This was almost a perfect double feature of new zombie films, which is hard to come by these days. Only one flaw has to be strongly overlooked for full enjoyment…
DEAD SQUAD: TEMPLE OF THE UNDEAD (2018)
I never know when I’m going to stumble upon a new favorite movie to add to my DVD collection while streaming. So I can only hope Dead Squad: Temple of the Undead becomes available on physical media.
The average star level of reviews on Prime was low, so I expected a bad SyFy quality movie when I sat down to watch this one with my hubby.
To me, Dead Squad is like the Hatchet of zombie movies. The gore, the over-the-top horror humor, the goofy characters, and the fantastic monster makeup are everything I could ask for in a party zomcom.
You know filmmakers are confident in their effects when they dare to brightly light scenes to capture every detail. I couldn’t get enough of what I was seeing here, and the filmmakers seemed to know that was the case, because once the zombies strike, it just keeps coming.
As a temple movie, Dead Squad is like the universe’s apology to me for tricking me into sitting through that atrocity The Ruins. Ugh. Ten years later and I’m still traumatized by the time lost.
After a Sin City opener (black and white with red accents) set in the mid-1900s introduces us to sinister military experiments, we meet a group of modern day pretty people that goes rafting in the jungle and ends up in an old temple.
Among the group is a guy with a rockin’ bod and a bimbo with a barking bag.
I thought the dog bag and hot boy bod were going to be the highlights, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The zombie freaks are phenomenal, the campy horror humor is delightful, the action fight scenes rule, there’s a twist at the end, and, well, there’s only one more thing I’m going to say…zomBJ…
CALL OF THE UNDEAD (2018)
I grew up on dubbed Euro horror, which was part of its charm, but the dubbing in this film is so horrendous that it mostly ruins what could otherwise be a pretty dang good zombie film.
It has all the gore, awesome zombie makeup, and perverse, nonsensical shit you could hope for in a twisted Asian horror film.
The opening scene is quite Resident Evil, with a woman waking in her car to find a city in shambles, and then being chased through a supermarket by shuffling zombies…that shuffle pretty damn fast.
There’s a mini Zombie Strippers segment with a nasty mob boss, tits, lesbianism, and of course, zombie strippers.
At this point the mob finds that the only way to survive the outbreak is to team up with the law enforcement that comes to raid the club.
Meanwhile, there’s a side story of a disgusting dude who actually looks like a zombie (I didn’t get it).
He abducts pretty young women and keeps them chained up in his basement until he’s ready to rape them.
Told you it’s fucked up. With nonstop action and great zombie sequences—plus that gross sex stuff, which is actually implied and never explicitly presented—this could be a great grindhouse flick if it weren’t for that awfully acted dubbing, which feels completely disjointed from the visual reactions of the onscreen actors. However, Call of the Undead gets bonus points for this distress signal scene…
