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Oasis of the Zombies

Oasis of the Zombies

List Price: $9.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bored of the Zombies
Review: A German mobile artillery unit in North Africa during World War 2 stops at a desert oasis only to be ambushed by a specially organized group of soldiers so they can take the gold carried by the Germans. Fast forward forty years and introduce some offspring of those soldiers to some really pissed off German corpses. I believe I have covered the plot without taking 90 boring minutes to do so. This was about as much story as the film-makers started with, before they started padding the film for time. The direction, lighting, sound, etc. are horrible. Did I mention the acting; as soon as I find some I will report back. As though 'Oasis of the Zombies' were not bad enough, then comes the dubbing. The dubbing at times is the only entertaining part of this movie since the action and emotion represented on screen rarely is represented in the dubbing (for example: a running screaming character on screen has a calm voice dubbed in). Even with an occasional laugh provided by the dubbing, that cannot stop this film from being a solid sleep inducer.-Bob

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Disapointment!!
Review: I am a fan of both goofy and serious horror movies but this fails to fall into either catagory. It was too lame to be serious and not funny enough to be entertaining. Your money would be better spent buying something like Dead Alive or Evil Dead.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Cheesy Zombie Fun!
Review: I have never been a big fan of Franco's films but I decided to purchase the DVD of Oasis because I love these Euro zombie pictures so much. I have read many bad reveiws on this film and didn't have high hopes for it, but after watching it I really don't see why people hate it so much. The dubbing is bad but what foreign film has good dubbing. Although it wasn't as gory as The Beyond the one dismemberment was a whole lot gory than anything I saw in Hills Have Eyes or Friday the 13th. I thought the low budget zombie makeups were cool. It had some great atmosphere and one great shot of the zombies walking over the dunes in the distance. Give this another chance it's a harmles way to spend 80 min. It's a whole lot better than anything that I have seen come out of the American horror industry in the last three years. Hey at least Franco had the class to write a script with something of a plot and didn't just take a home video camera and have his actors run around in the woods, scream cuss words, and fight over who lost the map while searching for a certain witch.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: This movie blows!
Review: I've never seen this movie before so one day I seen this movie in the store.So I say hey zombie film lets try this movie out, and I went out and bought it.I went home and wacth it and wachting half way in the movie I got really bored really fast! All they do in the movie is talk about some BS storey. About his dad dead and some gold he has hidden! So though the hole movie I was fast forwarding tryin to get to the goods parts! this movie sould have been never made! DONT BUY IT AND DON'T RENT THIS MOVIE!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Franco should have stuck with his Killer Barbies.
Review: Oasis of the Zombies (Jess Franco, 1983)

First, let me emphasize the good thing about this movie: the incredible score. Were it released now, I'd call it an interesting mix of trance and pseudo-ethnic music (rather like Muslimgauze, but with not as deft a touch), with undertones of death ambient and noise. But since those genres didn't really exist at the time, Franco was well out on the bleeding edge. If you must see this film, see it for the soundtrack. As for the rest...

Jess Franco has directed almost two hundred films in his long and completely undistinguished career (which, I might add, is still going strong, with two films released in 2002 and one slated for release in 2003 it doesn't look like we'll see until 2004). A large number of them have been softcore films. There's far more of Tinto Brass than Lucio Fulci around Jess Franco, which makes me wonder why on earth I'd have been expecting Oasis of the Zombies to be a decent flick. Oh, well, it's a Nazi zombie movie, and I got it cheap.

Yes, a Nazi zombie movie. I had always thought Shock Waves to be the only one of its kind, but it seems there's a whole subgenre of them (all inspired by Louis Pauwels' supposedly-nonfiction book The Morning of the Magicians). And of those I've seen, Shock Waves still remains far and away the best of them. But I digress.

In this one, the Nazi zombies are guarding a treasure in gold bars they'd taken from the Afrika Korps during World War II. The gold, however, never made it out of the desert; in fact, it never made it out of the oasis where the ambush was staged. After fierce fighting on both sides ('what? no one told me this was a war movie!"), the only survivor is the commander of the Afrika Korps. You know he leaves a son, because said son gets a telegram upon his father's death, revealing all this to him. So he and his friends head off to find the fortune. While they're gathering everything up, two other groups try to get it and meet the expected ends, along with a pair of coeds who stumble in by accident in the movie's opening scene. (One wonders why Franco has the zombies attack them before getting in a little gratuitous all-girl sex, but unfortunately, they die with their boots, and everything else, on.)

