Zombie Club - Forced Entry Night

Hey, it's not as bad as it sounds. Really. So last night I was in Clapham for my very first Zombie Club experience courtesy of Mike, Jim and Russ at Eat My Brains. Rounding out the audience - for the biggest ZC gathering to date - was Mike's housemate Matt, plus James, Jay and Sean from last Friday night's piss up. The evening began with a series of clips from Jay's collection including Geordie Star Wars (!), Calamity Of Snakes (not on a plane), Rape Squad (actually just one masked bloke) and best of all, Codfish, the Brazilian remake of Jaws which we all immediately agreed deserves its very own ZC outing. And I thought my DVD collection was weird and extreme! First feature of the night (Jay's choice) was The Jail: A Women's Hell (Dir: Vincent Dawn, 2006), the latest Italian exploitation from ZC 'legend' Bruno Mattei set in a Filipino prison - "It's the UK premiere!" announced Jay, who'd been saving it up especially for the occasion. What did we get? A women-in-prison movie where cast and crew seemed to be making it up as they went along. Opening with the vicious prison warden ordering 20 lashes for a prisoner who was ALREADY DEAD, it ticked all the right boxes - bad direction, bad acting, bad dubbing, uncomfortable scenes of sexual exploitation involving a snake, gratuitous female nudity including the customary lesbo shower scene, and at least one beheading... we had to fast forward some bits as the disc kept glitching, but that really didn't hinder the overall effect.

During the intermission Sean showed us some Japanese Shock trailers including the wonderfully named Eat The Schoolgirl, Shark Skin Man And Peach Hip Girl and the less exciting sounding (but equally wonderful) Yakuza's Law. Our second feature (Sean's choice) was Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (Dir: Yukio Noda, 1974), a Japanese pinku exploitation film with some wonderful OTT violence and questionable morality. Clearly an influence on such luminaries as Martin Scorcese and Tony Scott, this is the kind of movie that Quentin Tarantino dreams of making. With a rather confusing storyline to begin with (thankfully Sean was on hand to clarify what the hell was happening) and rather too many scenes of, ahem, forced entry, it descended into a Western-style bloodbath, complete with a random approach to subtitling - the best line of which came from one detective: "I can feel it in my urine." Quite. The EMB team's official write up for this one should be something special - I'll add the link in due course.

Updated 1/9 - check out the EMB review here!