Jarret's FFF - "The Defiled - We Are All Meat"

August 8, 2012: Just when you think you've seen it all, a movie like "The Defiled - We Are All Meat" comes along and reboots your reality. Actually I'm somewhat hesitant to even call it a movie. It's almost more like a bit of strange videotape that someone shot and managed to wrangle onto a DVD. You see, I found this very alluring zombie compilation at my wonderful local library called the Zombie Horror Fright Fest. Four movies! How can you beat that, and from the titles and pictures on the back -- "Woods of Terror" and "Fast Zombies with Guns" among them -- I really thought I'd found something remarkable. (We won't even START on trying to understand WHY my library stocked this weird item, but to me it's merely a credit to their awesome video section and its kind caretakers, who are among the few, rare people who treat me with any respect, despite my inability to ever get anything back on time.) Anyway, it was promising enough at first -- an appropriately moody black-and-white piece that began with your quintessential Romero-esque zombie stumbling through the woods on the wooden legs of a British punk rock guitarist, the way they do (the good zombies, I mean). He even looked like the classic first zombie in Night of the Living Dead, with the tall grey crewcut, casual jacket and face like my mailman. It wasn't long, however, before it all took a strange turn, beginning in about the first 90 seconds when apparently what was this guy's zombie family joined him at the side of a pond to lap up some water and grunt at each other. I mean, it couldn't have been dumber, despite the good make up. His son was more dog than zombie, and proudly bearing his one X'ed-over eye, he hobbled around on four legs and kind of barked. The daughter, meanwhile, made the most incessantly annoying whining sound, like Felix Unger. Things picked up at about Minute 12, however, when, after a sizable amount of zombie pantomime that reminded me of Raquel Welsh in One Million B.C., or Ringo's wife Barbara Bach in Caveman, the father and son find a pre-wrapped dead body in a tent for some reason, which we never actually get a good look at, but they bring it home to this odd structure in which they live, which is kind of some sticks tied together, and they eat it. This seems to be a key pay-off moment, and the director -- who I believe also shot, edited, wrote, produced and possibly acted in the film -- seemed to really relish the moment of some classic old-school zombie wolfing down. This includes one rather sexual moment, when the father zombie is kind of erotically having his wife suck down some stuff out of a very phalic sausage-like part -- I have to assume the intestines. Anyway, the film really gets entirely weird when the dog boy awakens in the middle of the night to see his father violently humping Zombie Mom from the back. It really brings disturbance to some new levels, and that's not even taking into account that the mom is on the verge of dropping her zombie baby. So then the next morning, when you're expecting the son to rape his sister -- and I'm still not entirely sure he DOESN'T, because these clothes are thrown down, but it's not clear whose they are -- the sister starts making that incessanty whining sound and the Dog Son begins losing his guts or something -- some parts come out of him, and the father tries to stuff them back in, but they won't go ... So then the daughter whines even more and she dies. It turns out that the dead body they ate was spoiled with some toxic waste or something that the guy had in the tent with him. And then, right after the wife dies, the mutated baby suddenly pops out. I'll be honest: this is as far as I got before my daughter came home and I got scared she'd see me watching it. In fact, I felt like I had the worst kind of demented porn or something in the player, and I fumbled it out with a wealth of fearful shame. Of course I wouldn't want to give the ending away, but at the same time, I'm not completely sure I want to know what it is myself. Still, if you're looking for a disturbing piece of crap with sick sexual zombie undertones, this might be the picture for you.