Video Dud

Should have been called the Straight to Video Dead.

The Video Dead is a rank little movie from my old stomping grounds of 1987 or thereabouts, a time that may have been just as senseless as our own but one in which women undoubtedly had better hair and makeup. It concerns a possessed TV that gets dumped off on a writer (Michael St. Michaels, a double whammy of a name you have to love), who gets butchered and dies with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Like a lot of guys.

Two bumbling delivery guys who were supposed to deliver the thing to the "Institute of Occult Studies" go and pick it up but somehow it ends up at the home of Jeff and Zoe (Rocky Duvall and Roxanna Augesen) whose seemingly too-old parents are off doing missionary work or something. Anyway, he and Zoe are in the house alone, and Jeff meets the Girl Next Door, April, (Vickie Bastell) who is an ice-blonde snow princess with perfect preppie hair, an argyle sweater, and probably an overdeveloped intuitive knowledge of how to accessorize. She's walking a dog. The dog gets killed by zombies. Ones that come out of the TV. It's all sort of foggy and smoky.

Jeff gets stoned, and a sexy porno kitten (Jennifer Miro from the punk band The Nuns) comes out of the TV, strips, and starts making love to him. And I can't remember what happens next, (and that's so tragic because in a movie like The Video Dead, every plot point is salient testimony to the genius of the director, which is on a par with Griffith, Eisenstein, and Orson Welles), but at some point later a woman is killed for no reason, by a guy that has no purpose, on a TV that is possessed; and the guy calls himself "The Garbage Man," and warns Jeff that the zombies from the TV must be stopped. I think.

Anyway, zombies emerge from the TV, one is dressed in a wedding dress, and the other is the groom, and yet another gets an iron caught in his forehead. A few cool scenes: a blue, rotting hand that moves and twitches, some zombie munching the severed head of another zombie, the aforementioned killing by The Garbage Man, and some chainsaw-fu, as well as arrow-fu, and washer-and-dryer-fu.

Unfortunately, the make-up of the shambling caricature zombies is pretty terrible, looking exactly like what it is: bad grease paint and latex appliances. No one in this movie has much appeal to me personally, except maybe for April. Later, an even less appealing character, Mr. Daniels (Sam David McClelland) who is a bounty hunter or Namvet or something comes along looking for the possessed Gateway to Hell Zombie TV, and Jeff and he go out to the woods to whoop some zombie butt. They do so, but it doesn't turn out very well for them in the end.

For years I'd been confusing The Video Dead with Terrorvision, which has cult film actress Mary Woronov in it. The latter film is a lot more Eighties in a "punk" way; the former is a lot more Eighties in a staid, conservative, yet undeniably still straight to video Reagan way. I'm not exactly certain what point I'm trying to make here, and neither is the film.

If there is a subtext here, it's that watching TV stoned might make you a "T.V. Casualty" (apologies to the Misfits). Shuffling zombies born of video nightmares, dressed in wedding clothes, and offing blonde preppy girls in upscale 1987 neighborhoods that undoubtedly all voted unanimously straight Republican. Is it saying something about the power of television to deaden the intellectual faculty, thus rendering the addicted Boob Tube disciple a shuffling, aimless, antisocial menace hellbent on washing the pristine green lawns of suburbia with warm, living BLOOD? Who knows. (Shrugs.)

They used to play The Video Dead on USA during "Saturday Nightmares." Or maybe right before. I can't, personally, imagine any nightmare worse than being forced to sit through this wretched bad movie a second time. Even getting scarfed by a Halloween latex mask-wearing zombie is no comparison.

Change that channel, bubbelah.