Review: Dead Meat

0.2This movie has some decent zombie makeup, some poor but passable acting, and some impressive locations for the budget they’re working with. However the script was flat and the whole thing left me feeling cold. The scene where they are attacked by a blood thirsty dairy cow was unacceptable.
Feb 25, 2006
Shambling Corpse
productDead Meat
2004
runtime 80 minutes

Spoiler:
I don’t remember this movie very well. It was so lame I watched a lot of it on fast forward.

A couple is driving through the middle of nowhere in Ireland when they hit someone. They check on the hapless pedestrian and discovered he is dead, little do they know he has been this way since long before they hit him. The guy who was driving gets bitten and subsequently becomes a zombie himself. This has a deleterious effect on the couple’s relationship and the woman takes off running. She wanders through the hills for a while, then gets attacked by a zombie in an empty house where she is saved by a chap with a shovel. This fellow explains he is the local gravedigger and that a new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow disease) has caused the zombies.

They find a little girl whose whole family has turned, and another couple in a jeep. All five of em’ drive around for a while and then the jeep gets stuck in the mud and surrounded by zombies. Just when it looks like it’s all over the zombies run away.

Zombies aren’t afraid of anything, so this is stupid. It turns out the fearsome adversary is a "mad cow". This is stupider. Then the cow pulls one of the women out of the car and eats her, and this is the stupidest thing in the whole damn movie. Even if it were possible for specific brain damage to make the ludicrously docile dairy cow a hyper aggressive beast, that doesn’t change the fact that not one of its four stomachs was meant to eat meat. ITS TEETH AREN’T EVEN SHAPED RIGHT!

When the cow’s hunger slacks, the remaining three are able to run for the dubious shelter of a crumbling castle (hey it’s Ireland). As the castle is surrounded a swat team arrives, and puts the girl in the back of a truck with a bunch of other survivors. Thankfully, the film is over.

Review: Feeding The Masses

Feeding The Masses

2004

This movie promises zombies and satirical political commentary and delivers... crap. The zombies are less than impressive, the budget is low, leaning heavily on poor digital effects, the sociological critique is obvious and heavy handed, and the acting is spectacularly poor.

Spoiler:

The movie opens up on a news cast about current zombie conditions, when it ends we see what’s going on in the studio and we get to know the insipid news crew. The film wastes some time on a failed attempt at character development and then the filming crew is called off to do an interview with the governor. The pothead camera man, the vacuous female anchor and the military escort all go to the capital building and find a pair of armed guards flanking a TV with a prerecorded speech. Why the governor couldn’t just send this tape to the TV station I don’t know. He launches into a speech about how the zombie threat is all but eliminated and people should continue in their day to day routine with no concern. Zombies come and chaos ensues as the television continues its erroneous claims in the midst of the carnage. At gunpoint, a spook steals a tape documenting this scene from the cameraman and the film crew goes back to the station empty handed. They all leave work for the day.

The military escort goes to scary looking guy with a big scar on his face in a creepy basement (this guy is the best actor in the movie, I suspect the scar is real because none of the makeup was that good). The military guy asks if they’ve made up the girl to look like the vacuous anchorwoman he likes. The guy with the scar assures him it’s all as he asked and sits him down in front of a peep show window. There is a woman in a blond wig who takes off her shirt and dances around and the military guy begins to “squeeze the Charmin”. Just before climax he hits a button and a zombie bursts into the room and eats the woman. Meanwhile the cameraman goes back to his apartment and chats with his sickly roommate and goes to bed. The next day when he wakes up the roommate is a zombie and the cameraman narrowly escapes. We neither know nor care what the news woman does when she leaves work.

