Redneck Zombies (1986) Review

Well, then… what to say about a movie named Redneck Zombies? There’s rednecks. There’s zombies. There’s redneck zombies. So, I guess the movie delivers what it promises. Which is something you can say about nearly every Troma movie ever made. Redneck Zombies is in good company with the collection of movies pumped out by Troma Studios, including Class of Nuke-em High, Sgt. Kabuki Man NYPD, and Troma’s War. These guys (the studio was founded by Ffloyd Kauffman when he made The Toxic Avenger) make horrible B schlock films for the sake of making horrible B schlock films. Redneck Zombies is no different. It’s an awful movie for people who like awful movies, and it makes no bones about it.

This craptastic opus starts with a kicked-back army dude transporting a barrel of nuclear waste in his army issue jeep on a seedy country back road. He tries to pass a joint to the dog that’s riding shotgun, it burns his hands, and he swerves off the road, dumping his nuclear cargo. Before he can retrieve the barrel, a good-ol-fashioned redneck sticks him up and steals the barrel, only to have it stolen from him directly afterward by an even more hickish family of backwater hillbillies. The family tries to use the barrel as a still to make moonshine, and ends up making nuclear waste flavored cocktails that turn the local shine-lovers into tobacco-chewin’, swill-drinkin’ redneck zombies.



This movie is pretty much only entertaining if you have something severely impairing your judgement (i.e. a 12 pack of Natural Ice). The plot operates at that one level, that level just below the minimum production value necessary to make a legitimate movie. Its saving grace is that the filmmakers never took themselves too seriously. You might think that anyone making a movie called Redneck Zombies could never take themselves seriously, but I’ve seen some of the most horrible films that someone honestly believed were a good idea to make. The camp-factor in this movie goes to the extreme of having one of the local rednecks deliver his lines directly into the camera, directly at the viewer. Not to mention the scene with the acid head dissecting the zombie before he tries to climb into the chest cavity. That’s fun for the whole family. If your whole family drinks moonshine and enjoys a good-ol horrible zombie flick.