• Written and directed by J.R. Bookwalter
• Starring
  • Pete Ferry
  • Bogdan Pecic
  • Michael Grossi
  • Jolie Jackunas
  • Robert Kokai

This movie has a reputation and mystique in the horror fan arena far beyond its actual audience: The zombie epic filmed in 8-mm! The jumping-off point for microbudget auteur J.R. Bookwalter, then only eighteen! Unofficially executive-produced by Sam Raimi, who cut bait when production costs spiralled to $100,000! The film that put Akron, Ohio on the map! (It’s there, I swear. I saw it once.)

Sometimes hype works against a movie, as we all found out in the Blair Witch Project backlash. When a movie has been played up so much, honestly, could it possibly be as good as it’s cracked up to be?

In this case, as with most others, the answer is, “Well… no.” But it’s still one of the better indie-zombie movies out there.

Know whut Ah mean, Vern?

In an obvious homage to Romero’s trilogy (in fact, huge chunks of this movie are such homages, if not the entire thing), the dead inexplicably start rising in Akron, Ohio (including a handful of zombies in a video store — renting, naturally, Dawn of the Dead).

Five years later, the nation is still awash in the living dead, barely being held back by various units of the government-sponsored Zombie Squad, one of whom we meet in Virginia as they explore a zombie-overrun farmhouse. You’ve got stony-jawed Raimi (Pete Ferry), designated female Kuller (Jolie Jackunas), young stud Mercer (Michael Grossi), portly Kline (Floyd Ewing Jr.), and Richards (Scott Spiegel), whom you shouldn’t bother getting to know well, as he foolishly gets his fingers bitten off by a decapitated zombie head and ends up infected.

After their little hunting expedition, the Squad heads back to Washington, where they’re given a new assignment: Accompany the stereotypically-driven scientist Dr. Moulssen (Bogdan Pecic) back to Akron, where things apparently got their start with the viral research of one Dr. Bow (Lester Clark, whom we saw briefly in the prologue). Apparently, if they can determine what [technobabble technobabble] Bow used in the original virus, they can [technobabble] a [technobabble] that will [technobabble] the virus and end the reign of the zombies once and for all. The mission becomes that much more urgent when Mercer, in an unguarded moment, gets bitten by a zombie strapped down to Moulssen’s examination table.

Don’t eat that — you don’t know where it’s been!

It doesn’t take long for the Squad, accompanied by Moelsson and Dr. Franklin (Roger Graham), to locate Bow’s old house, and his corpse in the basement. It also doesn’t take long for them to discover young Vincent (Jon Killough) skulking around — a supposedly harmless member of a supposedly harmless local church. Well, we all know that all post-zombie religions are dangerously insane, so it comes as no surprise when Vincent starts protesting the Squad’s plan to eradicate the zombies, proclaims, “My religion is right!” [Note: normally such a declaration is either preceded or followed by a delineation of some sort of doctrine, but not here], and chops Kline with a machete.

See, the oh-so-harmless church is led by Reverend Jones (Robert Kokai), and you know he’s evil because he wears sunglasses at night. You can also get that impression from the fact that he keeps scores of zombies in outdoor cages and locked in the basement, feeding them regularly.

Despite being evil, though, Jones is also stupid, as it takes maybe another fifteen minutes for the Zombie Squad to find Bow’s old notes and start working on an anti-serum. You’d think that, if Jones was so enamored of the zombies and unwilling to permit their destruction, he would have cleaned out the papers from Bow’s lab and destroyed them five years ago when he killed Bow.

The “Congress is in session” jokes are waaaay too easy.

Anyway. In between the ongoing conflict with the cultists, Moulsson comes up with a version of the anti-serum, and sends Raimi and Kuller out to get him a specimen to try it on; but being impatient in their absence, he goes ahead and injects Mercer. Then, when the cultists storm the lab, Mercer falls into their hands, where he completes the transformation into a zombie — but thanks to the serum, he remains fully conscious, and wants revenge on Dr. Moulsson for doing that to him.

The final twenty minutes is just chockful of escapes, rescues, secrets revealed, schemes unleashed, and a whole bunch of intestines being pulled from torsos and chewed on.

