Ed and Jose Quiroz have been making low budget films since the late nineties. They do it all – the writing, the editing, and even some of the acting and the music. These guys are, judging by the amount of work they do in their productions, dedicated to their craft even if they haven't necessarily honed it yet. This brings me to their latest film, Hood Of The Living Dead, a zombie film set in inner city Oakland, California in a neighborhood that your mom wouldn't want you playing in by yourself after dark.

We're first introduced to Ricky (Carl Washington of Killjoy), a young scientist who is obviously wise beyond his years. Ricky's been working on a top secret experimental formula that has the ability to regenerate dead cells. The possibilities for this are endless and this is obviously a big time project for him, so he's treating it very seriously but at the same time, Ricky has a life outside of work as well. You see, Ricky's parents died when he and his younger brother, Jermaine, were both quite young and he's made it his life's mission to make sure that Jermaine is well looked after.

One night, though, Jermaine is gunned down by gangsters in a drive-by and Ricky is devastated. Knowing the power that his work as a scientist has given him, Ricky decides to use the formula he's created to bring Jermaine back to the land of the living. There's on catch though that Ricky didn't think about – Jermaine has come back as a flesh eating zombie! The reanimated Jermaine starts wandering around the 'hood eating people as he sees fit and to add insult to injury, anyone Jermaine bites can become infected with the same formula, turning them into zombies as well. Ricky knows he has to stop them, and thankfully his good friend and work buddy Scott is on hand to help him stop Jermaine and the slowly increasing number of zombies in the area from taking over.

You know, reading that back, it doesn't sound like a horrible premise for a horror film and in fact, it sounds like it could be a bit of good, low budget fun. WRONG. Hood Of The Living Dead is painful to get through and it takes itself way too seriously to be enjoyable. The acting is no better or worse than most low budget indy features. I had no problem with that despite the obvious shortcomings of using people who may or may not be really good in front of the camera. The story, like I said, it had potential so we're safe there. Where this film really falls apart is in the direction and in the characterizations. Everyone in this movie is a cliché and the obvious and heavy handed nods to the zombie films of the past (do we really need another supporting character in a SOV zombie film named Romero?) don't come across as a tribute but instead seem like name dropping. Mixing urban suspense and some walking corpses could have been fun… if there were more walking corpses and any suspense at all. Sadly, this one doesn't even deliver in terms of undead gore. There's a couple of gut munching scenes but the effects are cheap and unprofessional looking and they're not helped by the flat cinematography. Had this film tried anything different in terms of the characters it might have been interesting even without the copious amounts of bloodshed usually associated with the genre but we get neither and we're left with a bunch of guys running around trash talking to one another, swearing so much and without any creativity ala Deadwood as to be anything other than tiresome, and posing and posturing for the camera. The end result isn't entertaining or 'so bad it's good' material – it's just bad.

Video:

The feature was shot on video and as such, you can't expect the kind of clarity that you'll get with a movie that was shot on film. The non anamorphic 1.66.1 image is pretty soft, there's some mild video noise and some mild compression artifacts throughout and the detail level isn't as high as you might have hoped. The colors come through reasonably well and the black levels aren't too bad considering the film's roots, but in the end, this one only looks marginally better than the thousands of over shot on video horror films out there.