Sunday, October 4, 2009

October Horror Fest #4: CHILDREN OF THE LIVING DEAD


Being a horror movie fan means sifting through a lot of shit. For every great scary flick that gets made, there's about twenty godawful abominations. I'm not in the habit of recommending bad films, but Children Of The Living Dead needs to be seen, if only so I'm not alone.

I bought this on DVD in a rare moment of impulse; I had never seen in, nor knew anything about it. There were 3 indicators that compelled me to grab it:

1. It's a zombie movie.
2. The cover looked cool.
3. Tom Savini is in it.

How can you go wrong? Well, you can. Horribly, horribly wrong.



Looks cool, right? It starts off promising enough; some grave robbing, a badass main zombie with great makeup effects, and Sex Machine kicking all kinds of undead ass. Then the movie hits the ten minute mark, and it all goes to shit. There's some dumb kids traveling through town in a van, a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and you're actually pulling for the zombies to kill them because they're so goddamn unlikeable. The head zombie, an evil preacher or something (hard to tell because the exposition makes no sense) goes from destroying everything in his path to shambling around the rest of the movie. I'm not kidding; there's scenes where it's just this guy staggering through the woods or a field, not doing a damn thing.

This one comes dangerously close to crossing the line from "hilariously bad" to "painfully bad". Some decent action, kills and Tom Savini save it from being a complete failure, but just by a hair. If anything, it can inspire would-be zombie filmmakers. Someone invested money in this pile of shit, so why not yours?


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