I know I have seen Raiders Of The Living Dead before. I would swear to it on my life. There are some unscary zombies and a teenager with a laser device. I suspect I saw it in some cheap DVD bundle that also featured a number of other low-budget horrors. I remember it being far from great. Having just rewatched it now, for the first time in well over a decade, I can now confidently tell people that it is actually godawful, but in a way that is mildly amusing if you’re in the right frame of mind.
There’s a doctor experimenting on bodies and bringing the dead back to life. A reporter, Morgan Randall (Robert Deveau) is on the case, being helped in his investigation by Shelly Godwin (Donna Asali), a woman who almost runs him over and then, as happens in movieland, starts a tentative relationship with him. Then there’s old Dr. Carstairs (Bob Allen), a man who has given up on trying to fix his laserdisc player. What has that got to do with anything? Well, his grandson (Jonathan, played by Scott Schwartz) is a bit of a tech whizz, and manages to make himself a laser device from the player. Impressing Michelle (Corri Burt) with his inventiveness, little does Jonathan realise that his weapon might end up helping to destroy a number of shambling corpses.
I doubt that I knew much about the background to this movie when I first saw it, but some very cursory research shows that this was yet another cheap cash-in, making use of footage already filmed by Brett Piper and then padding out the runtime with extra scenes that allow Samuel M. Sherman to take credit for the whole thing. This kind of approach can lead to some great results (Spookies remains a firm favourite of mine), but it more often than not leads to a complete mess. Raiders Of The Living Dead is a complete mess.
It feels unfair to spend too much time criticising the level of acting on display, especially when people are working with material that I doubt even the finest thespians in the world could have managed to overcome. Allen isn’t terrible in the grandpa role, and both Schwartz and Burt try to at least stay lively and enthusiastic for the duration of their screentime. Deveau and Asali are, well, they’re arguably asked to portray the most familiar, and therefore least interesting, horror movie characters.
There are no scares, and the lean plot only really kicks in after a completely extraneous opening sequence that fails to draw viewers in, there’s no decent gore, and the overall tone veers between painfully dull and strangely childish. The whole idea of the laser gadget is something that could have been part of some lighthearted teen adventure, but instead it’s in this muddled zombie tale that tries to play itself off as a Scooby-Doo mystery while viewers are already pretty well aware of what is really going on.
Not recommended to anyone, aside from bad movie connoisseurs, this is a slog to get through, visually turgid, and lacking enough minor distractions to make up for the overwhelming number of scenes that make you wish you were watching paint dry. And I hope this review will serve as a reminder to me that I never have to sit through it again.
2/10
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