Doctor Butcher M.D. (1980)
★ — Doctor Butcher M.D. (1980)
Marino Girolami was primarily a journeyman director of Italian comedies and genre pictures across the 1960s and 70s, and this late-career effort represents something of an outlier, an uneasy hybrid of zombie horror and cannibal exploitation that producers assembled partly from footage shot by two different hands. The cannibal and zombie cycle had been running hot in Italian genre cinema since Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1979) and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and Flora Film were clearly hoping to capitalise on that wave. The American distribution cut, retitled Doctor Butcher M.D. (with the gleefully absurd tagline intact), was reportedly packaged and sold from a truck outside a New York cinema, which tells you most of what you need to know about its route to audiences. Ian McCulloch, familiar from Fulci's Zombie, leads the cast.
Where do I even start? This is the kind of movie that makes you question if you accidentally walked onto a film set while it was being mocked in a comedy sketch. The acting is terrible. The effect are worse than your average Halloween costume. The dubbing is so hilariously out of sync it’s basically its own foreign language. At one point a guy gets shot, dramatically moves his hand to reveal the wound after he’s already clutching his chest. It's hilariously bad. And then there's a character early on who gets thrown out a window and clearly gets replaced mid-air by a mannequin that immediately loses its arm on impact. A+ stunt coordination. This is a grindhouse mess so bad it’s almost impressive. Almost.
Rating: ★ | Year: 1980 | Watched: 2025-07-17
Where to watch (UK)
Stream: Cultpix
Physical: Amazon UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Ian McCulloch: Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
