Zombie Holocaust aka Doctor Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980)

Zombie Holocaust, titled Doctor Butcher M.D. upon initial theatrical and home video release in the United States (Dr. Butcher was my primary care physician until he stopped accepting my employer's insurance), was filmed simultaneously with another Italian horror flick, Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Both films share sets and some actors and crew, and both begin in New York City before moving to a remote island (a fictional Caribbean island in Zombie and Indonesia's Maluku Islands in Zombie Holocaust, though Lazio, Italy, mostly stands in for both; Fulci also filmed in the Dominican Republic and Mexico). Fulci's film is the only one of the two that features a zombie fighting a shark, but Girolami gives us zombies and cannibals and a mad scientist. Take that, Fulci.

The movie opens in a New York hospital morgue. Some weirdo in a trench coat sneaks in at night and saws off the hand of a corpse. In what will be an unexplained Zombie Holocaust trend, bodies don't appear to have any bones. A budget thing? "We only have money for guts and blood. You want bones? Go to Hollywood." The next day, when a doctor who is listed as Dr. Drydock on IMDb, Dr. Dreylock on Wikipedia, and Dr. Drake in the dubbed English dialogue of the version I watched (Walter Patriarca) and his morgue assistant/aspiring anthropologist Lori Ridgeway (the stunning Alexandra Delli Colli) prepare to cut into the cadaver's stomach for a class of medical students, the absent hand is immediately noticed, despite Dr. Three-Names downplaying it. A couple of smartasses crack wise about the missing hand, infuriating the doctor, who kicks the students out and cancels class for the day.

The doc is disturbed. Several corpses have been mysteriously robbed of body parts in recent weeks, but Dr. Whatever won't call the cops despite Lori's insistence because he doesn't want his hospital's reputation damaged. This leads to a classic bit of conversation between the doc and his assistant. Dr. Maybe-Drake: "We must have a psychopathic deviant in the hospital.… Something like this would make sense in a society of primitive savages, but today in New York City?" Lori: "But Dr. Drake, do you really think we're that much different than the savages?"

Events escalate from corpse-robbing to murder, with a strange symbol left on the bodies that anthropology nut Lori recognizes as a ritual symbol on one of the Maluku Islands. Despite the doctor covering things up, a journalist named Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan) hears the rumors and barges into Lori's apartment for a scoop. Lori doesn't like her pushy style or the fact that she interrupted her gratuitous nudity moment (relax, pervs, we get several more nude scenes later) and gives her the brush-off. Back at the hospital, an orderly from (you guessed it) the Maluku Islands, is caught eating a patient's heart. He leaps to his death by smashing through a window. We get a great shot here of his stand-in dummy falling several stories to the sidewalk below and landing with such impact that the dummy's arm breaks off. They leave this scene in the movie, though when the camera returns to the orderly's body, his arm is once again intact. I love it. When the arm of the dummy falls off, you gotta keep it in the movie. It just looks too cool.

Lori finally convinces Dr. Three-Names to call the police. Two men show up who I assumed were NYPD detectives. They ask a lot of questions about the victims and the orderly, and Lori gives them the Maluku Islands scoop and introduces them to an anthropology professor she assists when she's not assisting in the morgue.

When Lori goes back home, she hears someone in her apartment, and her Maluku Islands dagger is missing. Fortunately, one of the two NYPD detectives (or so I thought) happens to be knocking on her door, and he searches the apartment. He doesn't find the intruder, but he sees the empty case where the dagger was. Then he says, "We should call the police." What the fuck? I thought youse guys were the police. What gives? I'll tell ya what gives. The two dudes who show up in trench coats and start investigating the crimes right after the hospital workers call the police are not detectives. They're anthropologists! This is the kind of shit that happens all the time in Zombie Holocaust. And I have no problem with it. I thrive on this kind of nonsense. It gives me life.

The two anthropologists are Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCulloch, not the Echo and the Bunnymen singer) and his assistant George Harper (Peter O'Neal). The two men plan an expedition to the Maluku Islands and invite Lori along for even more assistance. She's reluctant because she lived there as a child and doesn't want to spoil her fond memories. What? Why is she only bringing this up now? And why was she living there? We never find out. She finally relents but is irritated to discover that annoying journalist Susan is also on the trip because she's George's girlfriend and thinks this story will put her on the map.

One of Peter's old buddies, a former New York doctor and medical researcher named Obrero (Donald O'Brien), now lives on one of the Maluku Islands and hosts our quartet. He gives them directions to the island connected to the New York corpse-robbing but warns them to be careful because the natives don't like outsiders. His assistant (so many assistants in this thing) Molotto (professional wrestler-turned-actor Dakar) takes them out on the boat the next day, until Peter realizes Molotto is deliberately steering them to the wrong island. He makes Molotto change course against his will. Big mistake, dawg.

Dr. Obrero was deliberately deceiving his old buddy to keep him away from the island and its secrets (and Dr. Obrero's), but now that Peter's found the island, friendship is just another word. Our gang has to fend off the island's cannibalistic natives, bloodthirsty zombies (who are mostly your basic run-of-the-mill zombies except for the cool didgeridoo-esque sounds they make), and Dr. Obrero himself and his really fucked-up laboratory. Interestingly, the cannibals are filmed like Romero's Night of the Living Dead ghouls (several shots are ripped off wholesale) more than the zombies. We also get some pagan rituals involving body painting and a stone altar with a silhouette indention carved into it. We don't know what any of this means or why it causes certain events at the film's conclusion, but it does give Lori another excuse to get naked.

I enjoyed the absurdist New York chunk of the movie more than the standard-issue mad scientist, zombie, and racist cannibalism biz, but Girolami keeps things moving and is not afraid of piling on the blood and gore, Delli Colli has a mesmerizing movie face, and the dubbed English dialogue is a source of joy for me. There is always something beautifully off-kilter and hilariously strange about the way English-language rhythms, sentence logic, and slang get mildly scrambled in translation in mid-'60s-early '90s dubbed Italian horror, and it's one of the many reasons those films are so pleasurable, even a less-than-stellar example like Zombie Holocaust.