Cheap Oasis of the Zombies (Video) (Jesus Franco, Marius Lesoeur) Price

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Customer Reviews of Oasis of the Zombies

Not that bad at all.
This film has got a really bad reputation, but mostly cause the people that criticize it is used to see hollywood megabudget movies like Gladiator and Pearl Harbor. But we, who are familiar with the work of Jess Franco and Eurocine, won't be that surprised. Ok, the theme is not sex in this film, it's a typical lowbudget zombie slasher of the early 80's. And in fact it's really good. Mostly cause it's shot on location and using real people in the crowd scenes in the city (some of them looking into the cameralens). That almost gives the film some weird, crude and spontaneous documentary feeling in contrast with the obvious sets and photomodel actors in films like the Scream trilogy. The special effects are not that good, but much better than Zombie Lakes. The strange organ music in the film also adds to the weird atmosphere. It's hard to know how many stars I should give this film. The script is very stupid and the film look like it was made in a few days, but at the same time it's very entertaining and much more fun than the Friday the 13th series or the Scream trilogy. Well worth a look if you are a Jess Franco fan. Other people will probably just hate it.

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Cheesy Zombie Fun!
I have never been a big fan of Franco's films but I decided to purchase the DVD of Oasis because I love these Euro zombie pictures so much. I have read many bad reveiws on this film and didn't have high hopes for it, but after watching it I really don't see why people hate it so much. The dubbing is bad but what foreign film has good dubbing. Although it wasn't as gory as The Beyond the one dismemberment was a whole lot gory than anything I saw in Hills Have Eyes or Friday the 13th. I thought the low budget zombie makeups were cool. It had some great atmosphere and one great shot of the zombies walking over the dunes in the distance. Give this another chance it's a harmles way to spend 80 min. It's a whole lot better than anything that I have seen come out of the American horror industry in the last three years. Hey at least Franco had the class to write a script with something of a plot and didn't just take a home video camera and have his actors run around in the woods, scream cuss words, and fight over who lost the map while searching for a certain witch.

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Franco should have stuck with his Killer Barbies.
Oasis of the Zombies (Jess Franco, 1983)

First, let me emphasize the good thing about this movie: the incredible score. Were it released now, I'd call it an interesting mix of trance and pseudo-ethnic music (rather like Muslimgauze, but with not as deft a touch), with undertones of death ambient and noise. But since those genres didn't really exist at the time, Franco was well out on the bleeding edge. If you must see this film, see it for the soundtrack. As for the rest...

Jess Franco has directed almost two hundred films in his long and completely undistinguished career (which, I might add, is still going strong, with two films released in 2002 and one slated for release in 2003 it doesn't look like we'll see until 2004). A large number of them have been softcore films. There's far more of Tinto Brass than Lucio Fulci around Jess Franco, which makes me wonder why on earth I'd have been expecting Oasis of the Zombies to be a decent flick. Oh, well, it's a Nazi zombie movie, and I got it cheap.

Yes, a Nazi zombie movie. I had always thought Shock Waves to be the only one of its kind, but it seems there's a whole subgenre of them (all inspired by Louis Pauwels' supposedly-nonfiction book The Morning of the Magicians). And of those I've seen, Shock Waves still remains far and away the best of them. But I digress.

In this one, the Nazi zombies are guarding a treasure in gold bars they'd taken from the Afrika Korps during World War II. The gold, however, never made it out of the desert; in fact, it never made it out of the oasis where the ambush was staged. After fierce fighting on both sides ('what? no one told me this was a war movie!"), the only survivor is the commander of the Afrika Korps. You know he leaves a son, because said son gets a telegram upon his father's death, revealing all this to him. So he and his friends head off to find the fortune. While they're gathering everything up, two other groups try to get it and meet the expected ends, along with a pair of coeds who stumble in by accident in the movie's opening scene. (One wonders why Franco has the zombies attack them before getting in a little gratuitous all-girl sex, but unfortunately, they die with their boots, and everything else, on.)

And with this mishmash of a plot comes one of the most boring zombie films ever made. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is a masterpiece in comparison. (At least Joe D'Amato remembered he was a softcore director while filming that one.) Don't bother, unless, like me, you have a thing for Nazi zombie movies. And even then, you're better off just watching Shock Waves again. * ½