Dead Life

Without comparing this to any other zombie film out there, this was one of the worst movies I've ever watched. The acting was bad, and that could be attributed to this being the actors first film ever. The lighting was very very bad, it appears throughout the movie that they are trying to use natural lighting, if that's the case, why shoot the film in shady areas or late in the day? Most of the time you can't see the actors expressions or faces because of the shadows. The special effects are horrible in most places, sometimes the blood is red, sometimes it's black. You see a lot of blood that looks black and congealed running out of one wound while there's fresh red blood running out of another wound (This being on the same body at the same time). The story doesn't run very smoothly at all with dialog being forced to move the plot along. One or two of these things in an independent movie isn't enough to kill it, IF the remaining factors are strong enough to carry the weak points of the film. When you have all negative points in one movie, the movie sucks.

If you do compare this to other low budget zombie movies out there (Braindead or Dead And Breakfast to name two), it doesn't even begin to compare and ends up looking like a High School students weekend project that is paid for with his allowance.

Bottom Line: Don't Rent, Don't Buy, If it's on cable late at night watch an infomercial instead.

Dead Life is without a doubt the saddest attempt at film-making I have ever witnessed.

From a technical viewpoint, this film is a mess. The image quality varies greatly throughout the entire movie, sometimes switching to black and white for no apparent reason. The computer graphic scene is reminiscent of an early Atari game.

The soundtrack is out of sync during much of the film, and it's quality fluctuates.

The plot is thin and hard to follow. It is often impossible to understand the motivation for the actors actions.

The skill of the actors makes it painfully clear that they were chosen for their ability to arrive on the set, rather than talent.

This film is full of inconsistencies, hair length and clothing change inexplicably, the same extras appear in two consecutive scenes, supposedly miles away...

The list could go on, but I'm getting bored with this review, just as I was when watching this poor excuse for entertainment.

After watching Dead Life, I was surprised to find that it wasn't made as a middle school drama class project.

I'm a big fan of B movies, but Dead Life is an F at best.

Zombie movies, they've been with us for a long time. They are easy to make too. All you need is a camera, 6 or 8 friends living to wear raggedly clothes stained with stage blood; 4 or 5 other friends willing to run around a scream; some offal from a local butcher's shop and some guns with blank cartridges. Put them all together and presto, you are ready to make a zombie movie.

That's not to say that all zombie movies are GOOD though; and that brings me to the movie I am here to-night to talk about, William Victor Schotten's DEAD LIFE. This movie is bad! No, I mean REAL bad! It's not even so-bad-it's-good!

It starts with a young boy named Maxx who watches his dad go insane and kill himself. Dad was a worker at a chemical plant that was working on some mysterious toxin . . . but I am getting ahead of myself. Many years later Maxx is all grown up (and played by Michael Hanton). He and his buddies don't do much more than sit around, drink beer, listen to heavy metal music, complain about how bored they are and lie about their sex lives. Life gets a little more interesting when one of Maxx's buddies is attacked by a weird looking guy with silver skin (note to director: zombies are supposed to have a gray complexion!) and oozing a black fluid from his mouth. Pretty soon the guys are noticing more and more people with rotting faces and an appetite for blood. Luckily this is Redneckville, USA and everybody has a gun so defending themselves is no problem. Problem is, these infected people are tough! Nothing stops 'em except . . . all together now . . . a bullet to the brain. Finally the good 'ol boys figure out that somehow the recently dead are coming back to life as . . . now let's all say it together folks . . . flesh eating zombies!

Their town is pretty much toast by the time they figure this out so it's time to hit the road. While looking for a safe place they meet up with a doctor who tells them the zombies were created by a disease called Necrotising Faceitis M, which is an actual disease that the filmmakers embellished. The adult zombies eat flesh because their minds have been corrupted by bigotry, greed, corruption and all the things we experience when we grow up. Child zombies don't eat flesh because they have retained their innocence. Sound logical to you? It does? Good because it sounds like a load of tripe to me!

Well anyway the guys can't decide if they want to go live on a deserted island or in the desert. By the end of the picture it becomes a moot point anyway.

The plot is really off the wall, acting talent is non-existent; the zombies are . . . well . . . as convincing as any zombie is capable of being. Near the end of the film we even get to see a zombie clown with tears of blood leaking through his makeup (symbolism?) being followed by a bunch of living dead children, one of who is carrying a huge teddy bear. Somebody in the production crew was very fond of the Japanese cyber-punk subgenre because whenever someone turns into a zombie the camera is undercranked while they shake their heads violently back and forth. I have noticed this in movies like TETSUO THE IRON MAN and PINOCCHIO 964.

There are a lot of zombie movies out there now like FEEDING THE MASSES, DAY OF THE DEAD II, SHAUN OF THE DEAD and many more. With so many to choose from you can skip this movie and you will not have missed a thing.

For years, I've bemoaned the switch from film to digital video for low-budget horror movies, but I'd rather watch anything shot on video than watching the waste of film that is Dead Life. Don't be fooled when I say this movie is shot on film. It seriously looks like it was shot on a 1950s 8mm camera. It's perpetually grainy, dark, fuzzy, and shaky, and not in an artsy way. My $200 video camera looks infinitely better than this. The video quality is appropriate, however, as it's matched in wretchedness by every other facet of this stink-fest. The sound is murky and undecipherable, the acting is strictly amateur hour, the characters are paper-thin with no distinction or purpose, the story is non-existent, the dialog is a completely worthless bore, there's nothing remotely scary, and the special effects (including a couple of computer effects that look like they were made on a Commodore 64) are laughable. Or, at least, I wish they were laughable. That would've at least made for some sort of enjoyment instead of the utter torture of this (high school) student film. It's movies like this -- cheap and devoid of any real effort to uphold the horror legacy, but which get cherry spots on Blockbuster shelves because they're packaged with slick cover art -- that give horror movies in general (and zombie movies in particular) a bad name, and that make horror fans so wary. Disgraceful!

A terrible unprofessional looking film with an awful script,scene chewing acting and cartoonish "special effects".The plot is a silly unexplained mix of zombies and skin disease with the characters mostly standing around in a house and wondering what is happening while their neighbors all mill around outside and shake their heads really really fast.I guess the fast head shaking is supposed to scare us or something.I'm mostly scared I'll accidentally rent another movie made by this crew.

This film is embarrassingly bad and not in that "so bad its good" kinda way either.

Avoid this mess like you would a big steaming pile of dog dookie.