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Alan Ormsby gives a really obnoxiuos performance (yes, he does admit it himself) as a theater-director taking
his crew to a graveyard island for a night out to play some macabre
pranks on them, being even more macabre by playing with a corpse he
called Orville (Seth Sklarey) & in an incantation to the devil
awakening the dead. They eat the cast (thankfully).
Despite of being one of the very first movies to feature gut-munching
zombies (I think only Night of the Living Dead was earlier, but I
might be wrong), this movie is just a worthless piece of trash. This is
not because I don't like gut-munching zombies (I do) or dismiss a
movie just for having a plot that has been repeated all-too-often.
Thing is, here the realization of the plot just doesn't work. Thing is,
when you have a group of obnoxious teenagers/early twens trying to awake
the dead one night, you pretty much know what will happen, so why does
this movie spend a whole hour before the dead actually start to walk ?!
My guess is it might have been to build up the suspense, but an hour of
nothing really happening does not build up suspense any more but
general boredom. Furthermore all the characters are so completely
unlikable that by the time the zombies do show up, you don't care
for them one bit & actually wish them dead.
Having said all that, I have to admit, there are some nice scenes at
the end, though, when Ormsby as the sole survivor manages to escape the
zombie-hordes only to realize he's barricaded himself in the very
same room he left Orville the corpse, now awakened of course ... Also
the final scene where the zombies find the boat & contemplate to
cross the water to the world of the living (quite physically, not
metaphorically, actually) is quite nice as it foreshadows the opening
scenes of Zombi 2 (1979), when a boatload of zombies actually
arrives in New York.
Alan Ormsby, thankfully gave up his acting-career soon after that.
Later, he co-directed Deranged (1974) with Bob Clark,
& wrote numerous screenplays, among them also Porky's 2 for
Bob Clark (yet again).
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