The Video Dead (1987)

dir. Robert Scott


I never had video games as a kid. My family was poor. Plus my parents didn't cotton to that kind of mindless time-wastin'; so I grew up a movie addict instead. But I did have friends with video games. And I did leach off of their inviting-me-over-to-play-some-video-games-with-them-from-time-to-time goodwill, so that I could spend every last minute I had giving myself premature carpal tunnel. And I do remember the slight letdown that occurred every time I saw the dynamic, detailed paintings on video game cartridge covers of cool creatures and action within the video games, only to be met by the pixelated nothingness the 8 bit systems at the time were capable of displaying.

Oh books, why can't you ever live up to your covers?

Such was also the case with the poster to movie awesomeness ratio of Robert Scott's eighties, straight-to-video, horror (I guess)-comedy (I guess) The Video Dead. Few things are as infuriating to me as bad comedy. And bad horror-comedies? That shit falls somewhere between scat porn and the oeuvre of Rob Schneider. Bad dramas are full of unintentional humor; bad comedies rarely achieve even accidental entertainment status. And so The Video Dead was met by me with lots of disinterested eye-rolling.

A couple of delivery men mistakenly deliver a zombie-producing TV to a man who gets done in by the creatures.

["Well that's nice—a used TV, which, for some reason, has a mirrored strapped to the front of it. That's a nice little gift. I'm sure it would be fine if I took the mirror—which, again, I'm not gonna question the reason for it being there—if I took that off the TV so that I could watch some—]

["Ok, TV, lightning—I get it. Now get back to working. This is only marginally more interesting than the reruns I was gonna watch."]

["Seriously, TV, you need to cut this out. I've got TV watching to do. If this zombie can't at least re-enact a Murder She Wrote episode, I'm gonna get very annoyed."]

[This is what the zombies do to the unfortunate man.]

[And then this is how the first witnesses to the gruesome end of the victim react to the horror. Yes: a soon-to-be recurring theme in this movie of people reacting to grisly monsters and murder as if they have just been informed the office building doesn't validate parking.]

So, anyway, new people move into the TV-zombie house—the parents are away, but the son and daughter make themselves at home—and the son discovers the zombie TV. Although he initially gets a fright, a an old cowboy zombie-hunter appears and tells him to store the TV in the basement and strap a mirror to the front so that the zombies—apparently extremely vain and unwilling to gaze at their unbecoming reflections—will not venture into the non-TV world.


[When I was a kid, we had an old TV that shit the bed, after which it emitted a little bit of smoke. It was more exciting than this movie.]

And then the old cowboy says something about the zombies being unkillable, but that, if shot and whatnot, will pretend to be dead for some period of time, before they get up and return to havocking. To be honest, I wasn't really paying attention to this inane plot device. Because fuck this movie.

[Yet another subdued reaction to zombies. I think this movie was less about a zombie attack than an attempt by the living dead to force stiff non-actors into emoting.]

And then, because he's a class act, the cowboy takes the kid to the woods for zombie hunting and uses said kid as bait.

["No, no, this is...I'm totally cool up here."]

And then the cowboy and the kid get killed; and so the zombies converge upon the house to attack the sister, who remembers an important bit of inane-plot-device bullshit told to her by the cowboy: the zombies will only attack when humans appear frightened. (Again, given all the non-reactions of the actors to the zombies, I'm going to assume that the fact that the zombies still decided to attack the nonplussed folks was a bit of subtle "comedy" on the part of the director...either that or shitty film-making.) So, the sister puts on a happy face and has a dinner party with the zombies.

[For all the shit I've piled on this movie, I do have to admit that this is a pretty neat visual.]

And then other stuff happens.

And then, who gives a shit.

[The trailer:]


Dave's Rating: