During World War II, a secret Nazi convoy transporting gold through the desert is destroyed by soldiers (some kind of partisans? The screenwriter surely doesn't know either) while camping at a desert oasis.
The battle's only survivor is the commander of the attackers who is found by a band of desert nomads.
Years later, an old Nazi officer seeks him out to find out where exactly the nice little heap of gold his subordinates transported is situated. The other guy helps him out without batting an eyelash. Talk about forgiving and forgetting. Of course, the evil Nazi bastard is far less lenient and kills him.
Soon he and a few other people are on their way to the oasis, only to have an unlucky encounter with the resident Nazi zombies, who don't show any respect for his rank.
At about the same time a young man, Robert, who is the son of dead soldier guy, experiences the wonder of time travel. Although he lives on another continent, he already knows about his father's death and studies his father's documents. He, too, learns of the gold and flies with a bunch of friends (the meat) to Morocco.
Very soon most of them are going to be zombie chow.
When I read the above synopsis the plot sounds a little more sensible than it actually is. Probably because I didn't mention most of the flashbacks, sub-plots and unrelated scenes. I can certainly promise you that it won't make a lick of sense when you are watching the actual movie.
Nonetheless I can recommend watching it, if (and I know this is quite a big "if") you are able to enjoy Jess Franco's work for more than the laughs.
Oasis of the Zombies is one of the films Franco made for Eurocine, which means even lower budgets and much worse actors than in his earlier films, as well as much more exploitational themes. Theoretically.
In fact, Franco treats his (dreary looking) zombies with disinterest, if not contempt. It's quite obvious that neither the zombies nor the plot are of any greater interest to him.
Instead, he tries to show us a very different way of seeing, a singular way of filmmaking, that -as is the case with his brother in spirit Jean Rollin- breaks most of the rules of "correct" filmmaking and asks the viewer to forget those rules - or be bored to death.
Because what most reviews of the film say is completely true: Oasis is cheap, slow, circumcisious and (seen as a piece of normal horror cinema) just plain boring. But if you are able to watch it while keeping a different perspective, as if it were the first film you have ever seen, you can find in the way the scenes are framed, in the deliberateness of all movement, the insistence on strangely insignificant details, something (and I know how pretentious all this sounds) that is the visual equivalent of a poem, beautiful, ugly and captivating.
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