THE ZOMBIE ARMY / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR: BETTY STAPLEFORD / SCREENPLAY: ROGER SCEARCE / STARRING: CINDIE LOU ACKER, JODY AMATO, MICHELLE ANDERSON / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Set up in 2013, Phantom Pain Films is a low-key indie procurer of nasty, trashy, low-budget cult artefacts. With only a few reclaimed releases under their belt, the latest is The Zombie Army, a 1991 schlocky zombie film directed by Betty Stapleford.
Even by 90’s standards, The Zombie Army falls into some of the most dated mental health horror tropes. “Crazies” rape and screech via woeful performances, daft scripting robs the film of sincerity, stupid mistakes pile up quickly and the film just grates before it’s even really even begun. One of the first on-screen decent performances comes from Stapleford herself, here playing a female army captain with some cutting words for her dubious male superiors – “you won’t give ’em a chance just because you’ve got a dick and they don’t. Let me tell you captain, my soldiers are every bit as good as yours and they can get a dick any day of the week!” More of this would have made the film a fun twist on hyper-masc army stories, but the quotable parts start and stop there.
After a dull first half which drags its heels en route to the most saleable part of the film, The Zombie Army unleashes its undead on a squad of badass female soldiers. The pace picks up, the lighting and camera work is more interesting, pyrotechnics come into play, grenades fly, and squibs go off left right and centre. Whatever budget Stapleford had, she clearly reserved it for the last act. It’s just a shame that the bumbling, predominantly male, characters are so painful to watch that you might not make it that far into the film.
Shot with unsteady hands and bad cameras, the film looks and feels like a high school project or a teenage passion project, minus the passion. Films like Evil Dead, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, and many of the films on the Video Nasties List are testament to practical effects and guerrilla filmmaking. The Zombie Army just doesn’t have enough of those home-grown shoestring budget charms to stand out from the crowd. Worse, its resurrection in 2019 seems pointless.
The Zombie Army’s role as a cult curio is questionable. Sure it’s an early 90’s garage horror from a female director, about the sins of a man-led army, but it’s not savvy enough to have a cultural dialogue and not fun enough to merit a watch for pure escapism.
Trash is trash and The Zombie Army should have stayed where its corpses belong: the grave.
