The Dead Next Door ( 1989 )

Written by Happywax on april 10 2011
 Rating 6.5 out of 10


Director  -  J.R. Bookwalter

 Cast
 Pete Ferry       -   Raimi
 Joe Wedlake   -   Dr. Savini
 Jeff Welch       -   Cmdr.
                             Carpenter
 Bogdan Pecic  -   Dr. Moulsson
 Michael Grossi-   Mercer

 Ok so zombies have taken over much of the county, an overly confident scientist believes that he may be able to formulate a serum to accelerate their destruction if he can get his hands on the notes of the man responsible for the outbreak. A team is dispatched to Akron, which also happens to be the homebase of a religious cult that believes the zombies are God's way of punishing mankind for its sins. They refuse to stand by and allow the goverment to tamper with the instruments of God's will, eventually getting their hands on a partially-infected soldier and inspiring his comrades to mount a rescue in the cults heavily infested church.

 The Dead Next Door shows that Bookwalter is a zombie fan at heart. The movies teeming with homages to a bunch of the best known zombie flicks, and i could spend half of this review just rattling off all the connections to The Evil Dead. For one , its not a coinidence that one of the characters sounds suspiciously like Bruce Campbell. Some of the nods are a little heavy-handed, particularly naming virtually every character after some sort of horror legend, Oh and did I happen to mention that Sam Raimi funded most of the movie.

 Okay, so The Dead Next Door isnt on the same level as many of the same movies that inspired it but

 if your looking for the perfect movie to watch with your buddies and choke on your popcorn - this is it baby, its a love letter scawled in blood to Sam Raimi and George Romero, a campy, gory homage that keeps its tongue firmly in cheek until a rotting zombie corpse rips it out and eats it.

Finally dont expect to walk into your local blockbuster and find this one on the shelves, you'll have to go hunting to find this one , but it'll be well worth the hunt, just check out the trailer below.