Doctor Movie: Episode 308 : The Zero Boys

Show Notes

Join Doctor Movie for a look at your favorite movies from behind the steering wheel. The Doctor takes a first time watch for a movie combining alot of ideas from other films and makes a nice goulash of 80s goodness. Its the Zero Boys and its a pretty fun time.

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

What is Doctor Movie! and Hail Ming Power Hour!?

Cinematic oddities and awesomeness under the watchful of the all-powerful Ming and Doctor Movie!

Three guys that enjoy war games, it becomes a real situation for them, and Kelly Moroney is hanging out.

Literally.

All that and how to make your own pickles right here on Doctor Movie.

Let's hit it, shall we?

Hey, what's happening everybody?

Welcome back to Dr.

Movie!

We got another show for you.

If you're not familiar, welcome to the show.

But we do this show, I say we.

I and my car and my phone do this show.

While I'm driving down the road, back and forth to work, which is quite a haul.

And wanted to talk about a movie I'd never checked out before.

It always seemed like it looked cool.

And we are talking about, from 1986, The Zero Boys.

It's considered a horror slash action flick.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I can go ahead and say it.

What do you get when you cross Evil Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Red Dawn, and Rambo?

But not a whole bunch of any one of those.

Yeah, you get this movie.

And, you know, it really doesn't try to hide it either.

I mean, it's legit.

There's some Sam Raimi camera work going on in this that you can't deny.

I mean, there's shots that are set up just like the original Evil Dead movie.

And that's totally fine, because, you know, I'm an Evil Dead fan.

So, hey, if you're going to rip somebody off, rip off a good one.

So let's do a synopsis here.

It says War Games Turn Deadly for a group of young people whose celebratory camping trip leads them to an unoccupied house.

Wow, that leaves out a whole bunch.

Let's see here.

Directed by Nico Mastroakis.

You got me.

I don't know.

Like I said, 1986, kind of a direct-a-video.

We got some why to watch.

Let's see what this is.

Cinematography is nice.

The sound is crisp and the Zimmer-Meier score is fantastic.

Helps dry the suspicions.

Yeah, that's another thing, too, is this is early Zimmer work, getting his feet wet with doing some soundtracks.

So there's not a three-word review.

I'm kind of disappointed in that.

I could make my own, I guess.

Let's see here.

Released by Aero Films.

The picture quality of Zero Boys is, for the most part, excellent.

That's all it says.

Okay, well, they're happy with the Aero print of the movie.

We have the Zero Boys' very quickly imagined and executed feature, including getting the largely unknown cast together.

Well, that's easy to do if you don't want to spend money, is getting a bunch of unknowns together.

Speaking of the unknown cast, let's see what we got here.

We got Daniel Hirsch, who's Steve, you know, because you have to have just plain names, right?

Was also in My Chauffeur, which is a 80s kind of standard.

That's kind of the only thing I really recognize him from.

Obviously, we talked about Kelly Maroney in this.

I mean, she's kind of a staple of this time.

We've got Chopping Mall.

We've got Sorority Babes.

Night of the Comet.

I mean, she was kind of hitting those VHS shelves pretty hard.

And, you know, she is a good actress, but she's also known for her assets as well, if you know what I mean.

But she's had a career to where she hasn't had to show the goods.

I kind of have to hand her, you know, have to give her the golf clap for that.

I mean, it's a little disappointing, but at the same time, it's pretty, you know, commendable.

I mean, you know, because let's face it, if you're in the 80s and you're a nice looking blonde girl that's, you know, as the British say, fit, you know, the first thing they're going to want you to do is strip them off.

And I don't know of anything where I've seen her exposed, not to my knowledge.

So I may be wrong, and you may be yelling at me right now, but I don't think I've ever seen her exposed.

And I kind of have to, if that's a true statement, I kind of have to, you know, say good show, good show, or not good show, or good job not showing.

You know, you know what I mean.

Jared Moses, don't know who that is.

Nicole Rio.

She's at least got a picture over her name, so let's see if she's been in some other stuff here.

Nope.

So, you know, we're talking about a cast of unknowns.

We're kind of right here.

The only other one to really bring up in this movie is Joe Estevez.

