Dead and Gone DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

The beauty of the horror genre is anyone with a couple hundred thousand bucks, fake blood and a cast can make a movie. Sometimes you get innovative results, most of the time you get incredibly unentertaining crap like Dead and Gone.

This film treads into rather familiar territory here, territory that has been traversed by people much more talented and experienced as pretty much everyone in this film, both in front of and behind the camera. We start off 40 years ago where this redneck dude in a tiny shack finds out his woman is cheating on him. So he does what comes naturally and ties up the wife, makes her watch as he kills the kids (we don't see it... don't worry) and then kills her and takes his own life, but not before uttering the cryptic phrase "40 years of pain." We then cut to the present where Jack Wade (Quentin Jones) has just moved into the little shack from Hollywood with his wife Frankie (Katherine Bates), a former power player in the Hollywood studios who is now in a coma. See, Jack don't like his wife much anymore and basically took her up there to kill her so he can get the insurance money and split with his hot lawyer friend Peggy (Felissa Rose), who's back in L.A. trying to get the finances in order... and running into snags in the process. In the meantime, spooky stuff starts to happen and things get more complicated when a cute lady cop, Kate (Gillian Shure) keeps coming by and hitting on him. Then they both find out that the town's legends of the place might be true, and crap like that and Jack starts to have delusions and doesn't know what is real.

This movie has one of the most bizarre, semi-notable casts I've ever seen. I've never heard of the "lead" Quentin Jones, his bitchy wife Frankie is played by Katherine Bates, her first role in 18 years, and only had a handful of TV roles before that, Marilyn Ghiglioti, a.k.a. Dante's girlfriend Veronica from Clerks, has a small part as a nurse, Ben Moody, a.k.a. the dude from Evansecence as a local doofus named Booger and there are small cameos from Zack Ward as a weird weatherman and Tenacious D's Kyle Gass as a sleazy local televangelist. Isn't that the most motley of crew's you've ever seen? And, despite anything they may have done well in the past, everyone is just awful here. The half star is for glimpses of decency in Bates and Jones' performances (and maybe for the eye candy of Gillian Shure... sure), but everything else is absolutely craptastic. While Harry Shannon's script - his first, by the way, and you're not going to BELIEVE what his day job is; wait for the special features) does actual set a nice pace, he forgets important factors like non-terrible dialogue, filling up/explaining plot holes and actually having an ending that makes it somewhat worth it to have sat through the duration of this terrible 84-minute movie that feels oh so much longer. They set us up for some sort of big finish/explanation at the end, but the whole thing is just glossed over with this "40 years of pain" line, that could mean pretty much anything and just leaves something dangling. What's even worse, though, is for a horror movie, NOTHING is scary here and nothing is even funny... at all... ever. The only thing I did vocally throughout the whole flick was sigh... on many occasions.

It didn't surprise me at all that this is director Yossi Sasson's first directorial debut and man did he drop the ball. What's even worse is he even had a not-too-shabby score from Harry Manfredini, but Sasson's direction is so inept that there really aren't any scary parts to be found here. It also doesn't help that the effects are cheeseball supreme, but, even worse, they weren't trying to be funny either.

If you have 84 minutes to spare... I'm sure you can find better things to do with your life than watch this dreadful excuse for a horror film.

Not a ton here, folks. First up is Gone With the Dead: The Making of Dead and Gone and it really gives you a good feel of how amateur these guys really are. The lead actor, Quentin Jones, first found out about this when he went to see a therapist... who happened to be the film's first-time screenwriter, Harry Shannon. Unreal. We hear a lot from Yossi Sasson, who is also making his directorial debut (shocker...) and from most of the cast here, talking about their roles and stuff like that and we hear lame stories like when Sasson stepped on a yellow jacket hive, because apparently their location was infested with them. It drags out quite a bit and it seems that Sasson really enjoys talking about this debut flick and such, but it gets pretty boring. Everyone seems really fascinated with everything, actually, and it's not that surprising since most of these people haven't worked much or worked in a long time, etc. This thing drags out for and the last thing really surprised me was that Harry Manfredini did the score here. I wasn't surprised because the score was bad, because it wasn't, but just that a horror legend like that would work on such a low-rent flick. This whole thing goes for 28 minutes and there's no way it needed to last that long.

Next up are some Deleted Scenes and we get five of them here... and they're all incredibly short and incredibly lame. I don't think any of these go over a minute. Skip them.

The only other thing we get besides the Trailer are some Outtakes. They are about four and a half minutes long and the only funny one is the very last one where they make fun of Brokeback Mountain. That's about it.

The film is presented in the widescreen format, but it doesn't say what the aspect ratio is. Whatever.

The sound is handled through the Dolby Digital 5.1 format.

Cornball supreme, folks. We have a big title card with the "big stars" of the film, Quentin Jones, Zack Ward and Kyle Gass' names up top and a very dark shot of what appears to be a girl or Alice Cooper coming out of a grave, with a critic quote at the bottom. The back has a special features listing, which does one of those stretches where they include tech specs in the special features (sigh) and then a brief synopsis, some larger random shots from the flick and the billing block and tech specs. Pretty blah.

Just another lametarded horror film made for pennies trying to make a buck, with a terrible story, low-rent actors and corny effects. Save your pennies and dollars and pick up something else that's at least mildly entertaining.