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.
Zombie Brigade was the last movie made under the controversial, much-abused Australian government-stimulus program in which investors could claim up to 150 percent of their monies back against their tax bill but pay tax on only 50 percent of any income earned from the film. It's unclear whether Pattison and Musca conceived their undead-tale as such a write-off, but it's clear that some intelligence went into writing Zombie Brigade. There are enough Down Under caricatures to fill a chook shed, but they come with a self-mocking awareness. "As soon as it gets dark, every man, woman and child in the district will be slaughtered!" says one bushie, adding with perhaps greater concern, "Maybe even the dogs and the sheep!" While the filmmaking and acting waiver between rudimentary and terrible, what sustains the interest and affections are that the earnest performances are set against a backdrop of real and ongoing Australian concerns, such as racism, the marginalization of Aboriginals, the flight of young country people to the cities, and the challenges presented by international investment. Most remarkable is that we get an Aboriginal hero and a Japanese heroine, something that, to my knowledge, has never before or since been seen in an Australian film.
Pattison and Musca seemed aware of their movie's prospects as they made it, hence the scene where the undead paw at a video store window in which is prominently displayed a crude Zombie Brigade poster. And that's where the film ended up, in the most minor of VHS releases. Available internationally in a crummy DVD release, Zombie Brigade has long been out of print in its country of origin, although it did get a rare theatrical showing two years ago in Sydney.
So, given the mania for remaking 1980s horror, is Zombie Brigade worth resurrecting for the big-screen? The concept of an outback Aussie town over-run by the walking dead is no more or less interesting than any other current zomb-pocalypse. But we've perhaps lost our taste for Aboriginal ju-ju sub-plots, thanks to Baz Luhrmann's po-faced "exploration" of such in his modestly titled Australia. Speaking of Baz, there's one Zombie Brigade image that'd no doubt tickle his camp sensibility and perhaps bring a patriotic tear to his eye: that of a tattered zombie-vampire in his uniform, proudly bearing a tattered Australian flag. For that, he and we must salute it as a Bad Movie We Love.
Michael Adams is the author of the upcoming comic memoir Showgirls, Teen Wolves, And Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest To Find And Watch The Worst Movie Ever Made (HarperCollins)