This lands about halfway between a straight-faced (if over-the-top) horror film and a "Carry On" spoof of the genre, plus some sexploitation catering to the audience of the smutty softcore farces the male lead spent much of his big-screen career in.
The veteran actors are having fun, and the movie has a weird sort of generation-gap air to it in having hippie-ish youth used, abused and murdered by their elders at the titular "resort" where Robin Askwind is lured for a holiday. But the kids (also including the female lead, a pleasant presence who seems to have retired from the profession after this--maybe because she's so frequently and brusquely disrobed here) really seem to be present not so much to be "turned into zombies" as to offer sexy young bodies the camera can ogle. The male lead is an OK farceur in a rather manic, Michael Crawford/Tommy Steele-ish way, but god, he is hard to look at, like Mick Jagger's pugly brother.
The film has some energy and eccentricity that make it watchable, the problem being that it doesn't take itself seriously enough as a horror movie to be frightening (despite some rather surprisingly zesty, beheading-focused gore), while its silly humor isn't clever enough to be particularly funny. It doesn't blend the two angles with any confidence, either, yet the combination here is odd enough to raise it a notch or two above routine horror comedies of the era. As others have noted, the macabre camp tone that doesn't quite work nonetheless feels like an intriguing warmup for the future likes of "Rocky Horror" (and there's even a cross-dressing rocker at the beginning, though that's the end of the musical interludes, alas). Anyway, worth a look, but you'd have to be a big fan of lower-brow 1970s British film comedies or all things Hammer-esque to think it's more than an almost-good curiosity.
The veteran actors are having fun, and the movie has a weird sort of generation-gap air to it in having hippie-ish youth used, abused and murdered by their elders at the titular "resort" where Robin Askwind is lured for a holiday. But the kids (also including the female lead, a pleasant presence who seems to have retired from the profession after this--maybe because she's so frequently and brusquely disrobed here) really seem to be present not so much to be "turned into zombies" as to offer sexy young bodies the camera can ogle. The male lead is an OK farceur in a rather manic, Michael Crawford/Tommy Steele-ish way, but god, he is hard to look at, like Mick Jagger's pugly brother.
The film has some energy and eccentricity that make it watchable, the problem being that it doesn't take itself seriously enough as a horror movie to be frightening (despite some rather surprisingly zesty, beheading-focused gore), while its silly humor isn't clever enough to be particularly funny. It doesn't blend the two angles with any confidence, either, yet the combination here is odd enough to raise it a notch or two above routine horror comedies of the era. As others have noted, the macabre camp tone that doesn't quite work nonetheless feels like an intriguing warmup for the future likes of "Rocky Horror" (and there's even a cross-dressing rocker at the beginning, though that's the end of the musical interludes, alas). Anyway, worth a look, but you'd have to be a big fan of lower-brow 1970s British film comedies or all things Hammer-esque to think it's more than an almost-good curiosity.