Dumb Distraction Halloween 2005: In case you haven't heard... I love Halloween. You don't have to be thankful for anything... don't have to buy flowers for your good-for-nothing girlfriend... there's no need to make resolutions you're not going to keep... at it's best it Halloween season can even hold it's own against Christmas. When you think about it, it's really the least commercial of all the major holidays... the biggest purchase you're responsible for is an extra-large bag of candy corns.

Plus, it's a really great excuse for me to wallow in a month long orgy of horror movies. This Halloween, Dumb Distraction is your source for daily reviews of great horror movies. I've got a lot of good stuff lined up fron all ends of the horror spectrum... obscure foreign horror, classics from my childhood, direct to video zombie movies, high-brow thrillers and gorefests... Don't miss it!

Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, AKA Curse of the Screaming Dead (1982)

Directed by: Tony Malanowski
Starring: Steve Sandkuhler, Christopher Gummer, Rebecca Bach

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Sarah: You're using that poor girl.
Mel: She don't have to hang out with me! I don't twist her arm.
Sarah: No, you're twisting her heart.

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The best thing about Curse of the Cannibal Confederates is the title. How you screw up a movie about Zombie Confederate Soldiers I'll never know, but someone (Tony Malanowski) manages to do it. The movie opens with a bunch of confederate soldiers coming out of their graves. They look around, get their bearings, and start to march off. This scene is pretty cool, but was apparently added when Troma re-released the movie.

As the movie proper kicks off, six hippies in an RV are headed for a weekend in the woods. The three men are up front drinking and talking about how they're going to score this weekend. Back inside the RV the three ladies, including a character billed as Blind Kiyomi(!), change into their bikinis.

Ugh. Put some clothes on ladies.

They get to their destination and the blind chick hears some bells. No body else hears them, so they send one of the three dudes (I'm not going to bother naming any of the males... they're pretty indistinguishable) to check it out. Unfortunately, this means we have to watch him wander through the woods silently for, get this, 11 minutes! There's literally nothing going on for these 11 minutes, except for one shot where he leans over, picks up something and exclaims "Hmmm... an old timey bullet! You could knock a head off with that."

He finally comes across an graveyard where he finds some old confederate uniforms and flags. He brings the group to the graveyard, to show them what he found. The guys want to take the old stuff, but Blind Kiyomi pulls the Hiroshima card. Seems her Grandma was there when we bombed it, and it gave her a bad case of leukemia! Oooookaaayyy. Anyway, before dying Grandma told Kiyomi that you can take any physical item from a dead person, but you'd better not take their pain. "They're very jealous of their pain!" Somehow this convinces the group that they shouldn't take the flag and uniforms (But I thought it was OK to take a dead guy's physical items?) and they head off to set up camp.

That night Blind Kiyomi discovers that one of the guys took a diary from the graveyard. She tells him that they're all basically screwed now. Turns out she's right, because just then the confederate zombies attack. The hippies manage to fight off their attackers by, get this, putting a bag of fireworks on the campfire. Somehow this causes most of the zombies' head to explode. It's not at all clear why this is the case... the scene (and about half the film) is so poorly lit that you can't tell what's going on.

That's OK. I didn't want to see that half of the screen anyway.

The next morning the gang is headed back to their van when they get stopped by two cops. I wish I were making this up. Seems someone reported that the graveyard in the woods had been vandalized, and the cops were sent to check it out. This makes no sense, but at least we get to hear the cop utter the great line: "This is some spooky business. I'm sure glad I never took up undertaking like my Daddy wanted." The other great thing about this scene is that Director Malanowski doesn't even bother to hide the fact that one of the cops was filmed during the day and the other at night. He blithely cuts between the two scenes like it's the most natural thing in the world.

Even Blind Kiyomi could have caught this gaffe.

Soon the confederate zombies are attacking again. Fresh out of fireworks, the hippies are forced to use cop's shotguns. This is pretty effective, and we find out that zombie's heads explode in a burst of flames when you shoot 'em.

That was a zombie.

Anyway, we got some more running around and zombie attacks before the guy with the diary finally 'fesses up to stealing from the dead. Everyone gets pissed at him, so he tosses the diary at the lead zombie. Then, in a true WTF scene, the zombie cries a single tear, takes the diary, and walks off. The end.

One of the things that baffles me about this movie is who it thought its audience was. It seems obvious to me that a movie about Undead Rebels would be a perfect film for teenage guys (and adults who don't know better... like me). Apparently this simple concept was lost on Malanowski, because there's no cursing in this movie (instead, characters call each other colorful names like Bozo and Bonehead) and even worse, no nudity. The closest we get is a few shots of the ladies in their finest JC Penny lingerie.

S-E-X-X-Y.

Nowhere near as bad or as good as it could have been, Curse of the Confederate Cannibals rates a big old 'Meh' on the Micah-Meter. Or, a FF on the Dumb Distraction scale.

- Micah