D2D entry #63: Zombie Holocaust/Dr. Butcher, M.D. (1980, Marino Girolami)
(Featured in Grindhouse Universe.)
The question remains, why do I do this? Why do I feel compelled to wade through the unrespected flotsam of cinematic history? The answer is mainly so I can find things like Simon, King of the Witches. Barring that, it’s so I can find films like this one.
Whether you call it Zombie Holocaust (its Italian title) or Dr. Butcher M.D. (its notorious American title), Girolami’s splattery gutmuncher is little more than a crass, stupid, near-incompetent cash-in on the twin box-office forces of Fulci’s Zombie and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust… and it’s precisely its crassness, stupidity and incompetence that makes it such a deranged treasure. Girolami (hiding behind the Americanized moniker of “Frank Martin”), apparently not content with a mere Bruno Mattei-style ripoff, decided that if he was going to jack the plot from the Fulci flick and even go so far as to use some of the same sets, he’d also attempt to go toe-to-toe with Lucio in terms of gore and goofiness.
Thing is, though, Fulci for all his faults was an artist and tried to always make the best film he could, while Girolami is a hack through and through, so he ladles on the gore and violence because it’s all he’s got and all he can capture of that Fulci feeling. It’s a case where a guy knows the notes but not how to properly play them, so what comes out is weird and screwy and ugly and thoroughly wrong, yet it magically lands in the rarefied zone where its ineptitude starts to look inspired. There’s an early shot where a guy (who has just been caught trying to eat a heart) throws himself out a window, wherein we cut to a shot of a falling dummy. The beautiful part is that the dummy is poorly constructed and when it hits pavement, its arm clearly goes flying off.
I don’t know if they didn’t have another dummy and couldn’t do a second take or that no one involved gave a damn, but I treasure this sort of fleeting, obvious seamwork. This kind of cheapjack mania is everywhere - whenever the pacing flags, there’s a bit of splattery madness waiting around the corner to bring us back to attention, like when Ian McCullough pulps a paper-mache zombie’s head with an outboard motor simply because it happened to be handy. Furthermore, the dialogue is oft-priceless (i.e. the infamous, “I could easily kill you now, but I’m determined to have your brain!”)
And then there’s this, which is simply one of the funniest things ever put into a film:
Is it a good film? Hardly. Did I love the everlovin’ fuck out of it anyway? Oh yeah, because its crassness is its chief asset - the makers of this are fully aware that you’re just here to see some bodies get torn apart but good and make sure that you get it in spades, with some inexplicable goofiness to hold it all together. Truth be told, I think I prefer Zombie Holocaust to Zombie; while the latter ultimately works out to be a creepy apocalyptic horrorshow, this flick is more consistently entertaining.
