Director: Charles McCrann
Cast: Charles McCrann, Beverly Sharpiro, Dennis Helfend

When it comes to B movies, quite often my thoughts gravitate to the legendary movie studio Cannon Films. They not only made quite a bit of fun schlock, but they were successful with selling a lot of it to the world market (though, alas, ultimately not enough.) If your eyes were to glance at the entire Cannon library, you will see some curious things. One of those things was that Cannon made a ton of action movies, but when it came to horror, they didn't make that many dabs into the genre. I think there's a good explanation for that. Action seems to be a universal genre - someone getting a sword rammed in their gut and blood gushing out will sell everywhere from Boston to Timbuktu. However, when it comes to horror, it seems that there are hundreds of ideas of what is considered scary and what is not. Let me give you a few examples. Westerners may not be too surprised to learn that vampires are a part of horror lore in Asia, and have been for hundreds of years. However, the kind of vampires in Asian folklore are much different from vampires in European and western folklore. In Asia, the vampires like to have their arms extended straight in front of them, like what we'd associate with the classic image of a sleepwalker. Not only that, these vampires get around not by walking, but by hopping. For an example of a film that depicts Asian vampires like those, take a look at my review for the movie Robo Vampire. Anyway, while there are many Asians that accept this portrayal of vampires, you seldom see it appear in pop culture here in the west. The answer to why that is is, I think, pretty obvious: The way that western culture has evolved over the centuries and influenced westerners would result in huge fits of laughter from westerners seeing the sight of hopping vampires.

Sometimes, however, there are certain features of popular horror themes in certain cultures that while might not seem ridiculous to other cultures, all the same get a kind of bewilderment reaction from those outsiders. One such horror theme is zombies. If you are a westerner, no doubt you know how popular zombies are in movies in western culture. However, in other parts of the world, such as Africa, zombie movies are all but non-existent. Not just home-grown zombie movies, but there doesn't seem to be much of a fanbase in those territories for zombie movies from the outside. Of course, the question comes as to why some parts of the world are really into zombie movies when some other parts simply aren't. Well, I have some theories. I think one reason is that in the countries that zombies are popular in, there is more of a feeling that most threats to being safe and healthy come from other humans. There is less of a feeling of threats from things like starvation, God-like forces, or disease. True, in countless zombie movies, zombies are created from disease or some awesome force that seems to be beyond complete human comprehension. But the end results create a menace that is still quite human in nature. Zombies, after all, are really humans who have died but have been resurrected from the dead. Another reason I think zombies are popular is because although many zombie fans live in a modern world with a lot of defenses, there is still something in the back of their mind that fears that all their comfort and security could suddenly be shattered. Zombies would be something that poses a threat that hasn't been dealt with before. How long would it take to quell the problem - if ever? So a story dealing with a zombie menace may in the back of the minds of those who indulge in the story give some safety lessons should the unthinkable happen.

Although there is still a plentiful audience out there for zombie movies, I have a feeling that the audience has been somewhat numbed by the surge of zombie movies that have appeared in recent years. To me it seems that many of these movies are interchangeable, from their flashy direction to the behavior of the zombies. Personally, I no longer have much of an appetite for modern day zombie movies. I am more interested in older zombie movies, where the things that we see again and again in the genre hadn't quite formed yet, and I might be surprised or even shocked by what I see. Toxic Zombies promised to be such a zombie movie, especially after I researched its story just before sitting down to watch it. The story? Somewhere in redneck country, there are a band of hippie marijuana growers who are getting into heated clashes with the area's federal agents. When the situation proves to be escalating out of control for the federal agents, they resort to a desperate plan to quash the marijuana operation. The agents arrange for a crop-dusting plane to fly over the marijuana growing operations, and spray a chemical that is intended to kill all the marijuana plants and subsequently drive the hippies out of business. Once the spraying of the chemical has been concluded, another agent named Tom Cole (played by the movie's writer/director, Charles McCrann), enters the area to report back to his supervisors on one of his four times a year surveillances. Cole brings along his wife Polly (played by Beverly Shapiro) and his brother Jay (played by Phillip Garfinkel), which yes, turns out be a very dumb decision. That problem, as you've probably guessed, is that the chemical has poisoned the hippies enough that they become homicidal lunatics with a desire to eat human flesh. Of course, it doesn't take long for the innocents in the area to start getting attacked by the zombies, and eventually Cole, Polly, and Jay find themselves trying to flee the area and the threat of being chomped on by the zombies.

