Film Review: THE VIDEO DEAD (1987)

This is perhaps one of the worst films I've ever seen. I remember seeing the artwork on the video box as a kid when the film first came out and thought that this film looked to scary for me (which is a good thing if you're trying to rent the film), so, I finally decided to view the film (because now nothing really scares me anymore). The Video Dead (1987) is a film that I should have forgotten even existed.

The film concerns an accursed television set that gets delivered to a suburban home instead of its original destination at a paranormal research facility. The television is in fact a gateway to another world in which creatures called "the video dead" can escape and wreck havoc on the world. I could go into more details about the plot but it'll just bore you like it bored me. Just suffice it to say that the film concerns the video dead being set free and killing several people in the suburbs before a young boy, his older sister, and a video dead hunter go out to hunt the video dead and save humanity from the chaos. It's pretty derivative stuff even for the late '80s and is a perfect example of how the straight to DVD dreck of the '80s created the dreck of the '90s and up till today.

There is a lot of bad acting by everyone in this film (not one descent actor in the bunch) and the story is even worse as it spends a lot of time in a house (in which there was no art director available to decorate any of the rooms) or in the woods. What makes the even worse is the bad direction of the film. In one scene - to immolate the presence of police, the filmmakers used red sirens only the sirens flash inside the bedroom instead of outside (like they should be). In other scenes fog is used a lot but it seems as though the fog machine was still going as they were filming giving scenes an unnatural fog flow. The film is a subpar example of late '80s low budget filmmaking and not recommended for anyone (not even zombie film lovers).