texasarcane
Another poster called it the Citizen Kane of zombie movies. They were right. It's got some magic in it.If you heard the premise you'd judge this film in advance and in doing so you'd be missing a real horror classic. There's something about it that follows you out of the end. It's scored in a very interesting way, shot in a very interesting way and the whole thing has a dreamlike quality. Scott Grimes was superb in the lead. The very last bit really makes the film. Clever. The whole thing is well written. The dialogue is not hackneyed or trite, it's literate. Watching it I thought the director must have been really hungry because he spun this simple story into something gold.
Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki
Review based on the full 88-minutes long, UK version, titled Grave Misdemeanours. Well meaning, but slightly dim, high school kid Archie works at his uncle's funeral home, with a convenient explanatory scene telling us, the audience, why he works there. When four jock idiots play another prank on him at the funeral home, his cruel and mean spirited Uncle, V. J. Flanders (played superbly by John Astin, in what is basically an extended cameo) fires him. When the four jocks are involved in a fatal accident later that night, V.J. recalls Archie to collect the bodies. Slow motion scenes of Archie coming to the crash and finding the bodies lends a surreal, hallucinatory feel, as life often does in, times of crisis like that. But are the four boneheads really dead?His cruel Uncle rotates one of their heads nearly 180 degrees, in a heartless effort to show that they are dead, for Archie. But again, are they really dead, or did the lightning, and truckload of radioactive crap they plowed into do something ... *strange* to them? Lightweight horror/ comedy fare, the real horror doesn't really kick in until the final 30 minutes, when the four do indeed come back from the dead, and seek revenge on Archie, and anyone else they happen across, in particularly gruesome fashion. Astin's Uncle character has an especially awful demise. That final 30 minutes, and John Astin's successful cast-against-type role make this a winner.
ccthemovieman-1
This probably got better as it went on but it so filled with obnoxious, profane bully-type high school morons that I had a hard time finishing this...and I didn't.Typically-stupid modern-day Hollywood teen dialog (see "Scream" for better examples) turns me off, big-time, and this movie is filled with them. Four of the punks turn into zombies. Well, good for them. Do they get what's coming to them by the nerdy good guys? Of course, with a few twists but too many similarities to the theme of "Revenge Of The Nerds." The big difference is all the blood in here in this horror-comedy.This is definitely for young adults, not for discerning, older farts like me.
