Raiders of the Living Dead

Well, maybe I wouldn't go as far as the above, but this movie is really good! As a fan of "bad" movies, I thought this movie was incredibly stupid, but it was great! Samuel M. Sherman is one of my favorite producer/directors. Right up there with Roger Corman and Stanley Kubrick! He plays the film well, using the little money that he had to produce an entertaining zombie horror. I am a fan of George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead", and this movie is not in any was a knock off of it! That is an acheivment in itself, as everyone knows that most films with the words "Living Dead" in the title owe a lot to Mr. Romero. So, if your a fan of "my kind of movies", "King Kong Lives" (1986), Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958) and Samuel Sherman's production of "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (1972), then this film is AN ESSENTIAL WATCH! 8.5/10

Raiders Of The Living Dead is rather infamous and widely considered to be one of the worst zombie movies ever made. I can confidently say, I agree.

It's right there with The Zombinator (2012) and Hsien Of The Dead (2012) It wants so badly to be a Return Of The Living Dead movie but fails every stage of the way.

The plot is bare bones and is pretty terrible, the movie is full of incredible amounts of filler scenes, the soundtrack is laughable and there are barely even any zombies anyway.

Raiders Of The Living Dead would certainly fall into my bottom 100 movies ever made, it has not one single redeeming feature and was a chore to endure.

The Good:

Nope

The Bad:

CGI is awful

Loads of blatant filler scenes

Questionable soundtrack

Too few zombies for a zombie movie

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

The 3 Stooges scene was more entertaining than anything the movie creators did

As an avid Zombie movie fan, I bought this with hi-hopes of fun, gore and shambling ghouls. I got a shambling movie, no gore, and no fun (with the exception of the kid-hero frying his hamster with a laser gun (made from a cunningly converted laser disc player). That alone saved the movie from a score of 1. On the whole it looks like school kids on a budget of their accumulated paper-round savings put the movie together.

Even as a self confessed zombie fan I could only watch it once. In need of a second opinion I handed it on to another zombie fan. He watched it once too; then threw it in the bin for me.

Investigative reporter Morgan Randall (Robert Deveau) discovers that crazy Dr. Kapek (Leonard Corman) is bringing the dead back to life; when his friend Shelly (Donna Asali) is abducted by Kapek's reanimated corpses, Morgan launches a rescue attempt with the help of elderly physician Dr. Carstairs (Robert Allen), a useless armed guard, and an irritating kid (porn-star-to-be Scott Schwartz) who has constructed a pair of ray-guns from an old laser-disc player.

I'm pretty tolerant when it comes to Z-grade movies, having seen more than my fair share of absolute stinkers over the years, but I still had to watch Raiders of the Living Dead over the course of several evenings thanks to its incredible ability to rapidly send me off to sleep. Atrocious acting, boring direction, disjointed editing, an over-reliance on The 3 Stooges, and particularly dreadful laser effects all go to make this a truly painful viewing experience that is only spared the absolute lowest rating from me thanks to one shotgun blast to a zombie head (it's not great but it's definitely the highlight of this tosh) and the film's hilariously bad '80s theme song.

My review was written in November 1989 after watching the movie on USA Network.

"Raiders of the Living Dead" is a very minor zombie picture, reviewed here for the record after being cablecast on USA Network's "Up All Night" series.

Picture was begun in 1983 by Brett Piper (credited for "inceptive effects and direction") under the title "Graveyard" and completed two years later by Independent-International topper Samuel M. Sherman.

Hodgepodge relies heavily on library music and weakly inserted verbal exposition to spin a tale of newspaper reporter Robert Deveau, who's stumbled on the mystery of zombies. Befriended by Donna Asali, he tracks the undead down to an island prison, abandoned for 40 years, where a mad scientist is still up to no good in reanimating corpses. Two kids, Scott Schwartz and Corri Burt, come to their rescue with laser guns Schwartz designed- as well as grandpa Bob Allen, sporting a trusty bow and arrow.

Timekiller doesn't make much sense but has a couple of spooky scenes in a cemetery and the prison. Zita Johann, who co-starred with Karloff in Universal's 1932 classic "The Mummy", pops up as a librarian telling Deveau about the prison's history.