Nazi Zombies, Fuck Off; Pussy Horror Picture Shows (With Balls)

The modern proliferation of zombie movies suggests to me that audiences are bloodthirsty for carnage without consequence.

They want to watch plasma spray, bodies fly, and guts splattered, but only with knowledge that no one is suffering – they’re just zombies, after all, and by wasting them, in fact, you’re doing them the ultimate favor. That you get to waste them so royally is just the cool part!

The explosion of first-person zombie shooter games in the 90s (such as House of the Dead and Resident Evil) certainly planted this seed that has flowered endlessly in all branches of horror cinema (prime examples of which, of course, are the bargain basement House of the Dead flicks and big budget Resident Evil epics, each with their charms - most formidably in the guise of Smallville's Erica Durance doffing her top and slipping muff in the former; and in the latter, it's wonder-nippled supermodel Milla Jovovich revealing how she earned the moniker G.N.A.T.s -- Greatest Nipples of All Times).

And now, in 2009, Nazis get added to the all-kill, no-guilt hulabaloo.

First, they’re in this Sundance pick-up Dead Snow (because when I want to know where the next terror maestro is coming from, I turn to the people that enable Sofia Coppola to continue writing “filmmaker” in the occupation box on her tax returns).

Watch the trailer, then come back.

“Ein, Zwei...Die!” Holy shit! Ve haff a good time!

Later this year, there’s the Quentin Tarantino movie with the misspelled-on-purpose title that it would pain me too much to actually type. There, the Nazis are just Nazis and they’re not dead (yet). You know: they’re people (make what you will of their unsavory philosophy). Have at ’em.

I can blather on about how and why Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the greatest zombie movie (and it has nothing to do with the Vietnam War; whoever started that mass hypnosis should be buried in a mass grave at Mai Lai along with his professorial tenure).

But allow me to direct you to the climax of The Dirty Dozen (1967) for the greatest movie massacre of National Socialists.

Trapping dozens of celebratory schweinhundt officers in a basement with their fancy Aryan women, dousing them with gasoline and raining open grenades down is both heroic and horrific.

Everybody hurts.

Now, of course, I realize that Nazi zombies are nothing new to the movies. Many were the WOR-TV (New York’s channel 9) showings of Shock Waves enjoyed by Youngman McMeardo. I even pre-ordered the Blue Underground DVD back when I (and everybody who isn’t shopping for Shrek sequels and what have you) did such things.

[On a side gripe – what is up with Cultra Rare Videos not being usable on Apple computers? Not for nothing, I hope, did I see those commercials and aspire to be like the vaguely Hispanic, maybe Hebraic, slacker-cool urban hipster dood (he’s a Mac) and not like the antsy, pasty, uptight, suburban White Guy (he’s a PC – ironic, given those initials, no?).]

And there’s Jess Franco’s Oasis of the Zombies (1983), which is more beloved under the title by which I rented it in high school, Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies.

Just now, researching this piece, I came across the inclusion of Nazi zombies in a version of the popular WWII-themed video game Call of Duty. So here there you go. Full circle. You. Not me.

Righteous? Kill.

*

In mere trailer form, Dead Snow is already inflaming the type of nonentities who communicate using “WANT!” as a single sentence and who gasp agog at the thrill of adding Nazi Zombies to Pirates, Ninjas, and Pirates vs. Ninjas to … whatever it is they do (mostly, these days, that means controlling everything the rest of us have to see and hear, along with trying to force blood to their genitals in reaction to Tina Fey).

Two recent horror releases, it’s my privilege to report, will likely not unite NPR Nation and Worldwide Tech Support Social Control in anything other than disgust (not that they’d notice them, which is how it should be).

Gutterballs (2008) and Blood and Sex Nightmare (2008) present genuinely repulsive imagery as it emanates from minds (and talents) born from the fires of ’80s slasher classics, Italian vomit horror, rape-and-revenge atrocities, death metal, underground snuff amusements, extreme heavy metal, and the omnipresence of hardcore pornography – any kind you want, absolutely free, any time you want it.

