Many years ago, a teenager named Jim Reed was one of the few people to survive a fire that burned down the entire town of Maxwell and killed nearly the entire population, including his parents.  As you might guess, even after he grows up, Jim has some issues.  He feels tremendous guilt.  He has nightmares.  He feels he’s responsible for the deaths of thousands.  And even worse, he can’t really remember how the fire started or why.  All he knows is that he keeps seeing terribly burned people and they all keep telling him that it’s all his fault.

After spending years just drifting, an adult Jim (played by D. Vincent Ashby) returns to the town of Maxwell.  It’s been rebuilt and, amazingly enough, there seems to be next to no sign that it was ever the site of a huge apocalyptic fire.  (I suspect this has more to do with the film’s budgetary limitations than anything else.)  He ends up staying with his brother and occasionally, he seems to be possessed by some unseen force.  (For example, there’s the time that he wanders into his nephew’s bedroom while wielding a hammer.)  Jim meets his ex-girlfriend Shelly and an old friend named Bill.  And, through it all, he continues to have visions of horribly burned zombies telling him that everything is all his fault…

It’s always tempting to get snarky when talking about a movie like 2004’s Burning Dead.  This is a microbudget film that was obviously made with a largely amateur cast, the majority of whom are quite stiff as they deliver their overdramatic dialogue.  Yes, it would be easy to make fun of Burning Dead but you know what?  For what it is, it’s not that bad.  It’s a horror film that had a lot of interesting ideas but not the budget to really execute them.  But there are films with huge budgets that have absolutely no interesting ideas.  Ridicule the limitations of Burning Dead if you must but, as far as I’m concerned, the filmmakers deserve some credit for trying to create something more than just your standard low-budget zombie film.

Add to that, I am an admirer of the stoned nonchalance of D. Vincent Ashby’s lead performance.  It may be a the result of a lifetime of trauma but Jim, at times, seems to be one of the most mellow in protagonists in the history of horror cinema.  No matter what he’s confronting or explaining, Jim retains the same casual attitude.

My favorite moment in the film came when Bill asked Jim if his parents lost anything in the fire.

“Their lives,” Jim replies with a slight shrug.

Obviously, Burning Dead is not the easiest of films to find.  It’s included in the Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares Boxset and that’s where I found it.

(One final bit of trivia: according to his imdb page, director George Demick previously played a zombie in George Romero’s Day of the Dead.)

D. Vincent Ashby considers Burning Dead.