Zombie Beach Party starts as zombie wrestler Tiki (Rob 'El Fuego' Etcheverria) plans to stage a wrestling match in a bar between himself & two flesh eating zombies. The zombies are kept out back away from the general public but barmaid Cherry (Contessa Oblivian) finds her follow barmaid & friend Blossom (Sarah Murr) dead, half eaten from a zombie attack & with Tiki's zombies nowhere to be found everyone assumes that it was his zombies that were responsible. Everyoen that is apart from masked wrestler Ulysses (Jules Delorme) who believes his foll wrestler Tiki is innocent & sets out to prove it, for no apparent reason. Ulysses & a few of his wrestler friends uncover not one but two plots by evil wrestler the Zombie King (Nicholas Sinn), the first is to create a hybrid zombie that can easily be controlled while the second involves contaminating the local water supply with infected zombie blood in order to create an unstoppable zombie army so he can take over the world, Uylsses cannot let this happen...
Also known under the title Zombie King and the Legion of Doom this straight to video Canadian production was directed by Stacey Case & is quite simply bad, really bad. Obviously the script borrows the main theme of masked wrestlers as leading character's from the similar types of films from Mexico during the 60's & 70's starring wrestler Santo fighting monsters including such wonderfully titled flicks like Santo Versus the Vampire Women (1962), Santo vs. the Diabolical Hatchet (1965), Santo vs. the Martian Invasion (1967), Santo vs. the Riders of Terror (1970) & Santo & Blue Demon vs. Dracula & the Wolfman (1973) which sounds an absolute tag team riot. In fact all those Santo films are probably much better than Zombie Beach Party. Everything about Zombie Beach Party should have been fun, the masked wrestlers as both heroes & villains, the zombies, the silly plot & the mixture of wrestling & horror but in the end it all sucks. This is just poor on every level from awful dialogue to a plot that makes no sense to to the slightly surreal world the makers try to create that ends up just coming across as ridiculous. There's some crap about creating hybrid zombies & releasing infected zombie blood into the local water supply to create an army of zombies but none of it is plotted out very well & makes little sense. The way Tiki manages to domesticate the zombies at the end is also laziness in the extreme, he just touches them & with a magic 'ping' noise on the soundtrack that particular zombie is now friendly.
Zombie Beach Party doesn't even deliver on the horror or wrestling aspects either, the horror is lame & quite often there are day for night shots which look awful & the wrestling looks so fake, staged & almost like two ten year olds play acting. It's really stiff & unconvincing with no proper moves at all, people just seem to grab each other & shuffle around a bit. It really is that bad. There's a bit of poorly done gore, there are a few ripped off heads but nothing else. Obviously shot on a low budget during one scene it starts & stops snowing in the background as it cuts between individual shots. The artwork on the DVD cover (the one on the IMDb) looks bright & colourful & like a comic book but the film never captures that sort of kitsch or brightness or feel.
The IMDb says Zombie Beach Party had a budget of about $220,000 which goes some way to explain why it looks so bad I suppose. The acting is atrocious, even though most of the cast spend the entire film behind mask's the dialogue & acting is still so stiff & wooden it's cringe worthy at times.
Zombie Beach Party is a terrible film, it has no plot, it has terrible acting & awful wrestling scenes that look like they were staged buy ten year olds & a lack of any horror aspects worth mentioning sinks it even further. What else can I say? I am sure the makers had enthusiasm & a liking for the genre on their side but that doesn't mean they know how to make a good film & ultimately they didn't.
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