Plot: A woman sits down to read her son some stories, but her son is dead and his ghost brings her a strange tome. The book is titled Tales from the Quadead Zone, but she wants to make her son happy, so she opens the book. The first story is called Food For? and takes place at the dinner table of a poor, redneck family. Each night the eight family members sit down and hope to eat, but there’s never enough food to go around. Tensions rise as hunger starts to break them down, but one family member has an idea on how to better the situation. The next story is Brothers, in which a jealous man steals the corpse of his own brother. He yells at the corpse, dresses him up in a clown suit, and plans to bury him in a shallow grave, but the dead brother has other plans. As she finishes the story, her husband gets home and is none too pleased about the book. As she soon discovers, perhaps her own story, Unseen Vision, is the most horrifying of all!
Entertainment Value: I’ve seen Tales from the Quadead Zone get eviscerated by other “critics,” but to me, it is a testament to independent cinema. Someone had an idea, made it into a movie, and released it into the world. This is about as low budget and independent as a movie can be, without question. Shot on video with an amateur cast & crew, Tales from the Quadead Zone has managed to remain on the radars of genre fans, despite being quite hard to find for years. The stories are simple and thin, the acting is non existent, and the production values are absent, but this is still a unique, fun movie. I admit some of the appeal is nostalgia for those VHS video stores, but there’s also just something cool about the spirit of the production. I’d easily rather watch Tales from the Quadead Zone than a Kate Hudson romantic comedy, for example. This isn’t going to rate with even most genre fans, but I had fun with this movie.
No nakedness. There’s bloodshed, but its bargain basement gore and as such, is never graphic or extensive. In one of the stories, ketchup is even used as blood and come on, that is awesome. The Brothers tale weaves in a fun pitchfork duel and a clown using a force choke, so there’s that. Unseen Vision boasts a some domestic violence using a book as a weapon, plus a stabbing and a lot of coughing up orangeish blood. There are some nice quotable lines in here, not to mention a high pitched rapping introduction. The nature of the performances makes it so that the entire flick is pretty memorable in that way. The fact that Tales from the Quadead Zone is still around and sought after is pretty fucking insane, while the movie itself is crazy, but not gonzo crazy.
Nudity: 0/10
Blood: 4/10
Dialogue: 4/10
Overall Insanity: 5/10
Marc Fusion 