Night Of The Dead opens with Dr. Schreklich resurrecting a dead frog by injecting it with a serum. He then has to kill the frog when it goes bonkers. He’s interrupted by his wife and child who proceed to walk to the store and get run over by a car and killed. One year later, Dr. Schrecklich has his own clinic where he performs his experiments trying to bring a normal life back to his flesh-craving wife and daughter with new and better versions of his serum. Dr. Schreklich’s nephew, Peter Sturben, and his wife, Anais, are living in the hospital and trying to bring their baby into the world with the help of Dr. Schreklich. But, Anais doesn’t like it there and soon the doctor’s experiments begin to get out of hand.
Here’s another product from knock-off specialists The Asylum. I don’t know what current movie release this one could be shadowing, but Re-Animator covered this territory about 20 years ago and did it way better. The moral of the story: don’t try to bring back your loved ones from the dead, they always end up wanting to kill you.
There’s really no reason to make this movie except to showcase the mildly effective special effects. The zombie make-up was pretty effective. Sometimes it’s good, but often it’s pretty bad, like when one of the zombie peels back the skin on top of the victims head and begins scooping out her brains, without the problem of the pesky skull getting in the way. There are a handful of shots of an open chest cavity that are just a split screen mirror image and in one of them you can see the hand moving the innards as if it were alive. In one scene that was obviously filmed as one continuous shot, yet not not edited that way, you can see the hand of someone hiding behind a open door holding some sort of blood splatter delivery system retracting behind the door long after the shot victim had slumped to the ground.
It’s clear that Night Of The Dead was shot in just a few corridors of some sort of hospital. There are so many shots of people walking through open doors into other rooms, then when the camera is on the other room, it’s obvious (by what is just inside that door) that it’s a completely different room. Sometimes doors are completely reversed once the camera is on the other side. This sort of lack on continuity in the camera work is so prevalent that it’s distracting. I had more fun rewinding it and giggling then I did watching the story unfold. At the end when the protagonists are trying to escape, they seem to be running away from every clearly marked and glowing EXIT sign in the building. I could have overlooked one or two of these flubs as a “gimme”, but it was just too much.
At the end of Night Of The Dead there’s a twist that actually made me think “Hmm, that’s not bad”. But, getting there was so awful and not worth it at all. I can’t possibly recommend that anybody watch this movie.
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