Zombies: The Beginning Visual Vengeance Screening Hosted by Forbidden Planet (2024)

An evil corporation sends a team of marines led by the sole survivor of a previous attack on a rescue mission to a remote Pacific Island following a zombie outbreak stemming from nefarious scientific experiments. It all goes bad really fast.

Zombies: The Beginning is the final film from legendary Italian horror director Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead, Zombie 3, Rats: Night of Terror) who made a career of high energy knock offs of Hollywood hits featuring his unique splatter signature.

In the final years of his career, Mattei made several shot-on-video movies for the international market, and this was one of the best of them – featuring the plot lifted from James Cameron’s Aliens, mixed with elements of his own 1980 knock off of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. What follows is a third world acid trip from hell, with Grand Guignol gore, high-caliber weapons, mutated rugrats and goopy tentacles all colliding in a Calabrian casserole of spaghetti sauce-slathered greatness.

Presenting the most obscure analog gems salvaged from the video store era, the VISUAL VENGEANCE series highlights the peak of homemade genre cinema between 1980 and the early 2000s, and includes many forgotten, lost or never seen remnants of the direct-to-video boom. Whether it’s horror, action, sci-fi or just an unclassifiable stew of SOV psychosis, this series salutes those movies cobbled together by some of the most resourceful filmmakers to ever pick up a camera.