I had not seen the movie until now,  so I have no nostalgic blindness that makes me overlook the stupidity.

This movie is one of the reasons why horror is considered a low form of cinema.  There are too idiotic parts to make this anything but a dalliance.  Perhaps that is all that one wishes in a horror movie, but there are some horror movies that are cerebral, or that provide more than cool shots here and there.

Before I begin ridiculing the movie, I would like to point out that there is one very good aspect, and that is the inclusion of nudity.  It comes from a time when there wasn’t as much fear to show the female form.

Another positive thing that can be noted is that the zombies in some scenes appear to be dead.  Their faces do not change expression, which makes them appear undead.  I favor this depiction, but of course, the movie has zombies that look like someone was reading too many newspaper pages and smudged ink in their faces.

The action is ridiculous.   Molotov cocktails are prepared.  When thrown, inside a dwelling, of all places, they miss a gang of zombies completely.  While the fire burns, another bottle is hurled, but the shot that was previously in flames now appears as if no fire had ever occurred there.  This happens again.  It was so stupid that I actually laughed.

The zombies are noisy and lumbering retards, but they manage to appear like ninjas, suddenly and silently behind people who are on guard.  There is also a zombie in the ocean who adroitly fights a shark.  The funniest straying from zombie behavior is when a woman’s hair is grabbed, and she is pulled into a shard of wood.  If a zombie just goes around biting people and acts retarded, how would it suddenly devise such a tactic?

This brings me to the behavior of the humans.  Older movies like these seem to show people as idiots who forget self defense when there is a monster.  A woman is grabbed only by a few strands of hair, and as her face is pulled toward a sharp splinter of wood, all she can do is look at the object in total stupidity and fear.  If you ever play-wrestled a girl, you know that they are masters of squirming out of any hold.  So this legendary scene that reportedly horrified audiences was actually a source of laughter for me.  It was just too stupid to be taken seriously.  I would use it in a comedy, actually.

There are other silly bits of action and behavior, like when a person driving a jeep to escape zombies isn’t paying attention to the road.  In front of him there is a zombie.  Instead of running over it, the driver reacts as if it is an insurmountable barrier, and then he drives out of control and slams into a tree after a minute.  Why didn’t he use the breaks.  To make matters more silly, a backseat passenger tears the front of his ankle.

The story elements are ignorant or boring.   Perhaps the special effects at one time were considered good, but I found them to be funny.    I watched the movie more an an outsider who was trying to see this as someone from the past would have, but I had to change attitude and view it as a comedy.  There was no substance, nothing nightmarish, and nothing interesting, side from the exquisite form of the topless actress.