The Laughing Dead (1989).
“I’m not a monster anymore Ivan, you gotta help me.”
Directed by Somtow Sucharitkul
Written by Somtow Sucharitkul
Starring Tim Sullivan, Wendy Webb, Premika Eaton, Patrick Roskowick, and the Aztec god of death
The Stage.
A bunch of weebs on an archaeological trip to Mexico visit some Mayan ruins and get more than they bargained for when they encounter a zealous group of Mexicans attempting to revive a deadly ancient ritual of their ancestors.
The Review.
Pound for pound, this is one of the weirdest, wildest movies I have ever fucking seen, and I watch a lot of bizarre stuff.
We start out at a church in Tuscon, Arizona, where a group of people are meeting up for a bus ride into Mexico, led by a disenfranchised priest, Father Ezekiel O’Sullivan. He’s got a few secrets, including an affair that he had with a nun named Tess a while back. That’s not a secret for very long, because they come to join the pack on the bus trip. She is a horrible mother and the kid is just an absolute piece of garbage. Also on the trip are a young Asian woman who’s father is dying and a few hippies just trying to get away for the weekend.
On their way, they stop at a hotel and cross paths with a cult leader named Um-Tzec, who really just wants to be a Wall Street stock broker. From there, the film gets absolutely insane. Some of the highlights include a person getting their head whacked off, which flies out the window and gets stuck in a basketball hoop, a woman who tears her own heart out, then tears the priests heart out, and swaps them, the possessed priest punching through someone’s head and then ripping a person’s arm off and shoving it down their throat while the hands are still moving inside the throat, and the whole thing culminates with a Mayan basketball game that pits the tourists vs. zombies while a man who turned into a giant horned slug fights a man who turned into a dinosaur. I’m not kidding, this all happens.
The first half is pretty sluggish, but once we get to the second half, all hell breaks loose. You can tell the film isn’t trying to be serious and I think that helps things, because the plot is absolutely bananas and the dialogue is horrendous. A highlight includes a woman who’s clearly possessed and the priest is like, “It’s just Tourettes, nothing to worry about.” It’s obviously low budget - most of the end of the film was probably filmed in one small warehouse, the walls of a rock cave are clearly made out of crumpled up paper and a woman gets tossed into a 'stone wall’, only to have it shake like flimsy cardboard upon impact, but the special effects are actually pretty great considering. Like really, legitimately great. The human-to-creature transformations and the different gore effects really work, and that scene I mentioned with the hand in the dude’s neck was straight up awesome, as was another as a guy gets his head crushed by a bus and we see an eyeball pop out.
The End.
The Laughing Dead will play great with a crowd. It’s got that weird late-80’s batshit charm to it with some killer special effects. It stars a bunch of horror and fantasy authors in the cast, some in their only role and I think this helps with the pulpy, worn paperback nature of the film. If you’re into wacky stuff and that ‘so bad, it’s good’ quality, this should be right up your alley. Hang in there for the first thirty minutes, you’ll be rewarded as the film progresses.
Vinegar Syndrome once again does a bang-up job with the print, especially for a film that had never had an American video release. It also includes a feature length commentary from the director as well as a mini-documentary that features many of the people involved in the film. This is another perfect example of how much effort Vinegar Syndrome puts into their releases, tracking these people down and convincing them to be on camera was probably no small feat.
