It's time yet again for a movie about flesh eating zombies. Hell of the Living Dead aka Virus aka Zombi 4 aka Zombi 5: Ultimate Nightmare aka Zombie of the Savanna aka Zombie Creeping Flesh aka Zombie Inferno is a pretty generic Dawn of the Dead cash in.

The only thing new it brings to the table are fast zombies, which is something I usually don't take kindly to since it gets rid of one of the zombie's more endearing characteristics.

It's also one of the first zombie movies to use the virus explanation for the zombies. It's a decent enough explanation, but I for one prefer to believe in something mystical or some outer space gas as the reason for zombies.

A virus just seems too grounded in reality for me and these days it seems like every zombie movie is taking the virus movie. I want something more imaginative, like a Venus probe or uhh...radioactive moonshine!

The movie begins in some chemical storage facility. All I know is that it has lots of fancy dials and light-up buttons that don't seem to do anything in particular. Some of the buttons refuse to flash which means that something must be wrong.

A few guys dress up like 50s Martian aliens and go down into the bowels of the plant. It's here that they discover a dead rat which amazes them since it's in the "most sterile part of the sector!" Turns out the rat isn't dead and he somehow squirms himself inside the suit of one of the costumed dorks. This rat is a bit pissed and proceeds to rip the guy's chest out.

In his death throes, the hapless dork manages to do something and release a green gas that must be bad because it's GREEN. No green gas in the history of time has had a good purpose in movies. The head honchos of the plant go downstairs to investigate and stumble upon some newly created blue face zombies who proceed to eat everyone (with some truly great crunching sounds) except the head of the project.

The head runs back to his office to talk into his tape recorder and proclaim Operation Sweet Death a complete failure and begs god for forgiveness as the green gas seeps into his office and the surrounding city. Thanks for the plague, jackass. "A failure" is putting it pretty mildly.

We take you live to a hostage situation. It appears some terrorists are demanding the closing of the "hope centers" in ten minutes or else they're going to waste all of the hostages. Of course, shutting down the "hope centers" would be crazy. After all, where would the children get their hopes from without the hope centers?

Decisive action is called for, and so the government sends in a crack team of counter terrorists. The counter terrorists infiltrate the mansion and systematically take out all the terrorists before they can harm any of the hostages. Before the head terrorist dies, he warns the counter terrorists that they're all doomed to a bloody death, that they'll be killed and then eaten by their own dead brothers.

Is he speaking in a figurative sense about the dark nature of capitalism or does he know about Operation Sweet Death? It remains a mystery since they shoot him about twenty times and he shortly expires. It should be noted that this film stole the gay blue jumpsuits the SWAT team used in Dawn of the Dead.

They probably raided Romero's costume supply. It's not like they have any shame or anything.

The counter-terrorists teleport to a burial ground on some native island! I'm glad they came here since I get to witness their comedy stylings as they joke about fucking skeletons. They're unable to contact their superiors so they hop in their jeep and move along.

Meanwhile, in another jeep in some village sits Keith Richards, his wife, his son, Leia the reporter and Yanni, who happens to be Leia's cameraman. Keith Richard's son is in obvious pain from a nasty ass infection on his stomach that could have come from mosquitoes or a "crazy ass native." I think he picked it up in the Chuck E Cheese ball pit. Leia and her cameraman go looking for some water for the kid while Keith Richards goes crazy and punches the steering wheel.

His wife also leaves the jeep to get some air, leaving Keith alone with his son in the jeep. The kid comes to for a second and then passes out, dying. At the same time, Keith's wife has wandered inside some random building and found a priest with his head against the wall. To prepare us for some awesome zombie action that is forthcoming, the director plays some music that sounds like it came straight from Blaster Master on NES.

Crazy dead priest spins around bearing his pearly whites for the camera and attacks Keith's wife. Keith's son makes his best "evil" face (Hint: It sucks) and eats his precious dad. Not wanting to be kept out of the zombie fun, Leia and Yanni are attacked by zombies that come out of the water hole they were at. Leia and Yanni are competent enough to escape and run back to the jeep.

Here they run into the fab foursome of the counter terrorists and tell them about the monsters they just ran from. The Chief CT sends out two scouts to investigate.

Yanni looks into the jeep and is shocked to see the little boy feasting on his dear ole' pops. Everyone is disgusted by it and Yanni throws up all over himself but you really can't tell since his shirt was vomit colored anyways. The two scouts encounter some zombies and after much dicking around discover that the only way to kill them is by shooting them in the head.

