Island of The Living Dead
Introduction
Introduction
Give a man a mushroom and you entertain him for an evening. Teach a man to grow his own mushrooms and he now has an astral pass to explore the stars. Would you trust a book about mushrooms written by a person named Mandrake? Isn’t that, ironic? Don’t you think?
I wish I never had to cut my fingernails. It’s such a royal pain in the ass. Why do we think we’re all that different from cats? You’d eat a complete, raw mouse with zero hesitation under the worst of circumstances. Why do people like cats? I wish you all could read cat minds to realize what they really think of you. There would be a torrential rain of feline defenestration like never before. And then, well, 8 more waves just like the first, evidently. But that’d be the last one.
I was yelled at by a random homeless drug using individual in downtown Portland recently. At least, I assume he was yelling at me. ClusterBeeSorry, it’s one of those things that we’re a little self-centered about. Yelling equals conflict equals engagement equals yelling. See? I don’t need a therapist to see those little consequences marching smartly in circles.
But if he wasn’t yelling at me, he was yelling at my wife, which although I never considered this as a possibility in the moment, I now realize it’s much more likely that he *was* addressing her, context, coloring, complexion, and all. I’m a short heavyish tattooed bald white guy. I look like any random European football hooligan. Especially when I’m walking.
My wife on the other hand is a Swedish-Nepalese Princess, and looks about as exotic as that sounds. Considering what was actually yelled was “Do you want to be Native today?”, it kinda makes a lot more sense that he’d be addressing the brownish folded-eye-slant-lady rather than the card-carrying common Caucasian.
But, ClusterBeeSorry, when someone is yelling in my direction, I take it personally. Lord forbid I was yelled at and didn’t respond correctly? Yeah, funny and facetious and all to consider, but that’s also how 99% of bullying starts- with a challenge- that must be met somehow. Somehow is the interesting part.
Before I learned that I both enjoy and am good at the common fist-fight, I probably would have been scared shitless by this dude. He looked like Jason Statham after a three month meth bender that robbed him of everything but his perfectly chiseled chin and left him with rageful hemorrhoids.
“Do I want to be a Native?” What the fuck does that even mean? And why today, of all days? Is today a special day that I don’t know about? Have I forgotten something? What is the significance of a white tweaker yelling about Nativity issues while jaywalking the Naito Parkway?
I answered him honestly, since it never occurs to me to do anything else. “I DON’T KNOW!” I yelled back. I half expected him to close distance, I was mildly aware of my wife’s body placement, I was wondering if he was going to clarify what being native today meant and what the ramifications would be, I was bursting with curiosity and questions and he thought for a split second before nodding vigorously and saying “Good answer!” as if I’d just completed the “This is my rifle, this is my gun” routine all by myself for the first time.
What would being a native have entailed? I could see him attacking me. Sucks, but it’s pretty historically accurate. Or maybe he would have offered me some form of reparation. Perhaps it was a trick question for my wife that I defused through self-centered confusion?
How do you forgive? Why does one forgive? If something can happen, it will happen, that’s the nature of the universe. “Nothing in the ‘Verse can stop me!” Time is being considered to be a constant now, with our subjectivity the only change. How do my actions change anything then? Why would I forgive, unless the goal is to open up space within me that is being held full of rage currently and has been for a long time?
Is the goal of therapy not so I treat everyone else differently- better- the way they think I should treat them… but to release the carrion within as growth room for new life? I feel like I just figured out a basic plot point to a common children’s tale. If I’m right. I do think this idea is worth exploring.
There is so much I want to do and be, yet something- me- is stopping me. Maybe I’m the teacup that is already overflowing. I think by this time tomorrow I will have been hit in the head. That’s sorta the goal. I’m going to go to my first boxing class.
My wife will be asleep. I’m intentionally not telling her. I don’t have any real reason for it. I think I just want to be scared for myself on my own terms at my own pace. I don’t know how to do all these things at the same time, and I’m not posing as if I have any amount of anything on my plates… but I seriously am feeling anxiety over trying to schedule my time with my wife, my time training at the gym, and my time to write these guide entries.
