Dead of Night (aka Deathdream)

After the reprehensible Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and before the masterful Black Christmas, Bob Clark made this pseudo-horror film. Young Andy returns home from Vietnam a matter of hours after his parents have read a letter informing them that he had been killed. But Andy seems somehow... different. I guess the fact that he's one of the walking dead might have something to do with it. To tell you the truth, despite the enticing premise, it's mostly just dull. It does, however, in its own crudely fashioned way, make an interesting metaphor for wars and what happens to those who fight them. When Andy returns home, he's a homicidal zombie "I died for my country, now my country is going to die for me." The film seems to be saying that war makes zombies of all who must fight, and they will never be the same again. It's fairly direct considering the film was made in 1974, and no one wanted to touch the topic of Vietnam. It saddens me to realize that the parents in the film were played by John Marley and Lynn Carlin, who only a few years earlier, turned in amazing performances in John Cassavetes' Faces -- they deserve better. Well, I disagree with what it's trying to say, and I was mostly bored, so just skip Clark's early films and jump straight to Black Christmas.