Tales from the Quadead Zone is an hour-long shot-on-video anthology horror flick from Chester Novell Turner, the director of the infamous Black Devil Doll from Hell. The “Wraparound” (**) has a mother telling her invisible ghost son stories from the titular tome.
The first tale is “Food For?” (*). A poor family with many mouths to feed have to fight each other for measly portions at the dinner table. One day, junior gets pissed about having to fight his kinfolk for bologna sandwiches and grabs a shotgun and guns down the competition.
This is a very strange story that feels unfinished. The hook is intriguing enough, but it goes nowhere fast. Plus, the ending is a total rip-off as we only learn of the family members’ fates by an onscreen text.
Next is “The Brothers” (* ½). A guy gets his friends to help steal his brother’s corpse from the morgue. He then uses the opportunity to yell at his older brother’s body for all the shit he did to him while he was alive. As one final indignity, he plans to bury his brother in the basement dressed as a clown. But will the clown get the last laugh?
This segment is plagued with poor audio as much of the dialogue is hard to hear or just plain unintelligible. The scene where the protagonist is alone with his brother’s corpse and has a sort of half-assed therapy session with it had potential, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Although this tale gets points for general weirdness, it just doesn’t work overall.
The final tale, “Unseen Vision” (* ½) feeds back into the wraparound story. The mother is interrupted from reading her ghost son another story when her abusive husband comes home and attacks her. She kills him in self-defense and then takes her own life to be with her son in the afterlife.
Handled the right way, this could’ve been a tragic and powerful story. Too bad the acting is so amateurish. I did like the negative vision effects for the ghosts, but ultimately, it’s just too dreary to be totally successful.
The biggest issue with Tales from the Quadead Zone is that the three stories have no real meat on them. Anthology horror flicks should have a twist ending, or at the very least be atmospheric. The second story comes closest to meeting that criterion, but it’s still not very good. Plus, there’s nothing here approaching the sheer lunacy of Turner’s jaw-dropping Black Devil Doll from Hell. Turner was also responsible for the terrible theme song that sounds like Yoda rapping.
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