A B-Horror Movie Reivew of: Oasis of the Zombies (1982)

Finally an actual horror movie! This week I sat through Oasis of the Zombies, and I'm going to tell you right now: it isn't that great.

The movie is about a group of college kids that go in search of Nazi gold in a oasis, however that oasis is haunted by Zombies: the very same Nazi's that died there transporting the gold. The movie starts out like any other horror movie: with two chicks that have nothing to do with the story and are also kind of slutty. They just happened to be out in the middle of the dessert looking for an oasis, and as they walk around they start to hear strange sounds. Shortly after they are ambushed by zombies, but not before the camera followed them from behind, if you know what I mean. 

Then cut to the actual plot. There is an oasis where Nazis gold is buried, and its worth $6 Million dollars! The Nazi troops where intercepted by other troops and the fight killed everyone except for one soldier, who is the only one that knows where the gold is. This soldier is also the father of our main protagonist, who upon hearing of his father's death (yeah he gets killed by some poison) decides to go in search of this gold.

Overall the movie is really long and boring, there are big chunks where nothing happens and could had been easily cut out. The acting is so terrible! To the point were you wonder if they are even trying. The Zombies also look bad, most look like their face where plastered with paper mache, others just look bad. They also have a problem with light, most scenes are too dark to make sense of anything (although this might be because of the low quality of the film). There are also some night scenes that where obviously shot during the day, you can see the sky and its bright blue! but that just contrast with the rest of the shot, so again you can't see much. The music is also really "off" in a bad way, I felt like all music was in the wrong movie, oh well.

But this movie at least has one thing going for it: people get killed. One specially good death happens when this chick gets eaten by zombies in the first half of the movie. The zombies took the time to rip all of her clothes off before digging into her flesh, and there is one shot of meat being pulled out from her, not that great of a shot, but the gore is appreciated. All the other deaths are boring, mostly due to the poor acting and un-convincing screams. 

Final thoughts on Oasis of the Zombies: Its boring. Its hard to watch, you loose interest quickly, and to be honest the ending is not even remotely worth it. The acting is weak, the cinematography is weak, the zombies are lame, and all this adds up to a mediocre film. I did like that the camels had their own zoom-in head shots, I have no idea why I picked up on that.

Movie Score: 

• 2/10
• T (O.W.L.)

A B-Movie Review of Triassic Attack (2010)

This weekend I was out of the country, and Netflix does not have a b-horror section in Mexico. So what I did was to simply go to horror and chose a movie that looked interesting based on the name and poster, Triassic Attack was the winner.

Lets start off by saying that this movie is a SyFy Original. You know what you are getting into with those movies. I could not have been more excited when I saw the SyFy logo come up. But in the way B-Movies often work, my excitement quickly turned into frustration as I had to watch the first act of the movie. The acting in this movie is not bad, but it isn't great either. And I'm supposed to believe this guy is part Native American? I am also positive they have a British actor just for the accent. But lets forget about the casting decisions and talk about the plot. 

A small town university is trying to expand their campus by building new facilities. The problem is that the want to build on Native American sacred land. The owner of the Native American museum sets it on himself to save his heritage, so he calls on the ancient spirits for help. And help does arrive, in the form of...you guessed it: Dinosaur Fossils! The Dino-fossils wreck havoc around town, and must be stopped. If that is not enough to make you watch this movie, then I don't know what will.

In regards to the animations, the Dino-fossils are pretty bad. Sometimes you can see the outline were they put them in; other times, like when the Dino-fossil grabs a person (and one time a cow), you can clearly tell it was done without much care. I'm serious! Triassic Attack has some of the worst CGI I've seen. On the flip side the T-Rex (of course there is a T-Rex!) looks solid and is easily the most polished Dino-fossil in the entire movie. The Dinosaurs are also really bad ass. I wont spoil much, but there's a scene  where I was really shocked and at the same time made the T-Rex eleven times more awesome.

At the end of it all, Triassic Attack delivers in all the right spots, combining dinosaurs with the undead and the Native American curse to create some of the best B-Movie monster flicks. The characters where the weakest part of the movie, and some of the "comedy" is cringe worthy, but you can get over that and enjoy a good old-fashioned Dino-fossil rampage. 

Movie Score:

• 7/10
• A (O.W.L.)