Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007)

If you’re ever boarding a commercial airline and the pilot happens to mention it’s his last flight before retirement and a long vacation with the grandkids, turn around and get off! Because there’s a middle-aged housewife zombie locked up in the cargo bay and she. Wants. Out.

The proof is in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, which is like Snakes on a Plane, minus the snakes, adding the undead, but keeping same the ratio of “fuck” and its variations to all other words spoken. I’m fairly certain the subtitle only exists to hammer this point home, and even potentially confuse/trick viewers too clueless to know the difference.

Soap actor David Chisum is no Samuel L. Jackson, but his FBI agent has a gun. So does Richard Tyson as a federal marshal with a beret that, at certain angles, make his hair look like Princess Leia. There are three super-hot flight attendants (that’s how you know it’s fiction) on the Paris-bound plane, one pro golfer whose carry-on is a golden putter, Kevin J. O’Connor in the John Malkovich role of kooky criminal, several douchebags and, eventually, a jumbo jet full of zombies that just seem to come out of nowhere, despite the confined setting.

Once it gets going, Flight is awfully fun, but it could’ve been more fun, had the whole of it played things as over-the-top as the last chunk of scenes. One moment even veers into the purposely slapstick deaths of the great Final Destination 2. It gives you a lot of simple-minded entertainment for your ticket, but no free bag of peanuts. —Rod Lott

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Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (1979)

One thing I truly love about watching forgotten exploitation films are coming across moments where the filmmakers manage to transcend their obvious limitations (be it budget, talent or a combination of both) and create a sequence that truly stands out as something far more memorable than it has any right to be.

For the majority of its running time, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend (aka The Great American Girl Robbery) is little more than a blatant excuse to connive scenarios in which its titular characters are compelled to expose their breasts, but hidden at the end is a genuinely engaging heist sequence as breathlessly enjoyable as anything you could expect to see in a major studio film of the era.

So what I’m saying is that to get to the good part of this movie, you’ll have to sit through a lot of nudity featuring a bunch of attractive young women dressed in short skirts and very tight T-shirts. There are clearly worse ways to spend your time.

As the kidnapper/mastermind/former pro football player, co-writer Jason Williams (of Flesh Gordon fame) manages to walk the hero/villain line surprisingly well — at least enough to earn the final moment of connection he shares with the film’s nominal heroine (Kristine DeBell, a Playboy cover girl who went hardcore in the X-rated Alice in Wonderland before moving on to mainstream fare like Meatballs and The Big Brawl).

The rest of the performances are mostly abysmal, but in that amusingly porno way, that actually adds charm to a production rather than detracts from it. —Allan Mott

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Zombie High (1987)

Popular legend has it that when Zombie High was (very briefly) released to theaters, its distributor printed the negative with the reels in the wrong order and nobody could tell the difference. True or not, there’s no denying the film has a jagged, unfinished feel to it that is simply too strong to be overcome by its talented cast and a plot ripe with satiric potential.

Virginia Madsen — at the height of her Virginia Madsen-ness — plays a scholarship student at a prestigious prep academy, which has just started admitting female students (including her roommate, Sherilyn Fenn, only then at the cusp of her potential Sherilyn Fenn-ness). Despite its reputation and successful alumni, there’s something definitely off about the students at the school. Turns out, they’re all emotionless zombies whose brains have been drained to provide the serum necessary to keep its ageless faculty members alive.

Despite acknowledging the comic possibilities of its plot in the third act, Zombie High ends up being a dry, flaccid movie that completely fails to take what it has and turn it into something entertaining. As a result, the few moments that do stand out seem to have happened more by accident than design. That it ends with a bizarre animated sequence apparently inspired by similar sequences found in Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer only adds to the confusion.

A horror/comedy that is never frightening or funny, Zombie High is one of those films that prove that an interesting concept is ultimately powerless against a terrible script and incompetent execution.—Allan Mott

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Eurotrip (2004)

Found National Lampoon’s European Vacation too mature and sophisticated? Then Eurotrip is for you. Not only is it from the producers of Road Trip, its plot seems like a discarded draft of Road Trip. After being dumped by his girlfriend on the day of his high school graduation, Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) receives an e-mail from his German pen pal, who suggests some face-to-face consolation. Wrongly believing Mieke to be a guy, Scotty tells his online friend to “fuc off,” only to learn that Mieke (Euro pop tart Jessica Boehrs) is, in fact, a hot blonde. His hasty reply results in her blocking his e-mails, so he foregoes a summer internship to hightail it to Berlin to explain himself. (Couldn’t he just have e-mailed her from another account?)

Accompanying him is the requisite annoying/horny best pal, and because no Hollywood teen-trip movie is complete without crazy shenanigans and hee-larious misunderstandings, they also encounter enraged soccer hooligans, a robot mime, a creepy Italian guy (SNL’s Fred Armisen), lots of scraggly naked fat dudes, oft-topless hookers and, most belabored, the Pope.

Eurotrip aims for crude laughs and earns some in gags involving a cymbal-playing monkey, David Hasselhoff and the aforementioned Armisen. But much of it is just being vulgar or stupid for vulgar and stupid’s sake. I guess either you find a near-incestuous encounter between inebriated brother and sister incredibly humorous or you don’t. Ditto a kindergartener who apes noted Jew-killer Hitler, or a impoverished girl peeing while standing up on the sidewalk. I’m sure the kids will eat it up.

It’s worth noting that minute for minute, Eurotrip contains more gratuitous nudity than any movie of recent memory; the film is bustling with breast-rubbing, barely dressed prostitutes and public sexual encounters … and, unfortunately, dozens of uncircumcised Europenises in full view. Not since The Exorcist has the big screen seen such horrors. How in the hell did they get Matt Damon to cameo? —Rod Lott

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