GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL

What should be a mercifully short 67 minutes feels like an eternity. Don Swan’s 1986 Super 8 atrocity GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL begins in a field in the year 1386. Three men clad in black robes, members of the Righteous Brotherhood, expel one of their own, Goza, for high treason. As punishment, Goza is condemned to eternal life, an auspicious ‘curse’ which carries an unfortunate caveat. In order to avoid rotting, Goza must consume human flesh.

It was at this point, less than 10 minutes into the film, that I knew I was going to hate every single minute I spent sitting in front of my television. This is roughly the same set-up as the one found in DON’T GO NEAR THE PARK, a movie I hate so much it hurts. I will say that GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL is nowhere near as awful as Larry Foldes’ 1979 abortion, but that’s really not saying much. That’s like saying radiation sickness isn’t as awful as prostate cancer.

We move 600 years into the future. Goza is now running a crappy little restaurant with his henchman, Blozor. I would like to give you some kind of plot synopsis, but this movie simply does not have a plot to synopsize. It’s a tired parade of character introduction, character death, character introduction, character death repeated ad nauseam until the final 10 minutes. At that point, the men who expelled Goza 600 years ago reemerge to bring an end to his reign of terror. Even if there was a plot to be found here, I doubt it would be comprehensible.

I’m not going to slag off the film for looking like shit (it was shot on Super 8, after all), nor will I chastise Mr. Swan for not equalizing his sound mix (good luck hearing 25% of the dialogue over the awful slap bass synth puke this movie calls a score). Instead, I’ll take it to task for committing the gravest sin a movie called GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL could ever commit. 

It’s fucking boring.

The VHS box art is glorious, promising some semblance of splatter and gore. Apart from a few dime store severed limb props, there’s very little in the way of splatter to be found here. In the only somewhat competent murder set piece the film has to offer, a man’s head is punched off and his spurting blood is sipped like water at a park fountain. It’s the only on-screen death they bothered to film. I will include for your viewing enjoyment three stills from the film. Here, have a look…

See that? That is an actual murder scene in the film. The man in the pictures is Larry, some doofus desperate to find his finance after she went missing in the restaurant. What you’re seeing is the actual death scene. There is no action missing. It’s done in three individual cuts. We never see the girl stab Larry. We never see the knife extend towards him. This is EXACTLY how the death is presented in the film and when I can recreate with 100% accuracy the action of a moving picture in still shots, something is horribly, terribly fucked up.

I should point out that GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL is a horror comedy and not a straightforward chiller. This does not let it off the hook for being incompetent. When we first meet Larry, he’s sitting next to Sherry, his soon-to-be finance. She looks like this...

Larry attempts to slide a ring on her finger, but the ring is too small. He can’t get it past her knuckle, despite trying very, very hard. And yes, this is how she wears the ring for the rest of her scenes, with it sitting just below her knuckle. Now, the problem is… I can’t tell if that was intentional or not. Was that meant to be a joke? Was the fact that Larry refers to Sherry as “a blonde” a joke? She’s clearly a brunette so why is he referring to her as a blonde? Was it because Don Swan couldn’t find a blonde actress and never bothered to correct the script to reflect the casting? Was it an attempt at humor? I honestly cannot tell because the movie is so inept and stupid that it slips into Poe’s Law territory. I have no idea how to suss out what is intentionally stupid and what is unintentionally stupid.

Like, was I supposed to be on the edge of my seat as Goza and one of the priests from the Righteous Brotherhood have a Force battle in the park (and yes, they do throw each other around simply by extending their hands, a la STAR WARS)? There are actual stakes in those scenes, unlike the rest of the film. It’s the big fight between good and evil. So was I supposed to care or laugh?

I mean, I didn’t care OR laugh, but you get my point, right?

