This is an updated version of a review that was originally published in Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.
The most shocking detail in Todd Cook’s Death Metal Zombies isn’t the scene where a zombie stabs someone in the butthole. It’s not even when we find out that the drummer in Cooks’ band uses Sabian cymbals instead of Zildjian. No, the real shocker is the moment when we realize that there are other human beings starring in this movie besides Todd and his wife, Lisa. This is like waking up in the morning with no skin. We’re so acclimated to seeing the Cooks hang out and make sandwiches (Lisa Cook’s Deadly Workout) or watch them watch Friday the 13th: Part VII (The Dummy) that this revelation is alarming, confusing, and unprecedented.
In other words, Todd Cook (almost) made a real movie.
A killer in a Richard Nixon mask stabs a guy wearing plaid flannel shorts, then stalks three women in a house. One of the women says, “I’ve got crabs!” and then we cut to her hand, where she’s holding a bag of frozen crabfish. Aaay-o! The women are confronted by a group of zombies, which includes a middle-aged undead mom with her breasts exposed. The opening credits kick in and take up exactly one-eighth of this 80-minute movie.
In a John Hughes-esque montage, Lisa Cook watches the clock at her office job, Todd Cook and his friend Brad headbang while sitting on a waterbed, a guy plays the drums in a tiny room, and a woman takes a shower. Brad and Lisa are a couple. Brad enters a radio contest to win a cassette tape from the band Living Corpse. Brad puts his head on Lisa’s lap, and dreams about seeing Living Corpse live. That’s when we see Todd Cook non-shredding on a guitar while a woman licks his back. Was Lisa OK with another woman licking Todd while he worked through his rock star fantasies? Was Todd OK with another man fondling Lisa’s ass in her cutoff short-shorts? Serious questions demand serious answers, but we don’t have time for that. Because Brad wins the contest! The cassette arrives! And whoever listens to the tape becomes a zombie-slave to Living Corpse and their lead singer who yells, “I am Shingar, lord of the underworld!”
In high school, my friend’s older brother asked me if I was into death metal. I said, “I don’t know. What is that?” He let me borrow a cassette of Scum by Napalm Death. After two minutes, I turned it off and went back to listening to Weezer. As a genre, death metal is not for wimps or nerds. It is an ultra-masculine brick wall of aggression, confrontation, and vocals by those kids in school who could recite the alphabet with burps. My point is that Death Metal Zombies couldn’t be less “death metal” if it tried. The wall-to-wall homemade grunge-metal soundtrack sounds like Ozzy Osbourne fronting Tad. There’s a focus on positivity and friendship that makes the movie feel like an episode of Parks and Recreation as filtered through Zombie Bloodbath. There are lengthy scenes of people slam-dancing and no shortage of ferocious air guitar workouts. All of this should be distracting, but it’s actually adorable and it’s what makes the movie so enjoyable.
Evil Night is the purest expression of Todd Cook’s enthusiasm for making slasher movies with a camcorder in Missouri City, Texas. But Death Metal Zombies is the Cook jam that most resembles a movie made for human consumption. Despite the repetitive zombie attacks and loose structure, it’s clear that Cook paid closer attention to lighting, editing, and gore effects. The movie benefits from a full cast of people basically playing themselves. This includes the scene-stealing bodybuilder who runs away after a zombie puts his fist all the way through a guy’s chest. Sitting through a Todd Cook movie like Demon Dolls typically requires a combination of patience and understanding. But this one is different. With its heavy-metal-possession plot and sixth-grader humor level, Death Metal Zombies feels like a 1990s mash-up of Trick or Treat and Splatter University on a budget of four cheeseburgers. That’s high praise. And it’s entirely warranted.
By the way, the movie ends with this credit:
“This film is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Cobain.”
