Hump Day Horribleness: ‘Zombie Nation’

One of the great features over at the Internet Movie Database is the Bottom 100. Based on ratings viewers of the site give to various films, the worst of the worst films get put on this list. Some of them are on and off in a matter of days. Others stick around for the long haul, showing just how much suckage they truly emit.

It’s time to look at these movies and determine where they stand. Do they deserve to be on the Bottom 100 list? Are they not as bad as everyone says? Will they be off the list any time soon?

Here’s the breakdown for this week’s film:

Title: ‘Zombie Nation’

Release Date: October 5, 2004 (DVD: 12/06/2006)

Ranking on Bottom 100 (as of 4/22/2009): #23 (based on 3,381 votes)

Why it’s here: Let me just begin to answer this question by stating that the only Uwe Boll film that is currently on the IMDB Bottom 100 List is ‘House of the Dead’ and it’s all the way down at #85! So, this should say something for fellow German schlock-auteur Ulli Lommel’s ‘Zombie Nation’. I believe a “Wow!” is in order, here.

The general idea behind ‘Zombie Nation’ is to bring the serial killer and zombie genres together in one movie. Officer Joe Singer is a mentally disturbed police officer who is secretly a serial killer on the side, but finds himself facing his victims in an unexpected turn of events when they rise from the dead to exact revenge. From the plethora of faults and flaws that combine to form the train wreck that is ‘Zombie Nation’ I’ve managed to conclude that two primary factors play into this movie’s place in the hall of shame and they both have to do with expectations.

1. ‘Zombie Nation’ is supposed to be a zombie horror flick. The key word here is “supposed” as viewer expectations are geared towards seeing a scary (or, at least attempted) movie with zombies, but the marketing for this film is textbook false advertising. First of all, the so-called zombies in ‘Zombie Nation’ don’t even make their first appearance until about 50 minutes into the movie. The first zombie is the result of a voodoo ritual on a living woman that is intended to turn her is she should happen to be killed by the bad cop/serial killer Joe Singer.

Questionable plot aside, the important thing here are the zombies, and believe me, using that beloved terminology here is difficult. The zombie chicks walk, talk and think just like humans, have desires and emotions and yes, I kid you not, they apparently eat cheeseburgers to survive… when not feasting on humans. To make matters worse, the special effects are virtually absent as the only thing signifying these women are now zombies is an explosion of mascara around their eyes. Genre fans expect filmmakers to treat the zombie lore respectfully, as we discovered when many fans were upset by the sudden onset of super-fast, raging zombies in movies like ’28 Days Later’, etc. But, what about the DVD cover art, you ask? HA! Don’t be misled by that illusion. It might as well be from an entirely different movie because it has no place housing this DVD.

2. I found myself checking my remote to make sure I had my television’s input set to DVD and not cable, because ‘Zombie Nation’ had me thinking I was watching some late night Skin-e-max movie, except the soft-core sex scenes never happen… just the terribly bad acting and cheesy dialogue. Really, where’s the payoff? The entire movie is shot like this and just feels really lame, not scary or cool or even funny, assuming you would try and stretch this to be a comedy. I had mentioned Uwe Boll earlier and there is one crucial difference between Boll and Lommel. Uwe Boll’s movies may be bad, but at least he understands the importance of production quality and what that means. Lommel apparently missed that class at Ed Wood University because there are no signs in ‘Zombie Nation’ that he has any idea of what he’s doing.

Lowest of the low moments: Golly gee, there are so many. In fact, is it possible for a movie to be made entirely of low moments? Oh, fine. If I have to pick just one it would have to be the first truly, unforgivably disastrous scene in the movie when Officer Joe Singer kills his first innocent woman. Why is it so bad? He is riding with his partner (a good cop) in an unmarked cruiser when he pulls the woman over, proceeds to verbally abuse her and then forces her out of the car, into the police car and drives her to a secluded warehouse, tells his partner to wait in the car and practically drags the woman into the warehouse. OK, nothing abnormal here. Then, after a relatively suspicious wait, Singer’s partner watches him exit the warehouse without the girl but now carrying a large black duffel bag, dumps it into the trunk of their cruiser and drives off. Singer’s partner innocently asks where the girl is and he says he let her go and his partner doesn’t find ANY of this worrisome? WTF? My friends, it only goes down hill from here.

Will it ever get off the list: While it seems unlikely it will ever leave the list, ‘Zombie Nation’ was practically a direct-to-DVD movie and less than 5,000 people have voted on it on IMDB. In other words, this isn’t nearly as well-known a movie as many of the titles on the IMDB Bottom 100 List and given time, may find itself released early on parole due solely to the fact that other more widely seen crappy movies will likely nudge it slowly to the bottom until it falls off onto the floor to bne forgotten with the dust bunnies and moldy Cheerios.