Another problem is just how padded out this 67 minute film is. Songs are played in their entirety, including one impromptu blues performance in the restaurant. There is a 32 second long shot of two women sitting at a booth during which not a single line of dialogue is spoken. There is an over two minute long scene of Goza making a mixed drink. And what’s worse, because there is no such thing as character development in this film and all the deaths are bloodless, off-screen affairs, each new victim does nothing but prolong the pain. I should be excited when new characters come wandering into the restaurant. I should be giddy at the thought of watching them being butchered. But I don’t get to see that. So every time a new character was introduced, I groaned. It was never going to end. This fucking movie was Never. Going. To. End.

I hated GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL every minute it was on my screen. Even when the mystical goddess of the magical brotherhood of Force wielding monks super glued Goza’s lips shut so he would painfully starve to death, I didn’t grin. I didn’t once chuckle or giggle like an idiot. I just wanted it to be over with. I couldn’t wait for it to end. It’s a great, big black hole of a film, just a fun vacuum that sucks up an hour of your life. I would tell you to avoid it, but we both know that you won’t. You’ll want to see it for yourself because… well, it’s called GOREMET, ZOMBIE CHEF FROM HELL. It’s a great title, fantastic even. It’s also the one and only thing good about this whole rotting, stinking affair.

NIGHT RIPPER

Here’s a tidbit of information about yours truly that you don’t know and probably don’t care to know. When the weather changes, I get sick. It happens all the time, almost without fail, and that’s pretty shitty, especially since the weather here in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania has been fairly schizophrenic as of late. For the past two months, we would go from five days of 30s to two days of 50s to straight down to Siberia levels of wind chill. Three days of 60s gave way to a snow storm. All throughout the month, the weather would stabilize then stroke out. As a result, I spent much of mid-to-late December and early-to-mid January with night time sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever and couldn’t rest even with medicine.

As a result, I didn’t write very many reviews, mostly because it’s difficult to concentrate on writing complete sentences when snot won’t stop dripping down onto the keyboard. I did however watch a metric shit ton of movies, specifically shot-on-video slasher movies. I figured, I already feel bad so why not feel worse? And worse is exactly how I felt.

But as I was going over the list of films I had watched and checking them off on my “you’re wasting your life watching movies” Excel spreadsheet, I realized that a few had slipped through my sweaty, might-as-well-be-diseased fingers. Like this film, NIGHT RIPPER, a 1986 kinda-sorta giallo/slasher clusterfuck from director Jeff Hathcock. Hathcock is a director I’m quite familiar with. I also kind of fear the man. After all, he made VICTIMS, an absolutely abysmal film that, to my great shock, had a Blu-ray release not too long ago. I didn’t have high hopes for NIGHT RIPPER. Do you think the film exceeded my infinitesimal expectations?

NIGHT RIPPER is set in a world where everyone is cheating on their wife, fiance or significant other. It focuses largely on Dave, a soft-spoken chap with Eli Roth eyebrows, who runs a small photography studio with Mitch, a man we’re supposed to find creepy because he speaks very slowly and in monotone (Mitch is played by Larry Thomas, aka the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, and yes, that never stops being distracting). There is a murderer wandering the streets, slicing up models, a few of whom just so happened to be patrons of Dave’s studio.

One day, a pretty European woman named Jill shows up at the studio eager to have some risque pictures taken for her boyfriend. Dave is immediately smitten and begins pursuing her romantically, which is kind of a dick move if you ask me because Dave is already engaged to a woman named Karen. We’re let off the ethical hook rather early on as it’s revealed that Karen is having regular trysts with a man twice her age and four times her weight. Tossed into all of this melodrama is Janet, a slightly sinister lesbian delivery woman with some rather unsavory views of models. After the Ripper claims his fourth victim, Dave and Mitch are questioned by the police. Despite the fact that Mitch answers every police question sarcastically and grins like an idiot every time the coppers mention “murder”, “death”, “blood”, “mutilation”, etc, the cops let them go. A little later, Karen ends up dead and the cops turn to Dave, for reasons unknown, to help them catch their culprit, all while Mitch and Janet circle around Jill like two hungry sharks.

