Virus – l’inferno dei morti viventi is an Italian zombie film, made in 1980 by prolific hack Bruno Mattei, under his ‘Vincent Dawn’ pseudonym.
As with most of the Italian zombie films of the era, the film was less an imitation of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead than of Lucio Fulci’s attempt to cash in on that movie. Zombi 2 / Zombie / Zombie Flesh Eaters proved to be a huge box office hit – outstripping Romero’s film in several territories, including the UK where it opened before the retitled Zombies – Dawn of the Dead – and inspired several rip-offs, of which Virus was one of the first.
The film is a mish-mash of ideas lifted from various popular sources – there is a SWAT team (as in Dawn of the Dead) who are sent for no good reason to Papua New Guinea – i.e. cannibal country – where they are joined by a plucky and sexy journalist (Margit Evelyn Newton) as they try to get past the hordes of flesh eating zombies that have suddenly and inexplicably appeared. Their destination is top secret research facility Hope Center #1, where a chemical accident has caused the dead to return to life and lust after the flesh of the living. This, it turns out, is the result of Operation Sweet Death, a cunning but somewhat flawed plan to end world hunger by turning Third World populations into cannibals.
Virus began treatment by José María Cunillés later turned into a full screenplay by Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi. Dara Films in Spain and Beatrice Films in Rome collaborated to option the script, which was ridiculously ambitious in scope if not plot. Mattei was brought on board due to his experience with low budget exploitation, and attempted to bring the project under control. Exteriors were shot in Spain, but proved to be mostly unusable; rather than re-shoot or rewrite, Dara chose to simply dump the footage and carry on with the rest of the movie. Inevitably, this resulted in a somewhat incoherent plot.
Mattei suggested stock footage from Barbet Schroeder’s 1972 film La Vallée be used, with sets built to match this footage. How successful this matching proves to be is open to debate. Other stock footage – notably of the United Nations – was also included, with close -up shots of a ‘third world leader’ obviously inserted.
The movie has a Goblin score, which might seem impressive if it wasn’t for the fact that all the music was lifted from Dawn of the Dead and Contamination. This caused legal problems that delayed the film’s distribution.
The film was released – in a version that had cuts to both gore and narrative – into UK cinemas in 1981. Titled Zombie Creeping Flesh, it clearly aimed to cash in on the popularity of Zombie Flesh Eaters, but was not a success. Most people saw the film on video, where it was released in a shortened version and proved moderately popular. In the US, the film slipped out virtually unnoticed, playing as Night of the Zombies. Later DVD editions retitled the film as Hell of the Living Dead, a literal translation of the Italian title.
The combination of messy narrative, shoddy pacing, poor dialogue, sloppy special effects and Mattei’s usual disinterested direction ensures that Virus is a fairly dreadful film. Yet conversely, it’s oddly entertaining, the sheer awfulness of the film giving it the car-crash fascination of the Good Bad Movie. It’s certainly more fun than most of the other Zombie Flesh Eaters imitators or pseudo sequels, and if you can forget about trying to make sense of the narrative, is amusingly trashy, with enough gore – including a show-stopping scene at the end – and nudity to keep exploitation fans happy.
David Flint, Horrorpedia
Related: Peter and the Test Tube Babies – Zombie Creeping Flesh | zombies on Horrorpedia
