The Dead

Shot in Africa against some truly stunning locales, The Dead is another great addition to the growing library of zombie movies out there. Whilst it is run and gun type movie, the sheer fact that the production crew even made a movie like this with so many sequences shot outside in broad daylight really showed guts and it’s a great effort with much of what you would expect in a Hollywood production of the same sort. 

I enjoyed the heck out of this movie for both the fact that it is admirably courageous in the way that it presents the story but also the chilling way that we realise that this massive swath of land is simply brimming with the undead. It takes its time with telling us the story too, taking well over twenty five to thirty minutes before even bringing our main protagonists together. 

Some viewers might be uncomfortable with seeing hordes of black people being gunned down by a white man, even though this movie stars both a white man and an African who both gun down the shambling zombies as they fight to make their way to safety and find loved ones. I think viewers simply need to remember that there is no political message in the film and the ethnicity of the zombies is simply based on where the movie is shot. 

The look of the feature is grainy and that suits the tone perfectly. Colours are pretty awesome and the landscapes are shot to great advantage. Makeup effects are great for the zombies, who are always the stars in movies like this and the directors have gone old school but using the slow shambling zombies that the industry has shied away from for a few years now. It is the sheer number of the undead that are truly the threat in this movie as they make their painstaking way toward unwilling human flesh. 

The only letdown at all is some elements of the sound in this movie. I felt that not enough was down with the soundtrack to really drag us into the movie against our own free will and that ultimately we could have been set up for more shocks if the right noises had been coming out of the speakers. Scare moments are set up pretty well with sound but just maybe could have had more done with them. 

This is a really cool movie and one worth adding to your collection if you are a fan of the genre.