REVIEW: The Video Dead (Robert Scott, 1987)

The difference between good trash and bad trash is that good trash is risky, and bad trash plays it safe. Good trash attacks with energy and targets its authors' interests, even if it wildly misses the mark.  Bad trash offers no target, no aim, no goal.

For whatever reason, this happens.

A movie like Troll 2 gained traction in cult circles not because it is awful, but because it is awful in such specific, ambitious ways.  The film's anti-vegetarian crusade gives its villains some unexpected interest, as when a succubus brings a corncob to bed and makes the kernels go pop pop pop.  Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness is a pitiful thriller, but the descent from slice-of-life erotic thriller into ridiculous Carpenter-inspired slashery, replete with random acts of violence (drive-by-chainsaw!) and even-more-random characters, like the imaginary hooker and pyro-hunchback...say what you will, but the damned thing holds interest.  The Toxic Avenger is terribly made, but its grungy look supports the underlying material's go-for-broke nastiness.

The Video Dead is bad trash.

"But I'm a zombie with a wig and a chainsaw!  This must be fun!"

No, image caption, that's where you're wrong.

Here are the rules of the zombies in The Video Dead.  They turn on an old dial TV, they wander around in a black-and-white forest, and then they pull themselves out of the cathode box.  They attack people because, you know, zombies.  They don't like mirrors.  They also can't be killed, but they can be made to think they're killed, which is accomplished by killing them.  Kind of.  It's confusing.  Oh, and there are only four or five zombies in the film, and, let's face it, four or five zombies don't make a threat.  They make a semi-circle.  The deaths in this movie are an example of natural selection at its finest.

Even a premise this lame could inspire some passion, but what's here is more Manos the Hands of Fate than Plan 9 From Outer Space.  The actors mumble through their lines while the cameraman fails to hold their heads completely in frame.

We can only assume that these people have chins.

The zombies fail to scare, and the director tries to play their attack scenes for laughs without ever allowing for knowing dialogue.  The story derives from Ebert's classic "Idiot Plot," where the threat would be over in ten minutes were the characters not idiots.  An arbitrary scene with a naked TV specter seducing the dubious "hero" fails to titillate or, indeed, have anything to do with the rest of the story.

On that note.  The director probably had international distribution on his mind.  If a low-budget film can muster up naked breasts, foreign markets will be much more interested.

Even if the breast-owner looks like this.

The whole movie carries this cynical attitude.  There's no effort at the craft of film, no effort to develop any sense of wit, no effort to play with classic ideas.  The Video Dead was released in 1987, after the birth of "splatstick" zombie horror, with movies like The Evil Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and Re-Animator proving that a genre as trashy as the zombie gore picture didn't have to be devoid of style or humor.  These movies were the kind that fostered my youthful interest in the genre.  A kid raised on The Video Dead, however, would probably make a living volunteering for drug testing.  Which is fair.  That's probably more enjoyable than The Video Dead.  You probably see a lot of fun new colors with all those pills.

The film's main hub of drama - the recently-sold house - is completely unadorned.  The two kids never end up moving in comfortably, and I kept thinking that it was wise to set a no-budget zombie movie in a new house, because nobody has spend money furnishing the set.  Every room is white and austere and devoid of interest.  There's that weird zombie-TV-thing in the basement, of course, but the house is otherwise empty and useless.  Feels like a metaphor for the movie as a whole.  At least, I like to think it does.  It's always nice when I can end with a deep thought.  Took me a long time to come up with one for this flick.

RATING: F