You don’t want zombies that much.
Buf if italian zombie movies?
NOT the old ones you probably like, obviously.
Despite horror having mostly plauted as a prolific genre in terms of high profile releases here in Italy (and indie releases often being insanely obscure to find and often almost not worth bothering)…. somehow i still find here and then a low budget obscure italian-produced horror movie that managed to get itself released on DVD in the UK.
And if Arachnicide could do it, of course Eaters can too.
The subtitle to help cataloging can be stamped on the UK cover art for the DVD, why not?
Seriously, it’s incredible how obscure these low budget italian horror flicks are now even to the navigated perusers of “indiery”, so much that it took an import UK release to know they existed.
And to my surprised, this an even cheaper release than expected, as they didn’t even bother to give it a ramshackled english dub, the DVD still uses the original italian audio with optional english subtitles. Which is fine for me, but come on, even the aforementioned Arachnide was dubbed.
In terms of plots, it’s the mish mash of “borrowed” ideas you’d expect, not because suddendly zombies, but due to the intro doing a Children of Men thing, so mass infertility, no women AND zombies.
And zombi concentration camps? And the Pope just offing himself? WHAT? All of this thrown at you in the intro, too, alongside neo-nazis groups arising… which isn’t really that shocking, but helps set up cheaply the world in the brief tv montage intro, gonna throw all this shit at the viewers in a desperate effort to confuse and stun them right away, maybe putting them in the right state of mind.
I mean, it’s easier to have people talk about these things that actually show them, so…
Ok, the actual plot is about two “undead hunters” and a scientist… trying to figure out exactly what the audience is trying to, as how the hell did this happen to the human race. Maybe it was the guy that they think is behind the virus, nicknamed “The Plague Spreader”. Seems like a good guess.
Always a good sign when the characters in the movie’s plot are also trying to figure out the plot themselves. Not that one would expect anything else from something “presented by Uwe Boll”, and it’s exactly that kinda of movie where they try to throw random ass gibs of plot at the wall, but nothing sticks, so the movie it’s just evil guys experimenting on zombies for reasons, characters bickering about the situation and shooting zombies, and eventually Nazis.
The dialogues are just the usual zombie apocalypse science slop, going for a more realistic (kinda) tone but they often are heavy on excessive exposition, and all the characters are fairly unlikeable shitbiscuits, so you don’t care about them or whatever they have to say, and the two main characters (the introverted moody one and the constantly pissed off one) are no exception. Acting is bad but i’ve seen worse.
Doesn’t help when new characters just show up out of the blue and keep reappearing without ever being introduced, and the cinematography reminds me of big budget videogames of the time, as in everything looks extra murky and grey or beige, just a lot of desatured colors for the grit of it. It really was “the style at the time” and it fits a zombie apocalypse scenario, yes, but also makes the movie look very dull and muted, fitting the gloomy setting a bit too well.
The only things that can be salvaged from this otherwise very boring waste of time are the effects and make-up not being half bad for such an obvious amateur hour low budget zombie flick.
And the music is actually nice enough, some enjoyable 80’s style b-movie tracks.
There are some ideas but they’re often taken wholesale from other movies (like the dead using weapons and talking at some point), and even when they aren’t it’s all so underdeveloped, so it doesn’t amount to much, as the script reverts to just clichès, and a LOT of people talking about stuff, as action is very thin and so are the zombie populace shown hanging about.
It pains me even more since it’s a Tuscanian production (those are some very familiar accents to my ears) and it’s not a complete waste, as the presentation isn’t nowhere as bad as i expected, there some competence in the technical department, but yeah, Eaters it’s awful, boring and aimless in his garbage trudging through the cliches, doesn’t help this is one of those were you’ll feel every minute of it, and its not the usual 70 minutes or something, nope, this is a 90 minutes film.
It gets a bit better when the Nazis get involved, but it happens 40 minutes in, so a bit too late, but undeniably it supplies the movie with some action and some things actually happening… for a brief time, before these encounters that the movie built up to can peter out in a disappointing fashion.
Yeah, unless you desperately need to see every single zombie movie released upon this Earth, i wouldn’t bother with Eaters, even as a “bad movie fix” it’s mostly boring, almost plotless and utterly derivative. It is put together better than you would expect, it’s not a completely worthless effort, there are some ideas with some potential, but they never fully come together.
Even considering all that, the scene where zombies are watching a weird ass animation with bootleg boglins-ghosts getting zapped by a duck plus holding a Ghostbusters style lazer-rifle (really the most memorable part of the entire movie) and the one where “dwarf Hitler” is stabbed in the dick and mauled to death with a Mussolini half-bust…just aren’t enough to recommend watching it, unless you’re used to even worse zombie flicks. This is quite subpar, but not 2/10 territory, if you wanna put it that way.
Wise Cafe (International) 