I understand how ridiculous this sounds, but I cannot fathom successfully doing all three of these things concurrently for any length of time. Gary Larson has a cartoon that I don’t understand, but I feel. There is a lone fisherman in a boat, and he’s unable to decide between “Fish” and “Cut bait”. I don’t understand this. If he had a fish in front of him, he could be torn between keeping it as an eating fish, or cutting it up into bits of bait.
But it doesn’t look like this is the case. He’s just stuck between his tacklebox- cut bait, and his fishing pole- fish. Can he fish without cutting bait first? Is this a moot point, and that’s the humor? I’ve always hated this cartoon because it’s so confusing.
The fishing one I like a lot better is the two dudes in the boat in the middle of a lake looking out at distant mushroom clouds. One says something like “I’ll tell you what it means. No limit and screw the size restrictions.” I can understand that. It’s an opportunistic response to a situational change. It’s probably even similar to something I would say.
This reminds me of one of the best examples of parenting I have ever heard of, and unfortunately, I believe I have already included it in the guide. If I have not though, I would hate to leave it out. My friend’s father was driving them through the snow, and in their town there was a steep, straight hill. The car began sliding sideways on the way down, and there was nothing the father could do to regain any control over it. So he turned to my friend and in a perfectly calm voice said “So. What would you like to talk about?”
I read this and I want to cry. Was I ever asked what I wanted to talk about? I have to have faith and say yes, although my hubris could orate all day, step down off the soap-box, and complain that no-one ever listened to him and they are all a bunch of assholes. ClusterBeeSorry!
If I’d ever been asked what I wanted to talk about, I wouldn’t have actually ever mentioned anything I thought was interesting though. I would have tried to impress the asker with the coolness of my answer. I would try to show off, to claim more than I carried. I thought that Harry Winkler was a cool person. My first role model was “The Fonz”, primarily because he was the closest thing to a human Muppet my brain could conceive of.
I’ve never faced what I wanted, and the times I’ve been presented with the opportunity to do so, I’ve mumbled some translucent bullshit about an excuse and averted my eyes. The only thing better than a really great excuse for why you didn’t accomplish anything is to actually set a goal and achieve it, and I never learned this until I was running away from a woman I didn’t love and a career I couldn’t appreciate.
I still can’t commit to getting my face tattooed. “But I might be judged!” Oh? And found accurately to be a friendless psychotic twat who relied on alcohol for social fuel and now lives the meaninglessly pointless fruitless life of a lotus eater? I have the time to volunteer, and help people solve problems, but I’m a fucking misfire. I know this isn’t an ok thing to say.
I know logically, I think differently, not slower, and there should be no prejudice against those with disabilities, but it’s hard to think that maturely when you’re 45 and find yourself yelling “Fuck you!” from the back seat repeatedly at your father as you run through all the ways his master plan to create a perfect citizen fucked you up after he made the mistake of fishing for a compliment regarding how being raised on a 30+ acre compound on the top of a mountain without television might have helped grow me and my brother up into the fine young fellows we are today.
Why don’t I do any of the things that I want to do? Am I really filled up? Is that a thing? I do feel as if I have no bandwidth, and what little I can summon up on occasion I focus on someone whose bumper stickers I disagree with. I was going to devote more of this intro to mushrooms, simply because I’m excited to grow something new, and I’m excited to have shit-tons of psychedelics around.
I’m a drug addict, I like my drugs. I don’t think you can get addicted to mushrooms though, so I feel pretty secure. One of the things I was going to talk about was the weeklong mushroom bender I went on in undergrad. Driving on the highway while tripping balls is fucking stupid, don’t do it. But if you’re going to, steer into the grassy median and hit the E-brake and slide sideways in a cloud of dirt and grass at least once. Once you realize you’re not dead, it was pretty fucking cool.
Umm… I once had to march in place while standing out in a soccer field because if I didn’t, the grass was going to grow up through the pores in the bottom of my feet and root me to the ground. I also spent a long time placing a grape on the floor, and then insisted I had created the pinnacle of modern art, and I protected this… grape… space… for the entire evening.
