The Supernaturals (1986)

Armand Mastroianni brought us the screen debut of Tom Hanks in He Knows You're Alone. Here, he combines a cast of people who will make you say, "Hey isn't that..." and puts them up against an army of undead Confederate soldiers.During the Civil War, a Confederate town is taken over and all of the soldiers are ordered to walk a minefield, including young Jeremy, who is forced to do so because he has on the uniform. Only he and his mother survive.Fast forward to 1986, where the Army's 44th division - the same one that screwed over the southern soldiers in the past - are conducting war games under the command of Sgt. Leona Hawkins (yes, that's Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek). There's also Pvt. Ellis (Maxwell Caulfield, Rex Manning himself from Empire Records), Pvt. Lejune (Talia Balsam, Crawlspace and the first wife of George Clooney, as well as the daughter of Psycho's Martin Balsam), Pvt. Osgood (Levar Burton, uniting the original and TNG Star Trek casts), Pvt. Cort (Bobby Di Cicco, The Philadelphia Experiment), Pvt. Mendez (Scott Jacoby from Bad Ronald) and Maurice Gibb in a cameo as a Union soldier (he also wrote a soundtrack that wasn't used).Of course, someone screws around in the woods and the undead rise to claim the living. Everything feels rather low rent, which is fine, because the actual zombies look rather good and the reveal of who is behind the actual return of the dead is rather interesting.This is way better than it should be and in the hands of a better director would have been pretty interesting. As it is, it'll definitely pass an afternoon.

There was this sad, short period after the first Good Trek films came out and before we got saturated with bad Star Trek TV shows that the actors of Star Trek tried to cash in on their names in cheap films.This was one of them.Nichelle Nichols plays an Army Sergeant bringing a small group of troops out to the middle of the woods. Which never actually really happens in the Army. They immediately encounter the zombies of Confederate Soldiers who proceed to pick them off like nice plot device monsters.And that's kind of it.Nichols is the only thing anyone can remember in this movie, and the word we are looking for is "miscast".

Sigh…despite my many years of training in horror cinema and countless of previous bad experiences, I still get suckered into watching lousy movies because of their appealing and juicy looking VHS cover artwork! I knew absolutely nothing about "The Supernaturals", but purely based on that drawing of a toothless skull wearing a civil army soldier's hat, I simply had to see it! Way to go, Mr. Horror expert… Oh well, at least it isn't the worst genre movie of the 80's, that's for sure. "The Supernaturals" is a mediocre horror outing with a relatively original concept and setting and a handful of memorably worthwhile sequences, but ultimately it lacks the necessary suspense and panache in order to rank among the better achievements of the 80's decade. As stated already in numerous other reviews and user comments, the film effectively borrows the settings and characters of Walter Hill's "Southern Comfort" and H.G. Lewis' "Two Thousand Maniacs". Unfortunately, however, it features neither the claustrophobic atmosphere of the former and nor the outrageously delicious gore effects of the latter. What remains is a nonetheless interesting movie about a platoon of soldiers out on a training excursion in a Southern forest area and suddenly having to battle against seemingly spontaneously resurrected zombie soldiers from the Civil War. Ironically enough, the supernatural elements in "The Supernaturals" are the only ones that don't work. The promising flashback at the beginning hinted that a kid soldier saved his mother thanks to a sudden outburst of supernatural powers on this exact same location during the year 1865, and now he – Jeremy - as well as his mother and the long-dead members of the platoon he was part of still guard over the place. The explanation given to the presence of the zombies is unsatisfying and feels incomplete. This would have been less of a problem if there had been more gory murders and/or straightforward suspense to distract you from the plot. Now, there's little else left to do but wonder about how Jeremy obtained his powers, how exactly does he resurrect the dead and how come he's still alive after more than a century? The middle section is plain dull and I simply cannot comprehend why Armand Mastroianni decided it would be a good idea to make an 80's zombie movie with only a minimum of gore.

The plot is good, it's quite interesting but cheesy special effects, and bad acting make this a bad movie. The zombies are laughable, and the ending is... more than laughable. Avoid this one at all costs!