Jay of the Dead's New Horror Movies presents... Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Walking Dead. Well, hello, loyal listeners or new listeners or anybody out there. This is Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Walking Dead. That's me. So I recorded a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the summer, so Jay would have plenty of material to drop over the course of the summer. So thank you, as always, Mr. Jay of the Dead.
for being such a great producer and disseminator of my podcast. So now I'm going to start getting back into the school year and doing some of these too. to fill up the queue. So I don't know when this will actually drop, but it is currently the end of August. So that's the end of a summer break for me.
I'm about to go back to work this week to teach the young minds and to corrupt them in the ways of horror. Although I'm actually doing a science fiction class this fall to mix things up a little bit. But don't you worry, there will be monsters in that class. Definitely. Now will there be zombies? No. Depending on your definition, of course. And speaking of your definition of zombies, I have a very special twofer episode that is a that is a the whole episode is a is it a zombie?
So this is our special Is It a Zombie episode featuring director Joe D'Amato. All right, so why are we doing this? Well, Land of the Creeps, if you are not listening to Land of the Creeps, you should be. Back in there, episode 384. Greg Amortis and Ian Urza, they tackled some films from Joe D'Amato, and they did Antrophophagus and Absurd.
And in the course of that, they kind of talked about zombie stuff, zombie adjacent stuff. And Greg actually reached out to me to ask what I thought about these films, both films, which I have not. actually ever seen. Although I've heard of antropophagus, it's kind of infamous, so I've heard of that quite a bit. But I'd never heard of absurd.
So I thought, well, this is an unusual situation. So Greg is kind of asking my input on these films. And I thought, well, hey, I'll just make Dead Man Still Walking. episode out of it. So I can just share that with Greg instead of having to type a whole bunch in chat. But let me just say right up front, if you do want to listen to a perhaps more insightful, in-depth review of these two films from some real experts in horror cinema.
particularly in Italian horror, please do run on over to Land of the Creeps, episode 384, and see what those two gentlemen have to say about everything. Freak. An icy breath. A knock at the door. Omens of evil. Warnings of death. An invitation to terror from the Grim Reaper. Alright, so we're going to start by talking about Anthropophagus. Anthropophagus, whatever. It is a really complicated way to say cannibal.
This movie has come out in many different versions. So I think it was hard for me to find. I actually had to pay to rent it. There is an R-rated print of it called the Grim Reaper. And I thought that was the one. The one that I saw, but it isn't. So I saw the uncut version because of the scenes that are allegedly cut from the Grim Reaper. So on Internet Movie Database. Thanks, Internet Movie Database.
I was able to read the cuts and all the cuts that are listed there I did see. So I've got that. It has also been called... Oh, no, this is also kind of interesting. The Grim Reaper version, he uses the soundtrack of Kingdom of the Spiders from 1977. as opposed to the original soundtrack for this film. It was also released as The Beast, which is another edited version. But...
Yeah, so this is typical of films of the era, especially Italian cinema. I had to, it says it's on Tubi. Internet Movie Database says it's on Tubi. It's actually not on Tubi. So I rented it from Prime. Theoretically, it's also on Screenbox, which ironically I signed up for just after watching Anthropophagus. But it was $2.99 on Prime. And that did, to my knowledge, give me the original theatrical release. So, blah, blah, blah.
A lot of information. This film came out in 1980. It is a full 92 minutes in length. Written by George Eastman with Joe D'Amato and directed by Joe D'Amato. It is somewhat famous for having Tisa Farrow as the star in this, and it's somewhat infamous for some of its more graphic and grisly sequences.
But since this film is old and probably a lot of listeners are familiar with it, I'm going to spoil it. So if you don't want it spoiled, find it, watch it, come back in 90 minutes and we'll talk about it some more. So our chief question is, is it a zombie? Well, let me back up. It is a monster movie. There is a monster in this film, a very monstrous monster. But not...
Not a kind of supernatural monster, more of a psychopathic monster. So it could be construed as a slasher film. And in fact, that's how Internet Movie Database has it listed. Slasher horror plus horror. But most importantly for our discussion, it does feature cannibalism. Because the antagonist of this film, the Beast, or the Grim Reaper, is a cannibal.
So this film starts off with a group of people, a group of friends, and they kind of hook up with somebody else and blah, blah, blah. They end up taking a boat out to an island, kind of a tropical island retreat. And this is going to sound familiar to you because this is a very typical scenario for some of the films I've already talked about. It is kind of in that Italian horror vein, which is very invested in exoticism.
