• Directed by Michael Su
• Written by Daniel Benton and Michael Su
• Starring
  • Shelley Delayne
  • Aaron Gaffey
  • Bokhara Robinson
  • Michael Falls
  • Lindsey Lofaso

Once again, do-it-yourself micro-budget cinema proves fertile ground from which the dead can rise. If you’re one of those people who asks, “Do we really need another shot-on-video zombie epic?”, you probably won’t enjoy this one. Or most other movies in the genre, really. The Revolting Dead does make a good-faith attempt at bringing us a real story with interesting, if not entirely fully-rounded, characters. Unfortunately, somebody keeps letting the air out of the tires of the plot.

There’s a wee little town in the southern states in which you don’t want to die. Or if you should mischance to die there, you really ought not be buried. The single cemetery is an illkempt field of weeds (and boy, does that take the pressure off the location budget!), and the Crain family, which operates both the cemetery and the only funeral home, uses every underhanded trick to maximize their meager profits. Not only are they habitual graverobbers, but they also dump the bodies out of the coffin into the grave, fill the hole back in, and sell the same coffin to the next customer. They’re also more than a little dysfunctional; stepmother Millicent (Bokhara Robinson) married Cedric (Michael Falls) for his now-depleted money, and uses his lunkheaded son Sonny (Benjamin Keepers) and his pincushion daughter Betsy (Lindsey Lofaso) as grunt labor.

Two words, people: “Motel 6.”

You’ll be happy to know that the Crains are not meant to be our sympathetic protagonists. That role falls to Duke (Aaron Gaffey), a local mechanic who tends to make bad choices. the biggest one comes when he and his girlfriend Jenny (Ashley Novak) decide to spend a little “quality time” in the cemetery at night (given how rural the area is, you’d think they could find some other overgrown plot of land where they wouldn’t be disturbed). Their romance kind of goes sour when Jenny reveals that she’s pregnant; suddenly, Duke’s just not ready to have a family yet, and in a huff he drives off, leaving Jenny behind. Between the time he leaves and the time he cools down and turns around, Jenny unfortunately stumbles on the Crains digging up the grave of one Jonathan Drue; Sonny clubs her over the head with a shovel and rolls her into the grave with Drue’s corpse. When Duke comes back to find the cemetery deserted, he assumes that Jenny’s followed through on her threat to leave town if he won’t marry her.

Fast-forward six months, and Duke provides some mechanical assistance and directions to Marissa (Shelley Delayne), Jonathan Drue’s sister, who’s come back through town to pay her respects. Horrified at the state of the grave, she confronts the Crains at their home, and recognizes the gold medallion around Betsy’s neck as being her brother’s. She doesn’t do anything as prosaic as call the cops (or “cop,” in this town); as the family’s last name subtly proclaims, Marissa is a Druid, and she’s not above calling down cosmic forces and digital special effects to cause the dead to rise.

The smackdown’s coming, and it’s ugly!

At this point, you should suspect one of two things:

• “Boy, Nathan’s fast-forwarding through the plot awful fast,” or
• “Boy, this movie gets to the reanimation of the dead awful quick.”

The second one would be correct. We’re still practically on the first reel (using an anachronistic term for a flick shot on digital video) when Marissa dresses in her Renaissance Faire outfit, bares a mystic-looking dagger over Jonathan’s grave, and fires some hokey CGI lightning bolts all around. Which means that zombie-Jonathan and zombie-Jenny, along with the other dead who will rise soon after, don’t have much to do for a lot of the movie. In fact, they pretty much disappear, hiding in the woods or something, until near the climax.

Which means that, in large part, we get to watch the antics of the Crain clan for most of the movie as they swindle their customers and try to drum up new business. Yup, we’re gonna get to know them real good. Millicent is fastidious and cruel, using her cold British accent like a scalpel. Cedric is a milksop, retreating to the bottle to help him forget what a bad marriage decision he made. Sonny and Betsy probably turned out as well as one might expect in the environment, but that doesn’t mean you’ll want to invite them over for dinner; their sole redeeming feature is their solidarity for one another in the face of Millicent’s demanding pettiness.

Used car salesmen — from beyond the grave!!

Unfortunately, that also means that most of the movie doesn’t matter in story terms, i.e., most of the events depicted make no difference toward the eventual resolution and zombie attack. Yes, the Crains offend a few more of the dearly departed by raiding their graves; they even decide to kill a local moneyed ne’er-do-well in an effort to gain another client. But eventually, after two days of doing nothing, the walking dead finally come after their pray.

You’ll notice the absence of Duke in the summary above. He does show up from time to time, but it’s mostly to mope, to chainsmoke, to bounce the bedsprings with Marissa (who needs a “recharge” after her reanimation ritual), and to express his disbelief at this whole walking-dead thing. Despite being our nominal protagonist, he really doesn’t protagonize much. Even in the end, he’s just there to make some sort of peace with Jenny and himself when he finds out she didn’t just leave town.

Well, that’d put me off my Cheerios…

All of which means that the story needed some more brainstorming before being committed to a script. Even though the budget wasn’t more than a pittance, it’s a shame to throw any money at a nascent and half-formed story, when the same budget used on a better-constructed script would have yielded a far superior movie. few movies are completely without inspiration, of course, and the scene in which Duke finds zombified Jenny, confused and pitiable, is surprisingly poignant. But a much better movie could have been made with all of the same elements on the same budget level (and in fact, has been).

Technically, the movie shows the dangers of being not quite ready for prime time. Commendably, the scenes are well-lit (a major sticking point for shot-on-video movies with a proponderance of night scenes). However, the audio mix is more annoying that jock itch, with ill-miked characters whispering and muttering over ambient sounds, with the score drowning out what last bit of the dialogue you may have heard. I know that looping is an added post-production expense, but when an entire conversation is drowned out by crickets and other evening noises, it becomes a necessity.

Looks like someone was left in the marinade a bit too long.

The zombie makeup is simple and only partly effective, mostly greasepaint and graham cracker crumbs in the hair. If anything, it’s far too minimal, especially when Jenny, buried six months wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt, doesn’t look appreciably worse for wear than the fresh corpse that had only been planted twelve hourse before. (It seems all of the gooier effects were concentrated into a single skeletal zombie who manages to drip and slough all over the place while everyone else remains relatively clean.) On the other hand, the gore effects, when they do come, are surprisingly restrained, and appropriately so; most movies at this level linger lovingly over the latex intestines and Karo blood as if it were a surgical documentary.

Given the budget level, it’s an adequately-made movie. But I’m more inclined to consider it a practice run for a future production, one which doesn’t start filming until the script has gone through some serious refinement.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 10
• breasts: 6
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0