The Video Dead (1987)

I'll preface today's post with this: this is one of the hardest posts I've ever had to write, for reasons I'll reveal shortly.

It all starts so innocently. A shot of deliverymen dropping off a mysterious crate to an irate jackass who lives on, I shit you not, a road called "Dead End Lane". (For those of us versed in horror film vernacular, we know damn well that this is shorthand for "Hey, don't get attached to this character, 'cause he's, like, totally going to die.") Anyways, the crotchety old coot opens up the crate to find...

BOOGA BOOGA BOO!

Yep, a television. Which just so happens to turn on by itself, even when turned off or left unplugged. Which just so happens to only show one plotless, mindless movie (with a killer soundtrack, by the way) on endless repeat:

Again, all the more reason to, oh, GET THE FUCK OUT.

As expected, given the name of both the film and the film-within-the-film, said zombies emerge from the television in the middle of the night and perform their civic duty by killing off the angry old man. The deliverymen show up the next day, anxious due to the fact that they delivered the wrong package to this address--apparently, the killer tube was supposed to be sent to the rather-official-sounding Institute For The Study Of The Occult.

We're gonna file that one under "Oops".

So, three months pass, the zombie escapees apparently just idling their time away doing fuck all in the woods, and--stop me if you've heard this one before--a pair of totally radical teenagers move into the house. Jeff and Zoe (pronounced "Zoh") Blair (pronounced "Blair"), proud offspring of The Most Irresponsible Parents In The World, are taking care of their new place until said Irresponsible Parents come home from Saudi Arabia, which I infer to have been a common occurrence in the Reagan 80's.

It was the best of times.

We see the tubular teens meet their new neighbor, April, as she's walking her poodle, Chocolate. Jeff, who graduated from the George Michael Bluth Academy of Social Skills with highest honors, is instantly smitten, inviting the lovely April into the house for a nice, warm glass of water. There's a terse, awkward conversation, mercifully cut short by the poodle doing as we would have done and escaping the house--only to meet a nasty end at the hands of the walking dead, who seem absolutely jubilant to finally have something to kill again. Our teen sweeties realize the dog's gone missing and leave the house to search for it, leading to an overly-long search-and-rescue scene documented religiously here in this episode of Spongebob Squarepants:

You think I'm joking? This movie pioneered the YouTube subgenre of "X for five minutes". IN 1987.

We're treated to a delightfully bizarre aw-sucks bonding scene as April and Jeff come together over concocting an excuse for the dog's death, and then there's this line:

Thanks for the news, April. And now to Jim with sports!

Don't worry, Jeff seems as confused by it as we are. Anyways, sure enough, Jeff finds the TV locked away in the attic, brings it down to his room, and enjoys watching ZOMBIE BLOOD NIGHTMARE while smoking what appears to be yard trimmings.

Suddenly, a Zola Jesus impersonator (played by the lovely Jennifer Miro of legendary Bay Area punx the Nuns) pops out of the boob tube, drops her dress, shows her boobs (not full-frontal, kids, sorry), then sneaks back into the TV and gets immediately killed by The Garbageman, who warns Jeff of the powers of the dastardly device, telling him to lock the TV in the basement with a mirror taped around it.

If you made sense of that last paragraph, congratulations, you're a better man than I, and I watched the fucking movie. Jeff chalks it up to hallucinations due to whatever his dealer might've been cutting his lawnmower clippings with, and heads to bed--only to find Zola's dress on his floor in the morning and realize (with appropriate dun-dun-dun!) THAT IT WAS ALL TRUE.

The movie coasts from here on out in a delightful way. We get to see the zombies at play, mercilessly slaughtering the neighbors one by one and shambling about in a downright childlike manner, giggling like Daffy Duck nonstop as they toy with appliances to wake up their victims, pop up from washing machines to give little boo-scares, and generally mess with the corpses they leave behind in the way that one cousin you have used to do with those squirrels he killed.

If you didn't have that cousin, chances are, you were that cousin.

April moves in with Jeff and Zoh after her parents meet their ends, and a yeehawin' Texan, the prior owner of the demon screen, pops up to aid the trio in defeating THE VIDEO DEAD. But not until after, y'know, playing the role of Mr. Exposition to let us know what the hell is going on. It seems the dead are afraid of knowing that they're dead, so they're repelled by mirrors, and can only be killed by convincing them that they're dead by wounding them like a human--or locking them in somewhere with each other. Oh, and they're driven to kill by seeing people be afraid of them, so if someone was able to confront them without being afraid...

Fuck it, I'll buy it. Still a better set of rules than Inception.

The gang dwindles in number from there. April's the first to go, having had the least amount of lines so far in the movie, and the Texan and Jeff, while making a valiant effort with a chainsaw to dismember THE VIDEO DEAD, both meet their grisly ends out in the woods while stalking their prey.

And then, in the most stunning display of "fuck the rules we set up, we've still got a quarter hour of movie left" I've ever seen, the dead just ignore their injuries and get back up and head to the house, where Zohh lingers all alone.

I'm glad that someone in this movie shares my feelings about these developments.

Zohhh, cornered by THE VIDEO DEAD and too chickenshit to kill them, decides to do exactly what Cowboy Yee-haw warned her about and invites the dead in unafraid, fixing them chili and trapping them in the basement afterward--finally ending the CRT nightmare and sending poor Zohhhh to a mental hospital, where she gets her comeuppance in a totally-saw-that-coming twist ending you'll never forget.

OR IS IT???

So why has this been harder to write than all of my college essays combined? Could be the low academic standing of my school. Could also be the fact that I betrayed the number-one rule of shitty movie reviewing and actually liked the damn movie.

Yeah, sure, it's a piece of shit, but it's a good one at that. The jokes are corny in all the right ways. The scenes in which Zohhhhh has to put on her best face and pretend she's not scared shitless are actually sorta downright terrifying. There's no mucking about with explanations for the monsters, they're just there and they like to mess everything up, that's all. The zombies don't even eat people, they're just pissed that people get to be alive and they don't. And best of all, there's a sense of fun running undercurrent to everything in the movie, especially where the goons are concerned; making up for the fact that the budget only allowed for a half a dozen or so creatures, we're allowed to get attached to each of the zombies as their own individual character, with their own likes and dislikes and own ways of causing chaos. The bride likes to play dress-up. Four-Eyes likes to laugh. David Bowie likes to just glare menacingly.

And they say there's no truth in cinema!

The playfulness the goon squad shows in their dismemberment of the human victims more than makes up for all of The Video Dead's fault; heck, I was even actually a little sad when they got locked in the basement and started chewin' on each other, although that might just be the liberal arts major in me.

First boob: 26 minutes, 6 seconds. NOT FULL FRONTAL.
First blood: 8 minutes, 46 seconds.
Overall rating:


















The Video Dead is available on VHS and Netflix Instant. Any DVD copies you may find are bootlegs and not to be trusted.






The theme music from ZOMBIE BLOOD NIGHTMARE is still stuck in my head.