Directors/Producers – Steve O’Brien & Warren Speed, Screenplay – Warren Speed, Additional Material – Seymour Mace & Steve O’Brien, Photography – Steve O’Brien, Music – Dan Bewick, Visual Effects – IG Media Group (Supervisor – Darren Bykerk), Special Effects Heads – Mark Danbury & Jez Hunt. Production Company – 24:25 Films/Growling Clown Entertainment.
Cast
Warren Speed (Pervo the Clown), Seymour Mace (Johnny Dee Hellfire), Victoria Hopkins (Skye Brannigan), Christian Steel (Tycho Zander), Pete Bonner (Zeus), Kate Soulsby (Harmony Starr), Bill Fellows (Dr Henry Engelbert Zander III), Marysia Kay (Red Zander), Joe Nicholson (Damage), Kathy Paul (Florence ‘Mother’ Zander), Victori Broom (Rachel Brannigan), Donna Marie Foster (Cult Girl T), Gillian Settle (Blue Zander), Michelle Bayly (Cult Girl I)
Plot
Johnny Dee Hellfire and Pervo the Clown run a touring freakshow. Accompanied by the rock singer Skye Brannigan, they travel to conduct a tv interview at the farmhouse studio of Tycho Zander. Tycho leads a cult of women, while his father Henry is also conducting experiments in creating zombies in his lab on the farm. Some of Henry’s formula is placed in a punchbowl that is given to Tycho’s girls, turning them into zombies. Soon Pervo, Johnny, Skye and the rest of the freaks are under attack by the zombified women.
Zombie Women of Satan was the first film from Growling Clown Entertainment and its head Warren Speed, who is also the writer, co-director and the star of the film, playing the role of Pervo the Clown. Growling Clown specialises in comedy and cabaret acts, including adult grindhouse events, Warren Speed’s bio also states that he has worked in stand-up comedy, male burlesque and fetish acts. Speed went on to co-direct the sequel and one other horror film Coulrophobia (2018), as well as solo direct the documentaries Latex – Fetish or Fashion? (2017) and Aliens at Loch Ness (2023).
Within minutes of sitting down to Zombie Women of Satan, you have a feeling of “what the feck am I watching?” There is a stageshow with some really bad stand-up/burlesque where Warren Speed’s performance consists of him starting out doing a knife-throwing act and then deciding to just grab the girl he is using as part of the act and carry her off stage. Moreover, Speed appears in the scene bare-chested, wearing pasties, face painted white and with a black clown nose, (He wears the clown nose right throughout the film and loses his marbles whenever someone knocks or takes it off). This is followed by a scene at the hotel where Speed and his co-organiser Seymour Mace argue over him smuggling multiple women into his room, which descends into a comedy routine.
By the time the film arrives at the farm, it is hard to tell if Zombie Women of Satan is a work that is trying to be edgy (but just ending up being crass) or is someone’s idea of a fantasy. There are some 31 zombie women running around – the credits even list them as Cult Girl A through Z and then starts on AA through EE – all of whom wear white lingerie and usually pink/scarlet red wigs or dyed hair. The women are turned into zombies after drinking from the punch bowl and run around the farm attacking the performing troupe, during which most of them end up losing their tops and going into attack bare-breasted. In between this, Speed and Mace wander around the farm, along with the assorted members of the troupe, and spend most of their time insulting and calling each other names.
(l to r) Victoria Hopkins, Kate Soulsby, Warren Speed (as Pervo the Clown) and Seymour Mace face zombie women(2009)
These scenes are interspersed with others where mad scientist Bill Fellows has a girl (Donna Marie Foster) imprisoned on his lab table and turns her into a zombie, while he also keeps his wife (Kathy Paul) chained up nearby for reasons unclear. In one of the film’s more tediously edgy-just-for-the-sake-of-being-edgy scenes, Fellows persuades son Christian Steel to have sex with the zombie girl while he films it (for experimental purposes of course!)
Between the irritating characters, particularly Warren Speed and his constant barrage of sexual innuendo, crudities and insults, not to mention the lack of anything else beyond being an excuse for topless women running around, Zombie Women of Satan proves tedious. On the other hand, you can’t say it doesn’t deliver exactly what you expected of it at the outset, even if it does let down on the ‘satan’ aspect of the title.
Warren Speed returned to star in and co-direct Zombie Women of Satan 2 (2016), which also featured a return performance from Victoria Hopkins.
