Movie Review: The Video Dead
I have been looking for this movie for years. Years ago when I was in middle school and high school, the USA Network would take a break from their normal schedule of Airwolf and Riptide reruns to play old B-movies on weekend nights. It was called Up All Night and was hosted at different times by Rhonda Shear, a woman who provided me with many a night of spank material during the commercial breaks (hey, we were all 12 at some point) or by the ultimately unspankworthy Gilbert Gottfried. Up All Night was the younger me’s way to see a lot of movies I would never have seen any other way, for example I saw my first Troma films because of Up All Night (I want to say it was Class of Nuke Em High). It became a staple of my television schedule until I was old enough to get my own car and hunt down terrible movies on my own.
One of the movies I remember seeing started at like 4am one morning. I recalled only a few things about it – first off, it had zombies. I don’t know if you’ve done a google search on “zombie movies” but you will never find the movie you want based on that description. The only other thing I remember was that it involved an old television that these kids find in their new house. And that was it. I fell asleep after the zombies showed up and the kids were trying to figure out how to fight them—and then commercials started, I passed out, and the movie was a footnote in my mind. I was never able to find it again at the time, and when you add about 20 years onto a movie you fondly remember, it becomes a film of almost mythic proportions.
Part of the problem was that I didn’t remember it’s name, all I could remember was “zombies come out of an old TV” and it wasn’t like I could just google search that in 1989… or at the very least if some sort of amazing movie search engine existed then, I was far too computer illiterate to figure that out then. The other large part of the problem was that there are no more local video stores after Blockbuster cleaned them all out of business, and Blockbuster’s back catalog of bad horror films is always pretty suspect. Even after finding the name to this film (cleverly titled The Video Dead), I never managed to find anyone who had seen it or any store that could get it. After finally getting Netflix a year or so ago I thought I’d find it, but it was one of the few things I’ve looked for on Netflix that they didn’t have. Then, lo and behold, it showed up in the instant play queue when I did a random search for horror movies on my 360. Finally, the 20 year wait was over. Was it worth it? Well…. sort of. I’m definitely glad I got to see it again.
It all starts with this box…
Nothing good comes from a wooden crate anymore. Nothing.
The Hi-Lite Delivery company drops an unassuming wooden crate off at the home of a Mr. Jordan (first name withheld), a recluse author who reluctantly accepts this package despite the fact that he did not order anything. To be fair to Mr. Jordan — this box could just be full of pornography, and since he lives alone and obviously doesn’t get a whole lot of human contact (hint hint, OMGJeremy Secret Santas), that might make this wooden crate the best gift he’d received in years. Also it’s a prepaid delivery, so why the hell not take it.
Mr. Jordan wastes no time breaking the box open, and finds…
An old television set.
Even by the mid-80s standards, this is a pretty crap-ass television set. It appears to be black and white, it is maybe a 13 inch TV, and the top of the set looks to either have been partly melted or is covered in candle wax. However, I fully support taking advantage of a free television set, especially since Mr. Jordan did not have one of his own before this one magically showed up. So, he plugs the set in next to his typewriter, and I assume he heads back upstairs to drink himself back to sleep.
That movie has a name almost as bad as “The Video Dead”.
We flash forward to the evening, and the television is on during a late night writing session. Since Mr. Jordan doesn’t have my taste in movies, he is not interested in “Zombie Blood Nightmare,” and so he turns off the TV to get back to writing. As soon as he turns around, the television turns itself back on. This happens a few more times, which leads to the television being unplugged from the wall, and Mr. Jordan angrily stomping off to bed while cursing whoever sent him a broken television.
Shortly after the world’s loneliest writer goes to sleep, the set turns back on again to “Zombie Blood Nightmare”– a movie that appears to consist solely of zombies wandering randomly through the woods. Sadly, that makes it better than probably 60% of the real zombie movies that I’ve seen. Suddenly one of the zombies on the screen looks out into the room and the TV begins to erupt in a storm of smoke and lightning. The zombie begins to crawl out of the television set and into the real world. The scene fades as the zombies set out do whatever it is that zombies do in movies. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess it’s something like “feed on the flesh of the living” rather than something like “make a paper-mache sailboat.”
