The Dead is beautiful in its ugliness.
Here is a zombie movie with no pretensions to reinvent the genre or inject unneeded creativity into proceedings. It is the purest of pure scenarios where Character X & Y must get from Point A to Point Z on a map – the primary impediment being that all Points in between are infested with zombies.
And genre purist rejoice for the time of shuffling is at hand. These are the most Romero-est of zombies, mindless, numerous, and hungry… They have no rage or desire for violence, driven by base instinct and savage only by necessity, as the quickest way to the sweet blood of a living being is through the outer epidermis into the red goo beyond.
Unfortunately for the living these zombies are like fat people with a KFC bucket – they can never stop at one…
Another significant plus (for me at least) is the fact that the movie opens with no explanations. The zombies are just there, and by there it seems everywhere, at least in West Africa where the film takes place.
Brian is the lone survivor of a crashed plane taking the more privileged (read: white people) away from the bloodthirsty menace. He finds himself alone and smack dab in the middle of The Dead with no means of transport.
Brian teams with Daniel, an African soldier who is looking for his son, who is thought to have survived the initial onslaught and fled North with other uninfected.
After some initial race fueled resentment – Brian is a Caucasian-American and Daniel a black African-African – the duo realise that together they have a better chance of survival so they set off in a busted ute to risk exhaustion, heat, exposure and evisceration. Two guys, two guns and hundreds of miles of zombie rich terrain.
Again The Dead rebels against the standard motifs that have permeated the zombie genre in recent years, there is little infighting aside from bickering caused by stress and exhaustion. No-one learns any significant lessons, unbreakable bonds aren’t formed and they don’t have an epiphany in the finale along the lines of ‘gee maybe we aren’t so different after all’. It is simply a case of the Living Vs the (millions of) Dead.
Winning isn’t the name of the game, merely survival.
Of course there can be no tension if you can simply run past the shuffling undead, so cars won’t start when they should, torches blink and characters steadfastly refuse to look in the right direction until the most perilous last second, all forgivable requirements in such a film. The Dead is like last year’s vampire equivalent Stake Land, it isn’t as well acted, produced and directed – but then zombies have always been the ugly cousin to the pretty-boy vampires – but it is nearly as effective, and in truth remains truer to tone throughout (Stake Land had a couple of disappointing ‘look how cool this is!’ moments at the beginning and end of the film).
For many casual horror fans this probably means that The Dead is booooring, but I for one have grown very tired of sparkling vampires and trainable zombies in recent years, I sometimes prefer everybody shuffling every now and then to remind me that at base level zombies are dogged, vacant and extremely dangerous.
Push beyond the cheap CGI, occasional bad acting and threadbare plot and appreciate The Dead for what it is, a mindless, shuffling, determined zombie movie that demands you use your braaaaaaaiiiinnnnnnsssss.
Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. Who knew the unglamourous side of zombies could be so very pretty?
