Oh, it’s bad. “Night of the Zombies” is so bad it’s like you can almost feel the badness oozing from the television and into your body. After sitting through the entire thing (endurance is not the word), your mind, body, and soul feels forcibly raped in some fashion that’s hard to express. “NOTZ” leaves the viewer afterward standing in the shower, fanatically scrubbing oneself while repeatedly muttering “I feel so dirty,” over and over, and let me restate that’s not “feeling dirty” in a good way. Veteran (and still crappy...you would think after 50 films he would get it right by the law of averages alone) Italian director Bruno Mattei has dabbled in everything from sleaze/sexploitation to sci-fi/horror and back again. Here he utterly and completely rips off, first and foremost, George Romero’s "Dawn of the Dead" while generously pilfering from nearly every single zombie/cannibal film that I can think of. Easily. Christ, the man even steals the entire Goblin soundtrack from "Dawn" as well as several other Italian fright flicks! By all things holy, let’s make this short and sweet shall we?

At the opening, we’re shown a big nuclear reactor/science faculty type building where, apparently, a major leak of radiation has occurred. Everyone turns into zombies thanks to the “virus”, instantly chomping on any unlucky passerby and in turn making more zombies. Ok. Cut now to “somewhere in Italy” as a government building is being held captive by a group of terrorist’s. A team of crack SWAT members (all 4 of em’...ha ha) is sent in to take care of the situation. Killing the terrorists with about as much mercy as the terrorist’s themselves have, the team bares a warning from the groups leader that “you all shall be eaten alive”, spewing the typical “man does not know the evil he has unleashed, etc.” rant. That’s not it verbatim, but you get the point. If not don’t worry, it really doesn’t matter…trust me.

Before I continue with the “plot” (this is going on longer than I wanted) let’s take a closer look at our “heroes”, the SWAT guys. In what is perhaps the most ragtag and idiotic group ever assembled, these are the guy’s Mattei wants us to root for. They are, without exception, some of the weirdest looking “heroes” to ever grace a screen. Two of the four look like absolute loons while the other two look exactly like Lee Majors, as another reviewer has stated. They behave in such a manner that the term idiocy truly cannot describe them. First and foremost, as is typical with most early eighties zombie flicks, our “crack SWAT team” figures out early on that you must shoot the zombies in the noggin to kill them. Ok. So what do they do? For the entire length of the film they shoot em’ anywhere but in the fucking head! Aargh!! They also utter some of the most ludicrous dialogue known to man, I’m talking about some real howlers here, as a fourth grader could have done a better job writing these lines. I’m really hoping that those who laid down the dubbing tracks decided to have some fun, because no person with a brain would ever put such lines in a script. Aargh. At one point, even though bloodthirsty zombies surround them, one of our SWAT guys walks into a closet, puts on a green tutu and hat/cane, and proceeds to burst into an impromptu Broadway number! He is thankfully quickly eaten, but again, “aargh” and what the holy fuck is going on here?

Continuing on, our “crack team” of militiamen is then sent deep into the jungles of New Guinea to investigate the “incident” at the reactor place. Hmm…let’s see if that makes sense. You want to investigate a major problem that occurred in a city, yet you send them to the jungle to investigate. Ahh, Italian horror film logic. Once in the jungles our boneheaded SWAT guys team up with a male and female reporter (who are there for what reason?), with the latter showing a penchant for dropping all of her clothes and mingling with cannibals at the drop of a hat. Seriously, you have to see this shit to believe it. During this whole time the typical antics ensue, with our SWAT guys and two reporters running around the jungle being chased by native cannibal zombies, while they try to reach civilization to, well, I don’t really have a clue. In between the horrendous overuse of stock footage, bad acting and non-existent story, the viewer is treated to some fairly high levels of zombie mayhem. The gore quotient is about the only thing this baby has going for it, and it does push the UNRATED label to the limit. The various gunshots to the head, flesh munching and intestine yanking are all there, as one would expect. Keep in mind that, as Mattei himself stated, that due to the “how low can you go” budget, they had to resort to pig guts to simulate human innards for the flesh eating sequences. Nice. As for the zombies themselves, well, I think Mattei tried to rip off the look of every single zombie from "Dawn of the Dead" to Fulci’s "Zombie" and Umberto Lenzi’s "City of the Walking Dead"...all with bad results. Some of these undead fuckers are the twitchiest zombies I’ve ever seen, as they walk like zombies loaded on amphetamines while doing the hokey pokey. Again, what the fuck Mattei?

The only, and I stress only two things this baby has going for it is the UNRATED amounts of gore and, I suppose, the “bad film appreciation” quality that is instantly on display from the opening credits. While the Italian zombie/cannibal sub-genre is noted for gleeful borrowing from various like-minded films, they do however, typically have something that sets them apart from one another. No one can truly say that Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, and other directors who have dabbled in this genre were 100% unique, cause’ they weren’t. However, the problem here is that, unlike the previously mentioned directors, Mattei does not once inject an original idea on display, and it’s easy to see why he carries nothing more than hack status amongst genre fans. Avoid at all costs as this is for Italian zombie film masochists and bad film buffs only. I feel so damn dirty…