Tubi Tuesday: Dead and Rotting (2002)

It’s not a gourmet dish, but those craving genre junk food, “Dead and Rotting” is a tasty enough treat worth checking out for free on Tubi.

There must be something in the water in Akron, Ohio.

The industrial town known for its rubber tire production has given us the Black Keys, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, Devo, Steph Curry, and a host of other musicians, actors, athletes, and inventors. For a relatively small, landlocked Midwest town, that’s a pretty high batting average.

It’s also given us more than one entertainingly gruesome low-budget indie horror movie. First, there was J.R. Bookwalter’s The Dead Next Door, which was one of my favorite horror films I watched last year. Then, a full 13 years later, the Rubber City gave us today’s subject, David P. Barton’s Dead and Rotting.

Dead and Rotting is Barton’s only feature film to date as director, but it’s hardly his only credit. Barton joins the ranks of prolific visual effects designers who dipped their toes in directing, along with Gabe Bartalos (Skinned Deep) and Barney Burman (Barney Burman’s Wild Boar).

Barton has worked on special make-up effects for dozens of films and TV shows, from Tremors to Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Starship Troopers to 300.

While it seems he’s stepped away from movies in recent years, since 2015, he’s been the owner and designer of the popular Akron haunted house attraction Ghoul Brothers House of Horrors. In short, he might not be a household name, but the man’s horror bona fides are well-established.

So how does Dead and Rotting stack up against its effects-designer-turned-director brethren?

Released in 2002 by the venerable B-movie schlockmeisters at Full Moon Features, Dead and Rotting was not technically shot in Akron but in nearby Hartville and Springfield Township, no doubt chosen for their more rural locales. It looks like the type of small town that might feasibly be home to a witch.  And in fact, it is. 

Hollis (Stephen O’Mahoney), J.B. (Tom Hoover), and Eric (Trent Haaga), best friends and coworkers, drive out one night to visit the home of the legendary local witch, mostly to see if scaredycat Eric will piss his pants in fear. While there, they’re accosted by a strange feral man they nickname Jackal Boy (Christopher Suciu), who they later beat the crap out of when he gets a little handsy with a waitress at their favorite local watering hole.

Apparently, these three guys aren’t the best at deductive reasoning because they fail to surmise that Jackal Boy is the son of that very same witch, Abigail (Barbara Katz-Norrod), they were just hyping up.

Their assault on Jackal Boy (real name Pox) sets off a chain of retaliation that ends with the three of them cursed with a spell that causes them to rot while alive, but we don’t get to see much of this play out.

The three guys decide to hit back, hiring two shithead stoners (Jamie Star and Jeff Dylan Graham) to do the dirty work for them. But it turns out shithead stoners aren’t the most reliable, and one foolish decision sends a grieving Abigail on the warpath.

In one of the film’s best sequences, she tearfully mixes up a spell, pours it in the bathtub, climbs in, and emerges as low-budget horror legend Debbie Rochon.

I’d like to take a pause here to acknowledge that Rochon is one of the most prolific actors in the world of low-budget indie horror.

I can’t say I’ve seen a single other movie she’s been in (except as an uncredited bar patron in Vampire’s Kiss), but her IMDb page lists a staggering 265 projects as far back as the late ’80s, with another 14 in production.

In 2002, the year of Dead and Rotting’s release, Rochon was in 17 different films. Calling her a Scream Queen seems inadequate; Scream Empress is more like it.

Anyway, Debbie Rochon is very cool, and she gives a pretty perfect performance here, aggressively pursuing and seducing Hollis, J.B., and Eric, picking them off one by one, creating grotesque murderous ghouls from their, ahem, genetic material.

What I found very enjoyable about Dead and Rotting is its depiction of magic as something elemental, earthy, and downright gross. The witching life isn’t romanticized here; it’s something that’s not to be trifled with, lest you end up, well, dead and rotting.  

Where Dead and Rotting unfortunately stumbles somewhat is its ending (inevitable spoilers here).

I can’t help but wish Barton had stuck to the conviction of the nastiness of his premise, letting us watch a witch get supernatural vengeance on a group of morons who totally deserve it. Instead, he pulls back somewhat, giving two of the guys a heroic ending where they triumph over Abigail with the help of a deus ex machina in the form of a fellow witch named Rose (Tammi Sutton) and her magic witch grenade called, of all things, a Whammy.

Luckily, a flawed finale is not enough to sink the film, as most of it is highly enjoyable.

It has that ugly, flat, shot-on-early digital kind of look, but still manages to craft some delightfully gruesome moments.

Barton also handled the make-up effects under the pseudonym Notrab Divad, and it’s no surprise that they’re some of the best parts of the movie. There’s a bit of digital compositing going on at times, which looks a little dated but actually works to lend some accidental, uncanny creepiness to the proceedings. 

Rochon is, unsurprisingly, the MVP, but the rest of the acting is still a notch above the quality you usually get with these kinds of things.

While the characters are all unlikable on paper, maybe it’s because I’m a terminal Midwesterner, but I found most of them to be pretty charming in their own way; even the two stoners whose idiocy sets Abigail’s revenge in motion have good chemistry.

Dead and Rotting might not end up on anyone’s best horror movies of all time list, but if you have a taste for the cheap and gnarly, you just might want to give it a watch.