poe426 Review of The Dead Next Door

The Dead Next Door (1989)

A man's reach should exceed his grasp...

[6/10 · 13 October 2012]

It's not so much that this one's a low-budget Super 8/Hi 8 hybrid of questionable quality that makes it worth watching, it's the fact that this guy stuck with it for four years and got it DONE (not unlike John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon with DARK STAR, or Dennis Muren with EQUINOX, or David Lynch with ERASERHEAD, etc.). At a recent comic convention, I asked a panel of experts- John Russo, Russ Streiner, and George Kosana- about the difference in QUALITY between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and its bastard offspring (like THE DEAD NEXT DOOR). Russo explained that, while NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was a low-budget movie, it was made by a group of working professionals with years of experience under their collective belts: it wasn't just a knock-off of something else by somebody with a camcorder. (Not that there's anything wrong with that...) It's this experience that Bookwalter clearly lacked when he made THE DEAD NEXT DOOR- but at least he TRIED. As Russo says in his FILMMAKING SEMINAR (which also features Bookwalter): "At least make something. Don't do NOTHING!" Sound advice for anyone in any field, but especially true when you're dealing with no-budget filmmaking. I've spent FAR more time trying to talk people into making movies than I've spent actually MAKING them- and that's saying a lot: at last count, I realized that I'd started but had been unable to finish more than SIXTY shorts (thanks primarily to actors who bailed out on me for one reason or another- including the ENTIRE teen-aged cast of an X-MEN type of Public Access series I'd started, who walked out on me when I refused to buy them a case of beer after the first day of shooting)(I may have been desperate, but I wasn't THAT desperate). Bookwalter himself says: "Take what you have, do the best you can with it." Words to live by. Roger Corman (from HOW I MADE A HUNDRED MOVIES IN Hollywood AND NEVER LOST A DIME): "It is possible to go up against the system and win." NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is THE Prime Example of beating the odds, and even Bookwalter has gone on to carve out his own particular niche in the world of low-budget indie productions. I've always wanted to get at least ONE thing done that I could point to, that I could be proud of. It hasn't happened yet (and may never happen), but I'm reminded of something else Roger Corman said: "Is there tangible proof of your existence? When you make a movie, at least there is tangible proof. You create something." Like THE DEAD NEXT DOOR or not (and I DO), Bookwalter is a CREATOR- and that's saying something.