Remembering Zombie Brigade: The Best Zombie-Vampire-Soldier Allegory You've Never Seen

The undead (and theme parks!) are back in the spotlight this week thanks to Zombieland. And vampires have Twilight and True Blood keeping them in perpetual vogue. And Aussies, always aces, are surging after a bloody ripper showing at Toronto. But how, how to tap all these zeitgeist-y elements into one package? Too late -- because Zombie Brigade got there in 1988.

This Dinky Di Down Under zombie-vampire-fun park opus opens in 1969 in unconvincing Vietnam, where Aussie soldiers (known colloquially as Diggers) run into a Viet Cong guerilla with joke-store fangs. The horror, the horror! We jump from there to present-day Lizard Gully, a dying country town in the remote sheep country of Western Australia. But the mayor -- the shiftily named Harry Ransom -- has a plan to sell vast tracts of the place to Japanese interests as the location of their "Robot Man" theme park. Everyone will get rich, tourism will flourish, and Ransom's grip over his townsfolk will be tighter than ever. Just one pesky problem remains: the memorial and graveyard for local Diggers who died in Vietnam is smack-bang in the middle of the proposed Robot Man experience.

Clearly having never read Pet Semetary or seen Poltergeist, Ransom and his cronies simply blow up the mausoleum. While the town rednecks party with their new Japanese overlord and appreciate his assistant's musical stylings, the grisly Diggers, sporting green-black greasepaint and plastic vampire teeth, stir from their graves to unleash low-budgeted blood-sucking mayhem on the town... after a long overdue cigarette break, of course.

So far, so blah. Up until this point, Zombie Brigade is paced more like an arthritic member of George A. Romero's lumbering old-school horde than one of Zack Snyder's new-fangled Olympic-speed gut-munching team. And while the movie doesn't get much faster, it makes up for it by getting way weirder. See, the Australian powers-that-be knew all along that vampire-zombie-soldier resurrection was a distinct possibility and so put into place "Operation Body Count" that sees the town sealed off, ringed with landmines, and left to its own devices. This, the local cop explains, is the sort of cover-up in which the Aussie government is always dealing, whether by arranging the disappearance of a prime minister or bombing a city hotel to frame radicals. Far weirder is that local Aboriginal elder, Charlie, has the solution to the infestation: raising the "good" Australian soldiers of WWI and WWII from their graves to fight the "bad" Nam zombies.

And so we get an undead-soldier showdown -- or, at least, we would, were it not for directors Barrie Pattison and Carmelo Musca opting to insert a "Later that night - after their victory" text card where the big finale ought to be. Disappointing, yes, but stick around for the denouement. It's not every day you see zombie-vampire-soldiers becoming heroes, just as you don't see zombie-vampire robot ninjas doing decapitations with a samurai sword often enough.

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