The movie starts with a military dude delivering a barrel of radioactive material to some unknown location. He hits a pothole and the barrel rolls out onto some fat redneck’s property. (The fat actor is pretty funny, and I think Horatio Sanz stole his whole act from this guy.)

The fat redneck is pretty excited about his shiny yellow barrel, but he can’t read any of the writing on it. His neighbors show up with shotguns and slingshots. They take the barrel from him since the fat guy shot up their moonshine still earlier that week. They have a big batch of moonshine going out that night, and the yellow barrel will do nicely.

Sure, the moonshine ends up having a green glow to it, but that just means it’s more potent. And when all the rednecks across the county drink it, they turn into flesh-eating zombies! It’s a flimsy premise, but that’s all this movie needs. The redneck brothers are hilarious, especially Billy Bob, who insists on being called Elly May. I don’t want to spoil the funny scenes, but I will say that the zombie toddler eating human flesh was probably my favorite scene.

This movie was shot on video, and on the surface it looks very cheap. However, the lighting, sound and editing are extremely well done, especially considering this was shot in the mid-1980’s. I’d even go so far as to say this movie looks and sounds better than most Digital Video movies on the market today.

The blood and gore special effects are equally impressive, and also look very good compared to most of what’s available today. And there were several different cheesy country songs throughout the movie with “Redneck Zombie” in the chorus. I want the soundtrack.

Redneck Zombies has the distinction of being one of the first “video” feature films to get wide distribution. The movie is distributed by Troma (of course), and I think it’s one of the best movies in their library. And while it’s not quite brilliant enough for me to award it five stars, I think it easily earns four stars. You’ll definitely want to pick this one up for your B-movie collection.