Strange incidents at a New York morgue (body parts are being removed from corpses. Then a nurse is found trying to bite into a heart from one of the deceased) leads a group of scientists to an Indonesian island where they encounter a doctor who performs messed up experiments on both the living and the dead.

Please don’t watch this film during or just after you’ve eaten a meal. There’s a lot of gore which, for horror fans, is obviously a plus. Nothing is shied away from and the effects are excellent. A large part of the film’s budget must have been spent on animal entrails. Wanna see someone have their eyeballs plucked out of their skull? Or a zombie having their skull caved in by way of a boat’s propellor. Of course you do! These scenes don’t disappoint.

Genre favourite Ian McCulloch heads the cast and is as dependable as ever.

Some of the dialogue is also unintentionally hilarious. On discovering that something truly bizarre is going on in the morgue, a senior doctor utters the immortal line, ‘Oh no! It looks like we have a psychopathic deviant on the staff!’ Quite.

It’s also great to see that Zombie Holocaust boasts cannibals as well as zombies. My heart sank when the action switched from NYC to more tropical climbs. But my mood soon changed as events went from 0-100 very quickly indeed! I loved the scene where half of the cast become cannibal fodder in a matter of seconds. And to answer a question horror fans must have pondered- cannibals *are* afraid of zombies.

Zombie Holocaust was later re-edited (which involved sequences from a completely different film being spliced in!) and released as Doctor Butcher M.D. (which the poster helpfully tells us stands for Medical Deviant!) I don’t really see why this new film was created as Zombie Holocaust is such a fun movie on it’s own terms.

This is more killer than filler. Imagine watching this in a Grindhouse cinema or Drive-in back in the day.

4.5 out of 5 stars