Zombie Nightmare (RiffTrax)

Film Year:  1986
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Jack Bravman
Starring:  Adam West, Tia Carrere, Jon Mikl Thor, Frank Deitz
RiffTrax Year:  2022

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

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 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 Trax

As a general rule, I don't have much enthusiasm for re-riffs.  When Zombie Nightmare was announced as the latest RiffTrax however, I was enthused.  Not because I felt the Mystery Science Theater episode needed to be improved, as I think it's an all-time classic, but it also suffered from being horrendously edited for television.  That version of the movie comes close to incoherency, as entire plot points are just excised from the movie because they would have been too graphic.  RiffTrax taking on the film gives the opportunity for a more cohesive edit now that they aren't slaves to time frames and TV censorship.

Ultimately that's about all this riff has to offer.  It's a more coherent film experience than the MST episode (even though ten minutes have been shaved off), but the worst experience of a re-riff is always the sensation that they're essentially making the same joke the previous riff had done, only it's not nearly as funny.  Zombie Nightmare is one of those experiences, where Mike, Kevin, or Bill will say something and I instantly recall the riff from the MST episode that it echoes and find myself wishing I were watching that instead because it was much funnier then.  If anything in Zombie Nightmare feels on-target, that's because they've done most of these jokes before from "Hank Peters, Italian Grocer" to the CSI with the oddly exaggerated accent.

Though credit where credit is due, they do riff Frank Deitz a bit more in this version, which might make the noted MST fan happy.  Adam West jokes are a bit lighter here, and they don't ride on Batman references as hard as they had when they first watched this film.  There is a pretty smart Seth MacFarlane jab in his first scene though.  Oddly they don't note Tia Carrere in this riff like they did in the previous one, likely because Carrere's star status has fallen since the 90's.  Still, it's Tia Carrere.  I don't care if she is in her 50's now, anybody who lived through Wayne's World and True Lies should snap to instant attention when she's present.  To not do so is disrespectful to the queen.

There are a few odd esoteric riffs in the commentary that underline how underwhelming the experience is.  In the climax, there are lines of "It's quiet, a little too quiet" which leads to Mike saying "A little too Raph," which is a reference to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II:  The Secret of the Ooze, which isn't a terrible reference to make except you just know deep down someone much younger than Mike wrote that line and it doesn't feel like he relates to it.  There is also a line about the zombie belching like "Eudora Welty," which is a very odd riff to make because it's a very specific reference to a random one-off joke on the Simpsons about Eudora Welty in a burping contest.  But since Welty isn't best known for The Simpsons (this is like saying Stephen Hawking is primarily a Simpsons character), this is kind of a bad joke to make, especially since the Simpsons has no shortage of characters who burp constantly.

The RiffTrax version of Zombie Nightmare is not a harsh experience due to the film being so perfect for the format, and the version of the film seen here is much more to the film's advantage.  It's probably worth checking out for that, or if you haven't seen the MST version then you might find this much funnier.  And yeah, there are a couple of laughs (I lolled at Bill questioning why the voodoo witch would cross herself during her ritual).  But alas, what it boils down to is that there is a riff out there for this film that is a home run while this riff is just a pretender that fails to clone it.  It's too bad that such a classic can be turned into such a dud.

Not Recommended