“All they wanna do is kill the only thing they can never be. The living.”
You’ve seen the TV glow – but have you seen the TV bleed?
This is the question ultra-low-budget zombie horror The Video Dead (1987) – which you can watch, for free, on YouTube – asks, with a premise no doubt also conceived by every horror fan to ever smoke a joint, put a zombie film on, and stretch out in front of the screen.
Hey, man – what if, like, the zombies crawled through the TV and started coming after us?
Well, Robert Scott’s The Video Dead (1987) takes that concept – we won’t call it a high one – and spins it out into a feature-length film. And the results are…kind of alright, actually!
The Video Dead (1987) is about a TV that plays a zombie movie in which the titular characters have a habit of getting a little...interactive.
The Video Dead opens with the delivery of a crate to a writer, Mr. Jordan (Michael St. Michaels), who wasn’t expecting a crate but decides to open it anyway. It’s a TV! A proper hulking, prehistoric 80s sort of thing – it looks more like something you’d heat your dinner in than watch films on – and, upon turning it on, it begins playing a zombie movie, Zombie Blood Nightmare. Mr. Jordan tries multiple times to turn it off, but it keeps turning itself back on. Eventually, he unplugs it, goes to bed, and the next we see of him, is…well…this.
Michael St. Michaels's Mr. Jordan has seen better days.
Turns out, the TV is no regular TV, but a sort of conduit for some ancient evil lurking within. And Mr. Jordan is just its first victim…
Read on for Talking Terror's The Video Dead review!
The Video Dead (1987) Review
The most notable thing about The Video Dead – which wears its influences, unabashedly, on its tattered sleeve – is the way its titular zombies behave.
After dispatching Dr. Jordan off-screen, they do…well, nothing.
They wait and hide in the woods, feeding opportunistically on dogs that wander by and watching the patterns and routines of the neighbourhood’s local residents from the cover of the forest. Once the ball gets rolling and they start killing people, they seem less interested in murder – and not at all interested, as in typical zombie films, in eating their victims; outside of an isolated dream sequence, we don’t see a single zombie take a bite out of a human – and more keen to simply muck about.
Though they move at a similar pace as Romero’s zombies, The Video Dead’s shufflers don’t have the same implacable energy of Dawn of the Dead’s cannibals, or the appetite of Day of the Dead’s harbingers of doom. Instead, The Video Dead’s zombies are more like a blend of the intelligent, organised zombies of Return of the Living Dead (1985) – they demonstrate intelligence and innovation, and are capable of coherent communication – and the surreal, dreamlike qualities of the zombies of the Italian wave. The Video Dead’s reanimated anti-heroes try on wigs; gaze longingly at framed pictures of beautiful women; make themselves bowls of cereal and sit down at the dining table to eat them. They don’t just grunt and moan, but chuckle and chortle – and, when they turn that malicious sense of humour on their victims, it manifests in a series of wickedly inventive murders. (One particularly unhinged one involves the use of a washing machine; I won’t spoil.)
If anything, the shambling corpses of The Video Dead are less like zombies, and instead behave more like a nomadic tribe of murderous, mischievous pranksters.
The party hat strapped to poor Mr. Jordan’s head is our first taste of it – and there’s plenty more where that came from. Sure, it’s a little disappointing that The Video Dead opts to kill him off-screen – although the power of the iconic shot when he’s discovered by the deliverymen just about justifies it – and it isn’t the last time The Video Dead chooses to dispatch its characters away from the camera's eye. Ultimately, we have to put that down to the enforced limitations of what’s clearly an almost criminally meagre budget – restrictions which surely also necessitated the film being shot almost entirely in what looks like the same house. That said, The Video Dead’s tight purse strings should’ve also dictated that the zombies look terrible. Well, guess what? They don’t!
Sure, The Video Dead’s shufflers are a little rubbery and goofy-looking, but there’s a certain rawness to them; an indefinable edge also borne out of the low budget that makes them scarier than they have any right to be. (Especially this shot, from the opening 15 minutes.)
More latex than a pack of Magnums.
Oh…and some of them even have full heads of luscious hair!
Being dead is enough to make anyone feel blue.
So, is there a plot to this thing? Just about. After Mr. Jordan is killed a few minutes in, The Video Dead introduces its main protagonists, sibling pair Zoe (Roxanna Augesen) and Jeff (Rocky Duvall), who’ve moved into the vacated house to get things ready for their parents (who are overseas, and arriving later). Jeff becomes smitten with neighbour April (Vickie Bastel), but the two get into hot water when Chocolate, the dog she’s looking after for a neighbour, runs off and is dispatched by a zombie.
A Texan man, Joshua Daniels, comes to the house and tries to warn Jeff about the TV, but is ignored. Then, while smoking a joint one night, Jeff turns on the TV and is quickly seduced by a naked woman who climbs out of the TV. Before she can fellate him, the spectre is pulled back in by a guy who introduces himself as “The Garbage Man”, and tells Jeff to place a mirror in front of the TV. Although sceptical at first, Jeff sees the robe the blonde phantasm shrugged off the night prior on his bedroom floor, and cottons on.
Despite a close call when a zombified hand emerges from the screen and tries to pull him in, Jeff manages to tape a mirror onto the front of the TV. When Joshua returns later, we learn that’s the zombies of The Video Dead’s greatest weakness: mirrors. The Texan also dishes out some of the zombies' "rules": that, because they think they're dead, you can (at least temporarily) incapacitate them with weapons; and that, by trapping them in a place from which there's no escape, you can drive them to turn on and devour themselves.
You’ll have to watch The Video Dead (1987) for the rest, and – while the shortfalls of this movie’s budget, cast and script meant it was condemned to the bargain bin even before a camera was turned on – it’s surprisingly fun. There are zero pretensions here: just a film that knows what it wants to do and sets out to do it with style. The premise is simple lunacy, too, which is all the more reason to suspend all snobbery and go with the flow. (What's more, it's surely one of the only films of the 70s and 80s to actually contain the image promised by its movie poster. Damn you, Mortuary (1982)!
Because ultimately, The Video Dead’s no-brow approach isn’t aspiring to grandeur – and it’s not trying to be anything it isn’t, or do anything too far beyond its humble means.
What it is doing is having fun. Enter it with the right mindset, and you will be, too!
Want more Talking Terror takes of zombie films? I've reviewed Braindead (1992), Handling the Undead (2024), and Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead.
Keen to see me review a zombie flick you love? Drop a note in the comments section below and I'll be happy to oblige!
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