Marino Girolami

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) Anyone wondering why I’m even looking at Italian zombie films despite my dislike of the genre should be aware that I’m working to complete a list of popular 1980s movies more than really seeing what I want to see. If I really had my pick, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Zombi Holocaust based on reputation alone, and a viewing of the film only bears this out. Combining two of my least favourite movie genres, this film blends a zombie prologue (as New York City hospital is overrun with zombies) as lead-in to a cannibal motif that uncovers a plot by a mad scientist to bla-bla-bla. I really can’t be bothered by the plot given that director Marino Girolami isn’t particularly interested in it anyway. The point, as is usually the case with circa-1980 Italian horror are the kills, the gore effects and the overall meanness of the film. Zombi Holocaust is truly unpleasant, without any entertainment value, blatantly manipulative (there’s an insistent tone blared whenever something is going on) and of very little cinema history value—at most it’s one more example of what happened when giallo crashed into the 1980s and that’s not an episode that anyone should highlight.