Horror shocker with numerous actual shocks, from the maker of Raw Meat: Gary Sherman. While offering no narrative invention on the level of the earlier movie, this one nonetheless takes full advantage of the horror genre's -- and specifically the zombie subgenre's -- easy access to the subject of death. The pictured deaths are horrible enough in conception and in execution to more than adequately express our natural and rational fear of the event (e.g., a dose of acid pumped up someone's nostrils or a hypodermic needle stuck into someone's eyeball). And while the ending is overly tricky and unnecessarily defeatist, the development of the theme to that point exhibits a poetic enough sense of morbidity, especially when centering around a fancy-dan mortician with high artistic pretensions and a necrophiliac taste for the Big Bands, to speak to, if not answer, our more vague and irrational wonderings on the subject. With James Farentino, Melody Anderson, and Jack Albertson. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.