Strong and Moving!

So much average

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Story Synopsis: A group of budding independent filmmakers break into an abandoned hospital in order to shoot a horror film there. While exploring the building's basement, they find a strange coffin-like device with a corpse inside. Using both the corpse & the device as props in their film, they accidentally open a portal to a demonic netherworld which places the entire hospital in a temporal trap & unleashes an army of zombies. As the creatures ruthlessly slaughter their way through the crew, the survivors must rely on their filmmaking skills in order to close the portal.Film Analysis: In the 1970s, genre filmmaker Benjamin (Bob) Clark made a film called Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, in which a group of actors travel to a cemetery island in order to perform a satanic ritual purely for the fun of it, only to discover too late that their half-hearted approach to devil worship actually works, unleashing an army of zombies which then proceed to eliminate the entire group. Decades later, Clark decided to mount a remake of his own film, but shortly after shooting began, ended up being killed in a car accident. With the prospects of a remake at this point looking rather unlikely, the best way to revisit the material is a low-budget flick known as The Dead Hate the Living!This film is an uncredited remake of Clark's cult flick, written & directed by Dave Parker, a massive genre fan who would later be involved with a certain video game adaptation directed by a certain German director which would be ridiculed by virtually everyone in the horror world (for anyone who doesn't know that, I'm not going to make it that easy for you – do your research!). The only difference between TDHTL & CSPWDT is the location, nature of the zombie plague & competence of the humans involved.As much as I hate to pan a film made by a fellow genre fan, I must point out the flaws (& there are quite a few of them here) in this film. Parker's script assumes that the viewers are massive zombie fans (which I'm one of), leaving the cause of the zombies' aggression unclear (all we get is a line spoken by one of the zombies about how the dead hate the living, which is very unsatisfactory as a piece of exposition). In fact, very little in the film makes sense. The hero of the piece, a budding film director, makes some really stupid filmmaking decisions, here deciding to break into a hospital in order to illegally shoot a film there without first scouring the place to clear out any unwanted squatters, then having the stupidity to use a real corpse as a film prop in his film, only to receive some massive karmic retribution by placing him & his crew into a temporal trap. Other than that, the characters are an okay bunch.The other problem is that anyone who isn't familiar with 1980s' horror films or doesn't even watch any horror films would be unfamiliar with the references shown here. There are nods to John Carpenter (my favourite director), Jack Nicholson, Sam Raimi, David Warbeck (an actor who starred in one of the early 1980s' most legendary Italian zombie films, The Beyond) & Lucio Fulci. These references are quite clever but cannot in themselves elevate what is essentially a routine zombie film.That said, the acting is quite good. The cast give well-rounded performances & get into their roles with a relish that doesn't outstrip their talent. The film's best scene is where two of the survivors decide to infiltrate the zombies by using their makeup expertise to disguise themselves as the undead & mingle with them in order to rescue a fellow survivor. The ending where the hero & his only surviving crew – a female props buyer & love interest – kill the zombies' leader but fail to close the zombie dimension, instead entering it in order to survive, is quite bleak.

This is a pretty lame, poorly written B-horror movie, that remains stuck somewhere between an homage to- and more comical approach of horror movies of the '70's and '80's (The Romero, Argento and Fulci type of horror flicks) and a serious attempt of making a good, gory horror flick. Lots of these types of movie got and still gets made, rarely ever with a good result. This is unfortunately one of those bad movies. It takes forever for things to start off in those movie (most likely because of its low budget) and the written and dialog is just plain bad. Of course also the actors in this movie really aren't among the finest. When things finally start off, continuity and the character behavior becomes really bad and unbelievable, which also at times makes this an hard and also definitely unpleasant movie to follow. It also makes the intended comedy in this movie work out all the more lame.Sad thing is that the movie tries to put in many scare effects but the timing and just overall execution of it is so terrible that it often becomes more laughable than anything else really. It gives the movie also really an amateurish feeling in parts.Of course the movie is predictable in basically every regard. The movie just simply doesn't bother to put in any creativity or originality.On a positive note; despite it's low budget the movie is still a good looking one, with a good visual style and also some decent make-up. Too bad that it didn't got used for a better movie. There is also some gore pleasant but somehow it doesn't know to entertain or shock as much as its look allowed it to be. It just doesn't work out, just as rarely anything really works out well enough in this movie.Really not much good.4/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

If I were not against the ordering of products of the internet I would already have this film in my library but sadly I am still on the look out for this great marvel of movie making. When I rented it about six years ago i fail in love with it's intensity. it had more raw power in it's first five minutes than the supposed overly nasty new Texas Chainsaw Massacre had in it's entire run time. This film gave zombies there due, even more so then Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead (2004), or 28 Days Later. While all of those films are good this one shows love for the Zombie genre not just popping the old stories out all over again for a new stupid generation. The music in this is extravagant and lush. One of the head Zombies in this would later go on to play Tiny in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and Devil's Rejects both remarkable on there own. This film is a must for all Zombie lovers. Seek it out!!!!!!!

It's a shame that this film has such a low rating on IMDb because it really is quite an entertaining film if you are prepared to wait. The problem with this film is that it seems to take forever to actually get going which can be a problem with a lot of the cheaper horror films ( I think that dark power is the worst of those I've ever seen). But for a film with a low budget when it does get going the going is good okay so its not brilliant but you shouldn't really be expecting it to be. A good little horror film made on a low budget and if you have no patience at all just skip forward for the first half hour you'll still get some background info before the action starts.