“Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies” (2016): Nothing Says Zombies Better Than a Bavarian Barmaid Named Rita

Zombie film fans have a new hero, and her name is Rita, the Bavarian barmaid (played by Margarete Tiesel) who joins a pair of hot-shot young skiers to stop the infected from taking over a rundown mountain resort, the village at the bottom of the slopes and, eventually the world.

Directed by Austrian filmmaker Dominik Hartl, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies is the story of Franz (Karl Fischer) the slimy owner of a rundown ski resort with a desperate plan to attract foreign investors. He’s built a snow making machine that turns a suspicious looking green liquid — that looks like radioactive Mountain Dew — into fresh powder for the slopes. Unfortunately, the snow has a weird side effect: It turns anything it touches into a zombie.

If you think reading that last sentence will spoil the fun of watching Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, you can just relax. There’s no mystery to what’s happening in the movie. The big secret of how the zombies are being made is revealed soon after the opening credits giving Hartl and his cast the rest of the running time to fill the screen with gory — and goofy — zombie fun.

Naturally, there are three fresh-faced young adults on hand to battle the bad guy and the army of undead he creates. Steve and Josh (Laurie Calvert and Oscar Dyekjær Giese) are two extreme skiers out on the mountain to make their latest high flying video, and they are joined by their producer, Steve’s girlfriend Branka (Gabriela Marcinková). Unlike a lot of zombie movies, the three heroes quickly figure out they’re surrounded by flesh-hungry corpses and swiftly start killing them in some truly original ways.

And that’s one of the keys to Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies success: every object you see in the movie — on the bar, in the bathroom, in the storage shed or I the ski rack — can be, and is, used to kill zombies. Decapitate a zombie with a snowboard? No problem. Chew a corps to pieces with a snow blower? What could be easier? Shoot them to pieces, along with most of the bar, with a World War II 50 caliber machine gun? Just ask Rita.

Which brings us back to our new hero, Rita. She may start out as the wise-cracking barmaid with a taste for her own schnapps, but when the blood, guts and severed heads start flying, Rita makes a stand behind her vintage machine gun and lest the bullets fly. Tiesel lays her perfectly, too. Whether she’s revving up the snow blower, skewering a zombie in the eyes with some ski poles, or serving up drinks and barmaid wisdom to her customers before they start craving human flesh, Tiesel makes sure the warmth and humanity of her character shine through. Not an easy task when you’re covered in other peoples’ blood and guts.

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (4 / 5)

John Black

John Black still remembers his first horror movie, sneaking in to a double-feature of Horror House with Frankie Avalon and a Boris Karloff film he can’t remember the name of but will always remember for giving him his first glimpse of cinematic nudity as one of the actresses moved from the bed to the door without putting on any underwear! (Fond family memory: That glimpse, when discovered by his parents, cased John’s mom to call the theater and yelling at the manager for letting her son see ‘such filth’.) Luckily, John was more impressed by the blood and horror than the bare haunches and quickly became a devotee of the genre.

John has been a professional movie reviewer since 1987, when his first review – of a Robert De Niro film called Angel Heart – appeared in the entertainment section of The Cape Codder newspaper. He’s been writing about film ever since, primarily now as the entertainment editor at Boston Event Guide. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t watch at least one movie, which is how he thinks life was meant to be.