Really Surprised!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This is technically a "zombie" movie, but it's one that leans more on allegory than most I can think of. It's about a young soldier, played by Richard Backus, who at the very beginning gets shot and killed in Vietnam. And, appropriately, his family gets notice from the army that he died in combat. The father (John Marley) and his daughter (Anya Ormsby) give their response of immediate grief, but the mother, played by Lynn Carlin, is refusing it, it can't be so, no way no how, they're *lying*, in fact. That very same night, the son, Andy, returns home... but as WHAT, you may ask?How did Andy come back to life? No answer, and there's no effort on the part of Bob Clark, the director (one of his very few entries in this genre), and Alan Ormsby the writer (I assume related to the actress playing the daughter by the way), to explain this even in the brief 'radioactivity/satellites/voodoo' or so on. It's meant, I think, to be a pure metaphor for the time: this was Vietnam, of course, when Americans, as well as many more Vietnamese, were being killed by the thousands, and if people did come back they often were never the same again. Andy coming back to the family as a symbolic zombie first - he talks to his 'so happy to see you!' parents and sister in a plain monotone, with Backus looking like you sucked any of the life out of a Montgomery Clift type of actor - and then as a 'real' one, as the horror comes from Andy having to kill people and take their blood (this latter part reminded me of Martin, the Romero film, but that's another story altogether so let's not go there).I think that there's a good amount of, frankly, cheese to this picture. There's a scene where, to show that Andy is fully disconnected from humanity when some local boys come around and the dog is bothering him and them, he picks up the dog (this is after badly testing his 'strength' against one of the boys) and strangles it to death. And while the intention is for it to be a serious moment, it's purely laughable. What does work is that Marley and Carlin - of all things re-teamed as a married couple following the John Cassavetes masterpiece FACES - play it straight and play it all sincerely, and bring real drama out of it (up to a point, to varying degrees for both of them), and that Backus also fully commits and is genuinely creepy and terrifying when he has to be.In the last stretch, especially the last like 20 minutes, it gets progressively sillier, or just more demented or WTF or whatever, as Andy is literally melting away with maggots taking up his innards. It gets to the point where his character is set up on a double date with his sister and he has to put on sunglasses just so everyone else doesn't see how he's melting away, like a literal *walking dead* figure. The message is not exactly subtle, but aside from the grief of a parent over a child, which is made especially clear with Carlin's mother and she is delivering the real goods, yes, even when it goes more bats*** in the final stretch, it's also kind of, well, misogynistic (Marley, the dad, sort of just pushes aside his wife and daughter whenever he feels like it as an excuse of being angry about his son, to the point where he pushes one character off the screen!)Clark and the writer have something noble to say about how families dealing (or decidedly *not* dealing) with grief over their fallen family members, especially with a war as tumultuous and wrong as Vietnam was, and some of it shows. At the same time it's also an excuse to see Richard Backus act extremely creepy and detached for 90 minutes, and while he's certainly not bad at it, he makes it today seem mostly kind of silly. I'm not sure if the filmmakers intended that, but it does make for a highly entertaining sit, especially with a packed audience.

My rating may seem harsh as the movie isn't bad for what it is but in the end it felt quite empty. Not asking all my questions should be answered in the ending, I actually enjoy movies that leave something of the mystery untouched, but here were just too many which resulted for me in an unsatisfying experience. So this young man died in the war but returns home any way because his mother send prayers, so her son would not die. So he is a zombie even though he still looks like a normal human being. He changed being distant to anyone but his mother and he doesn't seem to have any need for food or drink, no heart beating. He does a bit of killing, assuming he needs the victims' blood to stay alive? It doesn't help in the end as his body starts to rot anyway. Clearly the director wanted to make some kind of statement or tell some message but that must have gone over my head. Yeah war does change people but if that was the message the director wanted to tell the viewer this was not a convincing way to do so. What was very clear to me is that the mother had seriously an obsession with her son. She loved him more than she did love her daughter or husband. Not too bad but too many flaws for me to give it a pass.

Tuned in to this on late-night TV, but did not see the title. Did not know what the name of the movie was. It was mesmerizing, a very good take on Viet-nam vets returning home. The scene with Andy on the double date with dark glasses and black gloves was especially disturbing. Finally found a VHS copy ("Death Dream") many years later at a Goodwill, ha ha, very surprising! Also, I wonder if this was somehow related to John Cassevetes, with John Marley and Lynn Carlin in it, and with somewhat similar style-- long real-time scenes at times. Still don't know: Just a thought. Very good low-budget horror movie!

A young Soldier is killed in the line of duty in Vietnam. That same night, the soldier returns home, brought back by his Mother's wishes that he "Don't Die"! Upon his Return, Andy sits in his room, refusing to see his friends or family, venturing out only at night. The Vampiric horror is secondary to the terror that comes from the disintegration of a typical American family.a lot of reviews say this is a zombie flick, but the guy only comes out at night so he's more a vampire. Frankly, I don;t know what he's supposed to be and the movie, in my opinion loses steam at the 30 minute mark because it's more of a message movie than a true horror film and it falls flat.I wanted to like this film, but found myself wondering what they were trying to say, because as a true horror movie, it sucks. Especially after seeing Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.Andy just rocks in his chair alone in his room. Don't get me wrong. The acting is really good and it's well filmed. Even well written. But it's sort of a bait and switch movie. You're expecting a horror movie and get a talky moody film.