Museum of the Dead

A study in BAD. Bad direction, bad acting, bad writing and f/x that´ll teach you that you´d better upgrade your computer before filming. It´s the kind of flick you used to do totally drunk in your cellar with Dad´s camera when you were young at heart. But YOU certainly would not show it in public when you´re sober again, would you? YOU wouldn´t even view it. Avoid at all costs.

We first see a parking lot where a mysterious figure is putting flier for the Museum of the Dead under windscreen wipers. Inside, our heroine is buying a coffee after a hard class and doesn't' notice that she's been handed some sort of ancient coin. She sits down with her chronically acted friend who tries to convince her to go out and party for Halloween, but instead they somehow agree to go to the museum of the dead instead.

Our heroine goes home to have a power nap (telling us that out loud in her apartment), then falls asleep, giving us not only visions of what's to come (I'll get to that later), but also giving us a recap of the first five minutes of the film! Ouch! Why?

To cut a long story short, her pal turns up dressed as a cat and brings along a costume for her pal (which she doesn't wear). They head off to the museum (a non-descript building) and gain entrance using the coin the girl was handed.

Inside, they discover that the museum consists of loads and loads of identical corridors, leading off to rooms filled with ancient South American artifacts (I think). Get used to these corridors, because the remaining 95% of this film will consist of people running around these corridors. Over and over and over again.

We're also introduced to various fodder, none of which are worth going into detail. One guy (who was quickly followed by a mysterious masked figure into the building) finds a skull with ruby eyes and gets sucked into another dimension, where the fanged warrior from the credits brains him with a club and a random zombie turns up and starts munching on him. Here the film really lets the viewer down as it becomes obvious that this is going to be a fairly goreless zombie film. Our girls wander around a bit, looking at things and walking down corridors. They get creeped out a bit and decide to leave, which of course brings them to the skull, and sucks them through into that other dimension. Elsewhere, a photographer meets the masked figure, who turns out to be some guy called McGlone, who's there to steal something or other.

In the other dimension , the two girls happen upon the first guy to be killed. At first I thought that this guy was some sort of break dancing zombie (he does some weird moves), but upon reflection I have absolutely no idea what this actor was trying to achieve at all. He bites that heroine's pal and gets into a kickboxing match with our heroine.The two girls head into a hut, where our heroine shows sense by trying to phone the police, but she can't get a signal. So, not showing much sense at all, she leaves her wounded pal behind and heads somewhere else to phone the police. About two seconds later, her pal turns into a zombie.

Here's where the film stumbles yet again. Every time this guy turns up to slash people to bits, we get the animated effects from the credits superimposed on everything, which just gave me a headache.

The film, already barely held together, starts to really unravel here. Our heroine manages to call the police, runs around the other dimension and the corridors, meets her Hispanic friend, and they run about a bit more, fight some zombies, and then…and then…

She wakes up on the couch of her apartment. It was all a dream, maybe. She goes to the loo, looks in the mirror, and then ends up back in the museum running around with the photographer guy. Both of them run around some more, end up in the other dimension, and then she comes back out of the other dimension with the Hispanic guy in tow instead of the photographer. Not a single bit of this ten- fifteen minute section of the film makes the barest bit of sense. At all.

Some cops turn up and do the 'not being able to understand that shooting zombies in the head kills them but shooting them in the chest doesn't' thing. Some drawings of female warriors come alive and attack McGlone, who uses magic to make them fight each other until they turn into gas (?).

(I'll leave the rest for you to discover)

It was really hard to write this review from memory as the countless shots of corridor running make up the bulk of this film. The heroine even dreams about running around corridors! Luckily, our heroine wears a low cut top and is front loaded so the constant jiggling kept me awake.

The dialogue doesn't help either. Here's your standard horror film lines spoken throughout this film: "What is this place?", "We have to get out of here!", and, most damagingly "I feel like I'm on a movie set". It's also fairly goreless, has no scares, and although there's a few fight scenes, they are executed in the modern 'Bourne' way.

I'm not totally offended by this film, however. I'll give it 'mad props' for the maze, the skull sucking people into other dimension, the Tolek warrior guy, and the warriors coming out of the wall, but I will not recommend this to anyone. It didn't hurt too bad, but you might get some sort of enjoyment out of it (maybe). In the case of Man Vs Film, I'd say man won - I don't have any ill feelings for this film. I didn't enjoy it either, though.

again such kind of zero-budget digital-video cam trash. and again I fell into this trap cuz the title had "zombie" in it (german title: ZOMBIE ATTACK!) the story: on halloween some people visit the "museum of the dead", it's a trap, a crazy doctor wants to kill the people, everything connected to some aztec-cult. so they fight against some zombies in there.

ultra cheap scenery: some corridors with black tape on it. a few dilettantish drawings and a few skulls as you can find them in every fun-shop. no actors, just low-grade models waking around with absolutely no idea what to do. no effects. laughable make-up, your local hobby-make-up-zombie-fan will do it better, some time it looked as if they had not enough money for enough colour, otherwise they just could not do it like this, man, they have to realize the looks of their "zombies". some laughable martial-arts fights with the zombies, slow-motion. just, when the director wants to have it scary he uses some standard digital-video-cam effect where everything is flackering. unbelievable! 0 out of 10!

well,there isnt much to say about this movie. its simply trash. very poor acting, poor script, and lame story.... well, the actress,(i odnt even know her name) who played mainrole,(not the blond one,but latina one) was acting fine,but the blond one who played the friend of main charactor,,,her acting level is just like highschool play,so as most of other actors in the movie. Also,zombies,,,,very bad acting as well. and,,the story itself has really no point at all. well, if you are really bored and really got nothing to do,but wanna kill time somehow, maybe you may wanna watch this movie,but eventho,there are still millions of better B movies than this crap. its total waste of money and time.

According to the DVD cover, Museum of the Dead is 'from the producer of Creepshow', who I imagined must have fallen on really hard times to be involved in such obviously amateurish crud. A little post-viewing investigation, however, soon revealed the truth: this execrable excuse for a horror movie isn't from the people who produced the 1982 George Romero classic, but rather the abysmal abortion of a movie that was Creepshow III—and anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing that garbage will know exactly what level of professionalism this means.

Hard as it might be to imagine, Museum of the Dead, directed by James Glenn Dudelson (a name I won't forget in a hurry) is actually worse than Creepshow III, a joyless, scare-free effort boasting the ugliest opening credits ever, terrible editing (used in a desperate attempt to disguise the woeful nature of the practical effects and pitiful action), dreadful performances from a cast of complete nobodies, terrible set design, and thoroughly unconvincing props (plastic joke shop skulls; a magical bracelet that looks like it came from Claire's Accessories; supposedly ancient murals that are as vibrant as the day they were painted—which was most likely the day before shooting).

As far as the action is concerned, anyone brave or stupid enough to pop this worthless sucker into their player will be confronted by the following mind numbingly inane content: endless shots of star Tanya Vidal running through drab corridors (I use the plural, but I suspect that there was really only the one corridor, shot from a variety of angles) which becomes extremely tiresome even though she's wearing a tight vest that accentuates her fine rack; a series of repetitive attacks by crap zombies played by a bunch of losers who can't even shuffle their feet convincingly; and sporadic encounters with a pair of spear-carrying female warriors and a cannibalistic bald dude with blue teeth whose appearance always coincides with a nauseatingly cheap and nasty video effect.

With all of that going on, Museum of the Dead has definitely earned itself a place in my top twenty list of worst horrors, and given how much rubbish I've watched over the years, that's quite the achievement.