 | The Dead Hate the Living |
|
When you read things in your favorite rags about some upcoming talent who grew up wanting to make the films you grew up loving, and wanting to make them with a style and grace that's new, yet reminiscent of the past
masters, you get a chill. You begin to salivate and wait patiently for the day his labour of love pops up on the shelf in the local video store.
This is what happened with this film. It is perhaps one of the most hyped indie horror films of the past couple of years and I cannot recall reading a single bad thing about it - only praise. You read this and you think, "How bad can this be?" Well let me see if I can answer that for you... Pretty bad. The film starts off with the cliché "film-within-a-film" routine where an ultra-low budget film crew is filming an underground zombie movie. Of course we're not supposed to know this is a "film-within-a-film", so of course you'll be shocked off your rocker when this fact is revealed. Then for the next half of the movie (45 minutes or so) nothing happens. I'm not joking - nothing happens. We are introduced to the completely unrealistic cardboard cutout clichés, er, I mean, characters who are portrayed by talentless Joes (what did you expect - Laurence Olivier?) whose names and faces are completely forgotten once they become zombie fodder later on. The main character (the "film-within-a-film"'s director) has two sisters, see, and one is ugly/bitchy and one is beautiful/perfect and of course he wants the beautiful one in his film. What is he to do? Lie to the ugly one of course and film the movie with the beautiful one. Right. Uh oh, though, the ugly sister finds out and shows up to the set anyway wanting to be the star of the film. Wow, someone call the academy awards - how's that for realistic, believable character/story development? So anyway, the filming moves forward (in the best Ed Wood tradition of find a prop, use it, find a setting, use it - I guess we're supposed to believe nobody scouted the location first and found the necessary props and sets to accommodate the script). We learn more bogus mumbo-jumbo about the character and his soap opera family life and how his best friend (the makeup guy) is involved, and do we care? No, not really - we came to see a zombie movie with heads severed, body parts chewed on, and dead people wobbling towards hapless victims. So far we're out of luck. Still not much happens. Then a whole lot of nothing else. And some more nothingness. Finally, the zombie movie starts. See, the film crew finds a corpse in this dilapidated, abandoned warehouse where they're filming their zombie film, and, hey, what better prop for a zombie film than a real dead guy? No joke, they decide to use a completely un-rotted "Rob Zombie-lookalike" corpse for a prop in the film (realism is something that apparently escaped the writers of this debacle). Of course Rob Zombie (as I'll refer to him from now on, as I can't stop imagining it actually not being Rob Zombie - the guy's a dead ringer - so to speak, tee hee), doesn't want to stay dead long and, once awakened, brings back other horrendous creatures from beyond the grave. OK. This would be a cool opportunity to have the typical graveyard scene where the zombies dig their ways out of their graves and wobble around like a bunch of idiots. Do the filmmakers go this route? Of course not. Instead, Rob Zombie, who was apparently some old mad doctor who discovered a way to reanimate the dead (must have been before the rock star gig), must have also invented some neat-o giant metal coffin-like thing that acts as a (brace yourself for originality) doorway to the netherworld (and I only say it's a metal coffin thing because that's what we're supposed to think, but you see the door of it wobble like rubber or flimsy cardboard whenever it is moved - and it's really noticeable). The zombies come out of this coffin thing like clowns out of a little car and begin their ravaging of the world - yikes, it had me shaking, something fierce. OK, you forgive the atrocity of the coffin thing, right, so you expect some cool zombie action, or at least some cool zombies. Ha ha, suckers, you just wasted your money renting a piece of crap that can't even satisfy that need. The zombies do very little other than walk real slow, grab dummies (that are supposed to be real people) and rip themto shreds while fakey blood splatters the screen. There are two Rob Zombie henchmen zombies that get the most screen time. One is tall (obnoxiously tall - portrayed by the world's tallest man) and lanky, the other is averaged height, but with a football player's build (portrayed by an ex-athlete, if memory serves) and neither is particularly creepy. The tall one is so ridiculous that all you can do is laugh at how stupid he looks (what, did the world's tallest man happen to die and fall into the damnation of having to serve Rob Zombie for the rest of eternitiy?). And the same for the football player zombie. He looks like a football player trying to act like a zombie in a really bad horror movie (suspension of disbelief was thrown out the window long ago). Anyway the movie ends (fill in your typical clichéd bad horror movie ending here). Not much happened. My life was not enlightened. Yours won't be. Don't believe what you read about this from other places. I am boggled by the raves it received from notable sources. The only thing I can think of that gave the film any notoriety in the horror film circles is the constant zombie film icon name-dropping that Parker put into his script. He proves that he knows his zombie movie trivia and history, but he also proves that his is not a name to look for on the back of a video box. His movie sucks. Timothy Gates |
Back to the Reviews Page | Back To The Main Page