The Dead Hate the Living!

Trailer—The Dead Hate the Living!

source: The Dead Hate the Living!

Oh my!!! What a terrible movie. I'm a fan of "B" films but give me a break. The director/writer does not have a clue on how to tell a story. This movie is very slow, the editing is all over the place, and the dialogue stinks. Director/writer "Dave Parker" thinks he's clever, instead he just insulting to his audience. He tries to pay homage to Fulci, Argento, Carpenter, & Bava but fails in doing so. In addition, the commentary track on the DVD is shameful. I have never heard such an arrogant selfish person in my life. I would not be surprise if any of the good reviews on this service came from the director himself. Hollywood hear my cry!! Don't let this boy direct, write, act, or edit a film again. Do yourself a favor and give your money to charity instead.

This is amateurish horror film making at best!There are a few huge plot holes,but there are also some great inside jokes.Horror fans will find references to Rob Zombie,Megadeth,John Carpenter,Tom Savini,Lucio Fulci,David Warbeck,"Evil Dead 2","The Beyond" and "Cannibal Ferox".The acting is pretty bad,but there is plenty of cheesy gore(heads get ripped off,throats ripped out,and the poor guy is dragged around by his intestines).Director Dave Parker is apparently a big Raimi/Fulci/Romero fan!The are also the digital effects,but they totally suck(electricity bolts,fire and a gunshot to the head).If you like zombie flicks give this one a look.6 out of 10.The plot:a small group of people shooting a low-budget zombie flick in an abandoned hospital unleash the living dead! Fulci lives!

Maybe it's because I've seen too many overrated and disappointing wannabe-artistic horror titles lately, but I hugely enjoyed this low-budgeted zombie-splatter flick. "The Dead hate the Living" is unpretentious and enthusiast horror entertainment; obviously scripted and directed by a guy who's obsessed with gory genre classics from the past. By no means this will ever be regarded as a masterpiece but the makers probably couldn't care less about that! They all really wanted to make a movie that brings homage to their childhood favorites and you should try to look at it like this as well. The story handles about a clique of young horror rookies that break into an abandoned hospital to shoot their own independent movie. Naturally this ominous location hides a couple of dark secrets and, through a portal in the catacombs, zombies start to showing up. These living dead are led by a deranged doctor (looking an awful lot like Rob Zombie) who wishes to exterminate all forms of life ever since his beloved wife died of cancer. As you can tell, the plot is all but original and features every possible cliché this genre can suffer from. But if you're not being too skeptical, there's not a dull moment throughout the entire movie. The gore and splatter only kicks in 45 minutes into the movie, but even before this, the story is pure fun with an incredible amount of inside jokes and references towards the oeuvres of Fulci, Romero, Savini, Carpenter, Raimi and others. The digital effects are lousy, but the good old-fashioned gory make-up effects make up for them. We have torn off heads, severed limbs and ripped out intestines. Enjoy!

I'm not going to waste much time on a review. The film itself has already bled me of 90 minutes of my life. But out of common decency I do feel that I should warn others who may be thinking of renting this out... just put it back on the shelf and walk away. Intending to pay homage to classic horror films it doesn't even manage to parody them. Boring, sub-amateur rubbish.

One thing that has been missing from horror for years is a good Zombie movie. Dellamorte Dellamore was the last great Zombie movie to come out and since then no new Zombie films have come out that were anygood at all. But now the Dead Hate The Living has given us hope for the Zombie genre. Dont get me wrong, Dellamorte Dellamore is still a better movie, but this movie is a breath of fresh air for Zombie fans who have craved for a new good zombie movie for years. Dave Parker makes both his writing and directorial debut with what is a surprisingly good movie. His style is an amateurish mixture of some of the greatest horror directors of our time as well as his own. The zombies in this movie are realy something, especialy Maggot. The Zombies are some of hte most original I've seen since Return Of The Living Dead. Maggots cool but Tarmans still the best. The F/X is a mix bag. With there limited budget they were able to come up with some great effects but unfortunatly on some scenes they had to cut corners due to the budget restraints. The CGI effects were the only real bad thing about this movie. The fire towards the end is very laughable and I think Dave Parker should have re-written the script so that they could have skipped using fire and done the scene in a more realistic style. The acting is pretty much what you would expect from a low budget movie but Parker made the wise decision of giving the bigger parts to the better actors and the throw away parts to the others. Over all the acting is good. It takes a page out of scream by using a lot of references to other horror movies but unlike scream it doesnt go for only the more mainstream horror movies(exorcist,Friday the 13th, Nightmare on elm street) but has references that mostly hardcore horror fans will know(I love the "Fulci Lives" bumper sticker part). This isnt the next "Dawn of the Dead" or "Zombie" but it's still pretty darn good. Check it out. My score: 8 out of 10

