Let’s do another Zombie movie.
The Dead Next Door is one of those horror movies that doesn’t get talked about a whole lot, but those that have seen it tend to count it as a personal favorite and/or a guilty pleasure. I had seen fans refer to it as being a pretty good cult film akin to something like Evil Dead multiple times, so I was excited.
I was pretty disappointed.
This movie starts out completely awesome. The zombie apocalypse shows up and there’s well done scenes of general zombie mayhem occuring. The best part is when a zombie is shown with a stack of famous zombie films at a video rental store. From there we see that they’ve established a police force specifically for dealing with the zombies. This in an interesting concept that gets abandoned pretty much right after it gets established. This sucks because a Zombie police squad itself is a fucking great idea for a movie. They could’ve focused solely on these guys and had a great film right there.
After that is where shit gets boring; the plot shifts focus to some scientists who are trying to develop a cure for zombies. This shit is never interesting but it shows up in like every horror movie that’s about zombies. No one wants to see these guys figure out how to stop the one thing that is keeping us watching the film. If they cured the fucking zombies, I wouldn’t watch the damn movie; so you know they’ll never get anywhere with their research, which just makes scenes like these fucking boring because you know they’ll ultimately be fruitless.
Then it almost gets interesting again; almost. They introduce the idea that there are religious cult memebers who believe that the zombies are a punishment/warning from God. Now that’s actually interesting. Like the anti-zombie squad, this idea alone is enough to make an interesting movie. In fact, you’d think the two ideas together would make a legendary horor movie, but man, would you be wrong. Like the scientists, the cult shit never goes anywhere.
Some of the redeaming factors in this movie:
- Zombie cops
- Zombies renting zombie movies
- Every major character is named after a horror personality (Romero, King, Raimi, Savini, etc)
- A zombie’s detached head eats a man’s fingers and we see them fall out the bottom of his head
- One of the main characters looks a lot like Bruce Campbell, even though it isn’t Campbell, his voice is actually dubbed over by Campbell for some fucking reason.
- The effects are actually really well done, especially for being in such a laughably bad low budget affair.
- The title is pretty cool, even though it doesn’t deliver.
It’s hard to really recommend this movie because it gets so damn boring near the end. I guess if you’re gonna give it a shot, shut it off as soon as the scientists show up. You won’t be missing anything at all.
