Revenge of the Dead

"Zeder" is the weakest film that I have seen from Pupi Avati, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. Just "Macabre" and "The House with the Laughing Windows" were simply better, even though they all have a slightly strange atmosphere, not exactly madness, but rather absurdity, surrealism, which presses onto you and causes unpleasant feelings that may not necessarily be horror, but they have an effect. (14/03/2015)

It’s not that I wouldn’t like to be called Pupi Pomo, but these 98 minutes of talking, talking and yet more talking, all in the name of solving a mystery that doesn’t really affect the main characters, were just too much. The horror scenes are done and over with in about three minutes and there’s zero gore. I did enjoy the retro stylization and atmosphere, though. [Sitges FF] (07/10/2019)

This is an interesting, stylishly shot movie, but I have to admit that I was quite lost at times, and even after watching it all the way through, I still do not quite get the impression that some parts of the plot are clear to me. Pupi Avati tells a perhaps unnecessarily complicated story with an excess of various characters who are incessantly spinning around the mystery at the heart of this movie, which then just ends with a relatively simple conclusion. However, it is an atmospherically filmed mysterious horror movie, which almost resembles a crime-thriller take on the adaptation of Stephen King's book Pet Sematary, the book which was published in the same year as Zeder, and so both works were probably created independently of each other. There is zero gore on offer here, so fans of bloody Italian horror movies will have to look somewhere else. [Sitges 2019] (05/10/2019)