Living Death Movie Review

I kind of feel sorry for Kristy Swanson. She stars in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a movie that makes no money and takes her career... absolutely nowhere. Then, years later, they make a TV show out of the movie, stick it on a network that nobody watches, and put Sarah Michelle Gellar in the lead role. It becomes a huge, cult hit and Gellar becomes a breakout star. You gotta wonder if Swanson is just pissed off, all the time.

This review of her latest, the straight-to-DVD Living Death, probably isn't going to help. It's a terrible little film, a blatant attempt to make a quick buck. The film is a ripoff of the latest trend in horror filmmaking: Creepy guy has a secret room that he uses solely to torture people and/or kill them. In this film, the creepy guy is Victor (Greg Bryk), an idle rich kid with a wife (Swanson) he all but ignores. She wants to divorce him, but their lawyer (Joshua Peace) has a better idea: Poison him and make it look like an overdose. The only problem: The drugs they give Victor are from his own stash, designed to put the taker into a kind of living death, where they can't move or speak, but they still hear, see, and feel everything.

This tired old drug shows up regularly in films like this (I saw it in an episode of Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes on DVD two weeks ago), despite its sheer impossibility. Of course, there are endless opportunities for suspense: Will they start the autopsy on the living subject!?

Oh, no. Please stop.

Living Death's third act has Victor coming back to life (regular life) as an insane person who gets his revenge... but who are we supposed to root for here? The psycho? His chilly wife? A lawyer? You won't care who lives or dies, and judging by the finale, neither did the filmmakers.