The Dead

This a very interesting film and it just shows how a change in location can energize a tired genre. The Dead is set in Africa. A virus or something has gone nuts and people have turned zombie. Whole areas of Africa are being quarantined.  An American Air Force Engineer is busy evacuating himself out of the hot zone when his plane crashes.  He's the only survivor and soon he's on the run from the dead.  He meets up with an African soldier who's looking for his son.  Together these two make their way through a biological hell.

A lot of films like this would make the two men into opposites in someway to create that mismatched friendship.  You know you've seen the trailers... "He's a cop, and he's a crook but they'll have to work together to survive...the DEAD!!!!"   Anyway, while they do come from different cultures they share a military discipline and work extremely well together.  They are standoffish to each other at first but there's no hyper drama and while you can't say they become fast friends you can tell that they do respect each other.

The landscape is beautiful and the dead are ugly.  There are haunting scenes like a midnight truck ride where zombies suddenly appear in the head lights.  There's a horrific scene where they have to explore a dark building with just a flashlight.  The pace of the film is deliberately slow and it might put off the zombie fan of films like "Planet Terror."  I like the pace though.  I think it adds tension and gives parts of the film an otherworldly quality.  The violence is hard core but not cartoony or torture porny.  All in all, I really enjoyed this film and definitely would recommend it to any zombie fan.  Oh, it gets a bonus points cause one of the actors is named Prince David Oseia.  He's probably not but it tickles my fancy to think of a prince in a zombie film.