Bloodeaters (1980)

Touches You

hyped garbage

best movie i've ever seen.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

One of the infamous video nasties that were banned in Britain, this one known as Forest of Fear, is still banned. It was released on video in the US as Toxic Zombies, and is also known as Blood Butchers. With all these names changes, maybe they can sneak it past the British Film Board.It is a typical zombie movie. The government sprays some unapproved substance (DROMAX) on marijuana fields on government land, and it turns the pot growers into zombies. They start killing their friends that didn't get infected, then move to campers in the woods.Lots of blood and body parts, but only one gratuitous nude scene (Debbie Link) before the whole thing starts as one pot grower is bathing out of a pail.Cameo by John Amplas (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Knightriders).For zombie completists.

Forest of Fear (U.K title) made its way on to the British list of infamous video nasties. GOD KNOWS WHY!!! To top that it is still banned in the U.K today. There is nothing disturbing about this movie, it is so unbelievably low budget, cheap gore, crap acting and an incoherent plot.... but I loved it!!! Anyway the story......The film opens (blown up to 35mm from 16mm by the way) with two men stalking through the woods. They open fire on a woman washing by a makeshift camp, shooting her in the throat. Suddenly the men are attacked and killed by a group of hippies.It turns out that the two men were Federal Officers (rather trigger happy ones at that) and the hippies are marijuana growers (unusually ruthless ones compared to how Weed cultivating hippies are normally portrayed) who have come to pick their illegal crop. Not hearing from the two Federal Officers their boss, with help from a young John '"Martin" Amplas, orders the whole area secretly sprayed with a new Herbicide to kill off the crop. And if the hippies get in the way, well that's just their hard luck.Sure enough the hippies are caught in the spraying and become contaminated. Soon after they start feeling sick and start slavering after meat before turning homicidal!Meanwhile Forest ranger Tom Cole (played by Director Charles McCrann) takes his Wife, Polly (Beverly Shapiro) and his half Brother on a fishing trip into the woods, unaware that the toxic hippies, with grey faces, sunken eyes and unsightly welts, are stumbling around in classic Zombie fashion butchering anyone they bump into. Oh, and doing a lot of gurgling…….Charles McCrann has been a busy boy here. He directs, writes, stars, edits and produces! And given this is his first (and only) film it has to be said he does a pretty good job on all fronts. And as McCrann was murdered during the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, it's nice to be able to say that he left behind a good, solid little horror film that hopefully will live on as an example of what can be achieved with little resources but a lot of effort and passion.McCrann gets things off to a good start with the ever essential to the plot 'soaping up some breasts' scene. From then on the action moves at a reasonable pace as the various separate parties all have fateful meetings. Very few scenes drag and the ones that do (like a rather peculiar 'nature break' so a young girl and her backward Brother, who are camping with their parents, can grin at some frogs) are thankfully over before causing any real strain on the viewers patience. McCrann spins the sub plots well and very little here does not work. Though one scene where our heroes are trying to escape in their car, but abandon it simply because of one flat tyre, does seem very silly and contrived…I for one, if I was fleeing for my life from a pack of killer hippies, would have driven that sucker on all four rims if it came to it!Music wise the film is very hit and miss. An effective pseudo-"Halloween" ditty plays other the titles, but from then one it's pretty much a mixture of empty background music and dodgy light comedy cues.The acting is very up and down, but McCrann does a perfectly acceptable job and everyone else is at least taking the whole thing seriously and delivering the lines with conviction and the hippies all stumble around and gurgle in a totally professional manner. John Amplas (despite what you may read in some reviews) only really appears at the end and is not one of the rabid weed growers. But he does okay in his tiny role. But it is sad to see him, 3 years after his wonderful lead performance in George A Romero's excellent "Martin", relegated to such a lowly support role in such a tiny film.Tom and Polly come across as likable and devoted to each other (though some of their romantic high jinx, accompanied by comedy flute music, could have been trimmed down), and make for leads that you genuinely care about. The highlight as far as characters go though is the alcoholic crop duster and his nagging Wife. Their less than loving relationship is delightfully summed up when, after he breathes in the Herbicide, the contaminated pilot (all sickly skin and black hollowed eye sockets) stumbles towards her only to be greeted with the following caring words; "By the look of your face I'd say your liver finally gave out"!The make up by Craig Harris does the job nicely and he who gives us some cheap but effective 'contaminated hippie' FX. Harris went on to have a varied career indeed. Including the FX on that other 'Nasty' "The Boogeyman", playing on the score to Carpenter's "The Thing" and doing sound effects/editing on such movies as "Braveheart", "Back to the Future" and "The Princess Bride". The gore on display is the most inconsistent part of the film. There are a few choice scenes of cheap 'n' cheesy mayhem (a spurting arm stump after a hand chopping, a knife in the eye, a pretty violent head bashing, a nice blood drooling throat bite and some messy bloodletting at the end) but very often the film cuts away to only show us some slightly bloodied bodies later on, or simply makes do with some blood splashed on the ground to stand in for any actual on screen death. There is certainly little here to warrant it's banning, and it is a far cry indeed from such extreme fare as "The Beast in Heat" and "Cannibal Holocaust" with whom it shared purgatory with.

