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Movie, Review, Zombies

The Dead (2010)

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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.

Movie, Review, Zombies

World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries (2011)

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World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
Remember how the cover for the first film has NOTHING to do with the film? Well, consistency is supposed to be good…

Have you ever had the experience where someone you know excitedly says “Hey, ya gotta see this film!“?  Then once you watch it you’re left thinking “What the heck was that about?”, or worse “There is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with my friend!”  Welcome to to World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2.

Immediately you can tell that this project has a higher budget and is visually more satisfying than the 2006 predecessor.  Then you get into the story and you start to see the problems…

The first thing you notice — as with the original film — is that the DVD cover is once again horribly misleading.  The cover art looks better than the film, and it represents something other than the content of the film.

Field full of zombies
I’m warning you — act like threatening zombies or we’ll shoot you!!!

The zombies feel very non-threatening — even less than in the original film.  The make-up is insufficient, the scares nearly non-existent, and the zombies are often so stiff they would be played better by untrained department store mannequins.  Add to that, when it comes to shooting the zombies I get the impression that the British film makers don’t have a clue as to what firearms sound like anymore (especially in the scene pictured).  The firearm sound effects left me non-pulsed — perhaps they were just the on-location recording of the blanks the actors were firing.

The biggest downfall of the movie…

World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
Yep, they should have stuck with this poster as the DVD cover

… aside from the emaciated plot and the you-are-there hand-held cinematography — are some of the specific content choices that film makers Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates included.  Various gangs of survivors prove to be even more vile than the zombies.  This is well summed up in a review by FlickeringMyth.com when they wrote…

“There are a couple of, frankly, unneeded rape scenes (one on a female zombie) that just felt like Bartlett and Gates wanted to do some kind of rape revenge film, but gave up and worked zombies into it”.

Frankly it left this bagpiper & humble amateur zombie-film reviewer astounded.  I cannot recall feeling this disturbed by any zombie film I have previously seen.  This content included a challenged young man bullied into delivering a beating upon one of the primary male characters, and then pushed into committing a graphic rape/murder on one of the female primaries.  I have to wonder where the writer and his co-director think that this was appropriate, or fit within the film!  I also have to wonder about the actors (or even the crew) assuming they saw the script before they agreed to do the film — why would they participate in bringing this film to fruition?

Is there any redemption for this film?

World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011, gas mask
Me around people who smoke

There are elements to this film that really work — the albeit over-used zombie-trope military element, the military and civilian survivors trying to escape from England, and the guys who ambiguously appear wearing protective suits and gas masks.  However it seems as though Bartlett and Gates thought that their ideas were so great — so sound — that they didn’t think to check their script or finished film with a third party.  And if they did, they didn’t listen to them say “There’s some good stuff here, but over all THIS IS A BAD IDEA.”  Or maybe they just half-assed it and figured this would fill a feature.  In the end, it is as The Daily Mail described the film, it’s an “88 minute waste of electricity”, and I rate it Red Blood.

Seriously, I’m starting to think I ought to make a list titled “Zombie Films To Avoid Watching“.  Do you think I would have this one on it?  YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!

A List Of Words Irrelevant To This Zombie Film
World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
At least you see one of these folks in the film — but destroyed city, a massive horde of zombies? Nope nope-nope!
  • Smash hit
  • Phenomenon

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pew pew pew
pew pew pew!

Movie, Review, Zombies

The Vanguard (2008)

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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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