Hard Vision

Zombie Brigade
(Substance)
by Paul Autry

Let's see if you can follow this one. The mayor from a small town in the land down under decides to sell some land to a Japanese guy with plans to build a cartoon theme park. But, there's a memorial/graveyard where the bodies of soldiers from the Vietnam war are buried on the land. So, the mayor has the memorial blown up and the soldiers, who weren't exactly dead in the first place, come back to seek their revenge. Some of them are vampires and some of them are zombies. Once we figure out what's going on, the uncle of the town's only black man raises the normal dead soldiers from the grave to do battle with the vampire/zombie dead soldiers in order to save the rest of the people who are trapped inside the town because the government, who knew all along what was going on from the moment the memorial blew up, set it up so that no one could get out. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? You'd think with a story line that's so absurd would end up being nothing more than total cheese. Well, to my suprise, this low budget horror movie from 1986 isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting's not exactly the greatest and you can tell that there wasn't a lot of money put into the production. But, they still managed to pull off a rather interesting and well done movie, one that's worth 92 minutes of your time.

As I said, the acting's not the greatest. But, the characters come off rather well, with the exception of the dead soldiers. They're not exactly the toughest looking bunch. They seem like a bunch of lost children. And the ending, well, that's where the cheese factor is the highest. The good dead soldiers beat the bad dead soldiers and then they work together to "make things right" so to speak. They go marching off to the borders of the town, which is where the government blocked it off, trapping everyone and everything inside. Well, the dead soldiers are walking through that, marking the places in the field where the mines are (you know, those things that explode) and, the living people see them doing this and the line, "We can follow them out" or something like that is spoken, which gives the film a happy ending because the people who were alive, well, you know they do just that...get out of the government blocked town...and everyone lives happily ever after. This one should be at the top of your B-movie favorites!