Dave Parker, the writer/director of The Dead Hate the Living! said that he wanted to make the most un-Full Moon movie that he could. Full Moon Entertainment has brought us such delights as Puppet Master, Killjoy and was a distributor of Gingerbread Man 2: Passion of the Crust. What Parker meant was, he wanted to make a film without small creatures and make a film that felt as much like a real movie as he could make it. I assume he meant “real” literally, as he also said he purposely made the film referential of the low budget genre. Believe me, the film is full of references.
We have a group of young filmmakers shooting a zombie picture. Through some forced exposition we learn that this is the director, David Poe’s first movie. His best friend Paul is the effects guy, and his two sisters are actresses (although Nina Poe’s part was secretly given to Shelly Poe, because everyone hates Nina). The film location is an abandoned hospital, which, again through an awkward bit of dialogue, we learn they do not have permission to be there and it is illegal to film there. For reasons that normally would not necessitate a group of people to split up, they do. One group finds a room with a tv and and a video camera with a tape in it. The video shows a man talking directly to the camera before getting mauled by zombies.
As plot formula would dictate they just assume it is part of the movie that they are making. Eventually they all come across a giant coffin. A dead guy (the one from the video) falls out. What happens next, I have dubbed, “The Weekend at Bernie’s Moment.” Someone suggests calling the cops, but David manages to convince everyone (except Shelly) not to. He claims that if they use the body, everyone will rush to see the movie with a real dead person (and I guess, also not call cops). I will assume the scene in which a re-write was done to include the coffin that they just found was cut from the real movie, as they immediately have lines and a plot that revolve around it. While shooting the scene the accidentally reanimate the dead guy and open some kind of portal to the world of the dead, thus trapping everyone in sort of in between land where time stands still. The dead guy was Dr. Eibon. His wife died from cancer and while trying to bring her back he created a bunch of zombies. They killed him (the scene from the video). Now that he is undead, he sends his undead henchmen to kill everyone so that he may continue his project. Everyone splits up and tries to survive, David and Paul using the director and special effects mastery to employ a few tricks. And the zombie film within a zombie film wanders off into the night.
The acting was terrible. The computer generated fire was almost insulting. The dialogue was outrageously bad. All of this paled in comparison to the almost checklist like insertion of horror movie references in nearly every scene. Allow me to share some of the more obvious ones:
1. “Fulci lives” sticker on a car.
2. Lucio Fulci’s name on a gravestone.
3. The ending of the film resembling the Lucio Fulci film The Beyond.
4. The line, “What would Bruce Campbell do?”
5. The line that includes the phrase, “…that Sam Raimi extra…”
I could go on. The sticker I could forgive, as it is on the car of a crew member and you can dismiss it as that character’s love of horror films, but why must you reference Fulci at least 3 times? Employing this many references is crossing the line of paying tribute and ego driven name dropping. Dude, you have a fine story. I was interested. But I find it a little incongruous for you to say that you wanted to make as a real a film as you could, and just making one big cross referenced Wikipedia article.
Now take your cast and crew, and remake this without all that crap. It’s a zombie movie: make me like it.
Comments
Post a Comment