FrightFest 2016 review – Night of Something Strange

My notes on the splatter comedy.

Hulking necrophile morgue attendant Cornelius (Wayne W. Johnson) fucks a female corpse who died of a radioactive sexually-transmitted disease – and becomes an uncontrolled sex zombie, who rapes his own mother and rips out her uterus for a snack, turning her into another uncontrolled sex zombie.  Then, the film introduces teenager Christine (Rebecca C. Kasek), whose diary entry sketches in a bunch of other teen stereotypes – party princess Carrie (Toni Ann Gambale), obnoxious Freddy (Michael Merchant), blunt-smoking faux New Yorker Brooklyn (Tarrence Taylor) and pudgy tagalong Jason (John Walsh) – before they take off for the beach.  Carrie contracts the bug from a toilet Cornelius has bled in and more sex zombies run riot at the motel where the kids are shacked up, with just-quit-the-army Dirk (Trey Harrison) – boyfriend of class slut Pam (Nicola Fiore) – by default the action hero who joins Christine to fend off the slobbering killer mutants.

Director/co-writer Jonathan Straiton homages 1980s Troma (or, worse, 1990s Andreas Schnaas) with a catalogue of bodily-fluid gushes and gross-out sex acts – Cornelius sucks on a used tampon, Freddy gets a used condom slapped on his face, folks are splattered with pee, cum and gore, vehicles splatter folks who stand in the road on a regular basis, Freddy mistakenly buggers Jason (note the names) only to have his dick trapped by a rectal spasm, a zombie mailman grows a yard-long killer penis, a female sex zombie sprouts a vagina dentata which gets penetrated with a pistol, etc.  Along with the relentless baseness, this reproduces that nasty, hateful edge which makes it hard actually to enjoy Troma films the way you can, say, John Waters movies – everyone here is continually unpleasant to everyone else, without actually being very amusing.  It’s odd that the film tries to make Dirk a hero after the midpoint since he’s as much of a misogynist jerk as everyone else in the film.

It’s all-round offensive, with as much comedy homophobia as misogyny – though yet again it’s supposed to be an automatic big laugh when a guy snarls ‘bitch’ at a female monster.  The all-in feel stretches to a motelkeeping family with Texas Chainsaw tendencies who barely get started on their rampage before being overwhelmed by the sex zombies and a couple of redneck idiots who continually make bad situations worse.  I hated Redneck Zombies, Rabid Grannies, Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence and the like in the ‘80s and ‘90s … and the notion of going through all this shit again decades on is just depressing.  Co-written by Ron Bonk and Mean Gene.