"The Zombie Brigade (from Lizard Gully")came out at the time of the Australian Bi-Centenary. It's got an aboriginal hero (John Moore) squiring an Asian heroine (Kihm Lam)in a battle with the undead of three wars - the fallen military are the most revered group in Australian culture. This is precipitated by the local councillors setting up a land deal that sells off the site of a Vietnam memorial for a Japanese developer (Adam A. Wong)'s theme park.
About this time a scheme to set up a multi-functional Japanese retirement polis was in the papers. Ben Elton used the same incident in a TV series a few years later.
"The Zombie Brigade" is just about the last film to be made under the tax concessions which terrified the powerful Australian Film bureaucracy, because they showed that their assessments, consultants, grants and awards were unnecessary - if not counter productive - to Australian production. More films were made without them, on tax breaks - and they could always turn out to be (shudder) like "The Zombie Brigade from Lizard Gully."
Produced in Western Australia, never a center of sophisticated film making, this one arrived after the demand for trashy entertainment, that had been generated by the spread of multiplexes, had already been cut back by closures and multi screen programming. It did not meet with the favor of it's international distributors and had limited showing, though local audiences regularly laughed in the right places - and a few of the wrong ones. Spontaneous applause was not unknown. It had a minor reputation as a good film to get high on.
It was the first film of star Moore who became the leading young black Australian actor of his generation and the support was drawn from Perth theater talent. The pitting of Geoff Gibbs' conniving mayor against Leslie Wright's upright copper (with Scobie Malone and Trooper O'Brien then the only police heroes in Australian film) centered the story and the twist ending was picked up by a few observers as offering an unexpected comment. Placing trash movie monsters among gum trees and Australian wooden verandah buildings still has novelty value.
A tight budget was stretched to - and occasionally beyond - breaking point and the first time director often had to settle for what he could get but years later some people do still retain the memory of night the risen Vietnam War dead marched through an Australian town which had turned it's back on the values that they had died defending, the film's central image.
Also, ponder the menace of vampire sheep!