I'm a big fan of zombie movies, but this low budget fan-made stuff doesn't tend to appeal much. It's not that I don't enjoy the splatter, it's that recycled ideas can only go so far before you're completely watching someone else's film; albeit regurgitated. The Dead Hate the Living isn't a complete dead loss, and it's easy to see what the filmmakers were trying to achieve - but it suffers from the common problem with films like this, in that it doesn't have enough ideas in it's own right to be fun enough to completely keep the audience going with it. The film definitely has it's moments, though, such as the ending which brilliantly pays tribute to Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond". The constant name-dropping gets tired after a while. It's not bad at first, as you can see that the film is made by fans of this sort of stuff (people like me and, probably, you) but once the point has been made; it doesn't need to be made again. And again, and again. The plot is typically thin, and it follows a film crew making a no-budget zombie movie in an old abandoned hospital, which also happens to be a resting place for a doctor that wants the dead to take over the Earth. This plot probably took about five minutes to think of, and the same again for script writing time; but funnily enough, the plot is what gives the film it's main point of originality in the way that the characters are making a film, which turns out to be about what's happening to them. What makes this idea fun is the way that the film almost spoofs itself with the way that we see the crew making their film, and then ending up getting butchered for real. While the plot isn't bad, the plotting will no doubt get on many people's nerves. The gore doesn't turn up at all in the first half of the movie, and even when it does it isn't thick or fast and the result isn't all that fun to watch. It's also ironic that you spend the first half of the film waiting for the zombie mayhem to start, and when it finally does; you realise that the first half of the movie was actually better! The Dead Hate the Living is a film that I would recommend to zombie enthusiasts only. There isn't enough about it to appeal to people who aren't zombie fans, and in that respect even zombie fans may be a little disappointed. A note to everyone; beware of the truly awful CGI towards the end!

I am still wondering what I was thinking when I rented this. I read about it in Fango and remembered them talking about how their zombies didn't eat human flesh, they just wanted to rip humans up, due to the fact that "it costs too much" to show cannibalism. I guess the premise of some filmmakers making a zombie flick in an abandomed asylum/hospital/whatever it was only to find real zombies there seemed sort of neat. MAN was I wrong. I knew I had made a huge error in judgement by renting it when early on, there is a scene where a supposedly 'hot' blonde babe wearing all black or course, goes into a convenience store for supplies. The cashier leers at her while ringing it up, then says, "that'll be $36.97" and she simply takes the sack, glares at him, and walks off making some rude comment. He just stares at her. You know what they forgot to include in the scene? See, there's this tradition when you make a purchase where after you find out the total, you **actually give the salesperson some form of currency in exchange for your items**. And the guy doesn't remark in any way about her not paying (or make any remark at all), so you know it was just sheer sloppiness on the part of the filmmakers. It just got worse from there. The worst make-up effects I've seen in quite some time, and that's saying a lot. THe previous reviewer was right, the stupid "skull" makeup on some guy playing a zombie actually gets less realistic when he turns into a zombie for real. I would like to give them a little credit for using air bladders instead of CGI (yeah, like they could afford it), but they actually parts of a guy's skeleton stretching like it was made of rubber. Little hint when you use air bladders guys, try to restrict them to parts of the body that actually stretch. One particularly bad effect was fake teeth, supposed to be part of the skull showing through, that actually were visibly glued on top of his upper lip (there was a second set underneath). Please note that I am making the effect sound more realistic than it was. The acting was slightly above average, but with lines like, "I think we've slipped into some kind of, like, netherworld, man" what can ya do? The plot seemed like it was being made up as they went along. There were elements that just plain insulted the audience's intelligence, such as a zombie whose main feature was that he visibly lacked any semblance of a nose, sniffing someone to see if they were human. I could predict everything before it happened. Don't even get me started on the much better films that they ripped off blatantly (and DON'T try to tell me they were homages, I know the difference) such as Fright Night, Alien 4, Dusk Till Dawn, all the Evil Dead Movies...those are just off the top of my head, too. At one point, the Rob Zombie character says, "Make them die...slowly" and I guess we are supposed to be impressed that they tossed in a reference to the cannibal flick of the same name. As far as the ending, they seem to have just ran out of money and film as many threads were left hanging (I have a horrible feeling this is because they were planning a sequel). Oh, and the credits were lifted from se7en. God, I wish I'd read the reviews here before I wasted 3 bucks and 90 minutes of my life on this stupid peice of s***!

I write this review with serious doubts that anyone will have kept reading through all the 50-odd previous comments to get here. There is, however, the problem that this movie is getting some seriously mixed reviews here. In order to do my part, I cast my vote for "It Sucked!" and hope I can save someone the depression that follows renting a movie with glowing quotes on the box, only to wonder if those quotes weren't from the people who actually made the film. I'll give it this; it's an educated film. Made for horror fans, by horror fans (who have a shoestring budget and no sense of continuity). Throughout the movie you'll see various references to influential directors (I saw the "Stab" poster, and as far as I know "Nails" cigarettes don't exist outside Kevin Smith movies) and various homages to previous zombie movies (like, all of them). This is, unfortunately, one of it's downfalls because much of the movie is extremely predictable. Also, the director tries to run with what works in the genre (anxiety, extra gore, handy power tools {Where the hell did that chainsaw even come from?}), but it is often executed poorly, regardless of budget. I didn't expect Citizen Kane here, but I also didn't expect a home movie made in a weekend. For horror fans who think they can look past the directorial mishaps, think again. The zombie volume is next to nothing (2 henchmen zombies and a couple dozen shady figures in cobwebs), the special effects just remind you how crappy the film is (if someone is getting electrocuted, sparks will do nicely, we don't need this crappy cgi fireworks display that looks like a screen saver), and the death scenes are mostly tame (1. character vanishes in mist, throw bucket of blood from off camera. 2. Character has head removed, off screen. Carry crappy fake head back into scene. etc.). The irony here is that the characters in the movie were in the process of filming their own horror movie which actually looked better than the one they got caught up in. So why did I give it a 3/10 and not a 1/10? Well hell, I can't make a movie. The effort alone is always worth something, no matter what the outcome.