When they all go back to the office the next day it’s being run by some guy from the government. He tells them that the fraudulent claims of safety in the governor’s speech were necessary because the economic repercussions of people not going to work and not buying things far out weighs the risk of more deaths. There is arguing and the crew leaves. The fed who has taken over the station is doing his own news cast when one of the guys who works there, patches through a live feed for our rag tag trio of protagonists, then dies and becomes a zombie, thus assuring that nobody will change the feed back. The first thing they film is an argument between a funeral director and the creepy guy with a scar. The dispute is over who gets to take away a female zombie that they have captured in a net. The funeral director has been commissioned to re-kill her and give her a proper burial. The guy with the scar presumably wants her for something unseemly. Scar face kills the funeral director and the military escort gets out of the news van and shoots him. The news crew then goes to another part of the city where the zombies are eating the people on a bus, they begin filming but the military guy knocks out the anchorwoman stuffs her into the news van and drives away. The cameraman is only momentarily distraught by his abandonment and then says “Hindenburg, baby.” and films the advancing zombie horde until they take him (even though a determined power walker could outpace them). And that is the disappointing end to the disappointing film.

Review: Dead Men Walking

Dead Men Walking (prison joke, get it?)
2005
Runtime of 82 minutes

This is by far the best zombie movie I have seen as of late. It’s basically 28 days later (not to be confused with 28 days) set in an American prison. This movie has a fairly sharp script, good acting, good production value, a very attractive female lead and an unnecessary topless woman scene (not the attractive female lead but still nice). The victims of the zombie virus cry blood (which is brilliantly creepy) and spend a great deal of time tearing out people’s intestines. This movie has everything you could ask for in a zombie flick.

Spoilers ahoy:

The movie gets right into it, starting out with a guy fighting off half a dozen zombies with a shotgun. He has a close call with the last one and when he blows its head off blood spatters on his face. He shrieks and wipes it off just as the cops burst in wrestle him to the floor and indifferently force his face into the puddle of blood from one of the zombies as they cuff him. The man is taken to a prison hacking and coughing and shortly there after vomits blood onto several people.

An attractive woman from the C.D.C. shows up to examine this man for evidence of contagion but is unable to conduct an interview because, like most undead, he cares for naught but the sweet taste of human flesh. This predilection predictably gets him shot and our comely protagonist is understandably distraught. The warden summons an inmate who was on the bus to the prison along with the un-dead and now dead-dead disease vector. The warden says: “I know you’ve escaped from every other prison you’ve been in, but that Houdini shit isn’t going to work for you here” or something to that effect and tells him a hot chick from the C.D.C. wants to talk to him.

“Yeah that dude was sick as hell. . . OH GOD DID I CATCH IT?” she assures him that she doesn’t know and sends him on his way. Shortly thereafter he escapes, not by regurgitating a set of lock picks or through some feat of MacGyver-esque ingenuity, but by beating the shit out of the incompetent guard escorting him back to his cell and stealing the keys.

By now the half a dozen guys who had blood vomited on them have gotten sick and projectile vomited on a bunch of other people - sort of like the pie eating scene from Stand By Me. Anyway, the whole lot of them have turned into zombies. The prison is locked down, nobody is allowed in or out and C.D.C. a containment team is called.

Next we witness a conjugal visit between some nameless prisoner and his wife. We’ve never seen him before and will only see him once more, when he and his lover are predictably devoured by the zombie horde. “Did you hear that? It was kind of like the anguished moans of a legion of blood thirsty undead” to which he of course responds “No baby that was probably just the air conditioner. Why don’t you take your top off”. And thus the obligatory topless woman scene, which every horror movie demands. As small bands of guards fight off zombies in their respective cell blocks our protagonist tries to make her way toward the front gate to meet and brief the C.D.C. team. She runs into the “escape artist” inmate making his anticlimactic escape and they work together.

There is an unfortunate scene in which a zombie attacks a family that was visiting the prison and the little girl is clearly laughing as the ghoul tries to get at her tasty entrails. The our hero is almost out of the prison when she runs into the recently zombified family. The little girls makeup was poorly applied as if they were afraid to get it anywhere near her eyes. The result is something of a raccoon effect which is the antithesis of scary. I don’t expect a huge amount of professionalism from prepubescent actors, but I do expect film editors to have the wisdom to cut their mediocre performances. As the main chick escapes from the family and runs to the gates waving her arms and yelling to the arriving forces, one of their snipers shoots her in the chest. Credits roll. The end kinda sucked.