically is not a good movie, but it is a cheesy fun and blood-spattered, 80s good time. The plot is ludicrous, but Greydon Clark takes the fur ball and runs with it. None of the acting will win any awards, and neither will its nostalgically rubber creature. The veteran cast barely escape this silliness with their dignity intact and writer/director Clark adds another cheesy fun B-movie to his distinguished resume. Late 80s horror fun! Also features a cameo by Assault on Precinct 13‘s Austin Stoker as a Caribbean police office.
Flick can be watched with ads on Amazon or purchased on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome!
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I have to admit, I am not the biggest fan of this flick. True, I was first disappointed because, I was expecting something far more serious from the co-creators of Night Of The Living Dead and Alien and instead got a silly horror/comedy trying a little too hard to be hip. But, over the years I’ve come to realize that simply not all of the bits work and it wears out it’s welcome and gimmick long before it’s 90 minutes are over. Sure it has some fun scenes and a few quotable lines and I understand that many consider this a cult classic and I respect that, but, to me the flick is mediocre at best.
The film uses the original Night Of The Living Deadas a springboard, as medical supply warehouse worker Frank (Poltergeist’s James Karen) tells newbie Freddy (Jason Lives’ Thom Mathews) that the film Night Of The Living Deadactually happened and and George Romero changed the details to keep the army off his back. The zombie outbreak was caused by a military chemical weapon called Trioxin that accidentally raised the dead and an army screw-up brought some of the containers here to Louisville, Kentucky. He shows him some drums that he claims contain the imprisoned zombies and… of course… one gets punctured and Frank and Freddy become infected and the zombie inside escapes. With Freddy’s friends on the way to pick him up and party in a nearby graveyard and warehouse owner Burt’s (Clu Gulager) misguided idea to cremate a re-animated corpse during a rainstorm, it all adds up to a night of terror for all involved as the dead rise with one thing on their hungry dead minds… BRAINS!
There is some witty stuff in director Dan (Alien) O’Bannon’s script from a story by Rudi Ricci and NOTLDco-creators John A. Russo and Russell Streiner but, a lot of it is fairly by-the-numbers, too and adding a lot of punk rock songs to the soundtrack doesn’t really cover up the fact that this should have been a lot more clever. It uses another classic movie as a springboard and while there is the initial clever notion that NOTLDactually happened and there was a cover-up, the film doesn’t really use it for anything other then another routine zombie siege flick. I do like the notion that they eat brains to ease the pain of death. That was a clever touch, but, aside from that, it’s just another board the windows and doors zombie movie with some only half-successful comedy and slapstick thrown in. O’Bannon directs the proceedings with a fairly pedestrian hand, translating the script to screen with very little style or finesse. The film could have used a director who was willing to really go for broke with the premise and doesn’t play it safe like O’Bannon. Even Scream Queen Linnea Quigley’s nude cemetery striptease is done quickly and over before you can blink without ever even trying to exploit the whole nude minx in a sacred cemetery angle. The gore and creature FX are well done but, stay well within the R-rated limits and the last act simply gets annoying as characters shout, curse and cry continuously about their dilemma but, accomplish very little. The slapstick reaches a fever pitch but, O’Bannon is not skilled or experienced enough a director to keep it down to a tolerable level and let’s his cast over-act and it just gets grating. The film basically showed us all it had in the first half and now just barrels along to it’s predictable conclusion. There are some fun zombie bits but, they are few and far between as the action remains focused on those trapped in the mortuary and warehouse… and splitting the characters up and thus our focus, doesn’t help things either. It’s no surprise when the film is discussed that the conversation and quotes are all about the zombies as the human characters never really register.
The cast all over-act a lot, especially Karen who you just want to shut up sometimes. Don Calfa as the mortician is in constant bug-eyes mode even before the zombie show up and Clu Gulager is shamelessly unrestrained the whole flick. Quigley is certainly fetching as nude punk rocker/zombie Trash but, her line readings are flat and her dialog, not much better. And the film sadly makes little use of it’s naked, curvaceous brain-eating sex kitten… again, O’Bannon playing it safe. Mathews spends most of his time shivering and whimpering as he takes over an hour to turn into a zombie and the rest of the cast play stereotypical Hollywood cliche’ punk rockers and hipsters… two groups that would never have hung out together in real life. Even heroine Beverly Randolph is reduced to a crying, shrieking mess and it gives us no strong characters to endear ourselves too or identify with.
So, in conclusion my original opinion remains. The film has some fun bits but, overall plays it far too safe and doesn’t really make good use of it’s premise. Anything clever the film has to offer is basically in the set-up and aside from a legitimately creepy dialog scene with a dead corpse, the film really doesn’t do anything new with the whole zombie formula except to make a joke out of it in an attempt to be hip. There is some fun nostalgia at this point and the flick is very 80, but, overall it’s an overrated attempt to get more gas out of a classic movie’s legendary status and needed a far more deft and clever hand behind the camera to succeed in what it set out to do. Watchable but, very overrated. Made enough money to warrant a number of sequels with only Part 3 being a recommendable watch…and one that might be actually better than the film that inspired it.
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