by Colleen Wanglund

Written by Todd Tjersland and directed by Matt Jaissle, the SOV flick The Necro Files (1997) stars Steve Sheppard as Detective Manners and Gary Browning as his partner Detective Sloane who are on the hunt for Logan (Isaac Cooper) a serial rapist and murderer who has killed and mutilated 200 women including Detective Sloane’s sister. The detectives find Logan at the scene of his latest kill and he manages to stun Manners with a shot to the head before he is handcuffed by Sloane. Manners, however shoots and kills Logan.

Nine months later a group of Satanists performing a ritual in a cemetery inadvertently bring Logan back from the dead. After killing and mutilating all but two of the Satanists who get away, zombie Logan goes around attacking women with his foot-and-a-half long perpetually erect penis, stabbing and feeding on their entrails while screwing them.

Meantime, Detectives Manners and Sloane are sent to find this attacker but something isn’t right. It seems the head injury that Manners suffered at the hands of Logan months before has made him aggressive, belligerent and a drug user. At first the detectives think they are looking for a copycat, until they see zombie Logan for themselves.

While all of this is going on, our two bumbling but lucky Satanists return to the cemetery trying to undo the ritual. They make things worse by bringing back the baby that was sacrificed in the earlier ritual. So now we have a sex fiend zombie and a demon baby running around town.

While I am a huge supporter of indie horror, I didn’t like The Necro Files at all. This is a low-budget film and it shows. The acting was overdone although the characters of Manners and Sloane were somewhat interesting. The dialogue is sufficient to move the story along, but that’s about it. The Necro Files tries to be erotic horror but the nudity generally falls into the juvenile and uncomfortable category. Watching a woman playing around with a (female) blow-up sex doll and a very large dildo made me want to fast forward through the scene. I have no problem with sex in movies. I like erotic horror when it’s done well. This wasn’t done well. And the “stage names” of the actresses (and I use the term loosely) had me rolling my eyes—Jen O. Cide, Dru Berrymore and Anne R. Key?

The makeup for zombie Logan was pretty good but otherwise I thought the gore was too excessive, like they were trying too hard. At times the Special Effects were amateurish as in the case of a dead female whose head was clearly fake. The demon baby is clearly a doll, which is made to fly around attacking everyone it comes across. The obvious demographic for The Necro Files is 16-25 year-old males. Is it tongue-in-cheek on the part of the filmmakers? Probably. Does that make me wish for the hour and fifteen minutes of my life back any less? Nope. To me the film is just silly. I can probably recommend it to that 16-25 year-old male demographic, but with bad sex and drug use, maybe not.