Rated R

Directed by Fred Dekker

Written by Fred Dekker

Starring Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins

My friends this is the quintessential 80’s B-movie that no one should ever go without watching at least once in their lifetime. It includes everything from alien spaceships to ax murdering psycho’s not mention my favorite movie subject the walking dead. Let’s not forget we also get treated to the usual comedic horror and frat boys chasing after busty sorority girls that the 80’s was so popular for.

The movie starts of aboard an alien spacecraft with two aliens having what appears to be a violent dispute over some sort of canister, one of them manages to jettison the canister out into space in the middle of laser fire.

The canister crash lands on earth in 1959, next to the Corman University campus grounds, where a couple of young lovers Johnny and Pam are making out in their car. Johnny goes into the woods to find the canister and ends up having an alien space slug fly into his mouth. Pam who is waiting nervously in the car ends being viciously hacked by an escaped mental patient with an axe. This scene is all filmed in black and white so it gives it a great 1950’s feel kind of reminiscent of “The Blob”.

We move forward to 1986, where freshmen Chris (Jason Lively) and his friend J.C. (Steve Marshall) who is handicapped and walks with crutches engage in witty banter as they stroll through Corman University. Chris instantly falls in love with sorority girl Cynthia Cronenberg, but being a nervous freshman he can’t bring himself to talk to her, despite J.C.’s sarcastic prodding. So instead he tries pledging the Beta fraternity to impress the new found object of his affection. What Chris dosen’t know is that 1) they’re dorks and 2) the Beta president Brad is none other than Cynthia’s current boyfriend which pretty much puts a damper on Chris’s plans.

They are given a pledge assignment nonetheless. Chris and J.C. have to steal a cadaver and deposit it on the steps of a rival fraternity. What do they do, they sneak into the University Med building, and accidentally luck into something else: A cryogenic chamber, with Johnny frozen in a tank (the guy whose head got invaded with a slug in the beginning of the movie). This being the only corpse at hand, they try to steal poor old Johnny, but end up freaking out and running for the hills when his eyes snap open.

Johnny, of course, is not dead, only zombified by the space slugs. After killing a medical grad student and spitting a space slug into his mouth, Johnny goes on a walk across campus and ends up at the window of the sorority house that used to be Pam’s and now belongs to Cynthia. We are treated to a view from Cynthia’s window of a smiling naked zombie whose head splits open and spills hundreds of zombie making slugs into the near by shrubbery.

At this point a large scale police investigation ensues into both the dead grad student and the ambulatory cadaver. Enter Detective Cameron (Tom Atkins), world-weary and hard-boiled; who was also the Patrolman who discovered Pam’s body after the axe murderer was finished with it. The fact that he was Pam’s ex-boyfriend has really messed up his life ever since.

Cameron tracks down Chris and J.C., who both were identified by the Med Center night janitor but since they weren’t seen running from the building with the corpse, they are let go. But not before Cameron scares Chris shitless by telling him how he had tracked down the psycho, blown him away, and buried him in a vacant lot which is now occupied by the sorority house mother’s cottage.

OK let’s see there’s a corpse of an ax-murdering psycho under a building right next to where the space slugs that like to reanimate the dead spilled out of zombie Johnny’s head—-hmmmm? I smell an ax-wielding zomibie in the making. Don’t you?

Well eventually all hell breaks loose and the mayhem ensues, a busload of frat boys on the way to pick up their dates for the formal, crashes and kills everyone onboard, then reanimate and proceed on with their dates, while Cameron, Chris, and Cynthia defend the sorority house with a 12-gauge shotgun and a flamethrower. Poor J.C. becomes slug bait and he himself turn into one of the walking dead.

The movie’s climatic scene involves blowing the heads off zombie frat boys also there’s even the use of a lawnmower in one scene.

For an 80’s B-movie this one is just perfect in my book. The low budget is not apparent in any of the scenes. Even the alien ship interiors and the 1959 scene we are given the impression that there was plenty of money to fund this project. Writer/director Fred Dekker wrote a script full of witticisms and in-jokes classic of the 1980’s horror comedy era complete with comic book gore, great pacing, and just plain fun.

Interesting Fact: There are two versions of the film’s ending. The version tagged onto the theatric and subsequent VHS release ends with Chris and Cynthia watching the sorority house burn down when the dead dog returns. The scene ends when the dog opens its mouth and a slug jumps out at the camera (and presumably infecting Cynthia).

This was not what Dekker intended, however. The ending he wanted: the scene of Chris and Cynthia standing in front of the burning sorority house moves to the street where cop cars race down the street. We then see the charred and zombified Cameron shuffling down the street when he suddenly stops and falls to the ground where the slugs scamper out and head into a cemetery. But before any chaos can ensue, the alien space ship from the beginning of the film comes back and retrieves their experiment.

The latter ending wound up never making it when Dekker made the admitted mistake of showing it to the studio before the effects were done. Not impressed with what they saw, they requested a different ending that became a cheap scare. Dekker’s original ending has been seen in some television broadcast versions of the film, and is available on bootleg DVD copies being sold on eBay.