Now, before I start pointing out flaws, as is my wont, let’s remember what we’re dealing with here. Bookwalter was eighteen when he wrote and directed this in 1985 (though it took another four years before editing, looping, etc., were completed and the finished product was available to consumers). Remember when you were eighteen? I do, just barely, and I’m glad that none of my artistic endeavors of the period (I was writing then, with some cartooning on the side) are available for public heckling at this late date. By those standards, then, we’ve got a rousing success on our hands.

Feeding time. (What, does everything have to be a joke with you people?)

On the other hand, when we consider the movie apart from its production and mystique, we can see a whole bunch of things that could have been done better. I’m not talking about the technical aspects; the finished product looks about as good as you can expect 8mm to ever look, and the special effects are both creative and charmingly hokey. No, I’m talking about the story being told.

The Romero trilogy to which this is a paean is so memorable not because of the level of gore — there were certainly gorier films before, and zombie films since have kept trying to outdo one another — but because there’s a depth, a level of maturity that can reach right into the viewer and rattle his bones. There are capital-I Issues dealt with. Here, though, the issues are sketched in and left as caricatures. To wit:

- Religion. As soon as we find out the church leader is “Reverend Jones,” we know exactly what to expect: Rubberstamped brainwashed cultists willing to die for a vague religious conviction. All fine and good, but look what a fertile field this could have been. After all, Christianity is awash in references to resurrection from the dead; a movie that truly delved into that material, showing its permutation in the face of the dead walking the earth, could be truly chilling. It could be the informing theme of such a movie, in the way that Testosterone Poisoning informed Night of the Living Dead and consumer culture informed Dawn of the Dead. Here, it’s given a moment’s lip service; cultists are simply convenient bad guys.

He may be a slimy religious shyster, but at least he brushes his teeth.

- AIDS. Vincent makes reference to the zombies being a punishment from God, very clearly mimicking the language used by fundamentalist pundits to explain the scourge of AIDS upon the unrighteous (back before heterosexual infectees started outnumbering homosexual ones by a ridiculous margin). But that’s all it is, a single-line reference. If there’s a parallel here, a statement being made, it’s certainly well-hidden.

- Military vs. scientists. Romero dealt with this familiar (to sci-fi fans, anyway) conflict in Day of the Dead, and did a wonderful job of it, even if he did plant the black hat firmly on the military’s head; the science contingent wasn’t infallible, either, and it turns out to be a single scientist’s myopic pursuit of narrow goals which destroys the fragile truce between the two camps. The situation here is almost a refutation of Romero’s scenario, and it goes overboard in differentiating the camps. Moulsson, personifying Science, is egotistical, overconfident, and casual in his assumption of moral superiority. The Squad members, on the other hand, are fine and upstanding and just about always right. It’s a knee-jerk characterization, and its application keeps the characters (especially the Zombie Squad soldiers) from developing into full characters, because rounded character have, you know, flaws. These guys have none; they’re content to fight for Truth, Justice, and the American way.

Okay, that’s enough; I’ve probably pissed off every Bookwalter fan among my already-limited readership. The point is not to bag on the movie, or call it names. The point is that chewing what’s been bitten off here requires a level of maturity that the eighteen-year-old director didn’t have, despite many strengths. It’s a fanboy production, albeit an unusually capable one, and it demonstrates it at every turn by referencing and mirroring Romero, instead of taking the ball Romero held and running with it.

J.R. Bookwalter is now the head of Fat Cat Post, a low-budget post-production facility in LA that’s closely allied with Full Moon Studios, and that relationship has given Bookwalter ample opportunity to keep his fingers in the creative side of the cinematic pie. Rumors of a sequel to The Dead Next Door have bobbed to the surface for years, and as unlikely as such a production may be, I would love to see how Bookwalter would revisit and delve into the deeper matters that he didn’t have enough growth-rings to truly deal with the first time out. Given how much ahead of the game he was at eighteen, I think the matured version would end up being all that the original is supposed to be.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 56
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 8
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• homages to Raiders of the Lost Ark: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0