We now see the Hi-Lite Delivery crew back at Mr. Jordan’s house the next morning. It seems that they brought the wooden crate to the wrong house. It was supposed to go to The Institute of the Studies of the Occult, but they accidentally brought it to Mr. Jordan’s house at 21 Shady Lane Avenue. Obviously, the Hi-Lite Delivery service is not a household name for a reason. As they don’t get an answer when they knock on the door, the deliverymen push the door open and find the author, although not in the same condition they saw him last.
Ok, I get that he was choked with a lamp electrical cord, but where did the party hat come from?
Three months later, 21 Shady Lane Avenue has been sold, and the new occupants, The Blair Family, are moving in. More accurately, only the Blair children are moving in. College-aged Zoe Blair and her high-school aged brother Jeff are sent to get the house cleaned and move their belongings into the house while their parents are off for business in Saudi Arabia. Zoe is obviously the responsible one, while Jeff is some sort of 80’s cool kid– he comes across as the poor man’s Corey Haim.
No sooner do Jeff and Zoe get started cleaning when they get an unexpected guest– Joshua Daniels, a guy from Texas who is looking for a crate that was accidentally shipped to their house. Mr. Daniels claims that the crate contained an old television set that he needed to find or thousands of lives will be lost. Because they just moved in, and because the idea of a killer television set is completely retarded, Jeff tells the old man to get lost and the kids get back to cleaning the house.
That afternoon while Jeff is taking a break from cleaning by combing his hair in front of his sweet Go-Gos poster, he hears noises coming form the attic. It’s clearly a woman’s voice saying his name and asking him to make love to her. Jeff runs to the attic to try and take advantage of someone actually wanting to sleep with him, and he finds the old TV sitting unplugged by itself in the attic. Jeff’s short attention span takes over, and he grabs the TV and takes it to his room because hey– free TV. He even points out to his sister “I wonder if this was what that old man was talking about,” which is almost a smart thing to do.
Thankfully, Jeff drops that line of thought almost immediately and goes out to rake some leaves, where he meets up with his love interest, April, and the poodle she is petsitting, Chocolate. Jeff immediately tries to hit on April by awkwardly talking to her about dogs and having her come into his new, empty house for some water. Chocolate sneaks out the open door and wanders through the woods while Jeff continues to impress April with his complete inability to read his lines convincingly, and the poodle runs right into the zombie we watched climb out of the TV about 15 minutes prior.
The zombie makeup is about 4000% better than anything else going on here.
Chocolate’s last yips of life are loud enough to get April’s attention, so she and Jeff wander off into the woods, allowing April the time to explain to Jeff that he is the new owner of what the locals call “The Murder House” because of the bizarre death of the author who lived there a few months prior. Unlike most people, who would probably flip out over finding this news out, Jeff reacts with a resounding “huh?” and the couple continues hunting for Chocolate.
When they find the dog, it’s laying dead on the ground (I would like to point out that no dogs were harmed in the making of this film, and it’s obvious to anyone watching as you see the “dead” dog clearly breathing), and Jeff and April decide that she will tell the dog’s owners that someone killed the dog by accidentally throwing a ball into its mouth and it choked to death on it– and they stuff a rubber ball into the dog’s throat, thankfully off-camera. This is sadly the most clever idea in this movie, because it works and April is off-the-hook, and now thinks Jeff is the smartest and cutest boy in town. Please don’t try this at home– I’ve probably killed 14 dogs trying this myself and all I got was a bunch of restraining orders.
That night, Jeff is relaxing from his long day of cleaning a house and mutilating animal corpses, so he plugs in his newfound TV, lights up a joint, and just zones out. When he turns the TV on, a woman is on what appears to be an old black and white movie, and she has the same voice that he heard in the attic that afternoon. She starts talking to Jeff directly about his new girlfriend and the appears in Jeff’s room in front of him, fully nude and looking for action.
My use of “Fully Nude and Looking for Action” might double our search engine traffic.
