Day 18:Revenge Of The Dead

      When you look at any tape's box art you need to have some skepticism. It's very common in the VHS world for a tape to have absolutely insane box art with a movie inside that doesn't match. This was a little trick that home video providers developed in the 80's to fool people into watching their lesser quality titles. To some degree it's still used today. But not nearly as much. I figured that by 1997 most video labels had moved away from it. So when I saw Revenge Of The Dead I thought I'd definitely be getting some basic zombie flesh eating goodness. I was wrong.

   Revenge Of The Dead is about a young novelist who, after receiving a second hand typewriter, discovers notes of the previous owner. The notes refer to the experiments of a since deceased scientist who discovered that certain types of soil have the ability to bring back the dead. Interested in using this as a basis for his next book, he investigates the notes. His investigation has him cross paths with a group still using the research to run their experiments.

    This is a pretty interesting premise. But ultimately the script fails to deliver anything short of a mostly boring hour and a half. There are a couple of moments of great tension and suspense. But this film moves at such a horrifically slow pace that it's near impossible to become invested in anything that happens on the screen. Not to mention that the cast of characters are all about as deep as a puddle of urine. You can throw as many spooky ghouls and tense moments at your viewer as you want. But if you can't invest in your characters none of it matters and none of it is frightening.

     What we end up with here is hardly a zombie film at all. There are some reanimated corpses, but none of them have decaying flesh of any sort. There isn't much else to write about this painfully dull movie. Aside from some solid moments at the end. This one just fails to deliver enough to keep you going from scene to scene. Such a shame that an interesting premise had me feeling so indifferent throughout its run time.

Body Count:3
Side Note: This movie has a 6.9 on imdb. For an 80's horror film, thats damn near masterpiece status. I can't wrap my head around it.