Corpse Eaters

Lawrence Zazelenchuk was an owner of drive-in on Route 69,just outside of Sudbury.With the budget of $36 000 he made "Corpse Eaters"-the first Canadian gore film about zombies emerging from a ghastly crypt filled with coffins and bones.He wanted to have a horror film of his own to play in his cinema."Corpse Eaters" is loaded with grisly over-the-top gore and violence.The graveyard and crypt are downright creepy and the zombies look very Fulciesque.The plot is cheesy and it often jumps all over the place beginning with the morgue attendants,then to our sex crazed and beer starved quartet,who unleash the living dead to the hospital and back to the morgue again.If you like zombie movies or Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefests give "Corpse Eaters" a chance.7 out of 10.

This movie has everything that makes a bad movie worth watching - sloppy editing, little to no continuity, insane dialog, bad (you might even say non-existent) acting, pointless story lines, shots that go on FAR too long...and it's perfect for MST3K-style riffing, not to mention the "Corpse Eaters Drinking Game": Scribble on forms...take a shot - Sign your name...take a shot - Catch a bad Foley edit...take many, many shots.

The only reason I didn't rate it higher than 8 is because there's not enough gratuitous nudity and because despite its insane badness, it's only an hour long - hell, a movie like this should have been at least 20-30 minutes longer!

An interesting little canuxploitation flick made in Ontario obviously so someone could get a quick buck on the drive-in circuit. It's cheap and very amateurish in both directing and acting. It does however display some pretty graphic gore scenes, some nudity, and an interesting gimmick at the beginning were a warning comes up before the violent bits (similar to Boardinghouse). It apparently caused some controversy and as a result several minutes of gore were cut out, and are presumably lost. There's really no reason to intentionally seek this out, but, if you are a fan of this sorta thing give it a shot, it's short at only 57 minutes and as of this review is available on youtube.

Corpse Eaters (1974)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Producer Lawrence Zazelenchuk is the man behind this Canadian horror film, which was considered their first "gore" movie. In a pretty interesting story, the producer had two dreams in life. One was to own a drive-in, which he was able to do and the other was to make a movie to play there, which is this film. The story is pretty simple as four people stumble upon some zombies and chaos follows.

CORPSE EATERS was made for $36,000.00 and you can tell that the budget was that small. With that said, for the most part I thought it was a well-made picture with everything considered and it's certainly lives up to its new reputation. I say new because this film hardly got released back in the day and it was pretty much forgotten until it was released to VHS back in 1993. I think fans of the Herschell Gordon Lewis gore films will certainly enjoy this.

As with the Gordon films, this was here screams drive-in because it has that low-budget atmosphere that can only happen when you're shooting something without much money. The film also manages to be rather creative when it came to the kill scenes including one poor sucker who gets eaten and chopped apart at once. The gore scenes are certainly the highlight as some of them (like the autopsy) look rather cheesy but there are others that look excellent. The before mentioned scene where a person is eaten in gory details as well as chopped up looked extremely good and this was four years before DAWN OF THE DEAD.

The performances are bland to say the least and there's no question that some better cinematography would have helped. I'd also argue that there's very little to no story here and even at less than a hour the film drags in spots. Still, this is a pretty fascinating film with an interesting story behind it so zombie fans will certainly want to check it out.

This thought long lost flick sometimes comes available on the web. So I bought me a copy. Well, of course the acting is terrible and the story line is childish but it does have his moments. I think people who searched this one also knows the backstory of it. It was made by a grindhouse cinema owner for an extreme low budget. But for me he surely didn't spoiled the money on props but on the make up. The make up is for that kind of flick well done. The zombies are watchable and the gore is intact. The only problem with that kind of movies is the quality of the pelicule. It's terrible, luckely no hiss on the sound but sometimes it's way too dark. So you have to watch clearly to see the gore. In a funny way they tried to sell this one as really not for the squeamish. A voice-over tells in the beginning of the movie to watch out for a sign and a man appearing with green flashes, that tells you there is gore on the way. Of course that doesn't work, made me think of Cannibal Girls, had that annoying bell when the red stuff started to flow. They had the original idea, Cannibal Girls was made a year earlier. Don't go for the storyline, go for the zombies and notice a continuity mistake. When the girl and guy are making love first she takes of her bra, then they make love and suddenly her underwear is back on...try to do that, or am I getting a bit offline,...eat it you ugly corpses