NIGHT RIPPER is exactly the kind of film you think it is. Shot on what looks to be a commercially available home video camcorder, filled with terrible sound, questionable acting, and bad special effects, NIGHT RIPPER moves with the speed of a geriatric on downers. To the film’s credit, it keeps the cops off screen for the vast majority of the running time. I’ve said before in some review of some godawful piece of shit, shot-on-video slasher movie, that if you ever see cops in a film like this, run the fuck away. Cops in shot-on-video horror films don’t act like cops, don’t look like cops, don’t do cop stuff at all, and generally only exist to regurgitate information we already know. Oh, you’re going to tell us for five minutes that a woman was murdered last night? Well, thanks, assholes, I already saw that happen a scene or two ago. Thanks for wasting my time.

Not only does the film leave the cops out of this, it largely leaves Dave out of it too, which is odd because, well, he’s the lead character. The final confrontation in the film is a three way affair between every speaking character that isn’t Dave. He doesn’t get to reveal the killer or even have the killer reveal their identity to him. He shows up on the scene after the killer is already dead. What a goddamn hero!

The motive is just a generic “I hate models” cop-out with nothing else added in for flavor. The violence meted out is certainly bloody, but it’s not at all convincing. Most of the murders happen in single shots. We’ll see the knife coming down and then cut to a cheap effect of the blade sticking in someone’s face. Clearly, the special effects budget couldn’t support anything too elaborate. A knife is dragged across an already cut throat. A knife dragged across a woman’s skin leaves a bloody trail of grue, but doesn’t appear to actually break the skin. That sort of thing. Disappointing, but forgivable.

The highlight of the film is the way the killer dies. See, this isn’t called NIGHT RIPPER for no good reason. It ties, or at least tries to tie, itself to the infamous Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. The cops mention the mutilation of corpses (mutilation that we never see; in fact, we often see the killer leave the scene immediately after haphazardly stabbing their victims) and how the killer would have to have medical training to cause such elaborate wounds, just like the Ripper case. Mitch was once a butcher, a theory floated around for Jack the Ripper’s then-current or past profession. Of course, that means the models we see are, according to this film anyway, tantamount to prostitutes, a line of thinking that some might find distasteful.

During the final confrontation between everyone but our hero and the killer, the killer talks about mannequins being like the corpses they’ve been leaving behind. Hollow on the inside, mwahahahaha! AHEM In a moment I’m sure we’re supposed to find wonderfully ironic or woefully poetic, the killer gets their knife stuck in the hand of a mannequin as they tumble to the ground. The mannequin tips over, stabbing the killer to death. And thus the victims have risen from the dead to slay the beast and put their souls to rest.

Or some shit.

It’s a dumb ending to a dumb movie, but I will admit that the absurdity of the ending did leave me with a smile rather than a pained grimace. In fact, there are some really unintentionally funny moments in the film, like how numerous scenes of phone calls end with the actors looking slightly confused at the contraption in their hand, almost as though they’ve been suddenly and inexplicably dumbstruck by 1980s telephone technology. A displeased loved informs her paramour that their frequent sex meet-ups are not love, rather they’re “...just sweaty bodies fucking under flood lamps!”. Clearly the film’s composer never got to finish the job as the creepy synth score sometimes gives way to bubbly elevator music.

Depending on your mood and taste for awful movies, you might get a chuckle or two out of NIGHT RIPPER. You certainly won’t find your hunger for wanton violence and sexual mayhem satisfied, nor will you be at all surprised by who turns out to be the killer. As far as Jeff Hathcock films go, I can’t say NIGHT RIPPER is the worst, but it isn’t going to convert anyone into a Hathcock devotee. It’s just a waste of time, shot-on-video shitter. It’s pretty damn bad, that’s for sure, but it ends with such a delightfully stupid final confrontation that I’m almost – ALMOST – willing to not throw my VHS copy into oncoming traffic.