Back at the jeep the Chief CT has been idly shooting the little kid without much success. You know, after you body shot a zombie twenty times I think you'd maybe reflect upon your strategy and just go for the head anyways. Not the Chief CT, he sticks to what he knows and what he knows is shooting little kids in the stomach.

The scouts come back and shoot the kid in the head for fun's sake. While this party was going on, Leia wandered off into an abandoned building where she finds the corpse of Keith's wife hanging from the ceiling (HOW?!) and the zombie priest.

The zombie CT's come to her rescue and once again dick around by shooting him in the torso a million times until the one smart CT arrives to tell them to use headshots once again. The movie switches locations to a TV studio where two important guys talk about how what the hope centers are doing borders on genocide and that they hope Leia can get to one and get the big scoop.

Leia and the CT's arrive at a road from which they hear drum beats coming from. Leia stayed in the midst of African tribes for a year and assures the CTs that this tribe can be dangerous and that she needs to go in ahead of them to smooth things out. She also gets naked and paints herself up. Well, that's rather shocking.

Leia is shocked to see the natives cutting up animal entrails and weeping for the dead children. Or rather she's shocked at the STOCK footage that she's watching of an African village as you'll never see her interact with anything. Finally we see her with some actual Africans although they don't look anything like the shamelessly used stock footage.

The CTs roll into town and Leia informs them that the entire village is contaminated and that the villagers think that the CTs have arrived to help. Yanni takes the opportunity to get some good footage of a woman eating maggots out of a dead guy's eye. Sometimes truth is sicker than fiction.

At night the tribe holds a ceremony that the CT's enjoy. Leia and the Chief go out for a walk and Leia does her journalistic duty to probe him for answers. She proposes that the military knows something about what's making the dead reanimate and that it's probably related to the hope centers. Before the Chief can respond, the two of them are attacked by some African zombies out of the jungle.

Their zombie make-up consists of a lot of bloody stuff on their feet and legs and nothing else. They should get some tough actin-Tinactin and it'll fix that shit right up. BOOM!

A zombie crashes the party by eating people instead of the pretzels and so the tribe goes into a panic. Since the tribe just left all the corpses lying around there's more than enough zombies available to eat the entire tribe. Leia, Yanni, and the CT's all escape.

After a while their jeep breaks down so they all have to crowd into the land rover. There's not much space so the CT's tell Leia and Yanni to ditch some of their film equipment in the jungle, something that they both heavily disagree to. Yanni gets a punch in his beautiful moustache for his troubles while Leia pulls a gun out on the Chief.

She gives her whole anti-government spiel but is quickly disarmed by another CT. The Chief resolves to take Leia and Yanni to the nearest village and dump them there. Later that night the second in command tries to come onto Leia but gets decked in the jaw by the CHIEF! The Chief doesn't let this shit fly on his watch! In the morning, the Chief takes the smart CT (the one who knew about headshots) out into the jungle to go scout.

They find some random body parts and blood along the trail. You know, the usual shit you find when you stroll through a city park.

Eventually they look up into the trees and find a few zombies. The scouts run back to the jeep with some slow ass zombies in pursuit. Yanni seizes his opportunity to catch greatness on film and stupidly runs to go get some zombie footage with his camera.

The CTs and Leia go to save his stupid ass, with the CTs doing nothing but shooting the zombies in the torso AGAIN. What does it take to get through to these guys? The smart CT can't stand their stupidity any longer and goes crazy, running into the pack of zombies and shouting "I told you ya gotta shoot them in the HEAD!" which he then does.

The smart guy fucks around with the zombies for a while, offering one of them his arm before shooting its brains out. The CT's then get back in the land rover and get out of there. Back at the U.N., two white guys debate a black guy about what's going on in Africa. The black delegate is obviously pissed that there are zombies all over the continent and tribes are running scared everywhere.

We also see some stock footage of African police but with dubbed in voices that change the stock footage into zombie patrol footage! The white guys get tired of hearing the black guy complain and so they leave him alone in the U.N. chamber. The CT group has arrived at an abandoned house and go inside to check it out.

One of the stupid CTs decides to play dress-up with some clothes he finds in the house, such as a top hat and a tutu. This CT may have some "issues." The redneck zombies don't like "those types" and so they eat him alive.

