Arlene, a passionate university student of environment science, and acquaintance Kevin, the untroubled son of an oil tycoon, travel to Poolville, Texas where Arlene’s adamant cause to save the planet has put her on edge with the imprudent Kevin and his family’s oil drilling, planet contaminating business. Arlene’s mission in the rural town is to test the Ozone layer after a chemical manufacture spill while Kevin tags along much to her chagrin. Before she can analyze the effects of the spill, the residents of Poolville begin to mutate into festering, flesh-eating creatures and Arlene and Kevin are stuck in the middle of the mayhem. The exposure mutates Poolville’s population at a slow and unpredictable rate that leaves no where safe to shelter and their own lingering presence exposes them also to the chemical agents. The longer they stay, the greater the chance their body will transform into flesh-craving fiends, wild-eyed and disgorging green vomit trying to get to their next meal.
On the heels of “The Abomination,” shot back-to-back in the same month and also at nearly all the same set locations, “Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants” is the perfectly obscure grindhouse film for a double bill from directors Bret McCormick, who helmed the house-shelled creature feature “The Abomination,” and Matt Devlen’s environmental bumpkin zombie horror! Shot on location in and around Poolville and Fort Worth, Texas, the lo-fi, flesh-eating, in more ways than one, gory feature is written by Brad Redd and produced by the Devlen and McCormick due along with composer Kim Davis, credited as Marie Skylar (“Body Parts”). The film has a strong cautionary, allegorical theme of man-made containing spill effects on the environment, such as the ozone layer in this narrative, and their underlining harmful effects on humans that go to an exaggerated level of devouring each other in bits and pieces. The body horror indie is self-funded by McCormick and Devlen and had a short run on VHS micro-label Muther Video.
If you’re one of the lucky ones and seen Bret McCormick’s “The Abomination,” you may notice familiar actors in Devlen’s “Ozone! “The Attack of the Redneck Mutants!” However, the protagonists do a reversal of demeanor with Blue Thompson as Arlene, the environmental science student who is thrust into being a competent and adept fighter against the mutants whereas her character in “The Abomination” was no different than the stereotypical female victim of horror trope. Scott Davis tackled the creature in his house with mild composer, even when it devoured his friends and family, but Davis’s Kevin Muncy is foolish and cowardly, wailing to the top of his lungs and flailing his arms and legs when attacked like he’s drowning in deep water because he doesn’t know how to swim. Arlene and Kevin are an unlikely pairing, environmental antagonists, stuck together in the mutated middle traversing the back country while rural residents transfigure before their eyes into flesh-hungry fiends. Loafing gun-toter Wade McCoy and his mother Ruby are two of those Poolville denizens that that come under threat. Played by Brad McCormick, Wade’s a bit of a stereotypical caricature of the term redneck with plaid shirt, truck hat, beer in hand, and shotgun at the ready, as seen in earlier scenes with his character blowing off the broad face of old gourdes in his backyard. Wade’s mother Ruby (Jance Williams, “Tabloid”)) is a fireball in her own aged way that’s gives evidence to Wade’s beer, guns, and philandering ways. The rest of the cast are all farming mutants who receive sangre-spilling screentime with Luther Webb, Barry Stephen, Londy Porter, Regina Hackenbush, Leon Bardol and Lorraine Dowdy, Rhonda Rooney, and Barbara Dow as their victims.
Spitting in the face of the budget’s limited purse strings, or rather spewing neon green glop right into it, “Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants!” has tremendous cult appeal with its sly editing of human-to-mutant transfiguration and its evisceration and cannibalism gore effects that munches on intestines, a staple dish for the prototypical zombie, undead or otherwise. The horror looks monstrously great on screen with simple syrup editing under its grindhouse celluloid aesthetic that concentrates a steady transformation of surviving environmental terror, a theme that’s been persistently weighty on activists, politicians, and science communities’ shoulders and minds to this date. Man-made chemicals and chemical reactions have had a known effect on the ozone layer since the mid-1970s when chemists found chlorofluorocarbons, such as in certain aerosols, had a negative depleting result on the ozone in the stratosphere. “Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants!” pulls from that scientific fact and swirls it with an extreme horror element devasting to humanity. Devlen and director of photography Guy Rafferty secure perfectly framed shots, with one sequence coming to mind of a grass field with wildflowers and buzzing with nature and the camera pans up and over a rolling hill toward a smokestack manufacturer that makes the connection stronger and more impactful to the story. There’s also a subtle conspiracy between oil tycoon inheritor having some involvement in his father’s oil business and the twist knowledge that his family has a relationship in owning and distributor culprit chemical substances that igniting hell on Earth, sparking extended internal beef, as if the protagonists weren’t already polar opposites butting heads and at each other’s throats between their ideals of big oil and an environmental science, the latter on the precipice of being a muckraker.
