Six hundred pages and still no explanation as to how a dead rat turned up in the most sterile section of the module? Come on!
While the lack of a reason, or explanation, being given for what was a running gag between my best friend and I was disappointing on a personal amusement level, it was not all that surprising from a creative standpoint. In his introduction to this comically massive doorstopper of a novelization of Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead, Brad Carter explains he is adapting the original concept as drafted by the husband-wife creative team of Claudio Fragasso and the late Rossella Drudi.
What Fragasso and Drudi had envisioned was a large scale cannibal apocalypse that, truth be told, might rival the unmade “Raiders of the Lost Ark with zombies” version of Day of the Dead that George A. Romero had hoped to make.
But, just as what happened with Romero’s costly first pass plans for Day of the Dead, budgetary restrictions would force Fragasso and Drudi’s concept to be whittled down to its barest, most cost effective of bones.
Those bones would be handed over to the low budget maestro Bruno Mattei, who, in the grand tradition of Edward D. Wood Jr, utilized mismatching stock footage from a couple of mondo documentaries to give his movie some sense of having a larger scale than its paltry budget was incapable of delivering.
Character development and exploration was kept to a non-existent minimum and almost all of the political commentary regarding how the industrialized world cannibalizes the third world, robbing it of it resources while also preventing its peoples from becoming independent and self-reliant, was likewise jettisoned.
The result was a cheap and shoddy exploitation flick that still manages to be entertaining. Only not in the manner intended by its creators.
I first learned about the film now best known as Hell of the Living Dead when it was reviewed in the pages of Fangoria magazine, in a tongue-in-cheek (and short-lived) column titled Zombie of the Month. Because, when the film was released in the United States, as Night of the Zombies, it seemed that there was a ‘new’ gut munching zombie movie being unleashed in theaters and drive-ins every month.
I did not see Night of the Zombies until well after its release on home video and, I think, I watched it all of two times, maybe. While my memory of certain moments were quite vivid, I was not all that inclined to revisit the film prior to cracking open Carter’s “epic” adaptation.
Doing so turned out to be a wise thing, because, as Carter notes in his afterword, this book departs from its source material “in just about every way.” While all of the significant story beats and scenarios remain, they have also been re-contextualized, or outright changed, to better serve a far larger and a tad more convoluted storyline.
Which also allows for some robust and biting (no pun intended) political commentary.
Commentary that is in no way subtle and is every bit as on the nose as the commentary in any of Romero’s zombie epics, or in the preachier episodes of any and all variations of Star Trek. Which only made it all that more endearing to me, because there was obvious heartfelt thought put into the book’s just as obvious political and social commentary.
Some of that commentary echoes, or at least reminded me off, observations made by Paul Farmer in his book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History.
A lot of the zombie action set pieces, as well as their evolving behaviors and intelligence, echo, or flat out repurpose, ideas and moments from Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead. I also spotted a few similarities to Resident Evil (both games and movies) as well as David Cronenberg’s zombie-adjacent thrillers Shivers and Rabid, to name just a few. There is even a healthy smattering of Stephen King's The Stand sprinkled over it all.
Which only made the book all the more fun to read. Because Carter knew what he was writing and why he was writing it. This reads just like the Italian exploitation movie it is based on, gleefully cribbing anything and everything it can to stuff into its sprawling narrative.
Carter also knows when it is best to be serious and when some tongue-in-cheek snark is needed to take the wind out of the narrative's nihilistic sails. A good example of the former is noting that the HOPE portion of Project HOPE is an acronym for Humanitarian Operations for Preserving Earth. Which reads and sounds feasible. But a giggle-snort inducing example of the latter is a political think tank organization calling itself the Foundation for American Reason and Truth. You know, F.A.R.T.
Also notable is how Carter puts in an effort to develop most of the primary characters, who come off as a lot more intelligent and interesting than they were in the movie, which was greatly appreciated.
What I did not appreciate was the frustrating to the point of being contempt inducing number of errors in the book. There were so many missing words and clumsy or repeated phrases (such as “she let herself into herself into the room,” or something to that effect) that I began to suspect the book had not been copy, or line, edited prior to publication. Considering its hefty price, around $25 to $30, I was annoyed and frustrated by the poor editorial oversight displayed here.
Yet, as frustrating as all that was, I still found myself really enjoying this over-the-top and truly epic return to conceptual form for what eventually turned into Hell of the Living Dead. I doubt any fan of the film itself, or fan of the zombie apocalypse genre in general, will finish this book feeling cheated, or all that disappointed.
So, if you want to read a big chonker of a book that is just a cheap and trashy movie at heart, but is also smart enough to keep you engaged for most of its almost 600 hundred pages, I suggest you give it a try.
Besides, any and all that have read this far will already have known if they want it to read it or not, before they even started reading this review. I hope you enjoy(ed) it as much as I did.
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