The film revolves around the life of Lieutenant Murphy, whose plane is destroyed. Murphy is the engineer of the United States Air Force. He has to turn the gauntlet across the African landscape after the crash. Murphy must always fight.
"The Dead," evocatively filmed in grainy 35mm, might carry the cinematic vibe of an old-school, flesh-eating adventure, but as it should be with stories like this, it's not a pretty picture.
The Dead is not the great zombie film I was hoping for but it does deliver a more grown-up horror film that eschews gimmicky shakycam and CGI to try and tell a real story, and for that I am appreciative.
You get used to the sight of the slow-moving undead swaying against the film's natural landscapes like half-imagined phantoms, and somehow that makes them more unnerving.
The Ford brothers' take on this tradition offers a fair number of shocks and the arm-chomping that is de rigueur mortis for this genre. Yet it has things to say, mostly by implication, before a finish that took me by surprise.
New York Times
October 13, 2011
A long, chemistry-free slog through the zombified countryside.
