Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie Review

Maybe not completely dead, but pretty close.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 10, 2014

Do you have any really annoying film fan friends, you know, the kind that like to trumpet their all inclusive knowledge of everything from Lumiere to who won this year’s Oscar for Best Short Subject? Chances are you can stump them with this simple riddle:

Name a film featuring performances by two future Oscar winners (with one of those Oscars not being awarded for acting), a supporting role featuring an instantly recognizable character actor whose work spanned from the early 30s to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a score by a famous rock band, another supporting role by a midlevel star of Westerns who also played on Broadway with Andy Griffith, and locations that are supposed to be middle America but are actually in a completely different hemisphere.

If they sputter for a moment, you could throw them a few bones like, “one of the Oscars was for a film about crazy people and the other one was for a movie tangentially about the movies”, but they would still probably be grasping at straws, a no doubt tantalizing state of affairs given their aforementioned tendency to annoy. Dead Kids (which was released stateside under the name Strange Behavior) is indeed that film. The Oscar winners are Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, still missing on Blu-ray), the supporting actor is the inimitable Charles Lane (Google his image if you don’t recognize the name), the band is Tangerine Dream, the other supporting actor is Scott Brady (his Griffith appearance was the musical version of Destry Rides Again), and the locations are New Zealand filling in for a Chicago suburb. If that isn’t enough to pique most people’s interest, throw in a trashy plot harkening back to the heyday of 1950s horror exploitation films, add a couple of lo-fi but still appropriately gruesome special effects, and Dead Kids is certainly one of the oddest quasi-slasher films of its era.

The film begins with a frankly silly sequence that even writer Bill Condon can’t help laughing about on the included commentary. Condon himself, in his only credited screen appearance (he has a couple of other uncredited cameos in later films), plays a teenager who meets his fate at the hands of a silhouetted knife wielder during a blackout. The intermittent electricity problems of Chicago suburb Galesburg would seem to be an important plot point, but it turns out to be only a tangential distraction, as the film moves on to the main thrust of its storyline, the dogged pursuit by local policeman John Brady (Michael Murphy) of what he believes is a serial killer. John has a personal stake in these murders, as they seem to be related to a long ago investigation into a disgraced local scientist named Le Sange, now deceased but still teaching at the local community college courtesy of old 16mm films of his experiments in mind control, a man whom John blames for the death of his wife.

Things get even more personal when Brady’s son Peter (Dan Shor), not to be confused with the similarly named tyke on The Brady Bunch, agrees to become part of some current experiments at the local think tank laboratory, which is headed by the weird but slightly seductive Gwen Parkinson (Fiona Lewis), in order to earn enough cash to finally get out of his native backwater. Meanwhile, a few (surprisingly few, in fact) other murders are occurring, including one by a killer wearing a (wait for it ) Tor Johnson mask. Could all of these shenanigans be linked? Gosh—I wonder.

Dead Kids is one of the more ponderous, lethargic horror films of its era, one that never goes the intentionally hyperbolic route of better known outings like Halloween, with nothing else like fascinating characters to fill the void. There are a couple of great creep out moments, including the discovery of the first victim (Condon) transformed into a scarecrow out in a field (another tantalizing plot point that is neither developed nor adequately explained), and probably the best shock moment in the film, when a housekeeper walks in on a gruesome dissection in a bathroom. But even the film’s signature scare, with Parkinson injecting a brainwashing drug directly into Peter’s eye, seems oddly dissociative and doesn’t really deliver the chills it’s obviously meant to.

Dead Kids was evidently planned to be the first installment of a proposed trilogy, the second of which is the at least marginally more entertaining Strange Invaders. That film had a more palpable point of view and was more clearly spoofing its sources. Dead Kids doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor about itself, and in fact most of the film is played with the same sort of unaware earnestness that marked a lot of 50s horror. Had director Michael Laughlin told his actors to play things with a bit more of a wink, the film may have had a bit more energy. As it is, it’s a surprisingly listless, uneven experience that is probably best remembered as a potential trivia question.

Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dead Kids is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.43:1. As with Severin's other simultaneous Blu-ray release Thirst , this transfer was sourced off the original camera negative, though there are problems that are more noticeable here than with Thirst. The most perplexing of these is the really odd color timing, which casts virtually the whole film in a kind of dull brown-yellow color. I frankly never saw Dead Kids theatrically (few did, evidently), and so can't speak authoritatively as to what the color looked like then, but I find it hard to believe that it was this jaundiced. The elements also have a bit of minimal damage to contend with, but one of the odder issues here is a rather wide variance in sharpness and clarity throughout the presentation. Despite the color issues, some parts of this transfer look rather nicely clear and well detailed, while others are soft almost to the point of looking out of focus. The film was obviously shot on a shoestring budget, and so some of these issues are probably inherent in the source, but this is still a somewhat lackluster looking presentation.

Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dead Kids, unlike Thirst (which had only a standard Dolby Digital track), has a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono offering, though, as with the video, there are a few passing issues to discuss. While the track generally sounds decently clear and clean, there are several awkward sound (and music) edits throughout the film as well as noticeable ambience variations that I attribute to ADR. Having never seen this film theatrically or previously on home video, I can't state whether these are endemic to the sources, but my hunch is they are. Other than these occasional hiccups, things sound passably good here, though probably not as crisp and defined as persnickety audiophiles might prefer.

Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Co-Writer Bill Condon and Actors Dan Shor and Dey Young. This is probably the better of the two commentaries, especially with regard to Condon, who of course has gone on to greater things, but who seems alternately proud of and appalled by this early piece.


• Audio Commentary with Director Michael Laughlin. This is the first commentary I can remember where the insert reveals it was held via Skype, and it certainly sounds like it. Laughlin has a tendency to wander, rather dramatically at times. In fact, it sounds like the close of this commentary was simply done by editing him more or less in mid-sentence as he continued to blather on about Hawaii (where he lives). The interviewer is not identified, though I'm assuming it might be Severin's Carl Daft.


• Isolated Music Track presents Tangerine Dream's score via Dolby Digital Mono (on two channels).


• The Effects of Strange Behavior (1080p; 20:32) is a really fun (and funny) interview with Craig Reardon, who divulges just how lo-fi most of the effects in this film really were.


• U.S. Trailer (480p; 1:45)


• International Trailer (480p; 3:18)

Dead Kids Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Dead Kids has one of the more interesting collections of onscreen and behind the scenes talent to grace an 80s horror flick, but alas it's all largely for naught. Had the film been played purely for laughs or gone a more dramatic, gory route, things would have been better. As it stands, Dead Kids is just plain dull most of the time, and the small budget means that special effects wizard Craig Reardon can't adequately provide chills and also isn't able to convincingly disguise one major character whose "real" identity is supposed to be a huge surprise, but which is pretty obvious from almost the first moment. This is at best a curio, or a way to exact some trivial pursuit revenge on those all knowing film fans who claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge about every movie ever released.