"Revenge of the Dead" is a twelve minute short, written, produced and directed by budding film maker and Bedford college graduate, Jason Impey. Like most of us, Jason and his film-making friend, Kemal Yildirim (here acting as the film's cinematographer) are big fans of classic cult exploitation movies and genres — gialli, Italian cannibal and zombie flicks etc. — and in their tentative, sometimes technically gauche but always enthusiastic attempts to emulate and recapture the taboo-busting spirit of their original influences, Impey and Yildirim occasionally come close to capturing that naive, lackadaisical charm one expects of an 80s Jean Rollin film. Their faded, 16 mm-shot imagery of green fields on an overcast day somewhere in England (providing the landscape for this terse zombie-based short) certainly recall the deceptively quite, pastoral dreaminess of the Rollin classic, "Grapes of Death" -- although the anti-pesticides theme of that film is swapped for a more Cronenbergian and paranoid take on sexually transmitted disease -- the faint undertones of lesbianism between the two attractive female leads certainly supports that initial impression; but the fact that their zombie creature sports a rather mottled and careworn erect phallus would suggest that the two film makers were thinking more along the lines of "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead"!
The simple story starts with two young women (Julie Gilmour and Helena Martin) having a picnic in a deserted piece of English countryside after one of them has just split with a boyfriend. This mildly erotic female solidarity (a slight brush of the hand on a bare knee) is interrupted, first, by a dubious-looking fella skulking about the undergrowth while out walking his dog, and then by a lumbering, bloodstained zombie (Nick Stoppani) who rises from a shallow grave, dispatches the other bloke and then lumbers after the two heroines. By the end of the film's ultra-short running time we've been treated to a D'Amato style zombie rape scene (complete with aforementioned zombie penis!) and the guts and internal organs of one of the female protagonists being removed and spread all over the screen! The film makers and their small crew actually manage to bring off some realistic special effects; the gut-removal sequence relies on the time-honoured method of using real butcher's offal and animal organs to create the requisite disgusting imagery. Obviously the film represents very early days in terms of the professionalism of the end result, but there is enough of a tone of brooding menace established (doom-laden base tones on the soundtrack adds no small degree of gravitas to the proceedings) and an occasional memorable image to suggest that Impey and his friends are worth keeping an eye on in the future. Both he and Yildirim are already hard at work on their own grindhouse double bill (a gialli and a rape-revenge flick!) which promises a more full-on, explicit approach to sex and horror than either have attempted to date!
This DVD is a promotional screener, unavailable in the shops, but Jason Impey's work can often be seen on Propeller TV and MTV Flux.
