Zombie Nightmare

Zombie Nightmare (1986 / 7)

Dir. Jack Bravman, John Fasano (uncredited)

Written by John Fasano as "David Wellington"

Starring Adam West, Tia Carrere, Jon Mikl Thor, Shawn Levy

I’d been on the trail of ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE for years before I finally caught up with it, going back at least to 2014, when I discovered its existence after mistyping the search terms for HARD ROCK ZOMBIES. At the time, though, I simply couldn’t get ahold of a copy – couldn’t find it on pirate bay, wasn’t streaming, no DVD available, VHS copies on amazon running for more than the zero dollars I was willing to pay. I settled for its sister film, the delightful ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, also released on video in 1987 (Wikipedia claims, with no citation, that ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE received a “limited release theatrically” in the US in in 1986; I have my doubts). Even aside from their analogous sobriquets, the films have much in common: both were shot in the Canadian suburbs around the same time, both were the creative brainchild of the underrated John Fasano (director of BLACK ROSES, THE JITTERS and ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, who, despite receiving neither credit on-screen, seems to be generally regarded as the writer-director here), and, most importantly, both feature the involvement of a man named Jon Mikl Thor, bodybuilder, actor, former Mr. Canada, and “Legendary Rock Warrior” as he billed himself in his bands Thor (just Thor), Thor and the Imps, and, if his Wikipedia page is to believed, “Thor and the Ass Boys.”

ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE is a goddamn masterpiece of Z-movie goofiness and monster puppets which really took me by surprise when I blindly watched it after having failed to secure a copy of ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE back in 2014. So when its elusive zombie-themed brethern suddenly showed up out of the blue on Prime streaming –in a pristine HD print, no less!— of course I jumped at the opportunity. That’s the weird thing about the brave new world of streaming; in some ways, it’s probably made the job of the offbeat cinephile more difficult, turning films into transient, ephemeral things which can suddenly vanish from the world in the blink of an eye and be utterly inaccessible to anyone who lacks a real-world video store which held onto an increasingly rare physical copy. But on the other hand, every now and then wildly obscure, impossible-to-find stuff just shows up, a click of the finger away, apparently unaware that yesterday it was more recherché than unicorn steak. If that diminishes the thrill of the hunt somewhat, it does afford the pastime a giddy quality of capricious fate; apparently the universe would like me to see ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE now, one says with a shrug. Yesterday this would have been a Herculean task, today it’s instant and free. C’est la vie, apparently the quantum physicists were right and anything can happen at any time for no reason, and you might as well just surrender your free will to the fickle vagary of a random, meaningless universe where Trump is president and now, for some reason, ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE is just there, waiting to be watched.

This man is seconds from saying "sorry ma" with the highest possible volume of Canadian-ness 

 I guess the universe knew what it was doing this time, though. It turns out to be a damn good thing that it was so easy to watch, because it’s disappointingly boring. It would have been kind of a bummer to eventually get desperate and, like, order some Vietnamese bootleg DVD for $35 only to end up with this. Where ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE was packed to the gills with silly gimmicks, hair metal excess and a veritable menagerie of homicidal muppets, ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE offers fairly scant pleasures. There is, for example, only one zombie, and his rampage is hardly a nightmare unless you consider killing the five teenage hooligans who ran you over and fled the scene a “nightmare” instead of a “public service.”  

Still, credit for this: the script by Fasano (hiding behind the mysterious name "Dave Wellington" for reasons he claims have to do with the Canadian copyright law and not shame at having been associate with this debacle) is, like his ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE script, actually at least a little smarter and coherent than you would assume at first blush. It begins with something completely unexpected, anyway: some indeterminate number of years before the main events of the movie, a young African-American girl (Tracy Biddle, SNAKE EATER II: THE DRUG BUSTER) is walking home, only to be accosted by two racist punks (possibly Tony Blauer [nothing] and Mark Kulik [“boy in line” in the 1987 Tommy Lee Jones starring TV movie BROKEN VOWS], both of whom are just credited as “teenager”). Fortunately, there’s help nearby: stocky local baseball player William Washington (Fasano himself!) intervenes, only to receive a fatal stabbing from one of the young rascals as they make a getaway! Meanwhile, William’s young son Tony watches in horror.