That's right.

He is the younger brother of Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, who actually looks older than they do.

And he's kind of the...

He's one of the bad guys in this.

So that's kind of wild.

Again, I can't really place anybody else, and there's probably somebody I'm missing here.

More importantly, I want to talk about this movie, because when it starts off, you kind of have a set up where it's a military game going on.

At first, you don't really know it's a game.

It could be just some kind of standoff, but as it goes on, you find out it's a game.

They're using paint guns, I guess, paintball guns, to a degree.

And when it's all said and done, the Zero Boys win, and Steve, our main character, he makes the leader of the other team they're going against get out of your megaphone and tell everybody that's there, which there was a crowd there to watch this happen.

So this is some kind of big event that they do pretty often.

But made him announce that the Zero Boys were the best.

So they're three guys, and they're pretty good at these games.

And the captain of the other team makes a wager with Steve that if the Zero Boys win, he gets to take his girlfriend.

I know.

You're probably going, well, that's probably something they did in the 80s.

No, it's really not.

This is a weird...

Maybe the guy didn't have anything else to offer.

I don't know.

But his girlfriend happens to be, you guessed it, Kelly Moroni.

So that's our setup with this.

And she doesn't want to go because she's insulted, obviously, who wouldn't be, that you've been given up by your boyfriend as a prize for a game.

And so she's not happy about it.

You can kind of tell she's not even into this whole world of these guys playing these games and stuff.

So, you know, typical kind of snooty girl.

Not downplaying, I'm just saying, you know, she's not interested, which, you know, come on.

It's hard to find a girl that's interested in the habits and hobbies that most guys have, right?

So if you're lucky, if you've got one that does enjoy the same activities as you do, that would be a bro kind of thing, right?

That's when you got a win-win situation.

Anywho, the Zero Boys go out.

The other two have girlfriends with them.

We got Kelly Moroney in here with them, and they're taking a trip out the middle of nowhere.

And while they're driving, Kelly Moroney's character yells to stop because she sees a woman running through the woods, kind of like the scene in Suspiria, which is, if you've seen Suspiria, you know what I'm talking about, where she sees an image through the woods, through the trees.

So they stop, they go out there, they don't find anything, but they find some blood on a limb.

And you kind of get this Texas chainsaw moment, where it's like, well, I don't see you anywhere, but look, there's an old farmhouse here.

Let's go ask.

Dump, dump, dump.

Right?

So do you really need to go ask?

Right?

So they go to the house, they can't find anything, the place is abandoned, so they decide, hey, let's just party here.

You know, because it's the 80s.

That was the whole goal in life, is to go out, shoot paint guns, steal a guy's girl, and then, you know, go party, because that's the 80s, dude.

So they go to this house, and the other two guys are a little more loose at the hips.

Yeah, they're fine with this.

Now Steve, he's kind of like, yeah, I don't know, man, it's not our place, we're trespassing, not really happy with this choice.

But he goes along because, you know, the other guys kind of disappear with their girlfriends because there's upstairs bedrooms, you know, that are just conveniently up there, ready for whatever's going to happen.

You know what I mean.

So yeah, you've got this situation where everybody is separated, and Steve and...

What's Kelly Maroney's character name?

They go sit on the swing, and they start talking.

So she starts softening up to him.

They start realizing that she'd realize he's not as bad of a guy as she thought he was.

He realizes that she's kind of easy.

And your story kind of goes from there.

But while they're walking around and spending some time together, another couple's upstairs, and a lady is obviously on the bed with a young strapping dude on top of her.

And she looks up and there's a hole in the ceiling and she sees an eyeball staring back at her, right?

So from here on, you've got somebody's watching them, they get a phone call, and it's people telling them that there's no escape from this house, you're in our house and you're gonna die.

And from there, it kind of plays out like inside the house, it feels like Evil Dead.

There's a lot of camera work, a lot of people standing in a circle and sharing dialogue and the camera spinning around them.

I mean, if you've seen the first Evil Dead, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

And there's some overhead shots that are, I mean, it's just Samaraini, that's all there is to it.

Which is, again, totally fine.

