Jun 28 2004
Movie: “The dead hate the living” (2000)
“The Dead Hate the Living” (2000), directed by Dave Parker.
Starring Eric Clawson, Jamie Donahue, Brett Beardslee and Wendy Speake.
Zombie Film Rating:
Summary:The movie starts with an odd little bearded man ranting at a camera, he is babbling about discovering the secret to life after death, as he babbles we notice zombies trying to force their way in through a glass wall and door. Eventually the strange little bearded man is attacked, and we next find ourselves in a morgue.
A female coroner is conducting a post-mortem, the victim seems to have suffered bite marks and chainsaw wounds, and (as is to be expected) during the examination the body disappears from the examination table.
Sure enough, the zombie attacks the coroner and cuts her throat, then the zombie starts making out with the newly deceased coroner who soon returns to life, resulting in a bizarre zombie orgie….
Just as I was becoming thoroughly confused as to what was going on someone yelled “Cut” (and this time it was not me, and we learn that this is, in fact, a low budget movie shoot (a movie within a movie). Further we are next overloaded with information about this particular low budget movie, now being filmed in an abandoned hospital (without permission) and using friends and family as cast and crew.
Naturally as they explore the abandoned hospital they stumble across the labratory of the previously mentioned odd little bearded man, and decide to incorporate it into the film. The subsequent discovery of the odd little mans corpse doesn’t change matters for them, and they decide to use him in the film (what could go wrong?).
Taking the discovery of a corpse in stride they decide to use the odd little bearded mans equipment in their shoot, and naturally they immediate reanimate the odd little bearded man who wastes no time and 
attacks their star, then with his strangely mutated zombies begins chasing the survivors around the hospital.
The survivors are whittled away one by one, as they try to find a way to beat the zombies and save the world. This culminates in a completely suspense-less stand-off between the director, his production assistant (girlfriend) and the odd little bearded man.
Ending with the director and PA arriving in the parallel dimension inhabited with zombies….they must now find a way to live (Although frankly I had assumed that living people showing up in zombieland would freak the zombies out).
b>Critique: I found this movie while trolling the horror section looking for (suprise!) zombie films, it looked fairly interesting and was a relatively recent film, so I figured what the hell.
Indeed.
The movie is pretty awful even by zombie movie standards, theres little tension through the film, and despite the interesting start the action tapers off to little more than generic “horror movie chase nonsense”.
Some of the acting is quite good (excellent for this genre) and some of the plot points deserved more exploration, but sadly the end result is a fizzle, without as much as a pop.
Shucks….