The Dead Hate The Living! (1999)

A bunch of wannabe filmakers are shooting a low budget zombie flick in an old abandoned hospital. While exploring the basement of the place one of the film’s crew (foxy actress Jamie Donahue) stumbles across an actual human corpse who, might I add, bears a striking resemblance to Rob Zombie. Now, since none of these fools saw “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”, they of course don’t know the harm that can follow if you mess around with a dead corpse. The director of the flick decides to use the cadaver in his movie, only to unwittingly resurrect the corpse and with him a whole slew of the undead. Now, what I found interesting about this flick was that it did have several memorable looking zombies. One is sort of an “Incredible Hulk” type zombie, while another is about eight feet tall, which was very weird to look at. The effects range from fairly good (the zombie make-up) to really, really bad. Though to be fair, the budget wasn’t exactly all that huge (is it ever?), so they did ok with what they had. Acting wise everything is pretty amateurish, and many of the attempts at “comedy” just did not come off all that great. I did enjoy the frequent in jokes (“You’ll be the next David Warbeck!”), the “Fulci Lives” bumper sticker, etc. On the downside though, the movie is never scary, the zombies are always to well lit, and there are to many damn strobe lights flicking everywhere. I thought for a minute I was in some trendy dance club instead of a zombie massacre. Credit must be given to director Dave Parker for attempting to pay homage to the old stuff, but I’ll say skip this one and just watch “The Beyond” for the hundredth time. (dir: Dave Parker)