Three shitheads named Bill, Mel and Wyatt (who look like a Southern Rock Bee Gees cover band) are on a hunting trip with their girlfriends Sarah, Lin, and Lin's sister "Blind Kiyomi". These girlfriends tend to have horribly disjointed conversations with each other that feel like the three took turns videotaping each other with a single camcorder, then gave the footage to someone with an advanced case of Parkinson's to edit together later. My theory is all the more strengthened by the fact that neither of the trio are seen on screen together at any point in their opening scene, and whenever any of the girls is being talked to by another of the girls from off-screen, the audio was a blatant playback of a voice recording... a really shoddy voice recording that sounds like it was made by somebody with a friggin' Teddy Ruxpin and a cassette tape that was recorded over one too many times. I'd hang myself right now, I do keep a noose at hand for such occasions, but I've got leftovers in the fridge and I'd hate to miss out on Thanksgiving Sandwiches for lunch the next 4 days. Damn you delicious traditional holiday food stuffs! Why must you come but once a year?!

Shortly into their hunting trip the sextet discover the burnt out remnants of an old church, complete with phantom bells and a backyard graveyard well stocked with Styrofoam novelty tombstones that shift around when touched by our undesirable cast members... one of which has also been graffiti-tagged despite being in the middle of nowhere in a graveyard that hasn't been touched in a century... Finding a Confederate soldier's long abandoned lock box, half the group wants to leave the possessions unmolested while the other half wants to haul that shit to a pawn shop and scrounge up some beer money for their troubles. They opt to leave the crap for now and make camp, unbeknown to them that Mel (who stole Weird Al's mustache and man-perm) has already grabbed a diary as a "keepsake" for himself. Naturally this leads to a small mob of undead secessionists succeeding from the union between their bodies and their burial ground so as to take revenge for their sullied eternal catnaps. Two things you never do if you value your ability to breathe: you never step on a homie's Pumas and you never desecrate a Southern corpse's personal plot!

After 48 minutes of aimless back-and-forth bullshit that feels more like a oneupmanship of bad acting between idiots than it does pertinent dialog, the ghouls (who groan like they've eaten some bad Mexican food), lead by a commander who bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town's Snow Miser, finally get their less-rotted-than-you'd-think-for-being-dead-100-years asses out of 1st gear and attack the campsite. Our "heroes" are lucky though, because these zombies' brains have apparently decayed into methane gas somehow, which is the only explanation I can provide as to why their heads EXPLODE in a display of pyrotechnics any time one of them takes a round in the face. To hasten the combustion of their rotted craniums, Wyatt (the poor homeless man's James Brolin) throws a bag of fireworks the group brought along into their campfire, somehow causing the monsters' faces to randomly go up in flames and horribly super imposed pyro explosions like you'd see on the last day of a county fair... where the footage was probably originally taken from.

Daybreak brings no solace for the gang, as the remaining undead continue the quest to restore their honor. A quest that includes a physical altercation with their enemies in somebody's backyard. You can actually see the owner's house in the background to the left of the screen if you can keep your eyes open long enough. Funny, I was wondering why the grass on the forest floor looked like someone had mowed it recently... A pair of cops show up out of the proverbial nowhere, convinced after hearing the group's story that some morbid pranksters must've dug up all of the dead soldiers and are now swinging the bodies from the trees like some maniacal puppet show hosted by Murder Legendre... did I go over your skull with that last joke? Come on kids, Rob Zombie would've gotten the reference! He's still relevant, right? Then again, after this flick, I don't see much of anything retaining any relevance anymore. Now I know how those whiny little emo kids feel...

If you didn't think the zombies were going to come out and attack the cops too, the ratio of living dead movies to Rob Schneider movies in your life is disturbingly off balance. And when one of the pigs is attacked, the old fart whimpers and cries worse than Stan Laurel suffering severe postpartum depression. Even when the other cop sees his partner being gang munched by the monsters, he reacts with all the urgency of a bowl of plain oatmeal as the youngsters have to verbally abuse him to let them have their guns back so as to fight the festering menace. On the plus side, this is when we finally get to see some gore as the living dead take some of the cast to Gutmunch Town. On the negative side of things, this involves the ghouls consuming intestinal tracts while making disturbing groaning sounds that resemble people "making whoopee" as Bob Eubanks would say. Zombie orgies and gangbangs are one thing, but somehow the idea of sensual (and squishy) zombie love-making creeps me out down to the follicles. And this goes on for several minutes! I think my soul was just sexually assaulted while I was forced to watch... Would any of our female viewers out there like to provide a little sexual healing to help me cope? I promise it won't take long and we can order a pizza afterward.

