What you get with The Video Dead is direct-to-video gem from the ’80s that feels, at times, like a modern-day parody of that era. I mean, the main character is in college, studying aerobics and music video. Yeah, seriously. Here’s the plot: a cursed TV that shows an endless loop of the faux film Zombie Blood Nightmare (along with some other weird shit, including a noirish succubus and a grizzled demon slayer) comes into the possession of a family in the ‘burbs. The zombies escape the television, murder ensues and the heroes (two unsupervised suburban teens) are left trying to kill the zombies and restore normalcy, with the help of a former owner of the TV who happens to be some kind of cowboy.
This thing is all rough edges but it’s got its merits. Some highlights: a bride zombie who wields a chainsaw, a brilliant plan that involves dangling live human bait from a tree to lure the zombies in for the kill and a machete/chainsaw duel that ends as badly as can be imagined. The zombies here are interesting. They are plenty decrepit but seem to have an unusually high degree of self-awareness for the undead. They can’t stand their own reflections, for example, and seem to remember at least some things from their days among the living. They even display a macabre sense of humor at times. They’re also unkillable — shooting them, cutting them up and other trauma just slows them down temporarily.
As interesting as elements of this are, it’s not really surprising that it is so obscure. The plot is full of holes, the acting is shoddy and the direction is strictly functional in the most limited sense of the word. It’s weird — IÂ kind of hated this while I was watching it, but as soon it was over I realized it was pretty cool in its limited way. If you run across it at a garage sale or maybe on late-night TV, it is definitely worth a look.
Technically, New Year’s Day is not a movie. It’s an episode of the FEARnet.com anthology series Fear Itself. Whatever — the distinction is pretty meaningless these days. The plot of this one follows a young woman who finds herself smack dab in the middle of a zombie outbreak after an epic New Year’s Eve bender. As you might surmise, she has to get across town to “safety” in the middle of all this shit. It’s not a bad set-up but this movie has some serious issues. The acting is fairly atrocious, but it’s not like the actors had much to work with – the writing is worthless. Add to this some utterly spastic and nausea-inducing editing techniques (think bad music video meets epileptic nightmare) and you have a pretty painful hour to sit through. The twist ending (I won’t spoil what the twist is, in case you want to watch it for yourself. You can do that by visiting the 
In Zombies the Beginning, you have a classic steal – the filmmakers (Italian “legend” Bruno Mattei, chiefly) took Aliens, replaced the aliens with zombies and voila, new movie! Only, not very new – we’re talking line-for-line swipes 95 percent of the time. There are a few moments of amusement to be found here in seeing how they deal, or fail to deal, with the changes necessary to realize the zombified take on Aliens. There are also a few moderately humorous lines, including the obligatory nod to George Romero. Then there are a few real WTF moments, such as the weird brain that controls the zombies, the pregnant women incubating zombie babies (which seems awfully redundant and pointless since a zombie bite appears to makes more zombies, but whatever), the weird air-conditioning ducts that lead to the pregnant women in one scene and the fucked-up zombie-hybrid naked hobgoblin children that presumably come from the pregnant ladies. Mostly though, it’s just a dull, tepid, cheaply made Aliens rip-off that isn’t worth the time it takes to sit through.
Famed studio Hammer weighed in on the undead menace with Plague of the Zombies in 1966, just a few short years before Romero changed the genre forever. The excellent reference book The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia gives this move credit for pioneering zombies as decaying and hostile. Plotwise, it focuses on an evil squire’s plot to murder townsfolk so he can use their reanimated corpses in his tin mine and the efforts of a couple of doctors to stop him. It’s a fun, unintentionally campy movie that goes to show that whatever their failings, studios such as Hammer had the fundamentals of filmmaking down pretty well. It moves along at a decent clip (for its era, probably a bit slow for modern tastes); the acting, direction and editing are all competent or better; and the story isn’t completely full of holes. Even if it wasn’t a solid, well-executed zombie movie, it would be worthwhile to zombie fans for its historical value as both an early champion of the decaying, murderous zombies we’ve come to know and love, and as one of the very last zombie films made before Romero supercharged the zombie mythos with Night of the Living Dead. There’s a nice decapitation in it, too, which certainly doesn’t hurt its appeal.
Welcome Pakistan to the international fraternity (is there a gender-neutral version of that word?) of zombie filmdom! Hell’s Ground is actually two different familiar horror plots shoved rudely together. The primary plot is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque creepy-family-in-the-woods vehicle. There’s a burqa-clad killer with a giant mace, and the greasy brother and the spooky older character (a mother, here) that should sound awfully familiar. Also, the six kids in a van that constitute our protagonists are an almost direct rip. Tacked on to that is a pollution-created zombie subplot that amounts to several scenes straight out of any post-Romero zombie flick. A field full of zombies is shown, the kids get attacked by one zombie and – surprise! - one of the kids (the handsome, slick player dude) gets bit and turn into a decaying, goop-yacking horror.
Sweet lord, Zombie Death House was a chore and a half. Its biggest claim to fame is being the sole directorial effort of veteran character actor John Saxon. It’s obvious why he never directed again, although with this script he never had a chance. You have a Vietnam vet who gets framed and goes to prison where he faces John Saxon’s mad-science disasters in the form of the walking dead. Only it’s far, far more convoluted than that and not in any kind of good way. There are subplots layered upon subplots, flashbacks, endless exposition and more ridiculous crap – hell, we have several threads of plot introduced in the interminable five-plus minute opening credit sequence! Plodding, rambling and dumb as a bag of rocks, this film is as close to worthless as they come.
Before Romero came along and changed things forever, zombies were rarely very interesting on screen. As evidence, I present Exhibit A: Blood of the Zombie. It’s also known as The Dead One and that’s a pretty apt title — thee ain’t much life here. It’s a typical early-’60s bit of plodding, matinee-monster crap. A man inherits a plantation, upon condition of getting married, so he takes his blushing bride down to check things out and take possession of the property. But his voodoo-practicing cousin has other ideas, and plans to murder the wife — via zombie — before the will can be executed. With one scenery chewing exception (the voodoo priestess cousin) the acting is totally wooden. The writing and direction are both awful. The zombie is as slow, unthreatening and uninteresting as the movie itself. The best feature of this movie was its runtime: 68 minutes — and that’s with some early padding scenes of belly dancers and jazz bands.
Despite the R rating, The Chilling has a very made-for-TV vibe. It’s a sloppy, uninspired zombie tale featuring a couple of recognizable faces, most notably Linda Blair of Exorcist fame and the guy who used to play Grizzly Adams. The plot involves a cryogenics facility, a doctor stealing organs from the frozen stiffs, an all-too-convenient lightning strike and some newly awakened, pissed-off dead folks. The whole thing is contrived, boring and pointless. It’s not good, not even a little bit. I was done with this movie well before it was done playing. I don’t know if you can make it out, but on that cover there, it says, “They came, they thawed, they conquered.” That joke, as lame as it is, is far better and infinitely more clever than the movie. At the very end of the movie, there’s also a Grizzly Adams joke tacked on that might, might coax a smile out of you if you have a warm reservoir of nostalgia for that particular hunk of ’70s cheese. Unless you’re like me and simply must see every zombie movie ever made, don’t bother with this.
Just a couple of days ago I wrote about my 
The worst zombie movie I’ve ever seen has got to be Zombie Night, and that’s really saying something. I mean, I have a totally different set of standards as to what is acceptable when it comes to zombie movies versus “regular” movies. It never even came close to watchable and the 93 minute run time was easily the longest hour and a half of my life. Seriously, I have had dental surgery that was more fun.
