Ruptured Review: Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher, M.D)

Country of origin- Italy   

Year of release- 198o  

Director- Marino Girolami (as Frank Martin)                                         

Stars- Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Delli Colli, Sherry Buchanan  

The film begins in New York where body parts are beginning to go missing, and corpses are being mutilated in a hospital. Eventually a morgue assistant is caught red handed (don’t excuse the pun) snacking on one of the poor unfortunate stiffs. After cutting the corpses heart out, the cannibal employee is chased and eventually throws himself to his death out of the window, making sure to turn into a stunt mannequin on the way down of course, as no cannibal morgue assistants were harmed in the making of this film. After this bizarre incident the hospitals resident sexy anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (played by Alexandra Delli Colli, who would later go on to play a role in The New York Ripper) recognizes the cannibalism and mutilation as a custom of a tribe in the Moluccas Island. An expedition is then organised by Dr. Peter Chandler (played by the charming Ian McCulloch of Zombie Flesh Eaters fame) to track down this tribe and discover why their cannibalistic rituals have found there way to New York.

Once the expedition arrives on the island the group quickly realise they have bitten off more than they can chew, unlike the hungry cannibals and shambling clay faced zombies that are hunting them through the jungle. Eventually the group find an insane, and extremely sweaty, surgeon who is performing horrific experiments and using his army of zombies to bring him fresh subjects, and it looks like he is need of something fresh to put on his butchers slab, much to the dismay of the expedition.

I may as well get this out of the way right off the bat, I fucking love this film! This was one of the first Italian horror films of the grindhouse period I ever watched, and it is one of the reasons I fell in love with Euro horror. Despite Zombie Holocaust being a cash in on the huge success of both Zombie Flesh Eaters and Cannibal Holocaust it still stands up as a grimy little piece of gore soaked magic, in my mind at least.

The film features the typical array of cheap camera work and lighting that leaves a lot to be desired, often poor dubbing coupled with moments of very wooden acting along with a plot with more holes that Swiss cheese a firing range. But these are actually some of the reasons I like this film so much, despite having all these typically Italian problems it manages to deliver a charmingly crap array of exploitation and cheap but effectively unpleasant gore. Top that off with the brilliant Ian McCulloch blowing the living shit out of cannibals while his men get gutted and have their eyes torn out all around him and you have the majestic cluster fuck of so-bad-its-good charm and nasty gore that is Zombie Holocaust. If you are at all a fan of low budget cannibal or zombie exploitation, or even just grime filled Euro gore flicks then this is a must, a confusing must, but still a must. I am going to give this one a hearty 8.5/10 it is essentially and often over looked viewing and considering it has been released on Blu-ray by 88 Films you have no excuse not to.