Halloween Party: Dead and Deader
It's time for another zombie review, friends. There are good zombie movies, there are fun zombie movies, and there are bad zombie movies. I consider it my duty as a moderately-regarded geek pundit to shine a light on the good ones, cheer on the fun ones and, yeah, even warn you abuot the bad ones.
In the realm of movies, especially horror movies, there’s a such thing as a film being so bad that you start to like it. It can be awful, campy, poorly written, terribly acted and full of special effects so bad you could probably make better ones on your home computer, and you’re still running Windows ’98. Freddy Vs. Jason comes to mind. This Island Earth. The original Little Shop of Horrors I say this because I don’t want you to misunderstand anything I have to say about the movie Dead and Deader. It’s not so bad it’s fun to watch. It’s not so bad it becomes a whole new level of entertainment. It’s not so bad it’s good. It’s just bad.
The movie stars Dean Cain as a soldier whose unit is sent to Cambodia to investigate the disappearance of a humanitarian company, only to find that the humanitarians have all developed a taste for human flesh. They seem to have stumbled upon some sort of magic scorpion that turns them into zombies, and Cain and his entire unit are wiped out.
Cain wakes up in the morgue some time later with no pulse, no respiration, no vital signs at all. In short, he’s dead - except unlike the rest of the zombies, he’s managed to keep his brain. When the zombies begin to rise and attack the living, Cain and a chef on the base get accused of a series of murders and wind up on the run trying to prove their innocence, while at the same time chasing down the body of the last member of Cain’s unit, who has been sent home to Los Angeles for burial.
Where do I start explaining what’s wrong with this movie? Well, I’ll start at the beginning: the writing is atrocious. The dialogue is terrible and the plot is ludicrous. The fact that Cain keeps his mind is explained in a cursory manner that makes absolutely no sense, and there are so many superhero jokes that even people who liked Cain’s Superman (which, by the third season, was officially the worst on-screen version of the character of all time) will be ripping their hair out and giving up. The characters are universally stupid and obnoxious. The film tries very hard to be a comedy on top of a horror film, but fails completely with lame jokes and stilted, painful dialogue. Towards the end there’s a totally misplaced argument about the merits of the original Dawn of the Dead and the remake that just goes on and on and on. It’s supposed to be ironic, I suppose, but it just comes across as stupid and utterly out of character.
Shaun of the Dead succeeded as both a zombie movie and a comedy because it was about funny characters in a terrifying situation. This film is about irritating characters in stupid situations. The math doesn’t work in the movie’s favor.
The writing isn’t helped by the acting. Cain, famously, was a football player who got into acting after a knee injury ended his sports career. Watching this movie, it’s clear that football’s loss is the entertainment world’s… well… “plague” seems too kind a term. But he’s awful. Fortunately, he’s in a movie full of terrible actors. Guy Torry, who plays his obligatory black sidekick, wants to be Chris Tucker in the worst way. And he succeeds - he’s Chris Tucker in the worst possible way. He’s stupid, obnoxious and made me actively root for the zombies to eat him alive.
How about the special effects? Cain’s flashing red eyes are awful, but not as awful as the close-up shots of the lacerations of an arm that’s so clearly fake that it wouldn’t scare a three-year-old in the middle of a haunted house. Even the costumes are stupid - halfway through the film Cain and his sidekick change into outfits ripped off from Don Johnson and Michael Jackson (respectively) for absolutely no reason. The sidekick even makes a joke about it. It’s not funny.
Considering this is a made-for-cable movie, I suppose I could theoretically forgive some of the bad production values, but there’s never any excuse for a bad story AND bad acting AND bad costumes AND bad special effects. Simply put, there’s no excuse for this movie. I lament both the time I spent watching it and the money I paid for it (out of a $5 DVD bin, and I still feel cheated), and in fact the only way I can sleep at night knowing that I experienced this monstrosity is by knowing that I took advantage of my mistake to warn the rest of you good people to stay as far away from this steaming pile of crap as possible.