Film Review: Zombio 2: Chimarao Zombies (2013)

SYNOPSIS:

When a zombie outbreak afflicts a small, Brazilian town, a group of idiotic survivors are forced to defend themselves and their countries from the newfound terror. With weapons ranging from an unloaded gun to graphic nudity, the band of misfits attempts to stop the spread of the virus and save themselves.

REVIEW:

The film opens with signage that states “The owners of this theater encourage you to eat, drink, and masturbate.” Is there anything else that really needs to be said about this film?

Yes, actually. A lot more, as a matter of fact. In a film that feels more like a National Lampoon or Troma movie, director Petter Baiestorf draws from his John Waters-influenced roots to make one of the most intentionally disgusting and needlessly violent movies I’ve ever seen.

To say I loved every minute of it would be a stretch, as the first ten minutes of the movie were filled with zombie slowly stumbling around and a man walking down a road to the roll of the opening credits while ill-fitting happy music blared in the background. In fact, the happy-go-lucky music was startlingly out of place throughout most of the music. One of the main characters, the police officer Chibamar Bronx, even had his own theme music that played almost literally every time he was on the screen. I couldn’t help but think back to Wes Craven’s original Last House On The Left’s bizarre music choice, though this film used it more for comedic effect than to make the film more unsettling (as Craven did.)

Check out the unsettling trailer for Zombio 2: Chimarao Zombies (2013) HERE

Zombio 2 is highly irreverent, feeling more like an exploitation picture than a splattergore film. When I saw explicit nudity, I mean it both figuratively and literally. There are several scenes of full-frontal female nudity, which is not only needless (often the best kind), but used to get a laugh more often than not. There is a scene where a prostitute beats her pimp with her breasts. This is, of course, after he pukes green slime onto her feet, causing a chain reaction that culminates with her vomiting onto the back of his head. There is also a randomly inserted blowjob scene, because “it’s not polite to deny a blowjob to someone.” Maybe in Zombio 2 it’s not… From a man peeing on a zombie to see if it’s just a dead body instead of the reanimated dead, to a zombie pulling a woman’s pants off just because, the film uses nudity as a crutch like very few others I’ve seen. There’s even a scene with a rotating micropenis, followed shortly by a weird western scene intercut with a rotating vagina. Why? Well… because. That’s why.

The zombie effects were actually decent, though they looked a bit more like burn victims than the zombies we’re used to, and were clearly stumbling actors wearing grotesque masks. The gore was, for the most part, very well done, especially for what was obviously a low budget movie. And there were buckets of it, for sure. From disembowelments to impalements, Zombio 2 had a little something for everyone in the creative and disgusting kills department. While I can’t say that Baiestorf did anything particularly innovative in this film, he certainly did what he did extremely well. No, the film isn’t realistic. Not at all, actually. But the gore itself felt like a more realistic Troma, which is never a bad thing.

Baiestorf has called himself a student of John Waters, and from necrophilia to eyeball licking, you really get the feel that this is a Waters zombie flick. The acting wasn’t just subpar, but just about the worst I’ve ever seen. The film was ridiculously goofy, with horribly mismatched subtitles, but the over-the-top antics of our cast of characters actually feel almost real, like what we would all actually be like if we were in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Bronx, the cop character, forgets bullets for his gun, instead having to pistol whip his way through. One of the townspeople snaps and ties a zombie to a chair, taking out his frustration on the poor zombie’s teeth and intestines. There are two characters that leave the relative safety of their bunker to get more cocaine. Stupid, yes, but probably realistic if you were experiencing all of this with some people I’ve known over the years.

In a movie in which there aren’t many characters whose intestines we don’t see, Chibamar Bronx delivers the best line of the film: “Shit, this has been a bad day.”