The Laughing Dead

Well, actually this movie is not so bad. But the first 40 minutes are just boring. After that movie starts to focus on the real plot. It's biggest mistake is its too long. You'll have to watch a lot of nonsense parts. And there is a really stupid & boring love story included. Special FX are good especially the scene with a hand in the throat. For the acting, well the cast did their best to drag this movie down. Especially the Mexicans. And the music, well half of the movie there plays a romantic melody, the other some mexican music, and on action scenes o rip-off of Nosferatu's soundtrack.

Well this movie's biggest drag is its just a soup of genres. You have love stories, splatter, Basketball, Monster fights, Zombies with sport shoes, possessions, devil worshippers. There is one thing i cant figure out, did they made this movie to be funny or they were really trying to make a horror movie.

Faith-losing Father O'Sullivan (Tim Sullivan) takes a bus of folks down to some visit some Aztec ruins. Also along for the ride are Tessie (Wendy Webb), his former nun love that he got pregnant, and her foul- mouthed son Ivan (Patrick Roskowick), who is O'Sullivan's illegitimate son. It all makes for perfect timing for some sort of sacrifice to the Blood Star for evil Dr. Um-tzec (writer-director-composer S.P. Somtow). This film gained some notoriety back in the day thanks to a gore-filled spread in (naturally) Gorezone. And while the film looks great in stills, it has many, many problems unspooling at regular speed. Somtow certainly doesn't lack creativity, but his staging and pacing leave a lot to be desired. He will have bits like the trapped characters seeing two people squashed to death by a bus, but they will act like nothing is wrong in the next scene. And there is some REALLY bad comedy going on here. The acting (most of the talent are Somtow's writer friends) leaves a lot to be desired too and the film offers quite possibly one of the worst child performances ever captured on film by Roskowick. When on, the film is pretty fun with some great make up work by John Buechler's MMI company. Interestingly, despite have a wealth of gore, this film is still unreleased in the United States.

Truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen but that doesn't mean it has no redeeming value. I love how Patrick Roskowick's character is a totally over the top out of control ADHD brat who swears like a drunken sailor all the time. In other words, a typical American teenage boy. The kid is feisty, obnoxious and self absorbed but you know that deep down he has a heart of gold. (Just kidding!) When "Ivan" (the terrible) dons his special Aztec (or is it Mayan?) ceremonial sacrifice costume he changes his attitude.

The gore and blood spatter are ridiculously over the top and the "special effects" are as good as in any 1960s 8mm home movie shot with Dad's Kodak by a nerdy teenage boy in the AudioVisual club at school. In other words: Bad! But who cares?

I read an online review that said: "The child actor in this movie gave the all time worst performance by any child actor in history." Clearly the person who wrote that knows nothing about really bad child acting! Patrick's "Ivan" was the Sir Laurence Olivier of child acting compared to some bad child actors I've seen (yes, I'm looking at you, Jake Lloyd!) All in all, The Laughing Dead is a movie I would have never even remotely considered watching but gave it a chance. This movie actually has a few laughs in it. It really does try to be a horror/comedy. Sometimes it's funny when it didn't mean to be but that's beside the point. So, it's bad, but not all bad. As predicted, this was Patrick Roskowick's one and only movie. Too bad. I wanted to see him in The Laughing Dead 2 - Ivan's Revenge.

The Laughing Dead is an incredibly cheesy low budget film without any value. It handles about a bus-load of social misfits (guided by a priest who lost his faith and impregnated a foxy nun) on a sightseeing tour around Aztec ruins in Mexico. There, they're awaited by a bunch of demons, zombies and mad-raving creatures in order to kill them during the 'Death Festival'. The first 45 minutes of 'The Laughing Dead' is very tedious viewing since they're presenting us a character drawing nobody really cares about. The priest and the nun are re-united and he learns he's the father of a bratty kid. There's no intrigue and the acting is very lame so the first half is very tough to sit through. After that, The Laughing Dead turns into a joyful splatter movie with cheesy make-up effects and a repulsive amount of blood. People's heads are chopped off (and used as a basketball), buses drive over torsos and one poor bastards even has his own arm shoved down his throat!! The film is bad and extremely amateurish, but there's a market for this kind of crap. So, if you're in to gory nonsense you can check this one out.

Christian fell asleep...Hell, I was in it and *I* fell asleep. As Ms. Kelleghan states, most of the actors were not actors, we were writers who knew Somtow and were invited to play characters, some of which he named after us (Ray Ridenour's character is named "Dozois", because award-winning sf writer/editor Gardner Dozois was originally slated to play the part). Me, I channeled equal parts of Roddy McDowell and Thurston Howell III; but Ed Bryant (damn his eyes) stole the movie simply by being Ed. Nobody could top the delivery of "big IL' armadiller." The crew in general seemed to like us a lot, mainly I suspect, because we were all giddy idiots thrilled to be making a film in Hollyweird, unlike, say, actors, who are usually fighting over who has the biggest RV.

However...you watch this thing at your own peril. GF