Tales from the Quadead Zone

There are not words in the English language or any language to describe the pure unadulterated evil which exists in this movie.

Imagine a 1980s camcorder with no boom mic and edited with a Commodore 64. I'm not saying that as an insult. Seriously try to imagine that.

I have no idea how this home made monstrosity was committed to video and got a release.

The plot: An anthology of horror starring Shirley; a black trash housewife reading from a book the size of Webster's Dictionary to a ghost. Since we never see the ghost we just have to presume it's there.

The first story focuses on a redneck family so poor their evening ritual is literally fighting to the death over sandwiches around the dinner table. The losers starve.

The eldest son decides to "take it to the next level" by bringing his toy shotgun and murdering his family members to assure himself a sandwich.

So how does this story conclude? It doesn't! It just ends! The first story is also the best. No kidding. It gets worse from here on. Far far worse.

The second story, 'The Brothers' focuses on two black brothers. After the elder's funeral his grave is robbed by the younger brother whom takes him back home to curse him out for 20 minutes about how he stole his wife. That's right! 20 minutes of one man cursing at a dead body! His ultimate revenge is to dress his brother's corpse up like a clown. But this somehow brings his brother back to life! The undead brother strangles his brother while saying something in a computer distorted voice. This distortion sounds like Steven Hawking on super fast forward in 'Twin Peaks' Black Lodge. It's unclear if the audience is even supposed to understand what he's saying and the distortion is intended make his voice sound scary, (now we know what inspired Christopher Nolan to computer distort Christian Bale's voice as Batman) or if the distortion was merely intending to be a scary scream.

With the word "quad" in the title, we'd presume this horror anthology would have four stories but that's it. Shirley's all done reading. There are only two stories! Now Shirley's abusive husband comes home to bitch smack her with the big book. He's angry that she's been talking with the dead. Let's deal with this issue on Steve Wilkos. "I beat her for necromancy." We can only hope that next Mr. Shirley beats up John Edward.

But Shirley busts a cap (cap gun) in her abusive husband. When the police (no they don't have police costumes or fake badges, they're just two guys with toy guns saying they're the police) arrive to arrest Shirley, she slits her own throat while sitting on the toilet. If only she burned her husband alive in his bed, or shot him while eating ice cream, then she'd have nothing to fear from the police.

This is tear your eyes out bad! Aside from the truly horrible "screenplay" the photography is like Abraham Zapruder with helmet cam and the audio is almost completely unintelligible. This is as bad as I gets. And yes, I've seen all of Michael Bay's films. Bay and Chester Novell Turner are destined to be cellmates in hell.

Chester Novell Turner returns from (or to?) Black Devil Doll territory with this anthology, which barely even qualifies as an anthology, as the framework apparently counts as one story, and there are only two stories presented.

Shirley Jones returns as well to play a woman haunted by her dead son's invisible ghost. She reads him a pair of stories from a book, the first involves a hillbilly killing his family, off-screen, in order to eat their sandwiches at dinnertime. Or, at least she starts to tell him the story. Turner seemingly either ran out of money, or interest in it, because crummy intertitles abruptly finish the tale for her, and the audience, after a short run time.

The second is about a guy who tries to bury his dead brother under his house. For some strange reason, he feels compelled to shout profanities at the dead body before dressing him as a clown and digging the grave. For some even stranger reason, being dressed as a clown somehow reanimates his brother's corpse, the two men battle it out in the cellar, while dead clown brother recites from cue cards lines of dialogue, which is then heavilly distorted to make it unintelligible.

That is the extent of the stories read by this woman. The third tale is, one supposes, the story of her husband coming home and whacking her over the head with the book from Hell, before getting himself shot and killed by her.

Slightly less annoying than Novell's earlier Black Devil Doll From Hell, and not quite as technically inept (we don't hear high pitched buzzing noises on the soundtrack this time around) Truthfully, the dead clown brother segment wasn't bad, in a zero-budget, late night cable television sort of way, but I doubt I could endure this a second time.

The closing credits read: "Tales from the Quadead Zone will return", implying that a sequel might emerge, which, thankfully, never happened.