There may have been PCP involved that night, now that I think about how it *might* have ended, if it’s the night I’m thinking of that ended that way. My three best friends in undergrad had a ritual where we’d all eat mushrooms or acid without telling any of our friends or girlfriends, and then we’d try to see if we could ride out the night without getting busted or one of us babbling it.
One of the worst trips I ever had went from a very long night that started way too late and wasn’t ending by early morning, and as I laid in bed, every 10 or 15 minutes a massively loud electric buzzer would sound/vibrate in the base of my skull for a split second, then cease… this went on for hours.
So many bonfires. Rolling around on the ground with C_____, yelling random crap. I went back to one of our old hangouts this past trip home. They’ve changed the park around a bit, and moved the trashcans that we’d knock over in his mom’s station wagon, but I parked my rental car and walked my balding, white-whiskered ass over to the closest can and kicked it good and hard in the side.
It knows what it did. When they say that you can never go back, does anyone ever ask “Yeah, but why would you want to?”? I don’t know how to use punctuation where I’m questioning a quote that’s also a question. Like, for example, that sentence right before these two. Looks all googly eyed at me.
What the hell am I going to watch. I was the fifth wheel… the only thing worst than a third wheel, on a Christmas mushroom trip. When I was peaking, I couldn’t speak, so I spent an hour writing the words “The Beatles” on the arm of the chair I was sitting in. Then I went to the refrigerator and stole a thanksgiving pie and hid in the corner of the kitchen and ate it all, regardless of my friend trying to get it away from me. I ended that night walking through the falling snow, deep in conversation with a friend of mine far away in Chicago. This was a decade before cell phones were a thing.
Island of the Living Dead “When a boneheaded group of treasure hunters are shipwrecked near a deserted island, they’ll instead discover an undead nightmare of flesh chomping, skull blasting, absurd plotting, perplexing flamenco, and old-school levels of graphic zombie carnage.”
If I may Leonardo a bit here… They have my attention. I think I can point and pull the trigger of the old scatter gun of interesting shit here with full comfort of guarantee that I will strike an item of interesting weirdness. Boneheaded? Treasure? Blasting? Chomping? Plotting? Flamenco? See, the fucking cat just glitched again. How long do you go between flamenco *anything*.
It’s so fucking rare that I’m ripping off someone else who you can find with a reverse search so allow my quotations “With roots in Indian, Arabic, and Spanish culture, flamenco dance is known for its sweeping arm movements and rhythmic feet stomping. Flamenco dancers spend a great deal of time practicing and perfecting the often difficult dance. Although there is no single flamenco dance, dancers must follow a strict framework of rhythmic patterns. The steps a dancer performs are dependent on the traditions of the song being played. Perhaps the greatest joy of flamenco dancing is watching the personal expressions and emotions of the dancer, which change many times during a single performance.”
So, explaining the cat glitching, I knew flamenco dancing was the one with the mussels clacker thing on the fingers, and I knew they liked to stomp a lot. But I’ve never been in a restaurant where they actually have a dancer wandering around the floor, getting in the way, smiling awkwardly since there are three different recordings of varied music, all blasting at 11 and she’s doing the best she can to pick the traditional beat out of an Iranian Idol’s cover of Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”.
I had a good time, the food didn’t suck, it was lovely to see my good friend Miss Um again, even if we *were* a bit fucked up on mushrooms… Maybe that’s why I suddenly had to bail outta that place. Fucking loud, and that was before the mussels and stamping. So, the one thing that needs to be known going into this movie is that it’s Bruno Mattei. Yes. The same one as Zombi 3 and Hell of the Undead. So, like, expect some splinters in the eye crap.
Review Notes
Review Notes
Starting off… the title font almost looks like it’s making fun of itself.
One very fucked up representation of what voodoo could look like?
If Spanish conquistadores were also standing around?
Is this a professional movie? Is including someone’s nickname as “King” professional? How the fuck did I fall down the historical zombie community theater rabbit hole?
We got bloody wrapped bodies sitting up and getting shot in the head to lay them back down…
“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
This… ok, there’s “Musical Commentary by Bruno, as well as Daniele Campelli ed. Flipper”. Whatever the fuck that means.
These sets are as if on stage. The dungeon’s floor is perfectly clean.
This zombie girl is pretty good. She’s definitely doing her own thing with it. I like it.
“Get back Satan! Get back!”
It appears the Spaniards have lost the church. Zombies, one. Spaniards, zero.
Oh. Shit is burning like a Brad Pitt’s plantation.
Which… uh… is this a zombie movie? Or a vampire movie? ‘cause that dude just got bit by a guy with fangs. Fucking cat.
I think we’re in modern times now… a couple of divers have found something and everyone on the boat is happy they’re going to be rich!
And old wood chest.
Guy hits himself in the face with a wrench?
And the wood chest breaks at the last minute and all the gold falls out the bottom and each character grabs their head like a participant in a Home Alone imitation game participant and then one of them actually dives overboard and then they argue and it becomes painfully obvious that either wasn’t filmed in English or wasn’t filmed with sound.
That boat is a tug-boat. That’s why it has tires all over it. It rams into other boats to move them. It is not a treasure salvage ship, nor is it the same ship from the day’s footage.
Down at the beer table, we get a lesson in overacting…
And underacting.
And not acting.
“It was a real treasure and we should have studied a way to recover it.” Dude, I’m sorry. Your character is a human Dale from King of the Hill. Or maybe you’re a retread of the cousin from the Lampoon series.
Now something is wrong with the radar. What’s wrong is the lack of continuity.
Suddenly everything is coffee-oriented.
I *think* they hit something, but that might not have been in the budget, so maybe they just pretended to.
Richard Ramirez. That’s who the mechanic is. His accent changes every word, and he talks back to the Capitan. Yup. Well versed in nautical… whatever. His description of the throttle made no sense…
Oh, this is rich. The Joey character wakes up covered in bird shit. That in itself is both funny and not funny. Like, it happened to me, which was funny but not funny, and then it happened to a friend of mine on her undergrad graduation, which was funny.
This asshole of a woman cannot act. Not even as an asshole.
Cartography is not her strong point. There is literally land all over that map she’s gesturing at as she talks about nothing but water.
They’re also going to intentionally not call the coast guard.
The give the least stable one the gun? Is this movie a farce?
Can we get to the zombies and killing? Maybe they’ll be able to do that right?
Nice. Separating into two groups and doing absolutely nothing to secure the boat. I hope the tide is coming in.
The idiot group found a graveyard.
Can’t even make that interesting…
The mechanic just sprayed himself in the face with cat piss.
The captain’s group is wandering some ruins… and being stalked by a zombie!
The least talented actor is ripping from the into to Night of the Living Dead…
Cool distance zombie though.
Team captain is playing the “After you” game.
Oh, well, he fell down the hole.
And now he’s hanging on a… fuck. What’s the word for those things. The cage they’d lock someone in to die.
“I think I shit my pants.”
Umm… Team idiot just fought off a zombie. The annoying guy did all sorts of…tae bo. And they passed it off as fighting.
Back to the mechanic bithing about his life choices. And beer.
The idiots in the torture chamber have found a bunch of skeletons with stakes in the heart, which they remove…
And tae bo boy keeps up the steady… flail… of ineffectual attacks.
Crazy lady found a bunch of old books.
Old man just sort of babbles whatever comes into his hands.
Richard Ramirez kills another beer.
And then… gets jumped by no less than two dozen dry zombies. He’s by himself on a boat. What the fuck. Did they all just magically teleport there?
Captain won’t stop reading Latin
Richard Ramirez… evidently wired the boat with a self-destruct mechanism, and he took himself and all the zombies out.
I mean, yeah, it’s a valid question. Why didn’t you send out the SOS?
Another is where are you going?
Why are you pointing your guns at each other conversationally?
We started with 8 indians, I think. We’re down to 6 now.
Zombie just snubbed out a cigarette with it’s foot
Once again, the mighty .12g is proving it’s worth. Once again, they’re not actually using blanks.
