A few years back the uber popular
horror film magazine Fangoria started releasing low budget films
direct-to-DVD. At first it was compilations of short horror films that played
at their Weekend of Horror conventions. Then they moved on to feature length
films. Dead Meat is one of them.
This extremely idiotic story takes place in Ireland, where a rare strain of mad cow disease has turned the local townsfolk into bloodthirsty zombies after eating the beef. A mousy chick and her beau are driving through this sparsely populated area when they accidentally run over one of these zombies, and after the boyfriend is attacked and bitten she teams up with a local farmer who knows just what the ghouls are and how to stop them.
It's an extremely short (75 minutes) little diversion that
has some good moments and a lot of bad ones. For every nicely directed and
executed stalker scene there's three ridiculously retarded scenes like when an
infected cow attacks a car and devours one of the heroes like a shark, or when
a zombie is killed by sucking its eyeball out with a vacuum cleaner. These
parts were so stupefying that I just sat there, mouth agape trying to figure
out why the filmmakers thought that would be scary or cool.
The acting is so-so, but it's hard to gauge a performance when the actors speak with such heavy Irish accents that it's nearly impossible to decipher what's being said. More than once I had to re-watch a section just to figure out what I'd just heard.
I really liked the fact that it takes place mainly
outdoors at some nicely picked locations in Ireland. The fact that it was
filmed in autumn really gave the environment a nice creepy vibe with all the
yellowish colors everywhere. The gore effects are decent too, but the zombie
make-up is quite lame. It looks like Paper Mache stuck to the actor's faces.
Another minus is that the flick just kind of ends. No real resolution to what's taken place over its short run time, just a loud clutter of noise and commotion and then the end credits start.
If allowed to play out for another 15 minutes it might have been decent, but the film that I watched, while it has some good points like nice cinematography and locations, is just too short and too dumb to be all that entertaining.
1.5 out of 5
This extremely idiotic story takes place in Ireland, where a rare strain of mad cow disease has turned the local townsfolk into bloodthirsty zombies after eating the beef. A mousy chick and her beau are driving through this sparsely populated area when they accidentally run over one of these zombies, and after the boyfriend is attacked and bitten she teams up with a local farmer who knows just what the ghouls are and how to stop them.
The acting is so-so, but it's hard to gauge a performance when the actors speak with such heavy Irish accents that it's nearly impossible to decipher what's being said. More than once I had to re-watch a section just to figure out what I'd just heard.
Another minus is that the flick just kind of ends. No real resolution to what's taken place over its short run time, just a loud clutter of noise and commotion and then the end credits start.
If allowed to play out for another 15 minutes it might have been decent, but the film that I watched, while it has some good points like nice cinematography and locations, is just too short and too dumb to be all that entertaining.
1.5 out of 5
*written 11/3/05
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