The Treasure of the Living Dead (1982)
"La tumba de los muertos vivientes" (original title)

With the legendary stinker reputation that this Jess Franco fable bestows (together with Jean Rollin's 'Zombie Lake'), I just could help myself to see what all the fuss was about. To tell the truth I was expecting something much, much worse when I got to the end of it, while viewable (think along the lines of a crash car taking place and you simply having trouble taking your eyes off it) I still couldn't deny just how uninvolved, flat and dull it was despite being compelled.

This leery zero-budget schlock never captures the premise's promising idea (where it has Nazi zombies protecting the gold from anyone who enters the oasis in the African desert) and doesn't go anywhere we haven't already been before. The lack of money for the production wouldn't have helped, but the execution is clunky and tame on all fronts for something that needed to be more risqué (no gore or nudity). A repetitively slow-going mess with incoherent story-telling and woodenly wordy script is what comes about. It's hard to get excited seeing the same lingering zooms, ponderous actions and having to listen to Daniel White's lousy score of cringe-induced skews being dragged out.

The ultra-cheap FX work for the threatening zombies (who seem to like to croak and shuffle) look like there done up in scrappy papier-mâché, but it has a decaying quality to it that's effective. Murky, washed out photography and lack of lighting doesn't make good use of the exotically bone-dry locations or helping to figure out just when it's night or day. Atmosphere is non-existent, but there's one decent creepy image Franco pulls off involving zombie silhouettes' moving down the dunes with the sun setting (or was it rising) in the backdrop and an well-organised explosive war set-piece during the sequence we're learning about the history of the Oasis and it's dead protectors. Acting is poor (but there are some stunning women about), and the character's they play (mainly the college kids) are plain stupid.

A doggedly uneventful zombie film that just manages to hold a spell over you. I don't know how though?