A Fantastic Fest ’10 review
Cast:
Rob Freeman as Lt. Brian Murphy
Prince David Oseia as Daniel
Directed by Howard J. Ford.
Review:
For better or for worse, The Dead will always be known as much for the behind-the-scenes brouhaha that surrounded its release as the merits of the movie itself. Infamously, co-director Jonathan Ford had a few too many drinks one night after reading negative comments on an article about its trailer at the website Twitch and launched into an “anonymous” tirade that was later revealed, and very publicly disputed, by Todd Brown, one of that site’s editors. Truth be told, I was entirely unfamiliar with this cloudburst in a chatroom before Fantastic Fest, but after witnessing Ford and Brown literally battle out their differences in a boxing ring, I was intrigued to find out whether the movie’s prospects would benefit or be wrecked by the off screen drama.
While not (as Ford apparently claimed in one of his comments) equal to classics of its genre such as Dawn of the Dead, The Dead is a perfectly serviceable zombie film that fails to utilize its unique locale well enough, but nevertheless conjures a sense of encroaching dread consistently enough to create more than a few frightening moments.
The film stars Rob Freeman as Lt. Brian Murphy, a military mechanic who survives a crash of the last plain out of all of Africa only to discover that he’s stranded, alone and unprotected, in the middle of a zombie outbreak. Carefully navigating his way to a nearby town, he manages to get an abandoned automobile working, and sets out to find an airstrip or military base where he can radio for help. Before long, he crosses paths with Daniel (Prince David Oseia), an African soldier searching for his wife and son, the two men agree to help one other. But as zombie hordes continue to approach from all sides, their journey across the beautiful but barren African landscape becomes ever more perilous, and they are forced to decide whether escape or rescue is more important â that is, if they survive at all.
The last decade has seen more than its share of zombie movies, and most of them weren’t worth the celluloid they were printed on. Mercifully, The Dead is actually pretty good, at least in the sense that the characters more regularly make smart choices than stupid ones, and the tension is maintained consistently by reminding the audience that the living characters are basically always in danger of being attacked and eaten by the dead. I never felt betrayed by the edges of the frame, which in less competent directors’ hands offered enough forced perspective to provide a few jump scares, and the overall atmosphere was one of dread and inevitability than shock and surprise.
What’s most admirable about the film is that it never lets up â meaning there are always, always zombies around, no matter how safe things seem. Rather than exploiting that for an exhausting series of nail-biting scenarios, however, directors Jonathan and Howard Ford (who also co-wrote the script) simply observe that almost any experience becomes more intense when there’s pressure applied, and they do that with an indefatigable string of zombified extras, who creep at varying speeds towards the main characters whenever they stop for supplies, to repair their vehicle, or otherwise need to rest.
On the other hand, as picturesque as the African locations are for the film, the Ford brothers do precious little with them more than capture them beautifully. Early criticisms of The Dead suggested that it was racist to make a movie about a white American soldier who kills black African zombies, but notwithstanding the (presumed) geographic authenticity, there’s nothing offensive (to me, anyway) about this scenario. The problem with it, however, is that the landscape is “new” to zombie movies for the sake of being new, but adds nothing thematically or conceptually to the story, which is otherwise very conventional.
Not that I would have wanted something more pointedly racial-tinged, but particularly at this late date in the horror subgenre’s history, I was hoping that a new context (or even just a new locale) would create different challenges than “zombies are attacking, shoot them in the head. Oh, we’re in a damn desert.”
As a whole, it is not inconsiderable to make a zombie movie that doesn’t think it’s too clever, is well-shot and constructed, and manages to be fairly entertaining. But it doesn’t change the face of horror filmmaking, or raze all known expectations of zombie movies, or qualitatively surpass any of the subgenre’s existing standard-bearers. As such, the biggest issue I have with The Dead is embodied in its title: if you want to see just any old zombie movie, this one successfully meets the genre’s most basic visceral, technical and narrative standards, but if you want one that, if you’ll excuse the pun, breathes new life into its conventions, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.
