HumanoidOfFlesh I remember seeing "The Supernaturals" on cable TV during my childhood.The film left some memories,so it was the highest time to check it out after so many years.The prologue starts in 1865.A group of confederate soldiers is captured by the Yankees and forced to walk across a minefield.All of them die with an exception of a young boy.The year is 1986.A group of young soldiers led by Nichelle Nichols is camping in the woods.When the night begins the confederate zombies appear and start killing recruits one by one.It's up to Maxwell Caufield to save his platoon."The Supernaturals" is competently made and well-acted zombie flick.The film is relatively goreless as all the killings are off-screen.Still if you liked Tony Malanowski's "The Curse of the Screaming Dead" you may give this one a try.7 Civil War zombies out of 10.

trashgang This is a perfect example of a flick that had many promotions but failed at the box office. I have even seen a article of 2 pages in an old fangoria concerning this flick, so go figure out. The picture in Fangoria were okay and made me think, it's going to be bloody. But I was wrong. Not that it was badly shot, it was all done in a proper way but it takes too long before the zombies arrive. The zombies themselves looks really okay and the effects used as they are dismembered are also really well done. It's even a bit funny with a hacked off hand keeping attacking ones throat and one soldier being killed by the remains of a slashed arm of a zombie. But as I said, it takes too long before they actually attack. The supernatural effects are out dated. The idea was okay and can be related to 2000 maniacs in some ways. It never had a proper release and is only available on ex-rental NTSC VHS.

udar55 A group of Army recruits (led by STAR TREK's Nichelle Nichols) head into the Kentucky woods for a weekend of training. What they don't expect to run into are some zombie Confederate soldiers led by the ghost of a lady who just happened to be married to Pvt. Ray Ellis (Maxwell Caulfield) in an earlier life. You still with me? While the set up of Confederate zombies seems great, don't get your hopes up as director Armand Mastroianni decides not to go all out. The film should have been more RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and less what it is now. The biggest problem is that it takes place over a series of days, when it should have taken place in one night. The leads to a series of build ups and screeching halts that really drag the film's pace down. Also, the zombies should have been the focus but they are an afterthought and mostly obscured. Instead, we get this mystery woman - who no one questions why she is in a nightgown in the middle of the woods - and some mumbo jumbo regarding her son (who has some kind of magical powers that make his hands glow and also lived into the 1980s after a 1864 prologue!). Probably the most interesting thing about the film is seeing Nichols alongside future STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION star LeVar Burton. Co-starring Martin Balsam's daughter Talia.

Coventry Sigh…despite my many years of training in horror cinema and countless of previous bad experiences, I still get suckered into watching lousy movies because of their appealing and juicy looking VHS cover artwork! I knew absolutely nothing about "The Supernaturals", but purely based on that drawing of a toothless skull wearing a civil army soldier's hat, I simply had to see it! Way to go, Mr. Horror expert… Oh well, at least it isn't the worst genre movie of the 80's, that's for sure. "The Supernaturals" is a mediocre horror outing with a relatively original concept and setting and a handful of memorably worthwhile sequences, but ultimately it lacks the necessary suspense and panache in order to rank among the better achievements of the 80's decade. As stated already in numerous other reviews and user comments, the film effectively borrows the settings and characters of Walter Hill's "Southern Comfort" and H.G. Lewis' "Two Thousand Maniacs". Unfortunately, however, it features neither the claustrophobic atmosphere of the former and nor the outrageously delicious gore effects of the latter. What remains is a nonetheless interesting movie about a platoon of soldiers out on a training excursion in a Southern forest area and suddenly having to battle against seemingly spontaneously resurrected zombie soldiers from the Civil War. Ironically enough, the supernatural elements in "The Supernaturals" are the only ones that don't work. The promising flashback at the beginning hinted that a kid soldier saved his mother thanks to a sudden outburst of supernatural powers on this exact same location during the year 1865, and now he – Jeremy - as well as his mother and the long-dead members of the platoon he was part of still guard over the place. The explanation given to the presence of the zombies is unsatisfying and feels incomplete. This would have been less of a problem if there had been more gory murders and/or straightforward suspense to distract you from the plot. Now, there's little else left to do but wonder about how Jeremy obtained his powers, how exactly does he resurrect the dead and how come he's still alive after more than a century? The middle section is plain dull and I simply cannot comprehend why Armand Mastroianni decided it would be a good idea to make an 80's zombie movie with only a minimum of gore.