Tag Archives: journey

The Dead (2010)

For starters, I have to say that I’m surprised that this tile wasn’t already used by some previous zombie film. Maybe it was and I’m just not aware of it, but let’s get into it, shall we?

RATING – Yellow Puss, nearly Green Ooze – The Dead is an interesting film among Z-films.

Somewhere off the coast of war-torn West Africa a plane-load of American soldiers are evacuating.  The plane crashes in an area where the night before a horde of zombies attacked villages through the area — and US military engineer, Lieutenant Brian Murphy, is the only survivor.

With no other options and limited resources,  Lieutenant Murphy starts to walk his way out of the country. Yeah, it’s The Journey, but for this film it works rather well. Amid a country of zombies there are very few humans — often called ‘survivors‘ — and our engineer finds and teams up with a regional soldier, Daniel, who is gone AWOL and looking for his son.  In time, Daniel asks Brian to locate his son.  And that’s all I’ll tell you about this as to not give any spoilers….

If National Geographic made a zombie film, it would look like this…

Here’s the thing about this film and my review — call it a confession if you will — I did not get to write my review after watching it, and I had a lot of good things to say during the viewing. Once I got around to writing I got very busy with Xmas holiday stuff and touring the state of Washington as a guest player with a Celtic-rock band — I did not have time to re-watch and better-write my review, but I will tell you this …

Remember kids, always brush your teeth.

This film has an unexpected element and rather different charactre among Z-films. It wasn’t a great film but it was a good film, and frankly it was hard not to give it a Green Ooze rating. It also gives some beautiful views of parts of Burkina Faso and Ghana. If you are a zombie film fan, The Dead is a must-watch.

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Addendum

Yes — an ADDENDUM!  Why?  Because I wrote and published this before, and somehow it survived a hard drive crash I had, but it didn’t originally get posted when I moved my website.  ANYWAY… Take a look at the Wikipedia page for this film regarding the production — it’s nearly amazing the film even got made…

The cast and crew encountered many problems.  Shooting was planned for 6 weeks — it took 12!  First there was a delay in shipping the equipment to Africa which added 3 weeks.  The lead actor, Rob Freeman, contracted malaria and almost died in the middle of filming.  Additional delays were caused by major damage to camera equipment.  Howard J. Ford — one of the directors — later published a book, titled Surviving the Dead (2012), that detailed the troubled production.

The Vanguard (2008)

Yellow Puss

I’m not sure if this is a Z-film.  Mashing together a few online summations of this film (mostly from IMDB) consists of … Zombie

The year is 2015.  Overpopulation and famine have plunged our planet into chaos.  One desperate survivor — an enigmatic man — journeys through this apocalyptic world hunted and pursued by hordes of rage-crazed zombies.

Frankly, that sounds like a pretty cool film — not to mention that we’ve seemed to survive that 2015 issue — but my perception was …. different. Zombie

In some respects The Vanguard seems to be a psychological abstract art-house film with black comedy bits — not to mention the presence of humans who have been medicated by some controlling corporation which turns them into mindless wondering killers, which strikes me as a possible different approach to ZOMBIES.

Mind you, the zombies are on the peripheral to the story and they look like they were created using left-over make-up from either of the Evil Dead films.  And what the heck the story of the film has to do with its cool name …. I haven’t a clue! Zombie

Frankly, this looks like another DIY flick.  Looking at IMDB …. it’s written and directed by Matthew Hope it’s classified as a low budget film … it appears to have been acted using friends and volunteers, and possibly assembled on a used iMac — but this was well done.  I liked it and I’m happy having seen it only once.

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