What’s an Undead Ringer?

I review zombie movies for the ZRC. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t want to come right out and peg their movie as a zombie flick. Maybe it’s artistic integrity or they just don’t want to be dismissed by being lumped in with such a stigmatized genre, so sometimes you have to read between the lines.  Every now and again, I come across one that looks like it’s totally a zombie movie, but they don’t want to use the ‘Z’ word, so they call them ‘the dead’ or talk about an ‘outbreak’ or ‘cannibalistic creatures’. Sometimes they use these terms to try to sucker YOU, the zombie fan, into picking up their flick, knowing full well it’s about ghosts or lame-ass monsters. By and large, these movies aren’t very good, so to add insult to injury, you’ve just rented a really bad movie that’s not even the zombie movie you hoped for. Well, I’ve been suckered on occasion and I’ll admit it so you don’t have to. We’ll call them Undead Ringers. I’ll review them, discuss them and, yes, spoil the hell out of them, all out of spite for being fished-in. This is the only SPOILER ALERT you get. Now on to:

Here’s what the back of the box had to say:

“Trophy husband Jack Wade kidnaps his comatose wife, an ex-Hollywood studio executive, in an attempt to kill her so that he can collect on her life insurance after she screwed him out of access to her finances. When she comes back from the dead to haunt him, Jack can’t distinguish reality from delirium. His secrets come to the foreground and he ends up destroying himself, both figuratively and literally.”

Below this are four pictures, three of which are of zombified cast members.  This coupled with the front cover depicting a ghoulish lady crawling out of a grave with “Dead and Gone” emblazoned across the headstone served well to convince me this was a zombie movie that I should review. I also have to mention that the front of the box (slightly different from the above picture in this respect) has three actors’ names across the top: Quentin Jones (the lead Jack Wade),Zack Ward (a cameo as a weatherman) and Kyle Gass (cameo as a televangelist). Why do companies insist on giving top-billing to actors that have cameos? Because they have an inferior product which they wish to sucker you into paying for. And this is the case here.

Dead and Gone is a boring, cliché, sophomoric attempt at horror/suspense. A guy goes to a cabin that has bad spirits in it from being built on an Indian burial ground, where a man once killed his family and himself. Does this sound like a low-rent version of The Shining to anyone else? Every now and again the camera either goes all haywire for a second or everything speeds up for a second. This is a stylistic trick that people have been using to death and I’m quite sick of it. Save it for the music videos.

The lead, Jack Wade, ends up killing a bunch of people that all haunt him and taunt him afterward. They all look like zombies, hence the pictures on the back of the box. The zombie make-up is actually pretty good, but all the other special effects are of fair to bad quality. The character played by Ben Moody (ex-guitarist for Evanesense), Booger, gets his hand chopped off by an axe, at least this is what you’re supposed to think when he holds up a rubber stub and wails in pain as it squirts blood for about a minute.  It looks like they spent a lot of time on the gag, but it also looked painfully rubbery. Not to mention that it is chopped off while on his knees, raising his hand in a defensive gesture. I can’t see an axe doing this the way a sword would, but evidently the makers of this movie could.

Basically, I rented this so I could review for ZRC, watched it in 3 parts because it just couldn’t hold my interest in one shot, figured out that it wasn’t even a zombie flick and was pissed that I wasted my time and money on it. Avoid this crap.

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