This is one of the weaker horror anthologies i have seen the light and sound are the worst and boy does it drag. A woman tells hers son who's a ghost some stories from a book called tales from the Quadead zone . The first story which is not even ten min's long is about a poor family who has to fight for there food one family member becomes becomes dangerously hungry the second story is about a angry brother who's more popular and favorite brother dies and he plans to bury him under the house in a clown suit there's one part where he goes on for 5 min's yelling at his brother saying he planned to kill him before he died. You feel bad for him his brother was a jerk always trying to one up him. Thats the last story from the book the movie ends with the woman's husband coming home and starting a fight which ends with him being stabbed.This is one of those shot on video movies that was filmed on a camcorder the sound is so bad when a ghost talks it non understandable the son sound like whispering when a scene is shot in a dark room it's pitch dark and for a movie thats only an hour long it drags there so much padding. The theme song is so off key it sound like some jive witch is singing it.

In the '80s, if you had nothing but loose change in your pocket and wanted to make a film, you had to make do with what you had to hand: a camcorder, friends and family for the cast, and a pair of video recorders so that you could edit tape-to-tape, resulting in a loss of sound and picture quality. Most people who shot such movies had the decency to restrict showings of their 'art' to their nearest and dearest, but somehow, a few managed to get their home-made travesties out to a wider audience. One such auteur was Chester N. Turner, whose work is unique, if nothing else.

Tales From The Quadead Zone is Chester's attempt at a horror anthology (if two stories count as such), shot on a negligible budget, with an amateur cast, a risible script, pitiful special effects, and a plinkety, plonkety Casio organ soundtrack guaranteed to grate on the nerves.

After ugly opening credits featuring amateurish drawings by the film's star Shirley L. Jones, the stories begin as a mother (Jones, sporting an extremely nasty hairdo and huge glasses) reads to her ghostly son from a book titled Tales From The Quadead Zone...

The first tale, Food for ?, sees a poverty stricken family of eight, with only enough food for four, resorting to a game of 'fastest gets to eat' at mealtimes. Eventually, one of the sons, a fat guy in dungarees, snaps and shoots several of his siblings, leaving enough grub for those left alive. The story ends with the killer given the death sentence (executed in the 'state gas chair') and his parents 'living high on the hog in witness protection program'. Everything about this tale stinks, from the script, to the acting, to the music, to the editing -- but at least it is mercifully short.

The second story is even worse, and lasts a whole lot longer. 'The Brothers' stars Keefe L. Turner as Ted, who has planned to kill his older brother Fred for stealing his wife and driving her to commit suicide. However, before Ted can carry out his dastardly deed, big bro' suffers a fatal heart attack. Still thirsting for revenge, Ted steals Fred's body from the morgue and, in an interminable monologue, tells the corpse exactly what he thinks of him, before humiliating the stiff by dressing it up as a clown and digging a grave for it in the basement. This diabolical scheme has Ted in stitches (although Turner's incessant, insufferable howling is no laughing matter for the viewer). Fred doesn't see the funny side, however, and returns from the dead to stick a pitchfork in Ted's guts.

Having finished these two dreadful tales from the Quadead Zone, the mother changes her eye-wear for an equally huge pair before answering the door to her estranged husband, who proceeds to knock her about for reading to their dead son. The woman fights back, eventually stabbing her angry spouse with a knife. Bleeding to death, the husband calls the police, who arrive to find his body in the kitchen. His wife is arrested, but allowed to visit the bathroom before being carted away, where she reminisces about her son Bobby (flashbacks featuring even bigger spectacles), before slashing her throat with a razor blade. Twenty-one hours later, her spirit is reunited with her son (via some truly awful special effects), and the storytelling continues.

Inept in almost every way imaginable, Tales From The Quadead Zone has to be of the worst examples of home-made horror that I have seen. However, in an attempt to find something nice to say about the film, I did find Bobby's whispering ghost voice rather eerie (although the real horror is definitely that hair and those glasses).

"Tales from the Quadead Zone" is an ultra-cheap horror movie/oddity shot on video from Chester Novell Turner,the man behind "Black Devil Doll from Hell".Turner is an enigmatic man.He was born in 1950,made his first feature film "Black Devil Doll from Hell" in 1984 (possibly in the Philadelphia area),made "Quadead Zone" three years later and supposedly died in a car crash in 1996."Black Devil Doll" star Shirley Jones reads her deceased son Bobby creepy tales from the book called "Tales from the Quadead Zone".The first one involves mass murder in the family of rednecks and the second one involves ghostly clown.After bloody shooting spree fat redneck dies on a gas chair(?)."Tales from the Quadead Zone" is gorier than "Black Devil Doll from Hell",but no less amateurish.There is pretty gory stabbing and suicidal throat slashing.Unforgettable and absurd "Tales from the Quadead Zone" is a must-see for fans of Z-grade trash.6 out of 10.