Flash forward to today. Woah! Certainly not the way I was expecting a movie called ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE to begin. This rather shocking prologue of racist violence helps inform our understanding of why young Tony has by 1986 grown up to be a baseball-playing bodybuilding sweatpants aficionado played by Jon Mikl Thor (RECRUITS, INTERCESSOR: ANOTHER ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE). And it makes his willingness to put his life on the line in a Steven Seagal-esque* attempt to foil a grocery store robbery all the more psychologically rich, as we worry that history will repeat itself and this second-generation good Samaritan will suffer the same fate as his old man. But no, he tosses the miscreants out on their asses with a righteous professionalism that would make Patrick Swayze in ROADHOUSE proud, and it seems for a moment that this might bring some closure to this saga of multigenerational heroism. I mean, he doesn’t look like he’s thinking about it too deeply, or noticing the unmistakable patrilineal synchronicity he’s enacted. But then again, he doesn’t have much time to reflect, because about four seconds after foiling the robbery, he’s run over by an unrelated car and killed. Damn.

I guess he technically one-upped his dad by at least surviving til the end of the encounter, but still, one can understand why his mom (Francesca Bonasorsa, nothing) takes this turn of events pretty hard. “They won’t do this to me again!” she fumes. And she means it, because next thing you know she’s called in a favor; it seems that the young woman her husband died protecting all those years ago has grown into a Voodoo practitioner of some renown (Manuska Rigaud, nothing) and, with a little coaxing, is willing to resurrect the fallen lad as a vengeance-minded zombie who sometimes is (and sometimes is not) still played by Jon Mikl Thor.

Look, I'm not going to try and claim this is not racist, but all things considered, it's probably as minimally racist as it was possible to be with this premise. At least she's the good guy!

 Meanwhile, the offending teens go about their life, amazingly unconcerned about the little vehicular homicide they’ve perpetrated. Despite our intimacy with the now-decimated Washington family, they will be something sort of like protagonists from now on, and the only people who could reasonably claim to be afflicted by zombie nightmares of any kind. This imparts upon the movie something of a slasher structure, with a central killer gradually murdering his way through a list of the people who wronged him. That's an unusual move for a zombie movie (and one which anticipates the plot of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER by an entire decade, not that this is exactly something to feel overwhelmingly proud of, though to hear him tell it in the commentary, Fasano definitely does), and one which in retrospect may have been somewhat ill-advised, because a slasher lives and dies on its kills, which are uniformly underwhelming here. And as is tradition in that venerable subgenre, the movie is at its worst when we're enduring endless scenes of its obnoxious victims, which in this case makes up a downright indefensible portion of the runtime. 

For the most part these victims are too shockingly bland to be worth discussing, although two of the actors portraying them subsequently proved noteworthy: the role of Jane A. Finalgirl is played by future Hollywood superstar Tia Carrere (WAYNE’S WORLD, TRUE LIES) in her first role (despite being so much more attractive than anyone else that it's functionally destabilizing for the movie, she still barely registers in a part which barely qualifies as a role), and, even weirder, future Middlebrow Hollywood Hack director Shawn Levy (CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) appears as the most intolerable asshole of the group. Even with Carrere in there, though, the idea of spending a whole movie focused on these dipshits is laughable, so once the teens start getting bumped off one by one, the movie offers a new possible protagonist (at more than 40 minutes in!), police detective Frank Sorrell (Frank Dietz,THE JITTERS, BLACK ROSES and ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, also a longtime Disney animator, with various credits on HERCULES, MULAN, TARZAN, and FANTASIA 2000, among others). And here the movie gets very slightly more interesting, because Sorrell has a vague suspicion that his shady boss Captain Churchman (Adam West, among other things, episodes of The Love Boat and The Adventures of Pete and Pete) would prefer this whole thing to just go away, and isn’t interested in getting to the truth.

