Dude, you got zombies in my Nazi war movie!

Yeah, well, you got Nazis in my zombie flick!

Wait, how about we combine them and make a movie about … zombie Nazis! They come back to life to kill a bunch of annoying med students in the mountains of Norway. We’ll call it Dead Snow and it’ll be an homage to Sam Raimi, only even wetter. We’ll have this scene where one of the zombies gets stuck in a tree and one of the heroes goes off the edge of a cliff with another Nazi zombie holding on to his waist, and the only thing that keeps them from falling all the way is that the med student is holding on to the tree Nazi’s intestines, using them as a rope.

Yeah, and we can have a guy cut off his arm with a chainsaw because he’s been bitten and he thinks he has to cut off any body part a zombie chomps down on, and then another zombie bites him in the crotch. Just imagine the look on his face!

We can make it a little scary at the beginning and then let it all get funny, like Raimi used to do. Not too much sex, if you don’t count the guy who gets ridden hard in the outhouse just before the girl gets pulled into the dump hole.

And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be good, because one of those assholes who write for Flick Attack will kind of like it, no matter how lame it is.

Dude, I write for Flick Attack.

Really? I meant one of the other assholes.

Well, all right, then. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.

So maybe you saw the 2008 American horror movie Quarantine and thought it was pretty good. Even then, I knew it was a remake of a Spanish film called [Rec]. Now I’ve seen the original and while I still think Quarantine is okay, I’m here to tell you that [Rec] is a 24-carat-solid-gold, plow-pulling, lottery-winning, mind-melting pants-pisser. I jumped out of my skin so often, I’m not sure I can get it back on again.

Manuela Velasco stars as Angela Vidal, one of those cute and perky TV reporterettes who get all the cat-stuck-in-tree human interest stories. She and her cameraman, Pablo (heard, but unseen real cinematographer Pablo Rosso), are doing a piece on what firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires, and this night, they’re called to an aging apartment building because some old woman is frighteningly sick. Like, she wants to bite people and rip large chunks of flesh off and devour them.

And then the corpses she leaves behind become reanimated and pick up her bad habits. And the cops show up, bringing the Army with them, and they seal off the building and won’t let anyone out.

As with the remake, [Rec] is shown to us through Pablo’s camera, so there’re a lot of jittery images, but it works better because co-directors Jaume Balaquero and Paco Plaza make the camera a character and not just a cinematic gimmick. The explanation of the insta-plague is also different in Spanish, and much spookier. Even the language works for non-Spanish speakers because it adds to the confusion.

I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the horror. So will you. —Doug Bentin

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Macabre is Lamberto Bava’s first solo directing credit and it arrived in the year of his more famous father’s (Mario Bava) death. The film is late giallo and lacks many of the genre’s traditional touches, but Lamberto manages the suspense well and delivers some genuinely creepy moments.

Bernice Stegers stars as Jane Baker, a New Orleans wife and mother who leaves her kids in the care of the yard man one morning so she can tryst with her lover, Frank. While the two of them are playing Ride ‘Em Cowboy, her adolescent daughter (Veronica Zinny) drowns her little brother in the bathtub. Someone calls Jane, who gets Frank to drive her home. On the way, they’re involved in a freak accident and Frank loses his head. Literally.

One year later, Jane is released from an asylum and moves into the old house where she and Frank used to meet. The blind landlord, Robert (Stanko Molnar), who has a crush on her, is glad she’s back until he starts hearing the sounds of passion issuing from her apartment as she calls out Frank’s name.

At varying points, the movie could become a ghost story, a psycho kid story, a creepy landlord story, or a nutty woman in the upstairs apartment story. Actually, it blends elements from all of them together. Unfortunately, Bava gives in to the temptation of tossing in a last-second kicker designed to shock that just doesn’t work and futzes with the story as we expect it to end. Bad move.

Filmed in New Orleans, the flick lets us see parts of the city that aren’t the French Quarter, and that’s nifty. It’s a near-miss that works for 88.5 minutes out of 89. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.