With a title like Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, one’s expectations are either going to be through the roof, thinking this movie will be out of this world, or highly tempered, knowing it will be nowhere near as good. In short, the film would turn out to be more of the latter than the former.

The story revolves around a group of friends who go camping and hunting, with a side of romance, when they stumble upon an old church graveyard. Said burial plots hold the remains of Confederate soldiers and whatever items they died with. Curiosity killed the cat, as they say, and the young men and women cannot help themselves from helping themselves to some of those very items from within the graves. All of this triggers something supernatural in the area, and the dead rise that night to take their revenge out upon the hapless adventurers.

For good or bad, this movie is a mixed bag. The acting was middle-of-the-road, terrible at times, and passable when it wasn’t. None of the actors is worth writing home about, but they at least deliver their lines with a bit of conviction, so that the audience is not entirely turned off. The story was not all that bad. Confederate zombies seem like a good idea on paper, and here, they were not downright awful, but they could have been so much better had the budget for this picture been larger. The practical effects were not significant, meaning the makeup used to make these shambling soldiers. At times, it was effective, and they looked quite creepy, but then there would be a couple of zombies that simply looked like a couple of albinos who had been living in a cave for a decade or so. As for the blood and literal guts that made it on screen, they turned out to be okay. With the scenes being quite dark at times, aside from the zombie makeup, it was sometimes hard to see the visceral horror, which was probably a good thing given the apparent lack of budget.

In addition to all of that, the direction was poor and the pacing was even worse. There was one scene that felt like a literal eternity as the zombies were chowing down on one of their victims. The sound engineer, if there was one, failed at his job, as the sound of zombies eating was far louder than anything else in the movie. With a scene that was already overlong, listening to zombies smack their lips and chew with their mouths open was pure torture. The film might not have been particularly scary, but it did have its share of horror.

If one is fortunate enough to make it all the way through this cinematic nightmare, they can count themselves among the few who have. It is not the most complicated watch, but there isn’t much that can be considered rewarding about it.

1.5 out of 5