The Dead Hate the Living

(1999) **



First the good things. Gotta love the title, right? That is one sweeping generalization if I ever heard one. It suggests that the 99.9999% of every human that has ever lived not only doesn’t care for but actually hates the .0000001% of us who are still breathing. No, not grandpa too!

Anyway – gotta hate the movie unfortunately. I bought this one used for a buck or two at Rasputin after being drawn in by the name and badass box. Almost everything else about this film sucks in old and unexciting ways.

The story involves a *groan* zombie movie within a zombie movie. Dave is the director and he has two sisters also involved in the film – the sweet one and the bitchy one. Because I didn’t particularly enjoy getting to know the characters in this film I’ll spare you the breakdown of why each and every one of them is annoying. While filming in an abandoned hospital they discover a gothic coffin which they do not hesitate to open. Inside the coffin they find a corpse that looks like Rob Zombie. Actually I would more accurately describe him as Rob Zombie’s pretentious and less menacing little brother. Let’s call him Chip Zombie.

Dave convinces the rest of the crew that using an actual corpse in their film would lead to recognition via street cred. (In fairness to them, this was probably a good idea because they needed all the street cred they could muster.) But as soon as they begin shooting Chip Zombie comes to life and a legion of real zombies crawl out of the coffin. Chip’s backstory is revealed through flashbacks. Turns out he was a mad scientist who created an army of the undead to do his evil bidding. A healthy dose of running around and getting killed ensues until the survivors hatch an escape plan consisting of *eyeball roll* pretending to be zombies by *sigh* putting on makeup.

As I mentioned earlier, this movie is rather lame. The makeup in the movie-within-the-movie looks like an 80’s magic shop job and once the “real” zombies arrive they graduate to Michael Jackson Thriller believability. Chip Zombie is almost a great villain in an obnoxious way because he tries/fails so hard to be scary but this sadly wasn’t intentional.