Stephen Abell This is a terrible film that had the opportunity to have been considerably better. It has an admirable start with Goblin's electronic music mixed in with story narrative, this gives it a modern feel. As the movie begins we are at a chemical plant that is not as secure as they thought. A rat is found in one of the rooms, though it's not dead as the workmen first think. It attacks one of the workmen killing him, unfortunately, he doesn't stay dead. As the trouble progresses the noxious gas starts to leak out of the facility and infects the air... bringing on an extinction event.From here on it should have been an awesome film but the Directors, Bruno Mattei (who used the name Vincent Dawn) - this action speaks volumes - and Claudio Fragasso (who also co-wrote the story with Jose Maria Cunilles) decided to go an entirely different route than you would ever imagine.The viewer is then subjected to some really bad over-the-top acting (more than usual for an Italian horror) as we are introduced to a crack army assault team who stop a siege at an embassy. This ten minutes is a waste of time as it's really bad and is only there to let the audience know their next mission is in New Guinea.It appears the location was only introduced into the story so the director could hop onto the tribe and animal cruelty bandwagon, as they weave stock film of death rituals into the movie. Once again, these are not actually required and are not relevant to the film. However, it does mean the lead lady can get her boobs out and they are nice boobs.Another handicap is the speed of the Zombies, these are your old-time shambling dead. Even Richard Briars on a Zimmer-frame could out run these stiffs (Cockney's V's Zombies). It's even played up in the film. Even the zombie make-up is poor most are just covered in light blue powder and any other embellishments are large, bulky, and unrealistic.The twist at the end is a nice one and again if they hadn't gone the wrong direction with the story then, it could have been an outstanding Zombie movie.I wouldn't recommend this one to anybody as there are much better Zombie flicks about, my favourite being Return Of The Living Dead... "Brains... We Need More BRAINS!!!"

MonsterVision99 This is definitely one of the best zombie movies ever made, its gory, it has nudity and its entertaining fun, Bruno Mattei its great again and Claudio Fragasso just makes it even better, there are different types of zombies on this movie, every extra just kinda of does their own thing, one of the truly remarkable elements in the film is its pacing with the zombies, at first you just see a couple of zombies, then it becomes a group of zombies, then a whole village, then a city and it goes on and on, there's also a sense of traveling in the film since it goes from one location to the other by the time it ends it leaves you feeling like you were on a journey, the dialog its great, Claudio wrote all the characters to be sleazy bastards with interesting pasts, its one crazy fun movie, definitely a watch for horror fans.

callanvass Prepare yourself for nothing but negative thoughts, so if that isn't your cup of tea, I'd suggest you read reviews elsewhere. To lambaste this film simply isn't enough. How about all the musical scores it borrowed? Dawn of The Dead, Beyond The Darkness, Alien Contamination, and City of The Living Dead among others. It doesn't have a pulsing score of its own! One of the characters is even a direct carbon copy of Roger's character in Dawn of The Dead! This was around the time where Zombie films were coming out like flies. Some of them were entertaining, others were virtually unwatchable. This is one of them. The dubbing is abhorrent. We get dubious lines such as "Hold it! That's not polite! I get the first shot!" "These mothers have more lives than a cat!" It could have realized how awful it was by adding fun cheese, but it takes itself incredibly seriously with a mundane approach. We get pointless shots of animal's at the most random times which I guess Bruno Mattei (Aka. Vincent Dawn) thought would be symbolism of sorts. The abundance of scenes with characters doing inexplicably idiotic things is uncanny. Things back then weren't so prohibited, so we do see some controversial violence. A kid gets shot in the head; a tongue gets yanked out of someone's mouth while her eyeballs pop out; countless scenes of natives and zombies doing some gut munching; many, many bullet wounds. The gore is plentiful if you're a gore hound. But since the movie is so boring, you probably won't care. It's hard to describe a performance with such atrocious dubbing, but I'll give it a go. Margit Evelyn Newton is our heroine, and she does OK. She provides a lot of screaming, and a failed tough girl act in the middle of the film, but that's about it. Final Thoughts: Please, please, please! I implore you to avoid this like the plague. If you are the die hardest of Zombie fans, you still won't get any satisfaction. If you wanna check out a good zombie movie; Dawn of The Dead (remake as well) Night of The Living Dead (original) or Zombi are pretty safe choices. 1.5/10

nvillesanti When I first saw HoTLD, I was about 7 years old when my sister's boyfriend rented it on VHS, oh those good old days of the VCR era. So after watching it on a Friday night, I have to admit that it scared the living hell out of me. There was something about it that terrified me, maybe the grainy look or the ominous music or the gory zombie scenes, but whatever it was I couldn't sleep for days. Back in 1997 I found a copy on the now late Suncoast video store and without thinking it twice, I bought it. Has it ever happened to you that when you're a kid and you see a movie and you like it to the bone then you see the same movie as an adult and it's a total disappointment? Well, this is one of those cases, heck I even returned the movie. So I Haven't seen it since then until just a few weeks ago a friend of mine gave me his collection of cheap zombie flicks from the 80s and there it was "Hell of the Living Dead."The story takes place somewhere in New Guinea where a research facility called "Hope" is developing some type of chemical that accidentally leaks out thanks to an infected rat turning most of the scientist into flesh eating zombies and the others into their happy meals. Meanwhile, somewhere else, a team of trigger happy commandos are sent to stop a group of environmental terrorist that have taken hostage an American Embassy, I think it was the American Embassy, and are demanding that all the Hope facilities be shutdown. The team storms the embassy eliminating the entire terrorists without much effort but not before the leader of the group says his last prophetic words about them being devoured or something like that. Then that same team of commandos is sent to New Guinea where they meet a group of reporters investigating, God knows what. There they find that the world has been overrun by zombies as they make their way to the Hope facility to find the answer of this Virus.What makes this movie so memorable is not the story or the F/X nor the acting, but the amount of material they ripped-off from the much superior Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Director Bruno Mattei, who credited himself as Vincent Dawn, shamelessly used the same type of uniforms used by the SWAT team in DoTD for the team of commandos in HoTLD, and even the same gas masks. But if that wasn't enough, he used the exact same music composed by Goblin for DoTD without their permission. Also Mattei used a lot of old wildlife and news stock footage that didn't fit the scenes or the story. The script is incoherent at worst and the zombie scenes are totally illogical to idiotic. There's even a guy who dresses up in a tutu and starts dancing while a horde of zombies storms the room, but most idiotic is when the ultra slow zombies approach their victims, they just stand there screaming. Although I have to say, the beginning is gory and entertaining, but after the embassy scene, the movie pretty much goes downhill from there.Okay, I'm not going to lie. It was a guilty pleasure to watch this retro junk again after so long and even with all its atrocities, it deserves some level of merit and it does delivers some horror value, well at least when it was released back in the 80s. Interesting note is that this movie has many different titles such as Virus, Night of the Zombies, Zombie Creeping Flesh and of course, the ultra generic title Hell of the Living Dead. So, if you haven't seen HoTLD and you don't mind the trashy story, the DoTD rip-off or the lame stock footage then you should check it out, at least for the gore.