The Road Down to Hell: Zibahkhana (2007)

Zibahkhana (Pakistan, 2007) (AKA "Hell's Ground")
rating: **1/2
starring: Kunwar Ali Roshan, Rooshanie Ejaz, Rubya Chaudhry

Well, not exactly the kind of zombie/slasher hybrid I was expecting, but I can't blame the hype either.

Five teens decided to ditch school in order to watch a concert, completely unaware of an unknown disease that seems to be affecting the water one town is drinking, which eventually turns out to be zombifying them into diseased flesh eaters. After a going through a detour in hopes of reaching the concert on time, these teens encountered, attacked and had one of them bitten by these zombies, forcing them to go back to the road in order to him a hospital. But as night falls, the group soon found themselves lost and soon encounters another set of monsters...

Foreign slasher films can be tricky, as what might be gory for one country may not be the same for another. Marketed as Pakistan's first Gore film, Zibahkhana, or Hell's Ground, is a slasher movie in vein of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) in plotting, with a little something extra that tries to be everything we love about Western horror but comes out as a rather average portrayal and somewhat misleading as well.

For starters, the claim that the film is somewhat "Texas Chainsaw meets Dawn of the Dead" had me thinking we're going to have zombies and psychos clashing for the kill count. That didn't happen; instead, what we have here is a build-up on a possible outbreak from the very beginning of the film, with news clippings and some shots of a town being contained, only to have around ten or fifteen of these dead guys lumbering around, attacking our van-riding group and eating random victims that are no connection with our characters, only for five minutes or so of screentime, in the middle of the entire movie. This here's a 77 minute horror film, so after we see the zombies, they were barely (or even never) mentioned and seen again, shifting focus to the film's other monsters, so they're more of an equivalent of a walk-in monster cameo than an actual plot set-piece. (the movie could had gone through without them to be honest)

Misleading Zombie Hybrid aside, the third act of the film is where it became a full re-telling of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, (with some elements of Psycho (1960) as well as Pakistani concepts of religion and healers) complete from the scene where they actually picked up a hitchhiker that turns out to be crazy, to the fact that the psycho family here rids themselves of their victim's corpses by selling them as "goat" meat. While not as gory as it make itself sound, the murders here are creative enough to be enjoyed by a seasoned slasher fan, plus the killer committing them does look cool, a Pakistani Leatherface equivalent labeled as Burquaman, who's face is obscured by a woman's garment that makes him look like a pre-hockey mask Jason Voorhees.

The film is quite steady on its pacing, and it really took a lot of time and filler before some real action happened, with a direction that seems to be juggling two horror sub-genres one at a time. This is perhaps where Zibahkhana is flawed; a true horror hybrid should have merged the slasher and zombie film themes in one single telling, rather than have these two come about in their own scenes. The result is a half-half movie doesn't quite deliver much of the scare factor, but instead shows a bit of cheesy low-budgetary mostly found in B-flicks, with a tone.

Even the promised gore is quite low in a Western standard; the zombies resembled people with red stained oatmeal pasted on their faces and the gore they're feasting on, as messy as it looked, isn't really something new. The other half, however, only showcased one or two kills that delivers a real splasher, the rest being cheap kills and offcamera murders. Perhaps I'm asking for too much, and I admit I do have those streaks, so that's why I cant really give Zibahkhana a low scoring; the concept is good and I love the dedication the cast and crew put into this film. It's trashy, micro-budgeted and somewhat lacking a footing on its own, but it does managed to entertain and give out a new perspective to slasher films in terms of culture and energy.

It's a keeper for my book, as another certified foreign, guilty pleasure of mine next to Russia's Trackman (nothing's gonna change that!); While far from the next great zombie/slasher hybrid I'm looking for (A little higher than Zombie Child (1977), but nowhere as high as Trailer Park of Terror and the outstanding Dead Snow of Norway), but for those who wanted to try a Ladoo version of a dirty, gritty slasher, Zibahkhana is the path for you!

There's nothing beautiful underneath this veil!

Bodycount:
1 male beaten with shovel, meat hook to the chest
4 males found disemboweled and cannibalized
1 male head found
1 male stabbed to death with machete
3 males and 1 female found dead
1 male hit on the head with morning star
1 male corpse found
1 male ran over by van, dies
1 female neck broken
1 male brained to death with rock, stabbed with a morning star's handle
1 male succumbs to infection
1 female killed offcamera
total: 18