31 Days of Halloween: The Video Dead (1987)
It’s Saturday and for my next choice in my 31 Days of Halloween list, I decided to go with something a bit more fun. I present to you the 1987 horror-comedy The Video Dead.. This is one of those one-of-a-kind horror films that could have only come out of the decade that spawned it. It’s a very basic, very silly, and oftentimes pretty stupid plot. It centers around a cursed television that works as a portal for a horde of the undead. Leaving the television on causes these creatures to cross over into our world where the murder and cause mayhem. The only person who figures this out, and has to stop it, is a slacker teenager named Jeff Blair (played by Rocky Duvall) Rocky is an airhead and he’s not very good at anything, making him the perfect stooge for the Video Dead to escape from their haunted prison.
The movie is full of silly monsters, ridiculous kills, and bizarre mythology behind the entire. These aren’t your garden variety flesh-eaters that go down when you shoot them in the head. These zombies are an unstoppable force that keeps coming that can be reminded that they are undead by the others and get right back up again. The television as a medium in which they cross over into our world is, I suppose, a commentary on the MTV generation of the time that were glued to their televisions to find something, anything, that is the slight bit titillating. As evidence from our young hero, Jeff, who spends his evenings smoking pot and aimlessly watching television. The television, a malevolent entity in of itself, takes advantage of this by showing the dumb stoner the type of crap that dumb stoners would be drawn to watch: naked women and gory horror films.
This movie is a refreshing change from your typical “haunted item” horror films that usually go with something old and creepy like a doll or a house, this movie is the few that takes a modern convenience — in this case a television — and uses that as a cursed object. It is an uninteresting brown television with dials and knobs that were so commonplace. It might be a little dirty, but there is nothing inherently menacing about it. In making the central antagonist a haunted television it opened up a unique avenue of storytelling.
This movie used to be somewhat hard to come by until recently when Shout Factor, those magnificent bastards released it on a Blu-Ray double feature with another similar film from the era, Terror Vision. Unfortunately for you, dear reader, that title is out of print so if you’re trying to hunt this one down you’re stuck buying it at a premium.
Tomorrow….
I'm recommending a book!? What the fuck?