Now hang on to your zipper-pulling hands, folks. Neither Gutterballs nor Blood and Sex Nightmare is any kind of masterpiece or milestone. In fact, they’re both pretty goofy, and not always intentionally. Neither possesses the palpable madness of Scrapbook or the August Underground movies, and self-consciousness coats every frame.

What they are, though, are glimpses of what might have been if it all hadn’t gone to feces around, say, 1986.

By “it all” I mean reckless exploitation filmmaking, the creative pulverization of on-camera taboos, and cheap sleaze worthy of illuminating fleapit theater screens. By feces, I mean home video, Troma, and the very technology by which this nonsense is now being transmitted to you.

And so Gutterballs and Blood and Sex Nightmare feel like what would be stumbling through the projector at your local grindhouse this weekend if such a place still existed. Each is as gloppily gross and corporeally explicit as you would have hoped movies would get by 2009 back when you were absorbing real-deal business like Rape Squad (1974) and Don’t Go Near the Park (1981).

This is praise.

Of the two, Gutterballs comes closest to being a “real” movie. It would be easy (enough) to sit through in a theater. Blood and Sex Nightmare spews out like a fever-bleat that used to fill out the graveyard position in all-night triple features. These are likable traits.

To both films’ tremendous credit, comedic elements remain effectively in check. Showy jokes exist within them but, as with the occasional pair of breast implants that turn up, such is the burden of the times we live in.

So beyond the aesthetic, what Gutterballs and Blood and Sex Nightmare deliver in terms of quantifiable shock upgrades are brilliantly executed illusions of penis-removal and adoring explorations of very real female genitalia.

In high school, we often referred to teen sex comedies and softcore flicks by the shorthand term, “tit movies.” Now that I’m 40 we have, at last, arrived at “twat movies.”

For at least the past 15 years, I’ve wondered how Rocco Siffreddi, Belladonna and their ilk could populate endless (and ongoing) extreme-porn videos with all-natural teenage super-beauties whose corporeal perfection and mesmerizing erotic allure is equaled only by their enthusiasm for accepting fire-extinguisher-sized cocks up their assholes two-at-a-time while their heads are stuffed in toilet bowls (which maybe haven’t been flushed since last used).

Compounding this conundrum is how, when contemporary Hollywood rarely does dribble out a nudie-crumb, they typically rely on the same pool of a dozen or so plastic-tit peroxide blondes (“Holy shit! Do you mean to tell me they got Nikki Schieler Ziering topless?! Kick ass!”), while Skinemax-style soft-sex materials also rely on similarly robotic silicone snoozers and B-movies, in general, are no longer reliable as wellsprings of breathtaking new T&A.

Alas, perhaps the taint doth meet now, as both Gutterballs and Blood and Sex Nightmare serve up steaming, open-faced hair-pie (hold the hair on a couple of pieces).

Gutterballs rolls out bogus-bosomed (but otherwise lovely) brunette Candice Lewald, whose authentic love-opening endures a bombastic gang-rape, followed by naturally huge-knockered blonde Danielle Munro, who adds open butthole to her vadge-tastic 69 scene and then sucks actual man-wang on-camera a la Chloe Sevingy on Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny (2003) and Linda Lovelace on The German Sheperd in Dog Fucker (1969).

Blood and Sex Nightmare delivers petite pretty-thing Nikki Notarile’s inviting cueball labia extensively, then mixes gore with gyno-shots vis-à-vis Lily St. Claire and, mo(i)st remarkably, Tina Krause.

Tantalizing Ms. Krause is a longtime veteran of Seduction Cinema’s soft-porn sexcapades, where she memorably pretended to mash gashes with Misty Mundae in multiple endeavors, including Vampire Seduction (1998) and An Erotic Vampire in Paris (2002).

Here the royally arousing native of Queens, New York spreads her thighs and invites us in to ogle her wide-open, sumptuously full-lipped sex organs, replete with tufts of lush pubes and a dollop of Karo-syrup stage blood, like topping on the sweet savory it is.

Naked, sopping, hot, ready-to-rock crotch is charging to the forefront of today’s up-from-underground horror endeavors.

Nobody stop for tampons.