Voodoo (1995)

I first caught this film really late at night on Joe Bob Briggs's TNT show. I wonder sometimes, since TNT has been doing that New Classics thing for like 5 years or so, what did they do with all these low-budget greats they don't show anymore? Did they have an auction? I'd love to have gotten my hands on some of the too sweet movies they used to show. Who the hell wants Jersey Girl when you can have anything with Dudikoff or Piper?

Voodoo has Corey Feldman as a dude who transferred schools to be closer to his homegirl. She's a tad on the lukewarm side to his presence, so he has to pledge a fraternity to get a place to stay. The fraternity is a bunch of voodoo zombies. Feldman meets up with one of the kids' dads, who's been tracking the kid all over who knows where. He tells Feldman to put a salt packet in one of the zombie's beers, because zombies can't handle salt. Later, as Feldman tries to take down the boys, they kidnap his homegirl, and he has to save her. It's a mess.

I'm not sure I understand why Corey Feldman can't get better roles than this. I know he was quite the addict in his day, but now that he's sober, how is he any less the great actor he was in the 80s? My only theory is that most of the people that cast for those things only remember him as the precocious teen from the Corey movies. That's too bad, and I can only hope that film makers from my generation will rediscover Feldman. He deserves a second shot.

The whole salt thing is great. I think I've seen that in other zombie flicks too. Growing up in Maine, I feel pretty safe from the zombie invasion, because we have salt everywhere after it snows when the plows throw it down. If the zombies tried to get us in the summer, we could just use the tourists on the beaches to lure them to the salt water. October is really the only time we have to worry about.

There is some ludicrous stuff in this. The head zombie at one point takes over the mind of a rival fraternity leader, and has him kill all his fellow frat brothers. If he has that ability, why didn't he do it to Feldman and have him kill a bunch of people? He'd still be plying his zombie trade if he'd thought of that.

The other one is the fraternity process. You can't just show up and live there. You've got to go through the whole pledge process first, then they let you move in. Maybe that's why he moved in with them: because they don't have those rules being zombies and all. A more realistic scenario would have been him moving up to the campus in the summer, and the zombies needing to rent out rooms to make extra cash while some of their zombies are home. Feldman's girlfriend really seemed like the summer school type.

A man named Jack Nance plays the dad that helps Feldman out. He starred with Feldman in another classic called Meatballs 4. If you're a David Lynch fan, you probably also recognize Nance, as he was a Lynch mainstay appearing in a bunch of his films and the Twin Peaks TV series. Unfortunately Nance passed away in 1996, dying of head trauma suffered after a fight in a donut shop. I'm not kidding.

I dug this. I'm not saying to go out and spend crazy money on it, but $5 to have a Corey Feldman zombie movie isn't a bad deal if you ask me. I think it's even cheaper, as it's often packaged with more horror movies in one of those bargain packages.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114872/

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/