The Curse of the Screaming Dead aka Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (Tony Malanowski, 1982)

Described by Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman as one of the five worst films Troma ever distributed, The Curse of the Screaming Dead is so inept that it turns into accidental surrealist art. Day turns to night and back to day in the middle of a single short scene (sometimes, one character is shrouded in darkness while talking to another character in bright daylight), a camper van is perfectly level and still though it's supposedly driving uphill, women change into bikinis on a hunting trip in the woods because "it's too hot" (despite the men all wearing jackets in the visible fall weather) but then immediately change back into clothes because they "can't bare their bodies in the woods," every person in a conversation is filmed separately in a different location even though they are supposed to be in the same camper/stretch of woods/graveyard, actors are shot in the center of the frame in bright lighting surrounded by darkness, dialogue bounces back and forth between mundane realism and inexplicable nonsense, the two policeman who show up in the final third of the film are decades past beat cop retirement age, the sound effects can only be described as experimental ASMR, and, despite much profanity, one character responds in anger to another character with "you goofy bozo!" This may also be the only film where a zombie attack is instigated by the theft of a diary.

Yeah, stretches of this movie are boring and dimly lit, and none of the whiny, irritable characters seem like they'd be much fun to hang out with, but I can't completely resist its DIY strangeness. This is a bad movie, but it's bad in its own uniquely fascinating way.

The Curse of the Screaming Dead aka Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (hereafter shortened to Curse so I don't have to keep typing all that) begins with three longhaired party animals chugging beers and getting into arguments in their camper van while "driving" (more accurately, sitting in place) through rural Maryland on their way to a hunting trip. Supposedly in the back of the camper, three women are having a conversation in what appears to be three different kitchens. At no point in this conversation were any of the women in the same physical space. Two of the women are sisters, and the younger sister is blind, which is a major topic of conversation in the film (sample dialogue: "She may be blind, but she knows a raw deal when she sees one"), though it doesn't end up making much narrative difference, other than the blind woman being able to hear better than the rest of the gang. She's the first one to think something bad is about to go down.

As mentioned previously, the women change into bikinis for no apparent reason and just as abruptly change back into street clothes. The dudes discuss locations for the hunt and decide to try a new spot because they've been using the old spot so often that "the deer even know what kind of beer we drink." They set up camp in the new spot and find an old Civil War-era cemetery and dilapidated church. 

Mel, the mouthiest of the dudes and a kleptomaniac (though he's ashamed of himself for stealing), finds an old trunk in the church with a Confederate flag and a Rebel army captain's diary. Mel swipes the diary to read in the tent after the hunting's done. Kiyomi, the blind woman, warns against taking anything from the spot. She says her and her sister Lin's grandmother survived the bombing of Hiroshima and warned her that the dead don't care about any of their earthly possessions but are fiercely protective of their pain. (Surprisingly, the movie doesn't go for any cheap Asian jokes at the expense of the Japanese-American sisters, which is miles ahead of what Hollywood was doing with Asian characters in the '80s.)

Guess what? The captain's diary was the record of the soldiers' pain, and the soldiers want it back. The cemetery and church were the site of their deaths at the hands of the Union army after the Virginians were pushed into the Maryland woods, surrounded, and tortured. The Confederate ghouls come out of the grave and start zombieing it up, attacking our heroes, who fight back with fireworks and hunting rifles. Of particular use is Mel's illegal exploding bullets, which really do a number on the Dixieland zombies. This whole business could have been avoided if the zombies were able to just ask for the diary back instead of groaning softly and, per one of the titles, occasionally screaming.

We get another inexplicable time jump to the next afternoon, and a couple of elderly cops show up. The cops said the cemetery and church are pet projects for the governor (odd, since they are in such disarray), and he's hopping mad after all the bodies were dug up and stolen the night before. Our six heroes tell the cops about the zombie Confederates, but one of the cops won't give up on his theory that some sick joker stole all the corpses, strung them up in the trees, and made them dance to freak out the hunters. He explains this theory at least three times, probably more, but this is the kind of movie that destroys your short-term memory if you watch too much of it. He's very clear that, in his opinion, one single man was able to dig up every corpse in a cemetery and string these corpses up in trees to make them dance. He's adamant about the dancing.

His theory is eventually disproven by the return of the zombies. This leads us to more scenes of the zombies' weird groaning and an extended scene of them eating human guts, with much bizarre ASMR sound design foregrounding much lethargic slurping, chewing, lipsmacking, and more chewing. It goes on for what seems like the length of an average '80s sitcom, sans commercials.

Eventually, the gang makes it to an abandoned house, and a classic zombie denouement/diary return ensues. Some survive, some die, all of them say weird shit while doing it. If any of what I've written here strikes your fancy, this whole movie is on YouTube, but I can think of at least eight more things you'd rather be doing. Until next time, chums.