After getting Jeff on the bed and then getting him, uh, extremely interested in the prospect of her company, the mystery woman vanishes and appears on the TV again, laughing at Jeff’s predicament. However, before Jeff really knows what’s going on, a man walks behind the woman on TV and slits her throat in front of Jeff. The man then goes into his plot diatribe explaining that the images and people connected to the television look like us but have no soul– and he is the Garbageman, and his job is to get rid of human garbage. He then warns Jeff that he needs to take the TV and put it in the basement, and then put a mirror directly in front of the screen. We will never see the Garbageman again, so I’m not really sure what purpose he or this woman served except to add about ten minutes to the running time of this movie.
Jeff writes all this off as a bad dream the next morning, until he finds the mystery woman’s clothes on his floor, so he follows the Garbageman’s advice and puts the mirror in front of the TV and throws the whole thing in the basement. However, before he can tape the mirror to the front of the TV, smoke starts pouring out of it, and a zombie hand reaches out from the smoke and grabs onto Jeff’s arm, trying to pull him in. Jeff lops the arm off with a conveniently placed hatchet, finishes taping the mirror onto the TV, and then takes the zombie hand– his only evidence that anything just occurred– and throws it into the garbage disposal in the sink and shreds it. It sure would be stupid to have any sort of proof that something is going on…
Speaking of going on, what about the zombies we saw in the woods earlier? Well, after eating the poodle, they apparently followed April home that previous day, and after April heads off to school, the zombies break into her house and kill her dad and their maid. They then start wandering through the neighborhood, killing people at random, and not eating them. These zombies aren’t killing for food, they’re just killing for fun it seems. This is made even more obvious when they start laughing as they kill people. These aren’t just zombies… these zombies are the dicks of the zombie universe.
He’s either just strangled the maid, or he’s working on a mean shadow puppet.
It is during this rampage that we really get a good look at our army of zombies, and I think their numbers have been exaggerated. There are only five zombies in this movie, and they’re all goofy character zombies. The zombie we saw eat the poodle earlier I will refer to as TV Dad. TV Dad has an old ratty suit and tie, wears glasses, and is bald. The Bride is the next notable zombie, as she is wearing a bride’s dress. College Guy looks to be wearing an old letter jacket and has slicked back blond hair. The Redneck is in flannels and has redneck teeth. The last zombie is the least notable but sort of looks like a dead businessman, so I will name him The Businessman. I am not really inventive with names sometimes.
April comes back from school that afternoon and finds her Dad and maid dead on the floor, and ends up coming back to Jeff’s house for comfort and safety. Yes, April decides to go to what she referred to as “the Murder House” for safety after her family is murdered. Before Jeff can take advantage of his not-girlfriend’s emotional state to get a cheap feel, he is interrupted when Joshua Daniels (the guy from Texas that was looking for the TV) comes back after the deaths of the neighbors are reported. In another burst of plot-forwarding dialogue, Daniels tells them that the television killed his wife and that he couldn’t destroy it– he could only manage to ship it away, and it accidentally ended up here. Zoe starts to argue with Daniels, because it really is the worst story ever told, and they begin yelling back and forth. It’s a really good thing that Jeff threw that zombified hand into the sink.
April has a mental breakdown, after all, she just lost her family and it’s being blamed on zombies that popped out of a magical television set, so she runs to the bathroom and… brushes her teeth until they bleed while staring forward at herself in the mirror. I guess that’s how she settles herself back down, or at the very least it’s suppose to show that her mind just snaps or something. I had a roommate once that stared in the mirror while shaving his head and repeatedly saying that he didn’t need friends, and I’m pretty sure he went completely insane… so this is just like that, except with more zombies. After rinsing out her bloody toothpaste, April looks into the mirror again to find that she is being watched by College Guy zombie– and immediately goes unconscious and falls to the floor.
College Guy zombie looks like he’s just covered in light blue housepaint.
College Guy picks her up and takes her outside for whatever reason (like I said– they’re just zombie dicks), but Zoe sees him leave the house with her body, so now Joshua Daniels seems a little less like a completely insane person. I’d like to point out that it was roughly at around this point that I had passed out when I saw this 20-ish years ago. I don’t remember it being so jokey, but the makeup on the zombies isn’t bad, and it’s still a zombie movie so it’s well worth seeing once. I had no idea that this movie was going to head down the path it’s about to take, and I think if I did I would have probably thought this was the best movie ever when I was 12. At 33… well, this is not the case.
