Rating: 3/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 17/52 | Shot on Video
Bobby’s mother finishes the dishes and calls him to grab his mug. The chair pulls back, and the mug lifts, but we see no one there. The mug arrives at her side, and she thanks Bobby. A wave of whispers and a wind from nowhere overtake her. She understands: Bobby wants to hear a story. A book appears in his mother’s hands: Tales from the QuandeaD Zone.
The first story is called Food for ?. A low-income family cannot afford to feed every family member. The head of the family rings a bell, and everyone grows silent. He blesses the food, and then a free-for-all starts, awarding it to whoever can grab it first. Every day, it goes this way until one family member takes matters into his own hands.
The Brothers is a story about two brothers, Ted and Fred Johnson, who have hated each other their whole lives. When one brother dies, the other and a friend break into the funeral home to desecrate the corpse. But things don’t go the way he expects.
I love the hand-drawn credits, the cheap synth score, and the sound effects. The dialogue is SO hard to hear, though—the score and VHS static often drown it out.
While the stories don’t make much sense, I admire Chester Novell Turner’s ambitions and the way he realized them. The movie really pops off when we step out of the stories, but I won’t spoil it. I genuinely love the ending.
This movie won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but if you can get past the Z-grade production value, you might appreciate what this movie is doing.