Zombie encounters are happening all around the house. The Chief has to shoot a zombie grandma in the forehead and Leia gets attacked by zombies that have burst through the windows. It's zombie blastin time and everyone's gettin' in on the act, even Yanni!

The group has fucked around in the house for far too long and as a result a swarm of zombies have accumulated outside. The group refuses to conform to the traditional zombie movie cliché of boarding yourself up into the house and instead does the intelligent thing by getting the hell out of it.

Smart CT goes off the deep end yet again and begins fucking around with the zombies with a torch. He may be overconfident as hell, but the man can back it up and holds off all the zombies by himself before jumping into the land rover to escape with the rest of the good guys. There's a brief scare when the jeep refuses to start for a bit but it's quickly over.

The crew follows the mouth of the river to reach the ocean so that they can sail to their "objective." The Chief is forced to bring Leia and Yanni along against his wishes, but to leave them would be murder. Hey man, no one's gonna convict you if Yanni dies.

After sailing around for a bit they reach their objective - the factory from the beginning of the movie where the virus came from. The crew explores the complex and finds the freight elevator which just happens to be full of zombies.

The zombies have been stuck on the elevator listening to Yanni music for the past few weeks and so they use their first opportunity to eat Yanni's throat when the elevator doors open.

Smart CT has a nervous breakdown as usual but this time he finally gets eaten by zombies, and thus we've lost the two best characters in the movie in less than thirty seconds.

Why did smart guy have to die? He had what it took man! He knew how to make it through this type of situation! As usual, the worthless punks that do nothing are the ones that survive.

Ten seconds later while the good guys search for another way up on the roof, the second in command gets jumped by a zombie. These people worked so hard to get to the end of a zombie movie and are dropping like flies in the last ten minutes. What a damn gyp.

The second in command gets bitten but he still has enough energy to keep on going. He goes into an office and finds the tape recorder the chief scientist was using at the beginning of the film. He gradually goes zombie, but not before he can burn up some of the evidence in the office.

Meanwhile, Leia has pieced together the puzzle. The Hope Centers were not actually centers where scientists did research for the good of the undeveloped countries but instead engineered a disease to cure the world of overpopulation by killing off the undeveloped countries. To get rid of the unfit in the simplest possible way - by getting them to eat each other.

It's hard to make a big deal out of this dramatic "I solved the mystery" scene when there never was one in the first place. First off, we were never told what the Hope Centers were supposed to do earlier in the movie. Second, we already know the virus came from this factory. There's no mystery, which means no STUNNING revelation!

Having solved the "mystery", Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown then get eaten by the zombies. In fact, one zombie shoves his entire fist into Leia's mouth until her skull explodes. Neato.

Back in the civilized world, a bunch of people are watching reports about the zombies on TV but dismiss it as rubbish. One strapping young lad and his good old gal leave the bar and go make out. The girl refuses to fuck him since he won't marry her then.

She asks for a light for her cigarette but the dejected young lad refuses and she goes to ask a dude on a park bench for a light instead. Of course it's a zombie and she gets eaten and they all lived happily ever after. Guess you should have put out for your boyfriend, although he ends up getting eaten as well since all skeptics in horror movies get theirs.

This movie has serious problems. It's all over the damn map and never seems to be able to focus on one thing. Since Bruno Mattei directed both this movie and Zombi 3 and both have this same exact problem, I'm going to pin the blame on him.

The heroes travel from random location to random location without any transition, like a video game or something. The most glaring example of this is when the CT's teleport from the hostage situation to the jungle without any explanation whatsoever. Nothing that happens in a previous scene ever has any impact on a scene after it, which explains why no one ever learns to shoot a zombie in the head.

Maybe this film was shot horribly out of sequence or something. The film also tries to have the moronic "Hope Centers" sideplot which just doesn't work. The poorly produced sideplot scenes, such as the guys talking about Leia and a United Nations boardroom with only THREE people in it, barely give the viewer any information at all and are just embarassing.

There's also the matter of the retarded stock footage throughout the film. It's like the nature footage in Survivor, where they show you random shots of animals in the jungle that you're supposed to believe are near the survivors, but you'll never see a survivor even remotely near those animals. The purpose of nature shots in any show or film that isn't about nature is usually just to pad the movie out to 90 minutes. Eh, at least the African tribe footage led to some nudity.

I wouldn't recommend this film to any casual zombie movie lovers, but if you're hardcore into this stuff and haven't seen it yet, Hell of the Living Dead is worth renting just to laugh at and to admire the tremendous overacting of the smart CT.