THE VIDEO DEAD

Directed by Robert Scott. United States. 1987.

How best to summarize Robert Scott’s THE VIDEO DEAD? Juvenile is a word that comes to mind. Cheap is another. Nonsensical, definitely. It never once rises above its roots as a straight-to-video cheapie, the kind of movie that filled VCRs but killed brain cells. It’s dumb and poorly made with bad special effects and worse acting, with pacing that lumbers and lurches like one of its antagonists, rotting corpses with personalities that can only be defeated through decidedly un-zombielike means. Its the kind of film that only makes sense in the mind of the screenwriter.

And it’s wonderful.

It’s been many, many years since I’ve watched THE VIDEO DEAD. This was a horror movie staple at my house growing up, one of a handful of tapes I would always rent when no other possibilities presented themselves. Seeing the MGM logo instead of a tracking screen and an FBI warning felt wrong. The picture looked too sharp. The details were too crisp. I was so used to watching what looked like a sixth or seventh generation copy that I never realized one of the zombies had blue skin. Everything was shades of baby shit brown and puke green back on my old tube TV.

THE VIDEO DEAD feels like a love letter to EC Comics. A cursed television on route to the Institute for the Studies of the Occult is accidentally delivered to a random house. This TV has a bad habit of turning itself on, even when unplugged. Though it has a channel knob, it only ever shows two programs. The first features a gorgeous, barely clothed blonde that beckons to our schlubby 16-year-old lead, Jeff. The other is much worse, a crappy zombie movie called Zombie Blood Nightmare. When this film plays, zombies crawl out of the TV, a la RINGU, and run amok.

Oh, how ironic. People are being attacked by the subjects of the violent media they consume. The TV is a portal through which corruption can enter our normal moral universe. No matter how hard you try you can’t turn the TV off! Oh no! The zombies draw strength from fear because of course they would, they’re horror antagonists. None of this is particularly deep on a subtextual level, but all of it feels perfect for this kind of horror comics-inspired fare.

It helps that nothing in the film is taken too seriously. Jeff’s sister Zoe is a freshman in college. What is she majoring in? Aerobics. Jeff catches the eye of a pretty neighbor named April while she walks her dog. After April’s dog is strangled by a zombie, Jeff wins her over by helping April make it look like the dog choked to death on a ball. That way she won’t be punished by her parents. The zombies act more like Gremlins than shambling undead flesh eaters. They put on wigs and gather at the dinner table like a dysfunctional family. They stuff a freshly killed woman in her washing machine, cackling as her legs spin round and round. To keep the zombies at bay, Zoe is forced to smile and throw them a mock dinner party, echoing how Phoebe Cates is held captive at the bar by an army of rowdy monsters. Jeff’s favorite horror movie is THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Want to guess which character gets chased through the woods by a chainsaw-wielding zombie?

The arrival of a paranormal expert Joshua Daniels sends the film towards it’s final chaotic conclusion as Jeff and Joshua grab their children’s toy bow and arrow and the world’s tiniest chainsaw and go zombie hunting. Joshua tells Jeff that they’re going to set a trap. “A trap!,” Jeff exclaims. “What are we going to use for bait?” Smash cut to Jeff being dangled six feet off the ground, his legs kicking in the air. This kind of low brow humor normally rubs me the wrong way, but it strangely works for me here. Everything is just the right amount of odd, like the way the zombies can only be killed by wounds they believe to be fatal. How does that work? Damned if I know and damned if I care.

I think the film only really stumbles once, and that’s with a late-game death that comes out of fucking nowhere. It’s the only truly somber and upsetting moment in the entire film, and it comes just when the movie should be barreling forward at top speed. Unfortunately, that death causes the entire film to require a reboot. We’re now with an entirely different protagonist, playing an entirely different game. We’re no longer hunting the dead, but playing mind games with them. This slams a foot hard on the brakes and kills the momentum completely. If I have any misgivings with THE VIDEO DEAD it’s this. The film starts strong, gets bizarre, becomes exciting, and then peters out. It’s a sigh of an ending, even with one final delicious dose of horror comics irony.

Still, it’s difficult to feel anything but affection for this wonderful little clunker of a movie. It’s got a good heart and good sense of humor. Not much in the way of gore, but there is that one death I mentioned and it’s a doozy. THE VIDEO DEAD holds a special place in my memory banks, and maybe that warm nostalgia is doing some heavy lifting, but I couldn’t give less of a shit. I love it, warts and all, a damn fine bit of comfort horror for yours truly.