Children of the Living Dead

Children of the Living Dead is a 2001 direct-to-video zombie film. Despite the similar name and sharing several of the same crewmembers, it has no direct relationship with 1968's Night of the Living Dead or any of its sequels.

Plot
In 1986, a small Pennsylvanian town suffers a zombie outbreak, which is eventually contained thanks to the efforts of Deputy Sherriff Hughes, though he dies in the process, and his killer, the zombified murderer Abbott Hayes, disappears. 14 years later, Hayes reappears and causes the death of four teenagers in town for a concert, then reanimates them as zombies, leading to a whole new zombie outbreak the year after that.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The title is misleading. You'd expect this to be a movie about zombified children, but most of the zombies we see are adults, and even the teenage zombies who kick the plot off are played by actors who are clearly in their mid-20s.
 * 2) Extremely idiotic plot, with the zombie outbreak having somehow been completely forgotten about in the 14-15 years before the first scene and the rest of the movie. The remainder of the storyline then focuses on an awkward romance between the two lead characters, with the second zombie outbreak not happening until roughly the last half-hour of the movie.
 * 3) The event which kicks off the storyline is completely nonsensical. The zombified Abbott Hayes wanders out into the road in front of the teenagers' van, far enough away that they could have easily stopped before hitting him, yet the teenagers completely freak out, then the guy driving the van panics and somehow steers the van off a cliff that clearly wasn't there in the previous shot. Then, in the next scene, we find out that they didn't even bother to start digging the graves for the teenagers until the night after the funeral, which allows Hayes to kill one of the gravediggers, then re-animate him and the teenagers.
 * 4) For some reason there are two time-skips in the movie. The first skip (from 1986 to 2000) is understandable enough, but the second one (from 2000 to 2001) is completely pointless. Presumably this was intended to explain why the teenagers look so decayed, but this just ends up creating the even bigger plot hole of Hayes and his new zombies apparently just standing around in a barn for a year before deciding to attack the town.
 * 5) Very few of the characters are in any way likeable. The movie expects us to feel bad for the teenagers getting killed, even though this happens right after they defile the grave of Hayes' mother.
 * 6) * The grave of the killer's mother being defiled by some drunken teenagers is also ripped off from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.
 * 7) For no reason that's ever explained, the main villain, Abbott Hayes, is apparently some kind of "super-zombie" who has a much higher level of intelligence, can survive injuries that would kill other zombies, reanimate people who are dead but not zombified, and even teleport.
 * 8) * What we do learn of Hayes' backstory is pretty ridiculous; apparently he started murdering people because his mother had wanted a girl, and so made him dress up and act like one. This is also a rip-off of the main killer's backstory from Sleepaway Camp.
 * 9) Terrible acting throughout, with the exception of only Tom Savini and Jamie McCoy. It doesn't help that all the dialog in the movie was redubbed in post-production, sometimes not even by the same actors who appeared on-screen.
 * 10) The dialog is extremely stilted and unnatural, often because it was rewritten in post-production in order to provide bits of exposition that were in scenes which got cut.
 * 11) Aggressively awful cinematography, with most of the scenes being too bright, too dark, or being rendered unwatchable by bad use of color filters, and the camerawork being so bad that it often looks like a home movie. According to director Tor Ramsey, the camera team were so incompetent that one major sequence had to be scrapped because they didn't even load the film into the camera correctly, and didn't discover this mistake until it was too late.
 * 12) The soundtrack, while not terrible, sounds very dated, like something you'd expect to hear in a 1980s horror movie.
 * 13) The climactic zombie attack is incredibly underwhelming, involving just a dozen or so zombies, and the three main characters hiding in a diner. It then leads to the ridiculous sight of a posse arriving and taking refuge inside the diner despite the posse outnumbering the zombies. If they'd all opened fire on the zombies when they arrived, the movie would have been over. Instead, it carries on just so that the deputy can die in a heroic sacrifice.
 * 14) * The deputy's sacrifice is meant to be him earning redemption for not backing up Hughes in his fight against Hayes during the 1986 incident. However, Hughes didn't even bother to tell anyone what he was doing, making it his own fault that he got killed. On top of that, Hayes is a apparently an indestructible super-zombie, meaning that it wouldn't have made any difference if Hughes had any back-up; they would probably have both ended up either dead or zombified.
 * 15) Sequel-baiting ending, which shows that Abbott Hayes survived.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Tom Savini is entertaining as Deputy Hughes, even if he does get killed off early in the storyline.
 * 2) The make-up and gore effects are pretty decent.
 * 3) The opening sequence is a lot better than the rest of the movie, despite the opening few minutes using a really bad day-for-night filter.

Trivia

 * Director Tor Ramsey publicly disowned the movie after its release, revealing that writer-producer Karen Lee Wolf had been gifted its budget from her father, a successful producer who had executive produced A Nightmare on Elm Street, among other movies. Wolf threatened to fire anyone who suggested any changes to her screenplay, made up much of the crew from personal friends who were unqualified to work on the movie, then fired Ramsey and editor Tom Dubensky after filming finished, and completely changed the movie's story in post-production.