#atom video

By Dan Kinem

Could it be?! Has this annoying zombie obsession died down? Well, at least in my world it has. I know somewhere out there there's still a bunch of losers gushing about The Walking Dead TV show or asking, "Yo, bro, what would you do if zombies attacked?!"  But somehow I have managed to separate myself far away from these types. For the past six years or more the thought of zombies became so overbearingly annoying that I almost lost all the love for them that had been building inside me since I was a young lad. Zombies became dork fodder and I couldn't fully enjoy myself watching or talking about them. Now that I think about it, it would have been great irony if I blew my brains out because I couldn't listen to dorks discussing fast zombies vs. slow zombies (it's fucking obvious, you idiots). But I digress. Because I don't associate with tools anymore, I was able to be as excited to watch something as I've been in a long time. Just look at how amazing that cover is!

I actually think most of my excitement came from the fact the movie was rare and had an interesting story attached to it rather than that I thought it would be necessarily great. I became more obsessed with the fact the director, Charles McCrann, only ever made this movie and that he died on September 11th in the World Trade Center. Now if that doesn't spark interest in your fucked up mind, I have no clue what will. I had to show my respect for the victims in that tragedy and hunt this fucker down. I appropriately enough blew its head off as quickly as I could (and by that I mean opened the box and put it in my VCR to watch). I pressed play and then reality set in, this wasn't going to be the amazing and mysterious lost gem like I hoped. It does start off promising, but never quite delivers the goods like I wanted.

The movie starts and two crazy hillbillies with rifles are riffling where they shouldn't be. They stumble upon a naked girl washing herself from a bucket. Only in a horror movie would there be a girl in the middle of the woods, completely naked, washing herself from a dirty bucket. Turns out they aren't just crazy hillbillies, they are crazy hillbilly cops and they have gotten word that a bunch of scum hippie youths (35-year-olds) are growing marijuana in the woods. Out of nowhere they shoot a hole through the girl's throat because she may or may not be growing pot. Their logic? Flawless. Their aim? Impeccable. Their lives? Soon to be ended by a swarm of vengeful hairy hippies!

Now, the funniest part about this whole scene is the cops they just killed don't matter at all. No one ever comes looking for them and no one cares that they died. All the government wants is to stop the hippies from growing this weed. They want to stop them so bad they are willing to drop untested and likely deadly chemicals all over them. And of all the crop dusters out there, who do you think they would hire? A lazy, alcoholic redneck who hasn't moved from his made-out-of-hay bed in years. He looks like the type of guy who would say "Yee-hah" a lot had he lead a happier existence. He provides the movie with some hilarious sexist ramblings, at least, toward his nagging wife. "Give me the phone you goddamn bitch!" Pure hilarity.

The chemicals start making these potheads go insane. Their skin starts peeling off, they can barely walk, and they become obsessed with human flesh. Two hippies survived the chemical dropping and keep telling the rest of them to "quit screwing around." Are you serious? Their flesh is rotting off, they are completely ghost-looking, they are coughing up blood, and are literally dead and you think they are screwing around? Even after the hippies are clearly eating human flesh like wilds hounds they don't suspect anything is wrong other than laziness. This stupidity is likely the reason they can't escape their mindless zombie friends and get devoured.

As if there weren't already enough meaningless characters, a whole new crop (heh get it?) of annoyances joins the cast. You get a nature obsessed freak, his pretending-to-be-obsessed-with-nature-so-she-can-tag-along-and-annoy-him girlfriend, and the nature freak's brother. They planned a bachelor fishing trip but of course his bitch has to ruin it. On the trip to the woods they run into... Holy shit, more pointless characters including an entire family of campers! What's one thing this movie needed? A retarded 42-year-old kid? Bingo! Actually, I can't think of one thing this movie needed less. It reached new levels of terrible when two fully grown adults pretending to be children begin roaming the woods. After the kids leave to go explore, the zombies find their campsite and attack their parents. And just when I thought there was only one retard in the family, as the zombies approach, the dad offers them some beans. Canned beans. No wonder they kill you, bitch. The weird thing about these zombies is they can use weapons, which is really idiotic. One zombie even uses a machete to cut off the dad's hand.

The kids, now without parents, are forced to team up with these nature freaks to stop the zombies. At one point, in the middle of the zombie attack, in order to try to get the mute retard to react, the brother does this hilariously racist Asian impression. Hands down my favorite part of the movie. To avoid the now torch-carrying zombies (give me a break) they find a house to hide out at. The owner of the house is insane and obsessed with cats (as any man should be). He snaps on them for no reason and kicks the group of people out of the house to fight the zombies. Two guys from the government show up to see what them dumping untested chemicals has done. They never expected to have a huge zombie vs. government vs. campers/nature freaks battle, but that's what they get. The government tries to kill everyone, but in the process gets eaten alive. Somehow the retarded kid and his sister live. There's some twist added to the end that reminded me of Cabin Fever. Lets just say it can be assumed the poison spreads to other parts of the country.

What in the fuck is he holding and how the hell did he outlive all the non-retarded people?

While it remains a pretty enjoyable and obscure zombie movie, it never lives up to its full potential or the hype I created for it. It never crosses into bad enough to be fun, or fun enough to be good. It just teeters in the middle and is watchable, but no classic. Worth buying if you love zombies movies or rare horror flicks, but definitely isn't an essential part of a collection.

Part of the reason it is obscure is because it has yet to get a real U.S. DVD release and might never get one (there is a terrible bootleg-ish DVD you can buy online, but it's apparently worse than a VHS print and horribly made). The movie was released a few times on video, however, and all of them are rare. The VHS I have and watched is an extremely hard to find and unique release. It was under the name Toxic Zombies in a big box on Videactrics and is perhaps the most coveted. This is unlike any other big box I have ever seen, too, because it is only slightly bigger than a slipcase, and much smaller than a normal big box. The movie was also released by Atom Video, under the name Bloodeaters, with a really strange cover that has nothing to do with the movie. If you ever come across any release of the movie for cheap make sure you buy it. It's a hard one to come by but not worth spending big bucks on it.