So I've noticed a lot of Italian horror films from the 70s and 80s are in a kind of a remote tropical location, often on islands. And so like with... Oh, now I'm blanking out. The Peter Cushing one with the Nazi zombies, right? They go out to this tropical island and they find this huge mansion on the tropical island. And then they start having some difficulties.
as they are being tormented and attacked and killed off one by one. So the opening half hour, maybe even hour, it feels very much like a zombie film. There is this sense of being stalked, being attacked, being tormented. And yes, cannibalistic behaviors. So there are some some good scares in it. There's some good gore in it. There are stabbings and.
hatchetings and grizzly hangings. There are also corpses. There's some pretty scary desiccated corpses and some kind of shocking portrayals of the dead. That stuff's in there. It's got a good gothic feel with this mansion house as they're kind of exploring it. It almost feels... Like Biohazard, the first Resident Evil game, where this group ends up in this mansion and they're going room to room and they're finding these horrifying things and these corpses and all this stuff's going on.
And it takes a while before we realize what exactly is the beast here that is tormenting everybody. Well, it is not a zombie. So, sorry about that. Antro for Vegas is not a zombie movie, but I will say that it is certainly zombie-like. I'm not going to say zombie-adjacent because it's simply a cannibal. And so cannibal films, Italian cannibal films, All the Rage, of course, the most infamous one of those being Cannibal Holocaust.
And this is not that, although it does share some similarities in location and kind of some of the soundtrack stuff and some of the character behaviors and acting, et cetera, et cetera. But really, this is just a psychopath. He is kind of a slasher, a little bit more of kind of a downplayed slasher because he's not like out attacking people. They came to him.
They came to his turf and came in his house, and so he started to do what anybody's got to do, and he's got trespassers, which is murder them brutally and then eat their flesh. So this film is really infamous, and so we'll just get it out in the open. The really infamous moment is our lead, our cannibal guy. Oh, man. And now this is where Greg laughs at me because I'm not entirely sure who it is. Oh, there it is. I got it. Klaus Wortmann is the cannibal.
played by George Eastman, one of the co-writers. And he attacks a pregnant woman, and he kills a pregnant woman, and then he rips out her fetus and eats the fetus. Yeah. That's pretty brutal. It's pretty over the top. You can see why that was cut from some of the theatrical releases or the other releases. Really, really disgusting. Now, it is not as sensational as...
the raw description indicates. He doesn't like rip or open. You don't see any kind of graphic on-screen C-section or anything like that. And the stand-in for the fetus is a skinned rabbit. And it's pretty obvious it is. I mean, it doesn't look like a human. It doesn't look like a human fetus. Thank goodness. But yeah, Eastman really does like take a bite out of this. This carcass. So, yeah, it is going for some interesting realism, kind of eschewing special effects for reality.
It's quick and it's pretty disturbing. You can find the clip. Actually, it's in the trailer that Internet Movie Database is showing with the film. So it's like some of the most gory moments and the things that were cut from. make it R-rated. They're just in the trailer on the public website that anybody can watch. So there you go. There's also a pretty upsetting scene where this young girl is pulled by her hair through the ceiling.
through the tiled ceiling, and there is some pretty massive trauma that takes place in that. People die. People die that you don't necessarily think you're going to die. Including our Anthropophagus, who in the process of his death infamously begins to feast upon himself. That's right. Auto-cannibalism is featured in Antropophagus. So there is spookiness, gothicness, death, despair, cannibalism, violence, gore. But...
No zombies. So there you go. Anthropophagus is not a zombie movie. Sorry to disappoint. So I think it's just a fun kind of film if you are not averse to taboos and violence and gore. I think it is a good example of Joe D'Amato's directing style and that of his kind of signature cast. It's a really moody thing. You can see it as a historical piece, how shocking it was at the time. But by today's standards, it's pretty tame. It's pretty low budget.
But it's fun. It's kind of a fun film. So I have to see if I've already rated this. I have not already rated this on internet. So I'm going to give it a 7. So 7 out of 10. I think it is an important historical film. I think it's one of these kind of infamous horror films that horror fans should be familiar with. I think it's a really good example of, you know, 70s, 80s, late 70s, early 80s.
Italian horror. I think if you're a fan of something like Zombies, Zombie 2, if you're a fan of the Italian... horror films and zombie films, if you're a fan of Fulci, I think you'll like it. I think it's a curious artifact. So that is... Antropofagus. Rent it. If you can find it for free, please do. So go ahead and check out Screenbox. Like I said, it's erroneously billed as being on Tubi, at least when I looked for it. Or it's $2.99 if you want to go on the old Prime video.
