I was suprised to find a zombie movie of which I had never heard of before. I guess the 80's brought more gems into obscurity then I would've thought. Probably not the easiest to find, The Video Dead is actually one of the coolest eighties flicks I've seen in a while. It takes the most populair themes and once again turns them into a funny and gory ride.
This eighties cheesyness can best be described as a mix between the movies that gave life to blunt objects, like Poltergeist, and the popular zombie (comedies) like 'Night of the Creeps. It has that tongue-in-cheeck approach with a high appeal for the youthful audience. With teen protagonists and plenty of gore. But not only does it borrow a lot from the classics, it's also doing some interesting things on its own.
There's an amazing scene in a shed where a headless zombie attacks the young boy with a chainsaw. Doesn't that sound like something Sam Raimi did as well? Awesome! The second the chainsaw gets involved, TCM had to come up...As you can see it's not really subtle when it comes to paying tribute and neither are the gore effects. It has some pretty cool kills, way better than you might expect considering the small budget. The zombies look great in all their cheap ass glory, aahh...those were the days.
The story is, of course, really simple. Zombies emerge out of a crappy tv which the boy found on the attic, so of course now he has to find a way to get them back in there. I guess you could say the tv is a portal for the zombies to escape from their 'movie' or 'world', it's not really clear as to where they come from. And frankly.. I don't give a single fuck.
It's times like these where I'm a bit dissapointed in my parrents. Why couldn't I grow up during the eighties?? Well, probably because in that case my mum must've been 12 years old and pregnant, but you get the point. This gem is barely known in The Netherlands, and I doubt it was a hit in America... but at least they had the chance to bump into this thing in a video library . I've read some rumors about a dvd release but i haven't been able to find it yet.
One of the zombies gets an iron to the head, deeply penetrating the skull but leaving the zombie alive. It immediatly reminded me of 'Idle Hands', a horror/comedy from 1999, where one of the zombies has a bottle sticking out of his head for the entire movie. Also, a 'movie'-evil coming to pay a visit to the real life by crawling out of your tv seems a lot like 'Ringu', doesn't it? But then again, maybe the dangerous-tv(broadcast)-idea was inspired by Videodrome...who knows.
It's a lovely movie where you will come across almost everything that made the 80's so awesome. Crazy lightning striking the entire room from a television? Check. Zombies? Check. Chainsaw? Check. The ''here we go again...'' ending? You got it!! If you missed out on this one before, don't hassitate to check it out now. It sure is worth your precious time.
Score: 85/100
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