What the fuck? They were doing a decent job holding their own, then they shot off a zombie’s arm, and another, new arm began pushing out of the severed wound? With fully formed fingers already? What’s that about?? Yuck!
Is the rest of this movie just going to be this group running around slowly getting picked off?
Captain is really fucking bossy. And able to come up with common sense at best.
Are those monkey noises we’re hearing?
This is what you get if you let rejects from the WB film a horror movie.
Are all of these people soap opera… extras?
Ok, the crawling zombie girl is pretty scary.
So… it’s the next morning and they’re breaking into 3 groups of 2. I care so little. I want to stop watching.
No one is going to remark that it’s strange there are lit candles?
I like the reaper dudes though. Improbable, but cool.
Worst actor in the world is paired up with angriest woman in the world.
No, there’s no random priest hanging out in the underground dungeon.
Pretty good special effects, though!
Ok, so THIS is how the candles are all getting lit.
Why do they keep giving lines to the world’s worst actor?
Well, the zombies bleed when you shoot them, but you need the headshot.
Drinking wine from… crazy town, evidently. Must have mushrooms in it, too.
Well, now I’m hearing the flamenco music. I wish I wasn’t.
They’re drinking centuries old wine named after something related to Edgar Allen Poe. Geniuses.
A trick room full of corpses!
Torches.
Stepping on corpses and hearing the bones break.
Dumb and dumber… getting drunk and drunker.
There’s meal worms in the wine? Some… have been in there for a few too many takes.
So… this last scene could be called “the 10 wasted minutes of shrieking zombie by torchlight”
The rotted hands playing the guitar…
“There’s something… strange there.” This is after an hour of screaming at and being screamed at by the undead.
That’s a creepy chest. I mean, the chest is fine, but the heavily adorned skull inside?
So, they’re gonna steal the gold
And a zombie smashes through the door and grabs her hair
Is this going to be the sliver into the eyeball? No? What? I mean, I thought that was a given!
And another character has sacrificed himself. Quite a lot of red, too, I might add.
The captain is having a The Shining moment at the bar.
Crap. I just totally spaced out and did all sorts of dumb things on my phone instead of watching this. An email chimed, so I got on that, and then… yeah. It’s not exactly like I had Jessica Rabbit waiting for me in bed. I can’t believe this crap is only half way over.
Lotta Misfits Ghoulish looking freaks crawling around…
So, now she reads Latin? Or is the book suddenly in English?
How… did these idiots cause the conquistadores’ deaths?
“Son of a bitch! I’m going to look for Snoopy!”
“You better stay here!”
“FUCK YOU!”
And the Captain is having some sort of fucked up conversation with a ghost.
The angriest woman ever is having shenanigans played on her.
They just accept that half of what they find is covered in a half inch of dust, while the other half of what they find looks like it just got waxed?
So, this is the wacky flamenco stuff they referred to. Yup. Pretty wacky.
“I find this amusing!”
“Give it back! It’s mine!”
Am I looking at two of the same woman?
Nope! This one was a vampire.
A epidemic? On the 21th of May, 1688.
Old battle footage from some old movie. Better than this movie, for the most part.
Oh. The mechanic is after the captain? And the other dead crewmen too?
It’s just a fucking mish-mash of random characters saying random crap by now.
The world’s worst actor just saved the day!
What is the point of any of this? Now Snoopy is gone too.
These people are all such crappy actors and actresses that I can’t tell if they’re being catty or sincere to each other. It’s like watching 8 year olds who have never met making up improv on the spot regarding subject matter they neither understand nor find interesting.
Ok, found the missing guy, he’s a zombie, whoop.
Now the angriest woman alive has been brought before the… ghoul king? Thing? That welcomes her?
And then bites her with vampire fangs? Before they all lift her up, put her down, and then start eating her?
Finally, back at the raft.
What the hell is going on? Is she trying to burn the place down now? Why? What’s the point?
Wow. Really willing to point guns at each other for no reason now.
Oh, shit! He bled black!
