Bob @ Beauty in Ruins

If you've ever done a late night horror movie marathon, then the odds are you've come across at least one of those 80's flicks where the specter of poorly stored, cheaply transported, or lazily discarded toxic waste has come back to haunt some backwoods, small town, smack-dab in middle America. It was a staple of the genre, and it's alive and well today (so to speak) in Night of the Living Inflatable Love Dolls by J.H. Glaze.

The contemporary twist here comes from reality TV. As anybody who has ever watched Shipping Warsknows, truckers are never content to take just one load, not when they can double their money with two. That's precisely what happens here when a hapless trucker loads up with boxes of sex toys and barrels of . . . well, something top secret and extremely dangerous. One armadillo, one moment of distraction, and one collision with a tree later, the barrels are leaking and the sex toys are alive.

It's a simple premise, but the execution is a ton of fun. It seems anything made of (or containing) rubber is fair game for toxic zombification, sending an army of plastic love dolls marching into town, followed by a sea of wiggling, squiggling, creeping dildos and vibrators. Of course, if that's all the makeshift small town army had to face, this would be a pretty boring (or extraordinarily obscene) story. Instead, as that army of wide-eyed sex dolls are on the march, they're spewing torrents of toxic waste from their wide-open mouths - and just a drop causes anything living to swell up and explode in a wash of contaminated blood and gore.

With a town under siege, stranded by cars and trucks with exploding tires, it all comes down to a desperate last stand outside the town bar. Hastening their demise is the poor decision but a pair of drunken rednecks to hurl a few sticks of dynamite at the sex-toy horde, sending an explosion of toxic waste as far as the eye can see.

Aside from the lack of obscene, inappropriate zombie encounters, Night of the Living Inflatable Love Dolls is pretty much what you'd expect. It's a tense, fast-paced, action-packed tale where victory is never more than an illusion, and things can always - ALWAYS - get worse. There's a lot of imagination here, with Glaze doing a fantastic job of following through on the implications of everything rubber.