Now, that was not the film Greg Amortis was asking me about. He was actually asking me about Absurd. Hey, this is Dave Z and you are listening to Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Walking Dead. Absurd, which is Joe D'Amato's follow up. to Antropophagus and is kind of a thematic sequel to the former. So this film, Rososangue, was released in 1981. It is 90 minutes long.
It is written by George Eastman. It is starring George Eastman as the killer. So you can see that there's quite a bit of similarities between the two productions and the two films. This is a different kind of approach to some of the same scenes, but it is also a kind of slasher, an early slasher, proto slasher, whatever you want to see, what you want to say. And as Greg Amortis pointed out, this film has been heavily, heavily inspired by John Carpenter's Halloween.
So Halloween is we all hopefully know the basic formula. There is a psychopath who breaks out of an institution and he goes to a small town and he starts killing people. And there is a showdown between a babysitter and the beast. There is somebody kind of old and wise who's on the trail. There is a child in peril.
So we've got a lot of the hallmarks of kind of babysitter horror in general, but Halloween in specific. It does a lot of the same things, but it also does some different things as well. So let's get into it. So. The film is about Mikos Stanopoulos, played by George Eastman. Mikos Stanopoulos has escaped an institution of some kind. It's a little bit vague, and maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention.
But he has supernatural regenerative abilities. So that's coming from Internet Movie Database. So he's from this medical lab, so there's kind of this idea that he has been experimented on, and his cells have been mutated or enhanced. But basically what makes this guy kind of supernatural is he can regenerate. So if he has any kind of physical injury, his cells regenerate very quickly. He heals very quickly. which makes him very difficult to kill. Now...
That, to me, is not supernatural. That's science fiction. Because what we basically have here with Mikos Stanopoulos, the character, is kind of a super soldier. This kind of idea of a super soldier. Kind of in...
Kind of like what Marvel is doing with Captain America and the Winter Soldier and all that stuff of trying to make somebody really tough and really powerful. The problem is Mikos is also insane and he's psychopathic. Now, George Eastman is such a... a great casting for these monster characters because the dude is like huge. I don't know how big he is in real life, but he is very big compared to the actors in which he's interacting. And just checking here, this dude is still alive.
Yeah, he is a cool two meters. He is six foot six and three quarters inch tall, which is almost two inches taller than me. So that would make me uncomfortable as a tall person. I don't like being around people that are taller than me because I'm prejudiced. Anyway, let's move on. Stanopoulos breaks out of this medical facility. He goes on a killing spree. And he is pursued, instead of being pursued by the psychiatrist, as in Halloween, he is now pursued by a doctor priest.
which sounds like a D&D class, but it's Edmund Bourdon playing the father, and the father is the only one who knows the truth, and he is on his way to stop this killing machine. He ends up working with a police officer, Sergeant Ben Engelman, played by Charles Boromel, as they try to protect people. from this killer. Now, one of the victims, the protagonist of the film is Katya Bennett. Katya Bennett, played by Katya Berger.
And so she's a young teen girl who is kind of confined to bed because of a medical treatment, because she can't walk. She's partially paralyzed again. I really was trying to pay attention, but I may have missed some of the subtitles, and I don't speak Italian. So, Greg, Ian, sorry. Anyway. The guy goes on a killing spree. They try to kill him. He gets back up. He kills other people. He goes nuts. He's hulking. He's relatively slow moving. And I think he's completely nonverbal. He grunts and...
He makes kind of monstrous noises, and he is ruthless and unstoppable. So, we have a monster who... acts very much like a zombie with kind of this plotting, slow, methodical efforts. But it is one who will also use weapons, and he will improvise weapons for a variety of really, really nasty kills. There's a really curious one involving a band saw. I say it's curious because it's interesting to see how the makeup was done. It's all practical effects using, you know, doubles and...
cuts and makeup. So that's kind of a cool one. It's really brutal. So there are some really interesting and kind of fun kills and trying to think about, okay, what was that and how was it done? So, yeah, I mean, it's got kind of the slasher appeal that you would expect. from the early 80s. And it does have this sense of, oh no, we've got this girl. How are we going to protect her? And she's got a younger brother. How are we going to protect him? Is this guy this absurd killer?
going to be able to actually get them. There's a pickaxe kill. There's some kind of weird drill kill. And there is an attempted gas oven kill. puts the babysitter's head into the oven. And I'm not sure, pardon me, but I think it's Annie Bell playing Emily. I could be wrong there, but he puts her head in the oven. And she kind of turns brown. It's like she's roasted like a turkey. And it's really long. It's really prolonged. It's like in real time. And I found it a little bit funny.
