Oh boy. I’m trying to restrain myself a little here, as there’s really no reason to take the awfulness of Mike Stanley’s auteur effort Dead is Dead personally. It wasn’t created specifically as an affront to me, and i’m sure Mr. Stanley – who wrote, edited, produced, starred, directed, and almost certainly wrote this imdb comment – worked very hard to make this as good as he possibly could. Unfortunately, this still leaves a film that feels painfully padded despite being barely over an hour, and features a plot that I just can’t figure out despite almost certainly paying more attention to it than anyone not directly tied to the production ever has. I wanted to find something to like here, but it’s seriously an artless, ugly mess with few redeeming features.
Eric (Mike “the man” Stanley) has just returned to his home state of Michigan after leaving years earlier following the death of his institutionalized brother in a fire. Eric had borrowed some money to help his brother out, but used the money on drugs instead so the guy he borrowed the money from burned down the institution. Got that? Because things are about to get stupid. Eric goes to the middle of a field to retrieve some money he has stashed, and almost immediately gets his hand eaten off by some creature. He wakes up to find himself cared for by the friendly ex-nurse Laura, who had worked at the Institution before it burned, and who she smuggled out drug Doxitol – a re-animating agent that can grow back severed limbs and even bring the recently dead back to life. She apparently doesn’t see how such a drug might have some value.
Eric steals/is given the drug, which he immediately attempts to sell to the nerdy Tony (Rob Binge who also composed the synth soundtrack), in exchange for having his debts erased. Instead, Tony attempts to have Eric run over in the closest thing this movie has to an action scene. Eric is understandably upset, and shoots Tony a few times until he reveals the location of Doug Hamil – apparently the brains of the operation. Hamil is in New York, which leads to endless scenes of the actor walking around the city, visiting Time Square, riding the ferry. Production value! Eric confronts him in his hotel room looking for the missing stash of Doxitol, which Hamil reveals is actually in a school back in Michigan. The irony! Thanks for wasting our time, Doug!
The direction (by Mike “Orson who?” Stanley) is strictly of the plant-the-camera variety, with the tiny cast (only four people!) often appearing to have been filmed at different times. Characters interact, but are rarely in the same frame together. Stanley is obviously from the “tell, don’t show” school of filmmakers, as most potentially interesting scenes (like, say, the plane crash) happen off-screen. I will give Stanley some credit for making early-90s Michigan appear to be the most unpleasant, post-apocalyptic looking place i’ve ever seen. I try to give points for effort – we’re still not in Hip Hop Locos territory – but there’s so little material here that has any potential.
Stanley’s acting – where he spouts such classic lines as “you look and sound like a penis with dry heave” – isn’t quite as bad as his direction, though his goofy look prevents him from ever looking as bad-ass as he wishes. Rob Binge as Tony and Dave Hildwein as Doug Hamil appear to be reading their lines from a sheet of paper which may or may not have occasional words misspelled, and both are about as menacing as children’s cough syrup. It’s hard to gauge Connie Cocquyt’s performance as Laura, since she vanishes from the film at the half way point only to reappear confusingly in the final few minutes. I’ll just go with “bad” to be safe.
As knievelcrash reminds us in the IMDB review, “director Mike Stanley doesn’t throw the gore in your face”, and that’s absolutely correct. In fact, violence is used minimally in a way that implies that perhaps it would have taken time and/or money to put more of it on the screen. There are a few shots of a zombie mask before Eric gets his hand munched, though unless organ meat and Halloween props are your cup of tea, I wouldn’t expect to be too impressed by the effects on display.
Dead is Dead is presented in its original fullscreen ratio, and the video quality here is really, really rough. It’s blurry, the color is all over the place, and there are even occasional tracking issues. This is obviously just a direct conversion of the VHS, and not a very good one. Sound is a little better, as most dialogue scenes take place indoors and are generally audible. The synth-heavy soundtrack by Rob Binge is cheesy, but actually underscores things decently and is appropriate to the contemptible material on display.
No chapter stops. No special features. No subtitles. No nothing. This film really is a bloody nightmare.
Despite being awful, confusing, and confusingly awful, Dead is Dead actually has a sequel, which – once again according to knievelcrash – has been edited together with this one for a 2008 Dead is Dead: Director’s Cut. While this film doesn’t really have the potential to be good, more footage might actually help the plot make a little more sense, though its brevity is one of the few redeeming features of the film as is. Far from fun or amusing, Dead is Dead is simply tedious, and better left buried.