Corpses Are Forever review by The Grim Ringler

We critics bandy about the Worst Movie Ever line like it’s an old war story. ‘Ah, yeah, I remember the time I went to see BLAH, and man, was it ever the worst movie. Worst movie EVER!’ It’s what fanboys do I suppose. We need some sort of measuring stick to give us, and others, an idea of the crapitude of some films. Sure, there are bad movies, and plenty of them, we all see a good five or six a year if we see many movies that are just not good, that’s the heck of anything you are passionate about, you take the good with the crap. But you are willing to wade through the ocean of excrement to get to the really great films. Once in a while though a cornlog floats your way and you get a whole new perspective on what a bad movie really is. It’s like finding proof of god, or that elusive unseen A-Team episode you were always looking for. You find a movie so vile, so heartlessly bad, it’s like someone literally stole a piece of your soul. It’s as if it’s a personal attack on your mind, and dammit, you won’t stand for it.

Is Corpses Are Forever the worst film I have ever seen? That’s a bold statement. I think I made it when I saw Zombie 4 so it’s hard to really say for sure. I know it’s ONE of the worst films I have ever seen, easily, and dammit, right now, today, tonight, right freakin’ now, it’s the worst. What makes it so bad you ask? Lemme tell ya ‘bout a little thing I like to call The Movie That Stole Grim’s Soul Then Crapped In His Eyes –

Corpses Are Forever is a very low budget cheapie that strives to tell the tale of a man who has lost his memory after awaking in unfamiliar surroundings. The heck of it is that he just so happened to wake up during the zombie apocalypse of death and doom! Good grief! Well, don’t fret friends as zombies – slow, aimless, doddering things that make the Romero variety look like track stars on PCP – are no match for the cunning and drive of this crafty, uh, whatever he is. After some running, some Kee-YAH martial arts action (martial arts are the best way to handle zombies, especially poorly choreographed and shot martial arts where there is no contact made and you can tell. And man, I tell you what, it looks double bad when the director IS the lead actor and he can’t even shoot his own action scenes well. Man…) the lead finds himself hearing a mysterious voice coming from his watch, a voice that warns him of impending doom. That doom comes in the form not of zombies but of some sort of military group that doesn’t really have any need to adhere to weight or hair restrictions that we are used to. Taken back to an underground military base (I assume that the world ‘underground’ here is a euphemism for Not Really Underground At All, being as we see cars driving about outside a window that actor Richard Lynch is sitting before), the hero find out that he has been part of an experiment to send him within his memories to find something out that, in all honesty, I can’t even remember. I swear. It has something to do with his past, and how he lost his wife, and a case he was working on involving a pudgy, slow serial killer that looks like he gave up retirement and fishing to get back into the work force…as a murderer. But he isn’t just a murderer, no way man, this fella is also EVIL because he has sold his soul…to Richard Lynch. And yeah, I guess Mr. Lynch is the devil in the film, despite the fact that he’s a druggy (pot head? opium smoker? Who can say), can’t do anything that’s really impressive aside from bossing around lazy zombies, and he acts out from time to time. Things heat up when our hero decides he needs to find out the secret to the movie’s plot himself and escapes the ‘underground base’ and finds help in the form of his wife, a doctor, and a giraffe hitman, ok, I made the last one up to make the movie more interesting. The film collapses under the weight of its own inanity, needless and silly fight scenes, double crosses, and odd horror icon cameos helping to make sure you know this movie sucks. The best thing of all? There is no ending here. Nope. The villain, Mr. Devil, tries to kill our hero but he escapes with the help of the very active and helpful ghost of his wife (who is a very bad deus ex machine), and just as there is some major ass kicking about to happen…we get the end of the movie with a placard telling us our hero will return in another Bond rip-off title. Oh, really? SCREW YOU!!!

To say this movie is bad is like eating rotten crap and saying it wasn’t to your liking. Being a writer, and therefore an ‘artist’, I can appreciate the time and effort it takes to create something. And I far from feel I have the right to crap on someone’s dream, but man, this is a bad film. The acting, all the way around, is horrible – the lead/director slips in and out of an accent and Oktober and I could never tell what his real voice WAS – the fights serve no purpose other than to show the director/actor took some classes in it, the main character sports odd, badly done fake tattoos which I suppose make him tougher, there’s NO FREAKIN’ ENDING, and man, this is one cast in need of a Supercuts. Sincerely. The fact that the filmmakers used a title to trick us into seeing this drek doesn’t make things happier for me. The film’s name makes one think of a fun, silly riff on the Bond series, yet with zombies. Great. Not so here. What we get is a strange mish-mash of genres that doesn’t know what it wants to be but knows that zombies are cool. The funny thing is that they are barely even in the film. It’s as if zombie apocalypse happened and someone forgot to tell the people in the film. And the hell of it is that there are some fun people in this that are wasted, though honestly, what would they do? It’s depressing because Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens, both women I lusted after as a kid, are in this and show that, dammit, they never really learned how to act in all those years. And that sucks since they obviously need the work. The most depressing thing about the film is there is an extra that purports to show Linnea Quigley’s house, which sounds cool…but isn’t. It’s depressing. She doesn’t really know what to say, was obviously asked to lead the tour in a bikini (which she still looks great in), and doesn’t really have any neat movie memorabilia to show off. So it ends up being like they went to your aunt’s house and asked her to show off her dogs and the weird, random stuff in her house.

DAMN YOU ALL!

Filmed with little talent and a stress on bad, barely audible dialogue, this is the sort of movie that actually hurts to watch. And sincerely, I hate to write a review like this because this is someone’s dream. This is someone’s baby. But man, they had money, they had sets, they had girls that would get naked – but they didn’t want them too! – they had kitschy actors, and they had zombies…they just didn’t have a director, lead actor, or story. The lead actor ends up looking like a silly kid playing dress up ‘cause he wears ‘tough guy’ clothes that don’t fit (fedora and a trench coat he gets lost in) and that work to make him look foolish and not tough. If you want a bad movie, well, brother, you have found it. But there is little joy to take in the deep hurting here, just sadness and the tears of a zombie. I wish the filmmakers luck and an influx of talent ‘cause it looks like they need it.

I give this a big, fat ZERO.




1 out of 10 Jackasses
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