The Video Dead

There is a scene early in The Video Dead that belongs in a better movie. A cursed television set, delivered to the wrong house, turns itself on. A writer unplugs it. It turns on anyway. Then a zombie crawls out of the screen, wreathed in fog and bathed in blue light, a thin ribbon of blood trickling down its scalp. It is a genuinely striking image, the kind of thing a film student might build a whole short around. I wanted to see where this was going.

The delivery men return the next morning. “I told ya headquarters would start mixing up shipping orders,” one says. “What I’m wondering is, what the hell did we deliver to the Institute for the Studies of the Occult?” I smirked. This would feel right at home in an episode of Tales from the Crypt.

The delivery men find the writer dead. Then we cut to three months later and a new family moves in. If you’re wondering what the zombies were doing for three months, so was I, but I let it slide.

The family’s teenage kids arrive first—the parents are overseas. Son Jeff discovers the TV in the attic and brings it to his room, where a woman emerges from the screen, strips, and kisses him before retreating back into the picture. A figure calling himself “The Garbageman” then appears, beheads her, and warns Jeff the set is cursed. Put a mirror in front of the screen, he says. Lock it in the basement. Now I was hooked. Ideas are flying. There’s a whole world inside this television, humans and monsters jostling for control, and I wanted to know the rules.

The TV cuts to static and Jeff shouts “Wait!”—the classic move where vital information is withheld to prolong the mystery. Except the TV flickers back on and the Garbageman actually answers his questions. I grinned. This movie had nerve. Did I mention Jeff’s sister is in college majoring in aerobics with a minor in music videos?

Then abruptly the ideas stop. Jeff moves the TV to the basement, places the mirror beside it instead of in front, and fumbles with a roll of tape until a hand shoots out and grabs him. This sets the pattern for the rest of the picture: characters behave with stunning stupidity for extended stretches while the camera cuts back and forth between victim and approaching threat, trying to wring suspense from dead air. In one scene a zombie crashes through the front door, climbs the stairs, seizes a woman, carries her back down, and walks out. Nobody in the house hears a thing. That is not a budget problem. That is a writing problem.

The Garbageman is never mentioned again. The mysterious woman vanishes from the story. Instead, the TV’s prior owner appears and joins Jeff on a trek through the woods to find a cabin Jeff somehow knows about despite having only lived in the neighborhood for three days. A zombie bride wanders around carrying a chainsaw and stabbing people with an arrowhead. Jeff steps into a bear trap he set himself. I am fairly certain the script was being written as they went along.

The finale involves Jeff’s sister weeping in the house for what feels like a geological epoch before devising a plan to dance with the zombies, because—according to rules the TV’s prior owner explained in an awkward exposition dump—zombies only attack if you show fear, and you can kill them by trapping them in a room with no exit. Sure.

I will say this: the gore effects have no business being this good on what was clearly no budget at all. Jeff chainsaws a zombie in half and two white mice scurry out of its entrails. The zombies don’t bite; they choke, pummel, and snap necks. After killing one woman they stuff her headfirst into a washing machine and turn it on. We see her legs spin. There is a low, strange humor running through the picture that I respected even when I’d stopped enjoying myself.

The Video Dead is one-third of a good movie. The first act earns three stars, and the remaining two acts together barely scrape one. I bet someone could cut together a great trailer from this footage. Watch that instead.