And with this mishmash of a plot comes one of the most boring zombie films ever made. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is a masterpiece in comparison. (At least Joe D'Amato remembered he was a softcore director while filming that one.) Don't bother, unless, like me, you have a thing for Nazi zombie movies. And even then, you're better off just watching Shock Waves again. * ½

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Oasis of the Zombies (1983) d: Franco, Jess
Review: Oasis of the Zombies was originally credited to be directed by A.M. Frank Much debate, to determine if this film had been done by exploitation director Jess Franco. The man has recently confirmed this himself, and now admits to the rare act of filming the movie twice, both in French and Spanish. The two versions shared some footage but utilized different cast for minor characters. The Spanish version La Tumba de Los Muertos Vivientes / The Tombs of the Living Dead (1983) has not yet been released in North America but does play on Spanish television. This DVD is the French version, recently released by Image Entertainment's EuroShock Collection. Oasis is a slow paced movie about a group of young college kids using their holiday to search out Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's hidden treasure. A former SS soldier is also looking for the treasure, both find the gold guarded by flesh eating Nazi Zombies who rise from the dead and attack anyone who would attempt to steal their loot. Don't expect much splatter, apart from a scene where a girl gets her guts ripped out. Besides that scene, this low body count film would be best recomended for Jess Franco completists only. Similar to John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), or Ken Wiederhorn's Shock Waves (1977) the movie rarely obtains a good review, and complaints range from the lack of gore to the lame zombie make-up. Comparisons are usually made to another French / Spanish production Zombie Lake (1980) directed by erotic vampire master Jean Rollin, and written by Jess Franco. This often made comparison leads me to question if Rollin perhaps had helped with this film as well? Rumors abound on the internet that perhaps Oasis of the Zombies is somebody else's hack job on Franco's Spanish Tombs of the Living Dead? Extras could have included the Spanish version [or clips from it] for comparison between the two films.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Oasis of the Zombies (1983) d: Franco, Jess
Review: Oasis of the Zombies was originally credited to be directed by A.M. Frank Much debate, to determine if this film had been done by exploitation director Jess Franco. The man has recently confirmed this himself, and now admits to the rare act of filming the movie twice, both in French and Spanish. The two versions shared some footage but utilized different cast for minor characters. The Spanish version La Tumba de Los Muertos Vivientes / The Tombs of the Living Dead (1983) has not yet been released in North America but does play on Spanish television. This DVD is the French version, recently released by Image Entertainment's EuroShock Collection. Oasis is a slow paced movie about a group of young college kids using their holiday to search out Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's hidden treasure. A former SS soldier is also looking for the treasure, both find the gold guarded by flesh eating Nazi Zombies who rise from the dead and attack anyone who would attempt to steal their loot. Don't expect much splatter, apart from a scene where a girl gets her guts ripped out. Besides that scene, this low body count film would be best recomended for Jess Franco completists only. Similar to John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), or Ken Wiederhorn's Shock Waves (1977) the movie rarely obtains a good review, and complaints range from the lack of gore to the lame zombie make-up. Comparisons are usually made to another French / Spanish production Zombie Lake (1980) directed by erotic vampire master Jean Rollin, and written by Jess Franco. This often made comparison leads me to question if Rollin perhaps had helped with this film as well? Rumors abound on the internet that perhaps Oasis of the Zombies is somebody else's hack job on Franco's Spanish Tombs of the Living Dead? Extras could have included the Spanish version [or clips from it] for comparison between the two films.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Horrible
Review: So bad I tried to sell it to blockbuster today it didnt even come up in there system. Complete waste of money.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not that bad at all.
Review: This film has got a really bad reputation, but mostly cause the people that criticize it is used to see hollywood megabudget movies like Gladiator and Pearl Harbor. But we, who are familiar with the work of Jess Franco and Eurocine, won't be that surprised. Ok, the theme is not sex in this film, it's a typical lowbudget zombie slasher of the early 80's. And in fact it's really good. Mostly cause it's shot on location and using real people in the crowd scenes in the city (some of them looking into the cameralens). That almost gives the film some weird, crude and spontaneous documentary feeling in contrast with the obvious sets and photomodel actors in films like the Scream trilogy. The special effects are not that good, but much better than Zombie Lakes. The strange organ music in the film also adds to the weird atmosphere. It's hard to know how many stars I should give this film. The script is very stupid and the film look like it was made in a few days, but at the same time it's very entertaining and much more fun than the Friday the 13th series or the Scream trilogy. Well worth a look if you are a Jess Franco fan. Other people will probably just hate it.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: More Eurotrash from Franco
Review: This is a re-edited version of the Franco's earlier "La Tumba de los Muertos vivientes". It's not one of Franco's best, lacking the sex and violence and monster mayhem of some of other work, but the zombie scenes are OK and complete with maggot-faced creatures shuffling through the sand. Quite dull, but hopefully the start of a long long long series of Eurocine films!


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