The Dead – 2010
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 explodes. 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 before the zombie outburst.
The first few minutes of this movie make 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. Unfortunately for the plot, there are very few explanations given. And I don’t mean that you’re supposed to be told why the dead walk the earth once more. You’re not usually told this in any zombie flick anyway. But I need some motivation from 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 the majority, of course. The makeup continues to be great, and I really like the way the zombies are made. But it gets boring. There is very little dialogue 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 it, 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.
Translated from a review I wrote in Swedish some years ago.
