Zombie Nation is about a murderous cop Joe Singer (AMERICAN actor Gunther Ziegler) who abducts and kills women. I would mention more of the plot, but for a whole hour, that's all we get!
When the movie isn't repeating the same formula of Singer picking up women and taking them to his 'love shack', it includes random scenes of people fight clubbing and main characters who vanish from the plot without explanation.
Singer, when not taking away duffel bags containing corpses right in front of his rookie partner-who's completely oblivious to what's in them-has flashbacks to his childhood at an asylum that his nutso mother ran. I can only assume that after his mom's asylum was shut down, Singer was relocated to somewhere in Germany, because AMERICAN cop Joe Singer, born and raised in AMERICA has exactly the kind of accent you'd expect from someone named Gunther Ziegler.
Having served with Singer in Iraq, all the other senior cops in the precinct try their best to cover up their friend's crimes in their state of the art police station...
...that apparently also moonlights as an Asian history goods storage warehouse. The police station in this film is seriously one of the worst I've ever seen. Apart from the pipes and steam dials, the walls of the set aren't even painted all the way!
This whole covering up their friend's murders doesn't seem like such a big deal to them though as they're probably the most corrupt police team ever on film, having their own hit-list of people, who they readily use as fall guys and sending masked thugs to beat up the rookie cop and his wife for reporting that Singer might be a little wacko.
So I suppose you're all probably wondering where the zombies are in this movie, it's called Zombie Nation after all, you only need to look at that box cover to see a ravenous monster out for human flesh...who is not in this film. There is only a grand total of six zombies in a film that's called Zombie Nation! And they're not even zombies, they're just women with raccoon make-up over their eyes!
Thanks to a ritual performed by a group of voodoo priestesses, all of Singer's victims come back to life to take revenge on him. They're not zombies though, they act just like normal people, except in their first scenes as zombies, where, in both scenes in question, the worst, the absolute worst suited music play as they chow down on their unsuspecting victims (who makes business calls in the middle of the woods anyway?). This revenge though only takes place in the final ten minutes of the film, so for the rest of their onscreen time, the dead women devote to dancing and talking with the voodoo priestesses, who talk about the women's perception of themselves and that instead of eating people, they should eat cheeseburgers.
One of the film's funniest moments comes with the arrival of Singer's father, the pastor at the local church in Sunville, Austria...Whoops, I mean Alabama. Yes, we're really supposed to buy that the heavily accented German Gunther Ziegler is from the South! His father's accent is also German and even more ridiculous, almost literally inflecting Z's and V's as he talks! Even stranger is that the actor playing the father isn't even German, he's just putting on the accent! As for who this actor is, I won't say, but if you choose to find out (or if you recognise him from the below photo), chances are, you'll be surprised as hell!
And one of the film's more baffling scenes is when a psychiatrist (played by producer/director/writer Ulli Lommel) visits Singer. In a nonsensical homage to The Marathon Man, all this shrink does is repeat the word 'is it safe' about thirty times.
Ulli Lommel has made quite a boring affair with Zombie Nation, but it looks like he did his best, since the movie's budget was unimaginably low, only about $1500. The lack of budget is especially noticeable in some parts of the film where the film quality plunges from normal to terrible and back.
As for Lommell's film's, they get worse, far far FAR worse! I'll get to them and to Lommel himself (and why I don't hate him as a film-maker) in later posts, for now though, everyone pick up their camcorders and try to make a worse film than Zombie Nation!
Edit: Because I'm an idiot, I forgot to talk about this film's acting, and how awesome Gunther Ziegler is. I rectify this in my post for other Lommel film, The Devonsville Terror.
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