Zombie Beach Party

Boy, can Jules Delorme turn crap into uber-crud or what? I'm guessing they cast him as a zombie on the misunderstanding he was acting, and when they swapped him to Ulysses and realised it wasn't an act... it was too late, the budget was blown.

The film itself has a bunch of funny nods to the zombie flick tradition and with a decent lead it might have stood a chance. If you're tempted to see this film, just bang your head against a wall for ten minutes instead. You'll end up with that same ache behind the eyes and unanswered 'WHY LORD?!' and it'll have taken far less of your time to get there.

Be warned.

Mark

I can't believe that a movie that is supposed to be about both luchadore wrestlers and zombies is somehow boring, but somehow this braindead, zero budget doo-doo-fest came along and proved me wrong.

Apparently I have to write more lines so I guess I will give more info and details... uh... so this boring movie is very dull. I wouldn't have believed it could be this sleep inducing but it proved me completely, totally, unfortunately wrong, wrong, wrong. So very wrong indeed that I had to write about it using as many words as possible.

Still more? Okay then. The acting stinks, the filmmaker is completely devoid of any talent either as a writer or cinematographer or even editing, because even that stood out as crappy. I guess the sound was okay and even some of the music, although I can't really remember any specifics about that. Talk about bad acting, particularly the small parts in this were basically played by people who are not just pulled randomly off the street, it seems like they don't even want to be there or care at all about what they are making.

Do yourself a big fave and skip this terribly boring, pointless mess of a movie. Even as a huge zombie fan who watches every zombie film I can get my hands on, I wish I had skipped this one and just re-watched one of the Living Dead movies or a couple episodes of TWD instead.

'Enter…Plaga Zombie 1.5' could be an alternate title since it could almost be a missing higher no-budgeted spin-off from that series. Actually, the 2nd Plaga Zombie movie was better than this. Ugh…will someone please stop this sub-genre! Did people learn nothing from the Santo film series? I'm sure there will be some people who love luchadores and may find camp humor here to enjoy, but it's a bad film that acts like its based off a non-existent comic book. I'm tired of watching luchador fanboys fawn over wrestlers in low budget zombie films; it gives me flashbacks to that John West theme song… (Zombie completionists will know what I'm talking about).

Ulysses, the 'hero' of the film drives around in his car continuously spouting 'I'm in my freshman year of college' philosophy quotes to the audience in an attempt to lull us into sleep, which he hopes we will awaken from having dreamt that this was a good film. Another reviewer tried to compare it to Bruce Campbell's narration in Don Coscarelli's "Bubba Ho-Tep", but there's a bit of a difference in that Ho-Tep was a brilliant film and this is cheesy garbage. Then there's Tiki and his wrestling zombies, which may or may not have killed some local civilians. There are several other wrestlers including bad guys, but you probably won't care.

Being a luchador film, we get to see these idiots running around with their masks constantly on (as is the luchador fashion rage) in an attempt to save on film-making down time due to hair and makeup crew and to save the 'actors' from having to actually emote. I wasn't sure if the acting was bad and the dialogue delivery was stilted intentionally to reinforce the cheese factor or if that was a lack of ability on the part of those cast in the roles. Looking through the credits, several of the cast members names seemed to be aliases, making me wonder if they didn't want anyone to know that they were in this film.

There were some nods to other horror films and filmmakers including: Ulysses at one point holds onto a book entitled 'Zombies: An Authoritative Study – Collected Edition compiled by Dr. G. Andrew Romero and Dr. Clifford Ruttle'. There's also a dialogue reference to Tod Browning's "Freaks" (take a wild guess what 3 word phrase a crowd shouts repeatedly).

THE PLOT: To bore me to death and cure insomnia once and for all… (wait, that was the filmmakers plot). The film's plot is: Our fearless wrestling heroes have to stop a plot involving genetically engineered zombies and a zombie breeding scheme involving human incubators in Zombie King and friends' bid to take over the world -- all while running around looking like bargain basement trick-or-treaters.

MAKEUP: basic low-budget zombie makeup with decent low-budget gore fx.

FEASTING: Yeah kinda DE-ANIMATION METHODS: cabesa removal CONTAGION LEVEL: I couldn't exactly tell if the victims turned into zombies themselves, but at least one did. There was mention of a way to turn people into zombies by forcing them to drink zombie blood.

The reported budget for this film according to IMDb, makes it about 9 times the budget of "Clerks", thereby proving that having a good script can do things for the quality of a low budget film that throwing a little more money onto the screen and watching it burn could not do for this film. I have seen several dozen zombie films and EZK rates pretty low.

This film is recommended only for zombie completionists and for devotees of the fake and annoying sport known as pro wrestling.

I was so excited to see this movie. Original idea in the plot summary, great cover art. The costumes and the characters interested me from the front.

But BLAM the dullness of the movie hit me Sooooo hard that it demolished all hope to enjoy this poorly made effort. The characters had zero development beyond them being introduced. I really didn't give a damn about any of them surviving, they were strangers through the whole thing. The "babe"(Mercedes) was not really a babe at all, I was almost glad that I couldn't see the rest of her face. Ulysses was so flat I could use his character as a coaster, and thats really a problem when he's supposed to be the hero. What was with his lame clothes. A Mexican wrestler would never wear anything so dull, especially a true hero. Think back to the BLUE DEMON & SANTO, and all the great Mexican wrestling monster movies of the 70's. They could really rip apart zombies and look good doing it, not the group of reject uggos in this waste of time. Half way through, I really wanted it to end. The story and characters were not progressing any further after the first 20 min, and the movie just kept eating up my time... The one redeeming character was Tiki, I almost wanted to know more about him, he was the only character who seemed to have any passions or emotions at all. But the makers were ridiculously trying to up-sell Ulysses the whole damn movie, and he was very very bland. I hope the makers all have day jobs. The guy at subway who made my sandwich contributes more to the world than this project.

After hearing his potential nemesis has returned, a masked wrestler decides to check out his activities and finds that a series of domesticated zombies are running loose in the community being brought about by the returning madman for a special show and must try to stop the nefarious plans.

Overall, this was an immensely fun cheesy genre throwback. Among its better features here is the highly effective setup that provides this one with a great look and feel reminiscent of the luchador films of the past. Featuring rather obvious nods and homages in the appearance and presence of the main luchador wrestlers as leads in the film who follow pretty much the entire role of the characters from the past films inherently well, the use of colorful presentation screens for each of the characters, and a series of silly storylines coming together to create a wild scenario, this one is quite fun overall. Those series of storylines here are rather fun as the wildly over-the-top storyline involving the use of a mad scientist trying to create a human/zombie hybrid to create an army of super-zombie soldiers in a ploy to overtake the world while operating on the outskirts of a storyline featuring the main hero looking into an old rivals' use of zombies in his show simply completes the picture with this one incredibly well. That allows for a spectacular series of cheesy and silly action scenes involving the luchadores fighting not just each other but also the hordes of zombies. As the first half goes for the idea of the rival being reckless with the domesticated zombies in his shows and finding them getting loose to commit the murders, this focuses more on the fighters going after each other while we see the zombie swarming scenes taking place to provide some solid gore scenes. That leads nicely into the series of confrontations that take place in the finale where the action takes place at the abandoned theme park hideout where the encounters featuring various henchmen and zombies are shown to take place throughout the locations with all sorts of lucha libre-styled fighting against the opponents in some fun battles. This might be way too cheesy and silly for some as the whole idea for this one comes off so wild that it's hard to take seriously, especially with so many characters trying to make sense of what's going on here, which is enough to hold it back.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Nudity, and mild drug use.