31 Days of Fright, Day 5: The Video Dead

Welcome to day 5 of 31 Days of Fright here at Road To The Movies! In today's episode, Gabe ponders whether or not Hollywood has the guts to take on...

THE VIDEO DEAD
1987
Rated R

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I go into every movie wanting to like it. When I step into a theater or hit PLAY on my remote, I do my level best to open my mind and approach whatever movie I happen to be watching with the attitude, This could be the best movie I’ve ever seen. Granted, it’s not always easy.

We’re told from earliest childhood, Never judge a book by its cover, but even if we have to lie to everyone else, let’s not lie to ourselves; sometimes you can just tell a movie is going to be a steaming pile. This is especially true when it comes to horror. I’ll admit, there are some great low-budget horror movies out there with covers that would make a Troma fanboy blush, but if I had a dollar for all of them that I’ve found, I probably couldn’t afford to buy one of them - not retail, anyway.

Case-in-point: The Video Dead. Look at that cover. Doesn’t it just scream, Quality? No. No, it doesn’t. It screams, 90 minutes of your life you’ll wish you could get back, or something more to that effect. At the same time, the optimist in me screams back, But remember The Dead Next-Door? Or Gamebox 1.0? You love those movies! This could be that rare gem, that diamond hidden within a lump of coal! You just never know!

And he’s right. I don’t know. I won’t know until I watch it. So I do.

Dammit!

The agonizing truth of this movie is that it’s not a total deuce. If it had been I could have turned it off after the first 30 minutes and saved myself the heartbreak, but there were some genuinely fun moments in this film, and that’s why I feel so betrayed.

Quick setup of The Video Dead: There’s a haunted TV. It gets delivered to a house by mistake. Zombies come out of the TV and kill the homeowner. Three months later, a couple living overseas buys the house, sight-unseen, and their adult-teen children move in without them. The zombies return (From where? Don’t ask.). All hell breaks loose.

Actually, that last one is a bit misleading. It would be more accurate to say that all hell thinks about breaking loose, creeps around a bit, breaks a little loose, then reigns it in, then creeps some more, then breaks a little more loose, then breaks fully loose, then reigns it in again before breaking loose, creeping, breaking, reigning, creeping, breaking, creeping, and breaking one last time. Needless to say, all hell doesn’t really seem to know what the hell it wants to do.

And that’s really the crux of my complaint here. Despite some really wonderful and original zombie elements (EXAMPLE: The zombies have a sense of humor, and think it’s the height of comedy to kill people and leave their bodies in degrading and/or mildly comic positions.) the story has absolutely no sense of structure or pacing. Once people die, they’re dead, but that’s about as much logic and structure as there is to be found. The final confrontation is sort of brilliant in concept, but is so poorly executed that it ends up falling flat, most – if not all – of the tension drained from it by bad acting and poor scene structure.

Oh, and I know it’s really just the whiniest of complaints, but if you’re going to load up a film with bad actors, is it too much to ask that they be at least mildly attractive? I mean, what motivation are you giving me to keep watching? The great writing?

I don’t want to end this review having illuminated all the flaws of this movie, but paid little attention to its virtues, so allow me to point out a few bright spots to be seen along the way.

The zombie makeup is pretty darn good. You can tell they were trying hard to create iconic zombies in the vein of Fulci’s worm-eyed zombie or Day of the Dead’s Bub, and had the movie been a little better, they would probably have succeeded. The word ick seems quite appropriate here, and for a zombie film, that’s a good thing.

There was also a lot of originality floating around in this one. Zombies that – for once – don’t give a crap about eating their victims; zombies with a weakness other than their brains; a zombie hunter who acts tough, but is arguably more inept than the teens he's trying to rescue; and (as already discussed) zombies with a warped sense of humor all beg the question, Why couldn’t a writer/director with some actual talent have taken a crack at this instead? Oh well. Maybe in a perfect world.

I’m going to end this review with a challenge. Hey, Hollywood! I’m talkin’ to you! You wanna churn out nothing but remakes? Fine. Here’s one for you. I’ve always said that there’s only 1 reason to remake a movie, and that’s when the writer/director/producer (or some variant thereof) just screwed the pooch and didn’t do justice to what could have been a really great movie. The Video Dead is that movie. The ball’s in your court, Hollywood. Thrill me!

4/10

-GABE


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