Dead Dudes in the House is a pretty damned silly title, and the movie itself is only slightly less silly. (Before Troma got it for distribution, it was finished with the not-silly-enough title The Dead Come Home.) But the wacky name is probably for the best - it's hard to play it straight when your villain is an elderly lady who likes to stab people (obviously played by a young man in makeup doing a generic Granny impression, BTW). There's some goofy fun and cheap gore to enjoy here, but mostly it's just a little too cheesy to be all that enjoyable.
Dead Dudes is about a group of eight or so friends (not all dudes, for what it's worth) going to renovate an old house. One of them bought the house as a fixer-upper at a bargain basement price... I wonder why? If you guessed "haunted," then come up and collect your prize. There's the creepy and stabby old lady wandering around, and the house itself seems intent on keeping the friends there - once you're inside, the doors won't open and the windows don't break. But the kicker? After someone is killed, they'll come back to life and try to kill their other friends. And they're not just brainless zombies or anything - they can still talk and joke around or whatever. The only differences are (1) they look worse for wear, and (2) they want to kill you.
So the film doesn't have a heck of a lot going on in the plot department. There isn't really a central mystery, or even much of a reason that the house is haunted (that I can recall). Dead Dudes is essentially an unengaging survival tale for the (not dead) dudes in the house. There's a lot of running and hiding involved - at least if you count running into a room and holding the door shut as hiding.
Save for one, the characters are entirely not worth mentioning. Everyone just kind of blends together into a bland heap. The one exception is Bob, played by Victor Verhaghe. Bob is such a ridiculously huge asshole that it's funny to watch. He's got this tough guy carpenter schtick that is really heavy handed and unrealistic, but is at least *something* noteworthy. The acting is pretty bad across the board, but the story is so simple and the script so... undynamic? Good acting would just be wasted on this film. But at least there is some funny ad-libbing here and there when people die. One guy screams "God I hate this!" and "God, this sucks!" as he is being cut it half. Legitimate claims for sure, but not ones that you hear a lot.
The gore is all right for a late 80s cheapie. While the bad lighting doesn't do it any favors, Dead Dudes is reasonably splattery. You get several shots of blood spraying from severed/smashed limbs and heads, and you can hear the blood being squirted out through the pumps (or whatever they were using). It's kind of funny, but it certainly doesn't help the film get into For Real scary territory.
Horror-wise, Dead Dudes wants to stick to the fun side of things (the pull-quote on the box describes it as "a hoot"), and it's more silly and action-based than anything. Probably the most legitimately disturbing thing about the film is when the old lady is just lurking around the house shortly after the group goes inside for the first time. Old people can be really scary, and I know I'd be terrified if I was in an old house and there was just an out-of-if elderly lady there for no discernible reason.
So yeah, it's not a terrible film, but it's not one I really enjoyed watching. The humor just didn't land for me the majority of the time. It's occasionally goofy fun, but it peaks at "just okay."
I would not recommend this film.
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