Joshua Daniels and Jeff decide that they have to end the Video Dead once and for all and rescue April. And at this point the movie makes a fairly notable change. Somehow, Mr. Daniels has gained far more knowledge of these zombies than he had about 30 seconds prior. First off, he tells Jeff to go get lots of mirrors, much like how the Garbageman requested one be tied to the TV. Then he has Jeff and Zoe tape the mirrors all over the front door– because the zombies hate their reflection because it reminds them that they are dead. This is a magnificently failed amalgamation of zombies and vampires, but it allows the corollary that explains the zombies’ killing spree. Daniels explains that when a living person sees a zombie and acts horrified or afraid, it also reminds the zombies that they are dead so they kill the person out of rage. This is the single stupidest reasoning shown in a zombie movie ever.
Now that the house is protected by a wall of poorly attached mirrors, Mr. Daniels explains that he and Jeff are going to go zombie hunting, and then he gets into the only ways to kill the Video Dead. The main way to kill them is to trap them together in a room with no way out. This will cause them to go insane and eat each other to death. The second way to stop them is to use traditional weapons on them, because the zombies don’t know they’re dead, so they will be convinced that they are dead for long enough to decompose. Essentially we’re supposed to believe that the big secret behind killing the Video Dead is to hit them with something and not exclaim out loud “holy fuck, I hit you but you are a zombie and therefore cannot die!” I get the feeling that the second half of this movie was written in 15 minutes by a 3rd grader.
Once he starts giving that kid a backrub, I’m leaving the room.
Now Jeff and Mr. Daniels wander off into the woods behind the neighborhood, after grabbing Joshua Daniels’ amazing zombie killing kit, which consists of a dufflebag with a machete, a copy of Guerilla Warfare for Dummies, a plastic bow (like you’d use in Cub Scouts), a bunch of little silver bells, a bible, and a chainsaw. It really seems like about half of this is useless, but whatever… I personally haven’t killed any zombies, but it seems that a plastic bow is really a colossal waste of time.
After spending a few minutes “killing” the Businessman zombie while training Jeff in how to use that bow and arrow set, the duo find a little wooden shack in the woods where they find April’s decomposing body– and nobody has any sort of reaction to her death. It is at this shack that Mr. Daniels decides they will make their final stand against the army of hundreds (meaning the 4 remaining zombies) will take place. He then details his plan to lure the zombies to the open area in front of the shack, where he will kill them from the safety of the flimsy wooden shed that will somehow stop the zombies from killing him.
Oh, but what about Jeff? Yeah, he’s the bait. They’re going to hang him from the trees and let him have the chainsaw (so why did we waste 5 minutes earlier teaching him how to shoot a bow?), while Mr. Daniels uses that child’s bow to take out the zombies one by one. The plan sort of works well… the remaining 4 zombies come out of the woods and start attacking Jeff, but Mr. Daniels has somehow fallen asleep in the shed, despite just setting up the trap maybe 30 seconds prior.
Meat pinata party! (I have no idea how to put the ~ on the ‘n’.)
After Jeff spends a few minutes helplessly flailing around in the air waving his chainsaw at sticks, Joshua Daniels hears the chainsaw and Jeff’s screams and wakes up from his nap. He jumps up, grabs that shit-ass plastic bow, and begins plugging the zombies full of cheap wooden arrows. He manages to down three before the Bride zombie somehow knocks the chainsaw out of Jeff’s hand, which is pretty much the only way this situation can get any worse.
Unlike the Romero-esque zombies, the Video Dead are fully capable of using devices, so the Bride is now armed with a chainsaw, which is infinitely more deadly than her previous weapon of “a sort of long stick.” Daniels is out of arrows as well, so it would seem that Jeff is doomed, but then Mr. Daniels runs at the Bride zombie and scares her away with a handheld mirror. Somehow these zombies are smart enough to break into houses and use a chainsaw, but they can’t piece together to break the mirror with the chainsaw. The Bride runs off (with the chainsaw, still running, in her possession), and Jeff is untied from the tree. Then they celebrate for “taking all the zombies out,” even though we just watched them let the Bride run off… and then they immediately go hunting for the Bride to kill her, leading me to sit there scratching my head and wondering why they let her go in the first place.
