604-Zombie Nightmare

Film Year:  1986
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Jack Bravman
Starring:  Adam West, Tia Carrere, Jon Mikl Thor, Frank Deitz
MST Season:  6

The Movie

A boy witnesses his father’s murder then grows up to be a beefcake with a baseball bat.  History repeats itself and he himself is murdered as well.  His mother is unable to cope with the loss of her son, so she takes him to the local voodoo witch (because every town has one) to extract brutal revenge by reanimating his corpse to kill those who took away her family.

Think of it as I Know What You Did Last Summer, only somehow it’s even dumber.  But this one at least stars Adam West as a corrupt cop, so that patented West annunciation is at hand.  Former bodybuilder and music superstar (HAHAHAHAHA, that’s a good one) Jon Mikl Thor plays our titular zombie, at least he does when he’s human.  In Zombie form, Thor wanders off set and a stunt man is regulated to the role.  Tia Carrere is also here, in what may have been her non-True Lies career high point.  Let’s face it, I’d rather be in a crappy 80s horror movie than General Hospital, Wayne’s World, and Jury Duty, but that’s just me.

Why waste an all-star cast like this?  Zombie Nightmare makes the most of it, with cheapie locations in Canada, lackluster special effect, and barely audible dialogue.  It goes for the gold in grindhouse mood and often flunks, with hilarious scenes featuring victim’s running away at top speed while the zombie stumbles in slow motion.  Victim stupidity is at a high point as they just seem to stand around and wait for the zombie to catch up, with my personal favorite going to Tia Carrere’s bizarre escape plan (which the boys in the theater happily notice as well) of hiding behind a window and staring out of it.

Worse horror movies have been made, especially in the 80s.  I can’t give Zombie Nightmare points for not sucking as hard as it could have, but at least the unintentional laughs are aplenty.  Plus it has a zombie killing people with a baseball bat, how can you not love that?

The Episode

Crappy movies aren’t exclusive to any single decade, but the 80s might have done them better than any other decade.  It’s a decade were cheap, trashy filmmaking wasn’t just easy money, but also an artform.  The aesthetics mesh together into a glorious whole of low budget, bad hair, worse acting, tacky clothing, and, last but not least, heavy metal music.  Zombie Nightmare certainly tries to be the pinnacle of this style, and even if it fails it may very well be the pinnacle of 80s crap featured on MST.

So of course I love this episode.  It’s the perfect movie for the show, and at this point in the show’s sixth season they were more than ready for it.  The movie is never painful to watch, which they seem thankful for, but it’s very much an easy target.  Mike and the bots bat this sucker around like a kitten with a ball of yarn.  Predictably they lay on the Batman jokes thick during scenes with Adam West (this episode also came out post-Tim Burton’s movies but pre-Joel Schumacher), and while there are a few too many spots where they simply say “I’m Batman,” for the most part they stay pretty funny.

But Zombie Nightmare is something of a case of editing the film for content but sacrificing its coherency.  It seems as if several of the teenagers’ deaths were edited out of the movie, as the episode cuts to commercial with them alive and but dead as it returns from the break.  It’s not hard to figure out what happened or why it was omitted (one entire scene seems to be omitted because it featured an attempted rape), but it seems unfair to the film to hack it up like that.

Host segments are brief, one-gag affairs during the movie.  It features the first of a series of a season running gag where Servo finds ways of running over Crow with his car.  Another has Servo and Crow in a hot tub (robots can get wet) and find themselves disgusted at the idea of sharing it with Mike (who has a spear and a fish for some reason).  More substantial sketches include a failed skit based on Batman (worth the price of admission for Mike and Servo’s costume’s alone) and the voodoo segments in Deep 13.

This is one of those episodes I can put on any day, any mood, and just laugh myself silly.  The combination of perfectly used movie and a wealth of great riffing make this one of the best of the series.  This is one sexy episode.

Classic

The DVD

This hilarious episode was released as a part of Shout Factory’s Volume XV set.  Video and audio were a dream, and as a bonus feature there were interviews with Zombie Nightmare stars Frank Dietz and John Mikl Thor.  Dietz nerds out, because he’s obviously a huge fan of the show.  Thor seems aware of the show, but uses his time to pimp out his latest projects instead of talk about the movie.