Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror etc..

When I was growing up, there were always rumors about videos that were kept behind the counter at video stores. Not that sassy ones with the naked ladies, but the secret ones that the video store wasn't supposed to have. Tapes made by random people with too much time on their hands and too much video and audio recording equipment at their disposal. Embarrassingly produced corporate promotion videos that were never supposed to see the light of day. Test footage or final cuts of movies that were killed before the studio ever released them. These were the stuff of urban legend, but everyone knew someone who knew about the tapes and if you found the right kind of video store you could find those tapes. 

Then came Hollywood Video and Blockbuster Video and the mom and pop rental places started to go under because they couldn't keep up the way the big stores could. The videos all disappeared from view for a while, but then the internet showed up and brought us the analog quality digital conversions of the videos that used to only be available if you knew that day that one video clerk was working and you told him your friend's older brother sent you.

The other day I found an article on Wikipedia about what was practically a unicorn in the world of duplicated VHS tapes, a movie called: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2. 

"I wanna lay you out on the floor and plow into you like a caboose, but a gentle caboose baby a gentle caboose." -Black Guy in movie

I remember hearing about this movie growing up a lover of zombie movies and VHS tapes, but never actually saw it. It was one of those things I chalked up to missed opportunities of my youth (like having a birthday party where all the invitations were custom made slap bracelets, or gotten a school picture with lasers in the background, or an over-sized pair of light up shoes). Of course when I thought that the internet wasn't the mass storage space for every pieces of media ever created accessible to those who look. Thanks to the ever diligent elves of the internets, someone got this movie on youtube.  

Our Feature Presentation in SHOCKING 2-D

What I love about this movie:

Anytime you watch George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, it is interesting to see how zombies as a movie trope have evolved since this movie. The Romero zombies aren't completely lost to the brain rot. They smash the headlights of the guy's car, they know how to use weapons, they seem more interested in killing their victims, and eating them seems to be an after thought.

This is not George Romero's movie though. This is what happens when nerdy film students from Jersey get together for a film project that they are pulling out of their ass at the last minute. It is a re-dubbed version of Romero's movie. It is filled with strange clips spliced into the feature of some found footage with the narrator telling some schlocky joke over the footage. There are also times when there is a phone ringing in the background that no one seems to answer until the narrator yells at someone and there is a jump cut in the narration. The jokes are over the top slapstick, crude, and incredibly dated as reflected by the frequent use of 90s slang and insults.

I can't remember the last time I laughed this much at a movie. The plot is rewritten so that the zombies aren't undead, but rather overworked and under paid wage slaves who have lost it and decided to fight against the "normals", aka people who don't have to work long hours for shitty pay. It's like they had an idea for a zombie movie, but had a budget of less than $100. 

Movies and found footage like this always feel like I'm watching the secret video-diary of someone who didn't really expect the world to be paying such close attention. It's endearingly heart-felt art in that way, but without that filter in the creative process of tailoring the work to an audience to make it be anything other than honest. Albeit in this case, the creator's honest art is a re-dubbed version of someone else's work filled with corn-ball jokes and poop humor.