Tapping into the same man-made environmental crisis horror to the likes of “Godzilla” and “The Crazies” and if you’re hungry for more of the same subgenre, “Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Zombies” is a bloody good time on a downsized appetite, now available on Blu-ray for the first time from Visual Vengeance, a partner label from Wild Eye Releasing. The director approved standard definition master from the original 8mm elements comes out of the antiquated format shadows onto an AVC encoded BD50 but the transfer was done from super 8 celluloid, retaining much of the emulsion gaps in light leaks and garners a fair amount of speckling, cigarette burns, and vertical scratching but the overall original print has been cared for, well preserved to offer an upgraded resolution as much as the increase in pixels allows with an untouched grading that keeps the nostalgic, sandstone complexion. A full screen 1.33:1 is the original aspect ratio applied also here on the Blu-ray. The English PCM mono track is about as a feeble as you expect but adds to the nostalgia in it’s muffled, boxy, and slightly hissy-scratching post-production recording. You honestly don’t need it touch up or have it upgraded into channel multitude or else it loses that signature singularity associated with hard-to-find, cult budget horror from the 80s. The front channel produces all the action and dialogue surrounded by simple fixed score and it works better than most of its ilk, but you’ll still find it lacking vitality and having a mismatch gap between the action and the audio. English subtitles are available. Where the technical aspects of a Blu-ray are always subpar, because of the fair warning received at the beginning of each film, the encoded and physical special features are what fans crave from the always happy to delivery Visual Vengeance label. Encoded is a commentary with producer/co-star Bret McCormick and actress Blue Thompson, a second commentary from horror/film experts Sam Panico and Bill Van Ryn, an interview with actress Blue Thompson which is an extension of her “The Abomination” interview on that Blu-ray release, location visits, deleted scenes and outtakes, including special effects behind-the-scenes, without audio, the original VHS intro reel from Muther Video, an archived interview with Matt Devlen from a Cinema Wasteland screening, a producer trailer reel from Matt Devlen, Devlen’s short film “Babies,” actress Barbara Dow’s acting reel, an interview with fellow era director Mark Pirro (“Nudist Colony of the Dead”) on the film, an archived public access TV interview Hollywood Unseen, a Devlen interview on the Let’s Watch Movies podcast, feature image gallery, the trailer for McCormick’s “Tabloid,” and other Visual Vengeance preview trailers. A massively encoded presence is always accompanied by a massive physical presence, beginning with a newly commissioned cover art by graphic artist, The Dude Designs, on the cardboard slipcover. The same art is also the primary art on the reversible sleeve, but I like to turn it around, switch it up, to reflect the original VHS box art. Inserted in the clear Amaray is a mini-folded poster with even more new art by a different artist, Andrei Bouzikov, an official, black and white comic book adaptation with Marc Gras doing all the artwork from cover-to-cover, a white paper puke bag with the feature title, a Muther Video sticker, and a retro sticker sheet from Visual Vengeance! A Visual Vengeance release is like opening a present on Christmas morning! The region free, unrated film has 93-minute run which, in my honest opinion, is a bit too long for the story being told as does drag between first and second acts, and if memory serves me, “The Abomination” was exactly the same way.
Last Rites: Gun-carrying, tobacco-spitting, beer-drink rednecks stand no chance against the manmade decay of planet Earth in this done-right DIY horror from Matt Devlen that’s creatively spewing its neon juices galore! Video Vengeance sheds light on another obscure release that doesn’t deserve to be at the bottom of the barrel with its natural celluloid intact, a whole lot of extra goodies in the special features, and a fun and yearned full physical presence too good to be true.
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