Some movies are great to an individual because of his or her own personal experiences with them. This film is one of those "special films" to me. I saw it originally in 1988 or so on the old USA show "Saturday Nightmares" at the tender age of 8. Saturday Nightmares was the best, way better than "Up All Night". They showed two horrendously crappy horror films every Saturday night, starting at 8 p.m. My dad and I would get very excited for "Saturday Nightmares" because it was always incredible. We were always amused/amazed by how bad these films were and we always wondered where the hell they found them. Every week you would see two movies that would blow your mind. "Toxic Zombies" was one of these. My sister, my father and I were laughing at this trash heap of a zombie film extremely hard. I searched for it for years, and just found it at Videoscreams three years ago. Still horrible, and I still laugh at it.

The film opens with a shot of a car in the distance travelling along a dirt track in the middle of thick forest towards the camera, we wait for what seems like ages before it reaches us. Inside are two Federal Agents (James Hart and John Kuhi). They stumble across a hippies camp site. Jackie (Debbie Link) is bathing, less than three minutes on the clock and we get some naked breast shots, I'm almost impressed. Realizing that this is camp of a bunch of illegal marijuana growers they attempt to arrest the hippies. Jackie is shot through her throat and killed, the other hippies, manage to turn the tables on the Feds and kill them both. Back in civilization the Federal Agents are missed. In their boss Briggs (Paul Haskin) office, we know it's a Feds office because there's a big table, swivel chair and an American flag, he tells agent Phillips (John Amplas) to spray the whole area with an experimental, untested, toxic, chemical herbicide called Dromax. Back at the camp site the hippies decide to harvest what they can and leave before more Feds turn up. As they start to harvest the crop five of the hippies (Bob Hanson, Gerald Cullen, Ronald Keinhuis, Kim Roff and make up effects man Craig Harris) get covered in Dromax as it's dumped by a constantly drunk crop sprayer (Bob Larson) from his plane. They all start to cough up blood and look very sick. The hippie leader (Dennis Graber) and his girlfriend (Debra O'Leary) both escaped being sprayed and quickly find out that the Dromax has turned their friends into bloodthirsty mindless zombies! A husband (Roger Mills) his wife (Pat Kellis) plus their two children Amy (Judy Brown) and Jimmy (Kevin Hanlon) and anyone else the hippie zombies can find are attacked. It's up to the local forest ranger Tom Cole (played by editor, producer, writer and director Charles McCrann as Charles Austin) his wife Polly (Beverly Shapiro) and his half brother Jay (Philip Garfinkel) who are on weekend fishing trip, to try and save the day and put an end to the hippie zombies reign of bloodthirsty terror! Starring in, edited, produced, written and directed by Charles McCrann, who according to the IMDb died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. Well, we know who to blame then. I didn't exactly hate it but at the same time I certainly didn't like it either. Generally quite poorly made with awful acting, cheap effects, extremely static boring photography and lackluster instantly forgettable music. There's next to no gore or violence in it, a chopped off hand, cut off leg, a few gunshot wounds and a few splashes of blood here and there, that's it. The only nudity is the woman taking a bath in the opening scenes. The script sucks, it has no excitement, tension and very little originality. The hippie zombies have no purpose, their bite doesn't turn others into zombies and their never shown eating anyone, they just kill for the hell of it. Most of the characters in the film aren't even given proper names which shows how much character development McCrann was interested in. The limp ending is terrible as well, it just sort of ends all of a sudden. The dialogue is very sparse and some of the worst I've heard in a long time, none of the characters are developed at all, I couldn't care less what happened to anyone at any point in the film. This film has various alternate titles including Bloodeaters, Toxic Zombies, Blood Butchers and it's known as Forest of Fear here in the UK. Poor, don't waste your time.