Besides being an older take on the zombie formula, one additional fact about Toxic Zombies that got me very interested in watching it was the fact that in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, the movie was declared a "video nasty" and was withdrawn and banned from the video market there. That did suggest that the movie might have some good blood and gore... but I also remembered that the mentality of UK video censors at the time included deciding dumb stuff like banning nunchakus from movies despite not banning the deadly use of easier to get items like lead pipes or cricket bats. Sadly, in this case, our UK cousins really shouldn't have gotten into a fit with this movie. Even back then, the horror and gore in Toxic Zombies wasn't that explicit. Blood? There isn't too much on display. Some of it is shown flying through the air without its source shown, oh wow. Some bodies have a few streaks of blood on them, whoop de doo. Zombies open their mouths and some blood leaks out, oh the horror. Oh, there are some severed limbs, throats are shot (twice), but they aren't all that bloody (if at all, believe it or not.) As for the zombies themselves, their depiction from the so-called special effects department is even more pathetic. Some actors playing zombies just have darkness painted around their eyes. There are a few other zombies that have peeling skin and facial wounds, but all the makeup is so amateurish that even children will see past it and not get any sense visually that these "zombies" are anything but pathetic human actors with pathetic makeup pathetically trying to project a sense of being menacing, but being anything but.

It's not just that nobody with a sane mind would be troubled or even a little creeped out by the sight of these zombies and their "mayhem", but also how these things and other horror elements in Toxic Zombies are directed by Charles McCrann. There is simply no bite to the movie apart from when zombies pathetically clamp their teeth on necks. People get killed with hardly a shrug. There is no feeling that the situation is bit by bit going out of control. There is hardly any expressing from the characters that they are struggling really hard to keep their lives. There are scenes such as when a fleeing innocent tries to get the attention of a passing motorist that could have been milked out for great thrills, but instead have absolutely no tension or suspense because they play out slow and in a matter-of-fact fashion. It's not just the horror elements of the movie that come across as sluggish, but the story that surrounds these horror elements. Toxic Zombies is a really slow-moving story. One example of this is that it takes practically half the movie before Tom Cole, his wife, and his brother even arrive to the zombie area. Once that happens, the movie keeps dragging its feet for significantly more time before all three characters realize the danger they are in. It's not worth the wait, believe me, even though the screenplay up to that point puts in some considerable plot stupidities, ranging from the opening attempted raid on the marijuana growth operation only being done by two agents (who have nothing on them identifying themselves as agents), to the growth operation only consisting of two camping tents. Oh, and we never get to see the growing marijuana itself, all of which should give you an idea of how unbelievably cheap this movie is. If not, let me also list that Cole's "desk" in his government office is just a table, that scenes in the forest in daytime are often close to being as murky and dark as the nighttime sequences, and the one "stunt" sequence consists of a zombie holding onto the hood of a car that's only driving about five miles an hour.

I guess there is the possibility you or other viewers might get a few chuckles out of the aforementioned cheap touches in Toxic Zombies, as well as a few other touches like the musical score by Ted Shapiro, which sounds at times remarkably like the music from the 1978 movie Halloween. But believe me, the movie is otherwise so bad that it's unlikely to be worth sitting through it just to get the occasional small glitter of comic gold. While the acting by writer/director McCrann and his cronies isn't the worse I have seen in any motion picture to date, all the same the performances are mediocre at best, and at their worst sorely lacking any understanding what real people would be feeling and thinking if this cinematic story was actually happening in real life. The story is unbelievably stupid and unbelievable, with us trying to be convinced of things ranging from zombies making flaming torches to a single small crop-dusting plane expected to spray sixty square miles. But it is that slow pacing really killing any chance of momentum. And when you add factors like photography so bad that you can hardly read the title at the beginning of the movie, you don't have a real movie, you have a home movie instead, albeit one even worse than your twelve-year-old nephew or niece could make. Really. He or she would at least put passion in their effort. There's only one way I can think of to make a viewing experience of Toxic Zombies somewhat better than what I have described up to this point, and that is to have previously watched an even worse regional independent zombie horror movie made around the same time, that being Curse Of The Cannibal Confederates. But a warning: Viewing both movies close to each other would make for a really toxic situation for any person, believe me.

(Posted July 31, 2026)