Unfortunately the zombie killings themselves are pretty dull stuff, mostly bloodless affairs which grind endlessly on as the incredibly inept victims ineffectually try to get away from a slow, stumbling assailant in matte gray makeup and uncomfortably revealing sweatpants. The first two kills, at least, have the advantage of taking place in some sort of bizarre dystopian modernist nightmare rec center, which affords a touch of actual unsettling ambiance which is otherwise almost entirely lacking. But when even the murder of the biggest jerk in Canada --by impalement with a baseball bat while he’s attempting to sexually assault a waitress, no less!— feels perfunctory and bloodless, I think it’s time to admit you don’t really have a movie, here. It’s nice to see West dutifully show up every now and again (even if he’s visibly reading his lines off the paper in front of him in one scene) but a few clips of Adam West and a few more of a pale-faced guy in sweatpants stumbling after a handful of screaming teenagers does not a Zombie Nightmare make. It’s not even colorful enough to be worth laughing at its incompetence, because for the most part there’s just nothing much going on.

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that this film is probably most known for the famously savage reception it got on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

 Credit where it’s due, though; just like ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, it ends with a bit of a twist which retroactively makes it seem, if not smarter, at least more intentional than one would be led to believe based on the meandering nothing that makes up most of the runtime. I guess it would be a spoiler of sorts to explain exactly what’s going on, but suffice to say a number of seemingly random details end up paying off in a way which is, if hardly mind-blowing, at least narratively satisfying. On one hand, being impressed by a film merely for having a baseline functional story is the height of damning with faint praise. But on the other hand, try finding me a $100,000,000-budgeted film today which can meet that low standard. For all ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE’s dull, time-wasting tomfoolery, at least it seems like it wasn’t just made up on the spot as it was filmed. Or at least not entirely so. In something this low-rent, that’s actually sort of miraculous, or at the very least not something you could have reasonably expected. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to hold it against ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE if it had a random hodgepodge of plotlines that went nowhere. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed. So even if this is by far the weakest work in the Fasano cannon, at least we must again take note that he was trying harder than he had to by any reasonable metric for z-movie genre schlock.

In the Jon Mikl Thor cannon, this also leaves a little to be desired, particularly for people who enjoy seeing Mr. Thor on-screen. Apparently production began with a different Canadian bodybuilder in the title role (a Mr. “Peewee Piemonte” if IMDB is to be believed, a prolific stuntman and sometimes actor [UNDER SEIGE, BATMAN FOREVER, WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II])** and obviously they shot a good bit of the zombie footage before he departed, because maybe as much as half the zombie shots are obviously a different actor with short, dark hair instead of Thor’s flowing hair metal mane (he also has a less prominent package, making the jarring continuity something of a mixed blessing). But if the movie shortchanges you on the Thor zombie action, it makes up for it with more Thor in every other part of the movie. Aside from intermittently playing the zombie, Thor did everything but cater the meals on the film; he wrote and performed the incidental music (under the clever nom du guerre “Thor and his Thorkestra”), and produced the extensive and inappropriately hard-rocking soundtrack, which at first glance seems to be a varied rouges gallery of unknown Canadian metal bands, until you look at the credits and see that Thor himself wrote, produced, and appears on over half of them.

