There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet