One Sunday morning when I was younger, the 3rd and 4th grade Sunday school teacher asked us to make a list of things of which we were afraid. I've never forgotten mine, no matter how many brain cells I killed with booze in college or ceilings I fell through in my parents house (for the record, I only ever fell through one):1. Zombies
2. Nazis
3. Getting lost in the desert
4. The Tasmanian Devil
I've since learned that most of these things aren't real. I mean, c'mon, an immense, arid area of land covered by nothing but sand? Maybe in Super Mario Bros. 2!
Oasis of the Zombies combines three of my worst childhood fears--zombies, Nazis, and deserts--yet fails at being anything but fairly horrible. It starts off good enough: two young women with ample posteriors crammed into tight-fitting shorts find themselves in an abandoned oasis somewhere in Africa. Why a twosome of college-aged females are traveling alone through the desert in a jeep is never explained, nor is the reason they decide to sightsee in a place full of abandoned weaponry, swastikas, and human skulls. The camera follows close behind the scantily clad coeds (thank you, Max Monteillet) as they explore the desolate surroundings. Eventually, as is usually the case in cursed, African oases, brain-hungry zombies rise up from the sand and eviscerate our buxom duo. From here we are expected to wait a full forty-five minutes before France Jordan exposes her breasts for the first time. In the words of one of America's living legends, how rude!
What's up with this oasis and why are there zombies all over the damn place? Well, apparently, during World War II, a battalion of Nazis used the oasis to hide stolen gold. A company of...let's say British...soldiers finds out about this gold hoarding scheme and sets a trap for the Germans that goes horribly awry. Everyone is killed, except for Robert Blabert Sr., who crawls off into the dunes battered, broken, and gold-less. He is rescued by The Sheik, who takes Blabert into his beautiful desert palace to recuperate/knock up his youngest daughter. After planting his seed in the almost certainly underaged Aisha, Blabert leaves The Sheik's home to rejoin the war effort. He returns upon the war's conclusion to find that Aisha died giving birth to his son and the "hero" of our story, Robert Blabert Jr. So, why is the oasis infested with zombies? I'm getting to that! Several years after the end of WWII, a ruthless treasure hunter and his lovely assistant pay old man Blabert a visit in his palatial African home. After learning the oasis's location, the treasure hunter--who either wasn't given a name or I just forgot what it was--murders Blabert and sets off to claim the Nazi gold thought to be worth over six million dollars as his own. Needless to say he and his crew are dispatched by a cadre of hideous, rotting zombies.
And what a dastardly crew of living dead they are. There's Half-Skull, One-Eye Zombie, my personal favorite; Zombie With Pinhole Eyes, who sort of just looks like a dude wearing a shitty mask; Mr. Chapped Lips, the zombie desperately in need of lip balm; and Pokey, the bug-eyed zombie; plus a variety of zombies with earthworms falling off their faces.
After meeting the zombies for the first time, I found myself in a double-sided conundrum. First, I was faced with the Pirate Ghost/Ghost Pirate Dilemma. You see, the order in which you place these words is vital to understanding the characters properly. A "pirate ghost" is the spirit of a long-dead pirate, while a "ghost pirate" would simply be a ghost pretending to be a pirate for some mysterious reason. The "ghost pirate" was not necessarily a bona fide pirate when he/she was alive, while the "pirate ghost" has known nothing but a life of rum-swilling, plank-walking, and cleaning parrot shit off his shoulder. In Oasis of the Zombies the question posed is are we dealing with Nazi Zombies (living corpses that were Nazis before their hideous transformations) or Zombie Nazis (Judeophobic zombies with a passion for marching and genocide)? Conclusion: probably the former. The second part of my made up conundrum was this: how and why did the these dead Nazis turn into zombies and what reason do a bunch of shuffling, intestine-eating corpses have to guard a hidden cache of gold? It's not like they can spend it anywhere--they live under the sand in a fucking desert. But seriously, why are they zombies? Who turned them into zombies and for what sinister purpose? Oasis never answers this question, but to be fair I never really asked it until now when I thought it would be funny. Once the girl in the blue shorts was out of the picture, I ceased to give a flip.
I know, I know--you're dying to know what happens once Robert Jr. and his badly-dubbed friends show up at the oasis of the damned. Do they find the gold and blow all of it at iTunes? Do they use it to buy new uniforms for their university's rugby team? Or do they simply get torn to shreds by hideous Nazi zombies? I'll give you a hint: it's the last one.
Oasis of the Zombies or The Oasis of the Living Dead or The Treasure of the Living Dead or Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies (my personal favorite) is a poor excuse for a zombie flick. It isn't particularly scary, the zombies look stupid, and we never get a satisfactory explanation as to who the zombies are or what they want. You could blame this on the fact that the movie has been dubbed so many times into various languages that producers probably forgot the original plot and tried desperately to piece something together in the editing room. You could, but you shouldn't, because blaming the producers lets the actors, special effects crew, cinematographer, and director off the hook.The final scene of the movie is my very favorite. Robert Jr. and his girlfriend have somehow escaped from the climactic zombie attack and are lying face down on a sand dune waiting to shrivel up and die. The Sheik, who is also Robert's grandfather, rides up to the young couple on the back of a camel and watches them quietly. Robert slowly comes to and meets his grandfather's gentle gaze. The Sheik frowns and asks:
The Sheik: Did you find what you were looking for?
Robert: I mainly found myself.
The balls on this guy! I mainly found myself? What an insufferable prick! He took his closest friends in the world out to a cursed oasis crawling with Nazi zombies on a quest to find himself? His friends were disemboweled and eaten alive so he could discover some elusive truth about his innermost being? His girlfriend had to be forever traumatized by watching her college chums be torn limb from limb and consumed whole while they screamed in agony and begged God to make their deaths as swift as possible just so Robert Blabert Jr. could become a man worthy of the Blabert legacy?
You suck, Robert. Seriously.