And now he’s coming back as a zombie!
While she’s getting ready… wait, what happened to his shirt? How did he fix it?
Let’s burn this motherfucker down, Pookie!
Some really cool footage of the ghouls bursting out of flaming crypts and stuff.
Bunch of crap, she’s on the beach, made it to the raft…
A helicopter is rescuing her…
And then she’s being pronounced dead. Or… IS SHE???
————End Transmission——————–
Plot Autopsy
Plot Autopsy
- A group of people who identify as treasure hunters and idiots fail at everything.
- Except crashing their boat into an island
- There’s ruins and a couple zombies here and there
- Reading old tomes in Latin is never a bad idea
- Why did they let the world’s worst actor in this movie?
- A bunch of shit gets lit on fire and thankfully we’re free to do something else.
Zombie Description
Zombie Description
Shit, you want these zombies to fly, they ask you if you want arm flapping or a magic genie shit. They can be anything to anyone, especially if it makes the plot spin even farther sideways into the ditch. Sometimes they’re vampires, sometimes they’re zombies, sometimes they can talk, sometimes they can revert to looking human again including reversing the huge buckshot blast through your midsection. Uh… they hate fire, and most are primitive with sharp teeth but then there’s a group that wear all black and worship, well, another corpse in all black. It’s hard for an outsider to follow all the sticking points of convention when they really go into the fine detail of the hierarchy of ancient monks that, once poisoned on fermented huckleberry juices, joined into a ritualistic pact with the devil on which they’d meet every Thursday afternoon to play a game of pick-up basketball at the park before going out for a couple beers. See? Somewhere there I just started making shit up and who cares?
Where the money went
Where the money went
I think these people made this movie as part of their community service. Why the judge hates us, I don’t know. But this was a waste of all money. The sets… people, you can see the fucking wood-screws holding the plywood floor in place! It’s a centuries old dungeon but it’s sterile level clean except for the three skeletons and four large rusty torture machines? There were some good special effects and gore and such, but… that’s not enough, man.
Best Weapon
Best Weapon
Well, maybe the spike to the top of the foot? Shotguns? Kicking someone? Changing the rules whenever it suits you? This was such a steamer that there’s nothing good to put here.
That was new!
That was new!
I figured it out. This is not a zombie movie so much as it is a game show between actors and actresses to see who can not-act, or act the least, or possibly double head fake the bluff and shriekingly overact… This is all of them intentionally doing the worst they can do. Can you see Fallon in the back there trying not to laugh but losing his shit? I don’t think I’ve ever seen something this patently bad released with a straight face. I’m so sorry for those of you that actually tried.
Can I get a hand?
Can I get a hand?
How about a foot? Like, what the hell was that zombie stubbing the cigarette out with it’s foot about? Was that supposed to be comedy, or was that to show that they feel no pain, or they dislike fire? Yes, ripping an attacking zombie’s hand off of it counts as a defensive move. Blowing off a limb also gets you extra points, but what the fuck is that “new hand growing out like a lizard’s tail” regeneration crap? I am not a fan. You know what I am a fan of? That guitar playing scene. I don’t know what it evoked, but it was dark and lovely.
Overall Recommendation
Recommendation?
I’m about 25 minutes in and, well, nothing makes any sense at all. Especially why they made a movie using these people. I see nothing redeeming about any of them, none of them can act, and I am beginning to personally dislike them for what although may be petty reasons, remain valid reasons none the less. Just finished it, and watching the credits, turns out whatshisname didn’t direct it. Amazon lied to me. But that’s ok, ‘cause this sucked, and there’s really nothing good about a movie that sucks, even if it’s directed by a mediocre genre legend. I’ll lay it out simple here. This is a fucked up, ridiculously convoluted series of weirdnesses that barely fit together. Everything changes constantly, there’s no point to anything, nobody can act worth shit, and… hell, I really don’t have anything else to say. Very little redeeming, even less stimulating, and a vast majority of uninspired stupidity. This is an exercise in punching yourself in the crotch and the sooner you stop subjecting yourself to it the better off you’ll feel.