Tales from the Quadead Zone

This is sort of all about a book the way Black Devil Doll was about the Doll. Less out and out exploitation and better pacing set this beside that oddity as equally worth seeing for fans. Not only does this have the same Casio pre rap music score this time it has a title song!!!! It will sear your preconceptions of reality. So will "the clown" episode. So will the whispering sounds made by a dead little boy, and so will the ending.

The rest of the film is not on the same level of odd bad strangeness, it actually shows a better grasp of making a movie than Devil Doll which will make it I suppose a step down for some, but it retains much of the odd charm of that film and this time you get multiple stories each with its own oddness. This film is better acted and in many ways easier to watch, it doesn't have as many video glitches in it as Devil Doll did. Who would have thought that a short decade later video would be making inroads on traditional film production and a short decade after that be threatening film itself as a format. These little shot on video oddities show how far video has come. Wow! Poor sound remains major weak spot you'll have to play some things back a few times to hear every black-ed-wood type dialog moment that you should not miss.

Where is Chester Turner now? That's the big question, he deserves some discovery as a pioneer of shot on video horror. And someone please tell me if Black Devil Doll from Hell part 2 really exists or not.

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.

C. M. Turner did it again with TALES... and this time it was even better! Rather then try to carry the entire running time of a movie by holding onto one story, Mr Turner throws out four stories to make it more interesting (?). Shirley Jones returns as the mother of a dead son who returns from the other side with a book, TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE. As she reads the stories to him they come to life on the screen. You just have to see it to believe it but this is one feat to ever make it into the public market. I am a die-hard bad movie enthusiast and I love this flick so if you don't like it, don't say I didn't warn you.

Ah, the good old days of VHS, when just about any cinematic turd could find a distributor - why else do you think so many of the movies shown on MST3K were released on VHS *before* that show was even aired? Tho I guess they had some standards; a direct to video release like Tales From the Quadead Zone probably would have never even qualified. And certainly not for a cinematic release, as the whole thing was shot on video. And it shows.

The second movie of Chester Novell Turner, who only made two films before forever disappearing into relative obscurity, shows that Chester Novell Turner is to writing what Chester Novell Turner is to directing. After a whole three minutes of lousy drawings and even lousier Casio keyboard music that makes up the movie's opening, we're introduced to the same ugly lady with the hideous hairdo that starred in the previous movie, The Black Devil Doll From Hell, who speaks to her crappy video effect of a dead son and reads him stories.

Obviously this movie is supposed to be a horror anthology like Tales from the Crypt, what with the premise and all, but for one thing, this film never even begins to work as a horror film; despite the title of the movie, there's only THREE stories in the entire film - and the third isn't even from the stupid book she reads! I don't think I need to even get into the storyline to tell you how awful this film is. Let's just say that both stories are neither interesting or terrifying, the audio mix is so bad that the awful and unfitting Casio music drowns out the already inaudible dialog.

This film really is best viewed with a group of friends while MST3K'ing the hell out of it.

"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.