The Dead Hate the Living! is set in an abandoned hospital where several enterprising young filmmakers have broken into illegally to shot a low budget zombie horror flick (art imitating life maybe?). The director Dave (Eric Clawson) has his two sisters Shelly (Wendy Speake) & Nina (Kimberly Pullis) in the leading roles, his mate Paul (Brett Beardslee) is doing the make-up effects & he has got the hot Topaz (Jamie Donahue) to be a production assistant. While exploring the hospital the crew come across a strange looking coffin like object in a downstairs laboratory, they open it up & the dead body of Dr. Eibon (Matt Stephens) falls out, sensing a bit of an opportunity Dave decides to put the body in his film but after accidentally bring it back to life using the strange coffin thing the crew have to fight for their lives as zombies start to appear everywhere as it quickly becomes clear that the dead hate the living...Written & directed by Dave Parker this cheap as chips zombie flick isn't as bad as it could have been & isn't as bad as a lot of low budget crappy horror flicks I've endured recently but it's still not very good. Low budget horror film maker, Full Moon Pictures president & killer puppet lover Charles Band was the executive producer although even he couldn't bring himself to release The Dead Hate the Living! through his Full Moon Pictures company, hey he might not have particularly high standards but at least he does have standards. Anyway, here the script takes ages to go anywhere, apart from a brief pre-credit sequence it's well over 50 minutes before any zombies show up to terrorise the cast & that ladies & gentlemen is just too long. The whole first 50 minutes establishes that a film crew are making a horror film in hospital illegally & basically that's it, until the first zombie show's up this film is firmly entrenched in snoozesville. Then there are lots of questions over the plot, if the guy killed himself during the pre-credits sequence how did he end up in the coffin thing? Where did the zombie that was seen during the pre-credit sequence go? Why didn't that zombie follow Dave & Topaz into the air vent? Why did Dave emerge the other side in front of Topaz when Topaz climbed into the vent before Dave to begin with? Why are some of the zombies easy to kill while other's aren't? Why do some talk while other's don't? Why can some sense when someone is alive & other's can't? What was that coffin thing? Where did it come from? Who made it? What was it's function? Why is The Dead Hate the Living! such a poorly constructed film where things just happen for the hell of it with little regard if anything makes any reasonable sense? Don't ask me, ask the people who made it. There are also some glaring references to other horror films, actor's & director's from John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, George Romero, Lucio Fulci to Bruce Campbell, Dick Miller & the obscure Italian special make-up effects man Gino De Rossi who besides doing the gory effects for such Italian splatter fare as Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980), Pirahna Part 2: The Spawning (1981), Cannibal Ferox (1981) & The House by the Cemetery (1981) also worked on the latest Bond film Casino Royal (2007)!Director Parker does OK on what was admittedly a low budget, at least there's some cheap gore effects here. There's a decapitation or two, some rotten zombies one of whom has their face literally punched in, there's some bubbling skin effects, someones guts are pulled out & there's some blood splatter. As in a lot of low budget horror flicks these days there are some truly awful CGI computer effects, when you have literally millions to spend on computer effects like Spider-Man (2002) they can look absolutely spectacular but when your working on the sort of budget the makers of The Dead Hate the Living! have it's impossible to create realistic computer effects. Here they use CGI to make three zombies appear as if they are on fire, they probably couldn't afford to achieve the effect on set & it looks terrible, I've seen PS3 computer games with better fire effects. It's not scary, there's very little atmosphere or tension & the story is far too loose to be gripping. Amusingly I watched this on cable TV last night (yep, at least I didn't spend any money on it) & during the continuity announcement just before it started the woman called it 'The Living Hate the Dead' rather than The Dead Hate the Living!, I'm not being funny but you would have though a TV station would at least know the correct name of the film they are about to show or is that asking for too much?With a supposed budget of about $150,000 this was definitely a low budget flick, unfortunately that doesn't automatically mean we should ignore all it's faults because at the end of the day it will cost as much to rent or buy this as a big Hollywood blockbuster like Transformers (2007) & to be brutally honest I know which I'd rather watch & to give you a clue it's not The Daed Hate the Living!. The acting could have been worse & Jamie Donahue who played Tpoaz is hot & helps make this a bit more watchable.The Dead Hate the Living! isn't that good, it's not as bad as some low budget efforts out there but that doesn't amount to much in itself. If your a real low budget horror film junkie than this may pass 90 odd minutes harmlessly enough but I'd struggle to personally recommend it to anyone.

This is an interesting movie. There are lots of cool Zombies. There's a zombie in it that looks like Sam Kinison! A Sam Kinison Zombie! He will make you laugh and then he will eat your brains! Watch out, viewers, Sam Kinison zombie will scare you! There's also a fat zombie that looks like the ones in resident evil as well. But, the Sam Kinison Zombie is the best. All in all, this is a great movie for Horror fans. Man, that Sam Kinison zombie, cant get enough of that! It's a very good movie, The Dead Hate the Living. They really show it, too. They really hate the living. I wonder if its because we are alive and they are dead? I think that's the correct answer.

It's a shame that this film has such a low rating on IMDb because it really is quite an entertaining film if you are prepared to wait. The problem with this film is that it seems to take forever to actually get going which can be a problem with a lot of the cheaper horror films ( I think that dark power is the worst of those I've ever seen). But for a film with a low budget when it does get going the going is good okay so its not brilliant but you shouldn't really be expecting it to be. A good little horror film made on a low budget and if you have no patience at all just skip forward for the first half hour you'll still get some background info before the action starts.

The Dead Hate the Living is a zombie movie. One would think the formula for zombie movies would be rather simple. Walking dead, scared individuals, head shots ensue as the dead lumber after the scared protagonists. Instead we get a meandering film that is likely to bore an individual to death. The plot is straightforward enough dumb, young, filmakers in abandoned hospital open one of the Gates to Hell mentioned in Fulci's The Beyond aka Seven Doors of Death. A couple of zombies come out of said gate and mediocre mayhem begins. A lame film that stumbles around not unlike a walking corpse and never really finds its feet.