more than it was supposed to be, especially because even though she comes in direct contact with the heating elements, she doesn't catch on fire or burn it any other way. But it's gruesome and it's slow. And it doesn't actually kill her. She comes back in the way a serial killer or a supernatural killer would. But, you know, she's dispatched. So what we get, and this is kind of cool, what we get is this supernatural...
beast, this scientific abomination that can regenerate and is just this killing machine. And he has to showdown with this kind of final girl who is young, sweet, innocent. and is struggling to walk because of her recent surgery and her condition. She's just in a nightgown.
very vulnerable, and they have this showdown. Well, like many great final girls, she rises to the occasion, and she is able to dispatch Mr. Stanopoulos, the only way that seems to be plausible, which is to behead him in a very violent sequence where she chops and chops and chops and chops until his head comes off.
So what we get from this character is something that I've noticed mostly in 21st century slashers where the final girl has to become a monster. Now, when Carol Clover talks about the final... girl of the 70s and 80s. She's mostly talking about how the final girl has to become masculine or has to become genderless and abandon kind of the stereotypes of the female character in order to confront this hyper masculine.
also queer monster, in order to survive. But when you think about films like The Descent, Or hostile to those are those are examples of where we have a final girl who kind of becomes a monster because of her engagement with monstrosity. And so the only way to combat monstrosity is with monstrosity. which evokes a semi-famous quote by Nietzsche, which is, if we're going to combat monsters, we must be careful not to become one. Something like that. I'm paraphrasing.
So anyway, so you have her kill Mikos, but then Katya seems to kind of be nuts at the end as she's smiling and covered in blood and holding Mikos's head as a trophy. So, whoa, stuff. All right, Greg, here we go. So is this a zombie? No. Unfortunately, the antagonist from Absurd is not a zombie, but I will acknowledge that we could make a case for it being zombie adjacent.
Why? Because of the way he moves, the way he is seemingly indestructible and unstoppable, the way he recovers from injuries and just keeps coming. his nonverbal nature and his attacks. But what is not particularly zombie about him is use of weapons and power tools. And, of course, the fact that he does seem to be operating under his own mental capacity. He's making his own choices. And he's not cannibalistic in the Romero tradition.
So, so yeah, sorry about that. It's an interesting film and it's kind of fun, but not a zombie. All right. My final thoughts on this one is I think it's kind of a fun film. It is in as much as Anthropophagus is similar to some zombie films of the era. This one is, of course, similar to Halloween. So they're both a little bit...
kind of derivative of existing films, trying to capture some success with existing formulas. That's okay. I mean, I'm not going to badmouth that. And this one does have some fun kills. It is a fun variation. on the unstoppable slasher killer that has some science fiction behind it and not just like crazy supernatural inexplicable stuff. So I liked that.
but I was kind of underwhelmed overall. It just didn't strike me the same way that Anthropophagus did. So kind of to break from Ian and Greg, well, actually just from Greg. I'm not going to spoil everything because you should go listen to their podcast. I'm going to give this one a 6 out of 10. It was, like I said, it's okay. It's kind of cool. It has some stuff going on. And it is available on Tubi. So you can get this one on Tubi, at least as of right now.
It is also available on Prime Video for $2.99. So yeah, I'm going with 6 out of 10 for the Joe D'Amato semi-sequel, Absurd. So my final thoughts about the pair, and it is a great pairing, and they do have this kind of sequel nature to them, and they are obviously linked by Joe D'Amato and George Eastman. I want to offer a suggestion that taken together... Taken together, we have a zombie. So if you can take the first...
George Eastman monsters, kind of wild and crazy cannibalistic traits, and merge that with this George Eastman's monsters, unstoppability and juggernautical approach to assault. you kind of do have a zombie. But each film individually... No, these aren't zombie films. They're zombie-like. And if you're a fan of zombie films, there's a good chance you're going to like these films as well. So I think this is kind of a first. I have an episode of Dead Men Still Walking.
two films and I did not talk about a zombie film but I came pretty darn close and that's cool by me so there you go Greg check out these films especially if you're into kind of a extreme low budget italian horror Otherwise, I'll be coming back soon in a couple of weeks, hopefully with some newer zombie films and some zombie releases. And we'll be able to talk about those. So as always, thanks. I appreciate the support. Share if you.
have somebody who might like what I'm doing. And yeah, peace out. He was trying to drive away in a vehicle that is now on fire.