Review: The Dead - 2010

The Dead

Director: Howard J. Ford, Jonathan Ford

2010

Horror

Somewhere in Africa the dead start coming back to life. No one knows why and the main thing is to survive. An American soldier – an engineer, gets left behind when the aircraft supposed to take him and other Americans home explode. He is the sole survivor! He soon teams up with a local soldier looking for his son. They decide to help each other even if they’re really enemies in the war prior to the zombie outburst.

The first few minutes of this movie makes a really great impression. The makeup is great and there’s no humor at all to be found. You wonder what really happened and what’s going to happen and it´s really interesting. Unfortunate for the plot there are very few explanations given. And I don’t mean that you’re supposed to be told why the dead walks the earth once more. You´re not usually told this in any zombie flick anyway. But I need some motivation of the main characters. I know what they´re after and what their goals are but it isn’t enough. It gets boring and a few zombies here and there don’t make up for it.

I think it’s great that the film is set in Africa. Black zombies are very rare in most zombie films but here they´re in majority of course. The makeup continues to be great and I really like the way the zombies are made. But it gets boring. There are very little dialog in the film and it´s kind of slow paced too. In the end it seems rather pointless but it was very well made and that’s the entertaining part of it. I wish I’d liked it more than I did, because it has true potential. And it’s way better than most amateurish zombie stuff out there. Too bad the script was such a mess.

I know I stated it to be a horror film above because I can’t say that it’s not. But it’s not made as a horror film at all. There are no really scary effects even if they are great! The drama is all wrong for and it’s more of a post apocalyptic film than a zombie flick really. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and I find the intention of this uplifting but It didn’t succeed all the way.

6/10

The Swedish DVD cover is by far superior don't you think?