Suffice to say that I had never heard about this 2023 horror movie titled "Scary Tales: Dead Zone", prior to stumbling upon it by random chance here in 2024. And with it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I opted to sit down and watch it, given my love of the horror genre.
But truth be told, given the movie's cover and it relatively low rating here on IMDb, then I wasn't really harboring much of any grand expectations or hopes from writer and director Geno McGahee. But still, I opted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
"Scary Tales: Dead Zone" is a horror anthology, but not a good one. But hey, I opted to sit down with an open mind and give the movie a fair chance. Just turns out that this horror anthology was somewhat amateurish and rubbish.
I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. And I will say that it was definitely a mixed bag of acting skills here. Because some of the actors and actresses put on very wooden and rigid performances, whereas others put on adequate and okay performances. There wasn't anything extraordinary to be witnessed among the acting performances, though.
The character gallery and dialogue throughout the 83 minutes that the anthology ran for left much to be desired. It wasn't a particularly interesting character gallery in general, and the dialogue was pretty cringeworthy at times, as if it was written by a pre-teen horror aficionado. A lot of the delivery of the dialogue felt very forced and scripted.
The audio in the movie was a bit all over the place, in some scenes it sounded like it was recorded with a home video camera from the 1990s, whereas in other scenes it was adequate. And the gunshots in the various scenes sounded fairly bad in general, as well.
The effects in "Scary Tales: Dead Zone" are generally cringeworthy, especially the creature on the cover. When that creature shows up in the movie, it is so blatantly obvious that it is just a rubber mask someone is wearing, and it looks pretty bad.
My rating of the 2023 horror anthology "Scary Tales: Dead Zone" from writer and director Geno McGahee lands on a generous three out of ten stars.