So now we see Jeff and Mr. Daniels following the sound of the chainsaw to try and finish off the Bride, but now Mr. Daniels notably has a rifle. Why the hell didn’t he use that before if he had it? If they had a rifle and a bow and arrow, wouldn’t it have made sense to give Jeff the rifle while he was hanging in that tree instead of a chainsaw that was too short to actually do anything? Why didn’t Daniels kill the Bride with the rifle instead of running at her with a mirror? In the last 10 minutes, this movie might have gone downhill faster than pretty much anything I’ve seen in 2010. It’s like they just stopped caring. Anyway, the pair find their way to the chainsaw, jump out from behind a bush to find… that there’s nobody there. While they stand there with their mouths open, the Bride jumps out from the same bush and kills Daniels by stabbing him to death with one of his own arrows.
Honestly, this picture is better than the last 10 minutes I just sat through.
The Bride now chases Jeff around the woods with her chainsaw until he runs into the old wooden shed to hide. The Bride follows him into the shed, where he’s waiting for her with a machete… but much like you’d expect, a machete isn’t really much of a match for a chainsaw. As a result, Jeff’s innards are now lining the floor of the shed. Haha, viewers of this movie… joke is on us. We just watched two people wander the woods for 15 minutes just to watch them die helplessly with about 10 minutes left in the movie.
Now that Jeff and Mr. Daniels are dead, the zombies that they “killed” are now slowly realizing that they aren’t dead at all. Or at least that they’re undead and still sort of alive, or something like that. They manage to get up and wander back to Zoe and Jeff’s house, I guess to kill her as she’s the only person left that we’ve seen in this movie. Zoe sees them coming, and starts freaking out because they have the house surrounded, and are beginning to find their way in. After the prerequisite crying and laying on the floor sequence, Zoe remembers something that Daniels had told her… if she can just keep from showing fear, the Video Dead won’t kill her. So, she invites them all in for dinner and smiles like an idiot.
Apparently the Video Dead love beans and weenies.
I can’t believe this is the turn this movie took. We are watching the world’s first zombie dinner party. How can this get any dumber? Oh… now the zombies want to dance. The Video Dead apparently miss dancing from when they were alive, so they start pointing to pictures of dancing in a magazine. This gives Zoe an idea. She convinces the zombies (because now these zombies are completely able to be reasoned with) that they can only dance in the cellar. So she gets all the zombies into the cellar, closes the cellar door that coincidentally has a mirror on it, and listens upstairs as the Video Dead realize they are trapped and start screaming and eating each other to death, leaving no proof of their very existence except for the TV itself.
Cut to a few weeks later when we see Zoe’s parents coming to visit her at the mental hospital. Apparently, losing your brother and a bunch of strangers to an army of zombies was just enough to drive her completely insane and catatonic, and it’s implied that she’s being blamed for the deaths. Her parents do manage to bring her a gift though… something from the house to hopefully trigger her recovery from whatever happened to her. Gee… what could that item be?
Yeah, I originally thought it would be a nice framed photo of her parents too.
In my memories, The Video Dead had become some sort of ultra-creepy zombie movie with an evil TV, but now that I’ve seen it again it’s clear to me that I was a really stupid 12 year old. I’m not sure exactly why I was so worked up over this movie, but I attribute it to three things:
- it being 4am when I first saw it
- that the very concept of an evil TV must have triggered something in my psyche since I watched TV about 16 hours a day at that age, and
- because I never saw the ending which comes as close as possible to completely ruining the first hour of this movie without actually doing it.
The concept of death by television has been done far better, a more recent example than this is The Ring, but at 12 this movie and the connection to a television and zombies had stuck in my head as horrifying and brilliant. The truth is that this movie is far more “Evil Dead” than “Night of the Living Dead” and that there’s nothing brilliant about it. However, in that Evil Dead vein, it’s really not that bad of a movie at all. It’s just got a slightly better budget, and far, far worse actors. At the very least, now we can cross “zombie dinner party” off the list of things we needed to see before we died.