And you kind of get this last, not last house on the left, the Hills Have Eyes thing, except these people are not, you know, degenerative mountain people or hill people who eat the babies and all that stuff.

These are pretty normal looking people.

I think that's kind of the big, maybe the big disappointment of the movie is the killers are just like, hey, our main killer is wearing an Ozod shirt and a pullover sweater, and he's out here swinging a machete.

It's just kind of weird, because this house looks like it's been here a long time.

There's definitely skeletons that's been buried and bones are popping up out of the ground and stuff.

So it's like this has been here a long time, but this guy is dressed like he just came home from a tennis meeting or something.

I don't know, it's just kind of weird.

But you think it's one person, but no, it ends up being a few more, which again, ties into it's almost the same setup as The Hills Have Eyes.

And again, nothing wrong with that.

So as the movie goes on, they find the woman that had been kidnapped or the woman she saw running earlier through the woods, and they've got a thing out in the barn where they're kind of torturing people and videotaping it.

You know, it's high dollar, high state of the art.

It's a VCR hooked up to a small, about a 10 inch TV screen, maybe a 13, and a video camera.

And they've got like a dentist's chair.

Obviously they like torturing people because killing people is not too much fun.

Torturing is where the fun is at.

You kind of get that through the story.

The reason these guys are called The Zero Boys is because they used to lose all the time.

And the other companies used to call them The Zero Boys, and once it stuck and they started winning, they thought for good luck they'd just keep the name.

That's why it's called The Zero Boys.

No other explanation.

But you go from this to some pretty good stuff.

There's a lot of survival things that these guys have, you know, basically been practicing for a situation like this with these games.

So it really becomes a fight for survival.

And I went into it, and when I got about an hour into it, I thought, this is going to be a typical Friday the 13th, which by the way, the majority of this movie was shot on the set or the actual location where they shot Friday the 13th, part 3.

So it may look very familiar to you, and that's why.

So there's a little tidbit for you.

This movie was shot like in 18 days, so there was not a lot of time to maybe find better outfits for our killers and stuff.

So I think it's probably why we don't have a, for lack of a better word, mongoloid type killer that we're used to, especially in this time in 86.

I mean, come on.

But yeah, it really takes an interesting turn.

I won't say a twist, because it really doesn't catch you off guard.

It's full of booby traps, you know, where the bad guys are setting booby traps to catch, you know, these people and knock them off.

And there's some pretty dang good things that happened in this movie that, I don't know, kind of surprised me, because I did not expect the level of some of this stuff to work out as good as it did.

But yeah, you find out there's more than one killer.

They've got crossbows, so they can shoot you from a distance.

They almost hunt you down as like their hunters kind of thing.

And I'm going to kind of leave it there, so that way you can check it out.

Like I said, it feels very familiar when you're getting into it.

And you feel like, yeah, I've seen this before.

I've definitely seen this before because of all the camera work.

But I tell you, it's not bad at all.

Once it gets going, there's not a high body count.

But there's some pretty good suspense going on here.

And it lacks a good ending.

It's the only thing, I mean, it doesn't end bad, but it's just lacking that something.

And they kind of cop out with almost a standard type ending that by 1986 you're kind of used to.

So other than that though, I don't feel like I wasted my time.

It is a nice looking film.

It's put together really well for a very low budget movie.

Yeah, I like it.

I'm going to give it a, I'll give it a 3 out of 5.

I think it's right down the middle for me.

And I think you would do yourself a favor by checking it out.

I don't even know what else to say.

I was pleasantly surprised by the third act, except the very end.

But that's just because, you know, it was probably a more original idea back then than it is now.

It's just been done so many times.

But anyhow, that being said, you can check it out for yourself.

It is on Tubi.

Check it out.

Let me know what you think.

If you're a fan of this one, let me know.

If I'm missing some details here, again, I pretty much just watch these movies.

I Google the movie, and I read the information that I'm given, and I try to give my opinion on the movie.

That's it.

That's all I really do.

So if I'm missing some details that are very, very crucial to this, let me know.

But I don't know.

It feels like a very standard movie, but that third act, I think, holds it together pretty well.

Maybe a little bit of filler here and there.

But yeah, check it out.

All right, folks, that's it for this one.

We will check you later.