After Mel manages to shoot Wyatt in the chest, one of the few figures roaming the woods who doesn't have a torso full of maggots, what's left of the group finds their way to a nearby farmhouse... probably the exact same house whose yard they were fighting ghouls in earlier. Reading the diary the gang discovers that the soldiers were all tortured to death by Union soldiers in the remains of the church during the final days of the war, including one kid who had the skin flayed from his body Hellraiser style. The Snow Miser was allowed to keep his Barbados born slave with him though, so of course the kid cast a voodoo curse that would bring the bodies of the Confederates back to exact revenge on whosoever disturbs their resting place. Wyatt figures this out just in time to be too damn late, giving the diary back to the monsters only after everyone but he and Lin have been served up for dinner on Zombie Thanksgiving. The dead touch his face in appreciation, shed a tear, then head back to their dirt beds, leaving two very unlucky twenty-somethings with a shitload of explaining to do when they come back to civilization 4 people shorter than when they left and with their fingerprints all over a crime scene that includes two dead cops...

In a world where you've got an endless supply of Italian zombie gore and George Romero imitators, you don't need Curse of the Cannibal Confederates dragging down the status quo. In a world where you've got Two-Thousand Maniacs, what's the point in making another "killer civil war hillbillies" movie, especially after you've already made something like Night of Horror? There isn't any. Besides, not only is this movie not needed in the world of bad horror movies, but it's a technical clusterfuck on top of all that... a very dirty, sticky, unwashed clusterfuck that's probably carrying more than a few diseases in there too.

The video and audio quality? Holy shit. Is transferring an old VHS copy to DVD then mass producing it really the best that Troma's willing to do for us? In the name of Lloyd Kaufman's left nut, the quality on this thing made my eyes bleed. My corneas detached themselves in an evolutionary act of self-preservation after the first twenty minutes. I've seen Hunt's Point crack whores after knife fights that looked better than this nightmare-for-the-senses, and that's not a joke because I really have seen such women! I had to keep asking my Evil Dead Bride if she'd slipped acid into my hot cocoa while watching this movie, because the incompetence with which it was both acted and assembled gives it this nauseating surreal quality that makes you question your own sanity, then grasp at the air desperately in an attempt to keep whatever little bit you've got left. I think I actually started crying at one point. If Barbara Eden were here right now, I'd have her do that head bob of hers into my lap and put railroad spikes through the feet of every bastard associated with this grade school excuse for a horror movie.

Though any video editor worth their salt would have just done the world a favor and torched all of the negatives for this movie, a half-way competent editor would have at least trimmed down some of the numerous drawn out scenes of NOTHING HAPPENING. Did we really need eight whole minutes of Mel wandering around the graveyard and church rubble for no reason? Or five minutes dedicated to the South "rising again"? Unless it's being accompanied by a fucking .45 Grave song (hey Dinah! Tiff sends her love!), the dead do not need FIVE MINUTES to claw their way out of the earth! For that matter, did we really need any of the first TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES left intact?! I'll answer that one: NO, WE DIDN'T! Did the local mental health institute go out of business during filming, cuz this much padding is usually limited to lining the walls of crazy people cells. Instead of hassling smokers, those Truth wankers should be out pulling publicity stunts to create awareness about the health risks that come with watching Curse of the Cannibal Confederates.

HOWEVER, sometimes in even the most unflushable length of colon lumber you can find a kernel of the sweetest corn. This time, Christopher Gummer (Mel) is that little glowing kernel of salvation. The energy the man puts into his overacting is only illuminated more when surrounded by the rest of the cast's criminal underacting, resulting in a performance that cracked even my own iron armor of disdain. The dickish anger and spastic colonic excitement he infuses his madness with breaks the bad acting sound barrier when he bares those Dr. Teeth choppers of his on top of it. The way he succumbs to his douche baggery when acting like a total asshole to an otherwise lonely and helpless blind girl like Kiyomi is upsetting, but somehow still very funny the way that Gummer does it. He's a human toilet clog, but the no-doubt unintended brilliance that comes with his work makes him a human toilet clog you want on screen as long as possible. Sadly the man's only other credits are for minuscule roles in flicks that probably wouldn't be worth watching otherwise, but if he's still alive by the time I start making my own bad movies (and he's willing to work for microwave burritos and Kool-Aid), I want Chris Gummer to be the Bruce Campbell to my Sam Raimi! The Jeffrey Combs to my Stuart Gordon! The... uhm... sorry, I got distracted by something the Amazing Jonathan was doing on TV. Where was I? Something about a "hank" of rope? Meh, I'm sure it wasn't important.