Sometimes it’s under his own name (as in the epic prog anthem “Rebirth” by Thor) sometimes it’s in disguise (“Dead Things” by The Things and “Zombie Life” by Knighthawk have the same lineup as Thor’s band), sometimes only as a producer (“I’m Dangerous!” by Death Mask, produced by Jon Mikl Thor and Steve Price), sometimes in rather more esotetic ways (The “Pantera” who sings “Midnight Man” is not, in fact, the Pantera you’re thinking of, but rather Thor’s wife Rusty Hamilton, herself an actress*** and nude model who also sang backup for Thor).**** In fact, one of the few tracks which does not feature Jon Mikl Thor is also the one you would figure would be too expensive for the movie – Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” which inexplicably plays during the opening credits. I don’t really know why they would feel the need to begin a movie which is in no way rock and roll (and, in fact, begins at least a decade in the past) with the hard-driving sound of Motörhead’s most recognizable single,*****  but it definitely imparts upon the movie an unearned sense of credibility for it to fail to live up to.

Anyway, the whole thing is kinda a debacle and an inauspicious start for all involved. Still, especially after listening to the commentary with Fasano, Dietz, and an over-the-phone Thor, it’s hard not to feel at least a little well-disposed to such a scrappy little film, made by people dedicated enough to just replace their lead zombie halfway through and keep moving forward. It’s a movie without much whammy to speak of, but with no shortage of charming, handmade oddness. That’s not enough to keep its unassuming 89 minutes from dragging a bit, but at least it’s something. And unlike most regional horror flicks which were shot for less than $180,000 (most of which, reportedly, went to West), this time we have the added comfort of knowing that most of those involved don’t need to settle for a patronizing “well, at least you tried.” This movie didn’t really work out, but they moved on to better things. Let that be a lesson to you: never give up. Sure, a lot of times life just doesn’t work out the way you want, and you end up making (or watching) a ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE. But if you stick with it, just around the corner could be your ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE! Amazon may want to convince us that the world is random and meaningless and anything can happen for no reason, but good old fashion misplaced optimism, feckless ambition, and hopeless persistence can still pay off in the end. And if not, at least you can come back as a zombie and brutalize your enemies.

  

** Weirdly, Seagal will remain a theme here. Not only is it an extremely Seagalesque move to open a movie by foiling a small-time retail robbery, but Thor claims that Seagal himself taught him how to stage fight scenes! And, as we will discover, the "other" Thor who appears on-screen had his own run-ins with Seagal as a stuntman on several of his films.

** Including, according to IMDB, in JACOB’S LADDER (uncredited), THE GODFATHER PART III (uncredited), OUT FOR JUSTICE, UNDER SEIGE and… NEWSIES?

*** She appears as “The Seductress” in ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, and has a stunts credit in the 1992 Willem Dafoe action flick WHITE SANDS.

**** Please note the seemingly unimportant detail that the soundtrack was recorded, in part, at Ontario-based Triton Studios. This turns out to be vital information for your understanding of ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE, because in that movie Thor’s band is called “Triton” and his character is named “Jon Mikl Triton.” There. Now you know something.

***** Website horrormetalsounds.com reports that “John Fasano originally wanted to use another Motorhead song Killed By Death as he thought it would fit the movie better, but Lemmy insisted they use Ace Of Spades." I don’t know why he would insist on that, but who am I to tell Lemmy his business? Anyway, it definitely makes both the movie and the soundtrack initially feel way more legit than they actually are.

               

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	And Here’s A Zombie Tale That Will Give You The Creeps. I appreciate the tagline starting with “and,” a startling bit of grammar-bending ambition which imparts the sense that you and the poster are old chums already deep in conversation.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a zombie, but “Nightmare” is sure pushing it.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, good god, no.
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Canada
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombie, revenge thriller
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	I can’t in good conscience call Adam West an A-lister, or even Tia Carrere, but it’s kinda impressive to have em both in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Fasano
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	One teen meets his end while assaulting a woman, although it’s pretty tame
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yup
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Thor into Zombie into different guy zombie
VOYEURISM?	Some zombie-vision, as you might expect for something with a budget of O
MORAL OF THE STORY	You gotta learn to walk before you learn to ROCK N ROLL NIGHTMARE.