Mucha Sangre (2002)

Dir: Pepe de las Heras

The irrepressible Paul Naschy stars in this oddball Spanish comedy-horror about a race of alien-zombies that invade Earth in human form. Their intention is to eat the ovaries of our women (in breadcrumbs, no less) and inseminate our men, thus reproducing their own race in some complicated manner (it gets explained in a Powerpoint presentation involving muppets and nude pin-ups). The only way to kill them is by shooting them in the balls and it's down to an inept pair of narcotics cops and a criminal called 'The Gouger' (who has a beer bottle cap tatooed on his head) to save the world! In its dreams, this film blends the gonzoid gore of early Peter Jackson with the stylised bullet ballets of John Woo. Sadly, the atrocious production values make it play more like a bad porn movie and the Spanish idea of what's funny and cool (ie: policemen who eat faeces, farting zombies who follow through, endless gay rape and Paul Naschy shouting "pull down your pants!" every five minutes) probably doesn't tally with the rest of the world's. There are one or two good bits (a zombie getting its head chainsawed off 20+ times, only to keep regenerating as the mountain of heads piles up on the floor) but overall it's just too puerile and badly written to really work. Naschy's own films, even when he had his tongue-in-cheek, had a certain class to them which the makers of "Mucha Sangre" could've benefitted from. *1/2