User Reviews

I have finally found a movie that sucks worse than the Blair Witch project and it is called Dead is Dead. I purchased it used because the description made it sound cool and I like Zombie movies. I also didn't mind that it was low budget, normally I like those kind of movies the best but this movie had no gore or nudity so being low budget didn't matter. First the lighting was horrible, you couldn't even see the actors faces half the time. The other problem was the crappy keyboard music that would never end. Then you have Mike Stanley who did like everything in the movie and starred. He looked like a lame version of Chuck Norris and had a bowl hair cut. No offense to anyone with a bowl hair cut, but you can't look tough with one. The story was cool and i was into it at the begining but when you don't do anything with it for the entire movie whats the point? The stuff about the two drugs that can heal a person or turn them into Zombies was cool but they never even showed a person turn into a Zombie or maybe they did but it was so lame and boring i couldn't even tell. That is pretty much my biggest complaint you don't even see one blue Zombie in the whole movie! Most of the movie is just Mike Stanley walking around and trying to make sure you can see his face (guess they made sure the lighting was good when he was on camera). One good thing about this video was at the beggining during the FBI warning. They had the audio from "Amazon Women on the Moon" about the video pirates, but I'm pretty sure that was the distributor's (Video Outlaw) doing not the makers of the movie is self. Only watch this movie if you are shooting a low budget horror movie on tape and you want to see how not to do it.

First, let me make this very clear. This review is not for the 1992 VHS version of Dead is Dead. This review is for the new 2008 DVD Directors Cut edition of Dead is Dead. "Dead is Dead The Directors Cut",combines the original with it's unreleased sequel "Dead is Dead 2: The Incarnation". Dead is Dead has been fully re-edited with added scenes shot for this release. A new soundtrack and new special effects were also added. This movie reminds me of old school horror. The story idea in this film is fresh and original, not the same old re-hash. Zombies and gore are not the main focus of this film. This film is about a drug called Doxital and how this drug controls those who come in contact with it. The Doxital can turn people into zombies, bring them back from the dead and grow back severed limbs. What makes this film spooky, is knowing what might happen and the anticipation for it. Director Mike Stanley doesn't throw the gore in your face. Dead is Dead delivers. This is old school horror at it's best.

After an unusually prolonged period of procrastination, I finally watched Mike Stanley's no-Fi, almost sci-Fi 'Dead is Dead' which is stridently regarded in some murkier quarters of filmdom with quite some infamy, and merely ten minutes into 'Dead is Dead', I sincerely felt as though the film actively had it in for me! Having been written, produced, directed by and 'starring' Mike Stanley would suggest that this multi-tasking fellow would have a degree of competency in at least one of these disparate art forms, but the overly pedantic, monotonously delivered exposition to some unseen priest strongly belied any possibility of this being the work of some hitherto underappreciated filmmaking polymath! And I sincerely wished I could blithely appreciate Stanley's audaciously bizarre story as much as I unambiguously dug his audaciously bizarre, pseudo-Johnny Ramone bowl cut! Right on!

Eric (Mike Stanley) had lost his asylum-residing brother (perhaps the true author of the film!) in a terrible conflagration that Eric later unearths was cynically orchestrated by the grisly-looking geek-of-the-week Shylock/dope-dealer/nerdquake Tony (Rob Binge) who Eric still owed hella scratch to. So far, so so-so, as the exponential 'weirdness' of Stanley's singularly opaque oeuvre begins after the poor lad awakens groggily in the wood being kindly tended to by petite blonde lovely Laura (Connie Cocquyt); since it is precisely at this very juncture when I should have ingested the potent psychedelics that may have eased the existential malaise shared by the increasingly addled Eric, as Laura Blithely expounds in the film's unerring monotone that his arm bloodily wrenched off the night before in a Dr. Who-style tussle with some twitchy, jam-slathered appendage has been completely re-grown!!!!???

'The medicine I gave you grew your arm back!!!' she blandly explains to a rightfully incredulous Eric. 'I take it every day like a vitamin; it can even bring back the dead!!!' Like, wow, I'm trapped on Mulholland Drive, dude!!??? This unusually aggressive, jam-slathered appendage belonged to one of gnarly (unseen) mutants that have erroneously ingested the 'Green Doxital' which is bad m'kay, while the 'Blue Doxitol' rapidly rejuvenates living tissue and has dead re-animating properties that are good, m'kay?

There is one especially scintillating dramatic sequence wherein a plainly reflective Eric, slumped wearily on the kitchen floor, leisurely consumes a pickle and considers his next move in this incidentally surrealistic, diabolically Doxitol-addled, corpse-reanimating celluloid conundrum which palpably whetted my appetite for my own delicious snack of fermented legumes but, sadly, did little more to endear me to this frequently odoriferous melodrama.

There is perhaps some mischievous alchemy at play here, since this 72 minute 'feature' felt like a long wintry weekend in wet underpants, now with all that having being said, I'll always have a genuine admiration for any mercurially minded gent who playfully mixes his metaphors in such a cavalier fashion as the estimable Mr. Stanley! The only special effects on display in 'Dead is Dead' are the monochromatic, torpor-inducing performances, all ceaselessly reciting the moribund text in a nightmarishly tepid drone which I paradoxically found to be both excruciating and soothingly mesmeric at the same time???!!! WTF!!!!?????

I shall end my pseudo-review with some final S. O. V controversy by boldly stating I genuinely adored Rob Binge's frequently shrill, occasionally doomy synth score. So there! But, on reflection, I would much rather watch another altogether noble failure like 'Dead is Dead' than suffer through yet another tawdry, witless, quick buck slasher, and, besides, the very fact that some of us are still talking about Mike Stanley's magnificently muddled mess of a horror movie all these years later, is, perhaps, something even he could not have legitimately expected! Kudos!!!

'Hey!!!! Lay off the Doxital' kids, otherwise you too might end up manifesting a lifeless DTV dud like 'Dead is Dead! Only kidding, sexy S. O. V fans!!! Take as much of it as you like...and bring on the sequel!!!!! Yay!!!!!! - Goosey Lucy@Buxom Bloodfiends.

'...'The medicine I gave you grew your arm back!!!' The dope dialogue in 'Dead is Dead' rocks rilly hard, dude!!!' - TerrorTampon @ SalonTitty.