The Dead
If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I was at last weekend's Grimm Up North festival to talk zombies after the Sunday afternoon screening of The Dead, the Ford Brothers' Africa-set zombie movie. I thought it was a fascinating, yet strangely unsatisfactory film which is certainly worth your time. Here's the trailer. Click the link below the video for my full thoughts.
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An evacuation flight crashes off the coast of Africa leaving sole survivor Air Force Engineer Lieutenant Brian Murphy (played by Rob Freeman) stranded in an inhospitable landscape filled with the walking dead. The Dead follows Murphy as he fights to reach civilization and escape from his hellish surroundings. Along the way he meets a local sergeant, Daniel Dembele. Dembele's village has been devastated by the dead, and he's in no better position than Murphy. The two men are forced to work together to survive.
Shot on 35mm and filmed at some remarkable locations in Burkina Faso, West Africa, Ghana and the Sahara Desert, The Dead is, without question, one of the most beautiful zombie movies I've ever seen. The opening shots and the first zombie reveal (glimpsed in the trailer) are magnificent, and the high visual standards are maintained throughout. The living dead themselves are well realised and are reminiscent of classic Romero zombies from Dawn of the Dead (yes, the blue-faced Savini creations from the original, not the CGI-enhanced corpses from the Zack Snyder remake). Although there are plenty of gruesome injuries on show – broken bones jutting out through wounds, plenty of head shots and the like – the effects are deceptively simple with the dead having little more than a deathly pallor and piercing blue-white, alien-like eyes. They are classic slow-moving, silent corpses which shuffle relentlessly towards the living, and their noiseless appearance is frequently genuinely unsettling. You can keep your fast-moving corpses, thank you very much – the zombies in The Dead reminded me why they're such a terrifying screen monster: determined, driven and unstoppable. They exist only to destroy.
It's a shame, therefore, that the movie as a whole doesn't quite live up to its extraordinary visual style. The two leads give perfunctory performances, but in fairness, they're given very little to work with. Murphy's quest, in particular, is unclear, and as a result it's difficult to make any real connection with the character. That's a shame, because it robs the film of any tension and reduces the effect of what should have been a story filled with strong emotion. The character of Dembele fairs a little better, and there's a decent chemistry between the two men, but it's not enough to sustain the movie and drive it forward.
In spite of my reservations, The Dead really does feel like a breath of fresh air for the genre. It's a film that's well worth watching – it's worth a thousand Resident Evils, for example. It's visually stunning, sounds superb, and is a genuine and heartfelt attempt to remind us why, beyond all the blood and gore, zombies can be so damn terrifying.
The film's official site is here, and the movie is available on DVD in the UK.
The Dead is a post from: David Moody - author of HATER, DOG BLOOD and the AUTUMN series
