2004 (Ireland)
Contains spoilers.
'Old O'Conner had a
farm, ee-i-ee-o, and on that farm he had some cows ee-i-ee-o. With a
mooeerrgghhhh mooeerrgghhhhhere here, a mooeerrgghhhh mooeerrgghhhh there. Here
a mooeerrgghhhh, there a mooeerrgghhhh, everywhere a mooeerrgghhhh
mooeerrgghhhh. Old O'Conner had a farm, ee-i-ee-o.' Zombie cows eh, that's a
new one, and yes it sounds ridiculous, hell, it is ridiculous, but at least it
gives debut Director / Writer Conor McMahon's otherwise rather samey low budget
bland zombie Night of the Living Dead remake, something unique that one will
remember it by.
Mad Cow Disease or
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a rather nasty neurodegenerative disease
that came to wide spread attention in the eighties, especially in the UK after
some bright spark thought the best way to feed cows on the cheap was to offer them
the culinary delight that was the brains and spinal cords of cows that may or
may not be already infected. Anyway, after 180,000 infected, a cull of 4.4
million and the meat entering the human food chain, mutating into
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and killing 177, farmers decided that maybe they
should stick to grass.
So what does this
have to do with Dead Meat? Well, Dead Meat in a playful twist on real life
events, has cows rather than stagger about dumbly as their brains turn to
mush, instead turn into homicidal bovine butcherers hell bent on rampaging
across the green fields of County Leitrim, Ireland, looking for people to bite
and spread the epizootic-love too. Dead Meat is also a clever play on words to both
point to the dead meat fed to the cows in the first place, and the state couple
Helena (Marián Araújo) and Martin (David Ryan) and the scant other survivors
find themselves in, as they battle to stay one step ahead of the ever increasing
horde / herd.
One has to always
frame reviews of film projects such as this in context. Financed in part by an Irish Film Board grant, it was filmed in just three weeks
under frugal conditions making use of the production crew's own vehicles and sets and reliant on the good nature of locals who agreed to
act as last minute extras. What I'm saying is, it was never going to be able to directly compete production wise, with the many
million dollar franchises I've also reviewed. But the one thing independent films like this do have in their favour is
the ability to be highly original, so the fact other than having zombie cows, it's all rather formulaic, is a disappointment.
On the one hand,
like I said, we have a fairly safe Irish take on Night of the Living Dead; a
couple get lost, the girl gets away and is harried across the countryside by an
ever increasing undead presence until she meets up with a few other survivors
before we have the big final siege. It's
well shot, pretty well acted and competently put together with some real
attention to spice things up with gnarly bits of Fulci-esque gore-porn and
pulls off the remake. On the other hand it tries a bit too hard at times to be
a bit Evil Dead with dark and zany elaborate kills that just
end up feeling out of place, and an odd-ball couple who feel like they've just
dropped in straight from the set of Father Ted. The humour just never really
gels with the competent little survival horror idling along in the background, taking over scenes and
detracting from the flow.
This identity crisis
travels over into the zombies themselves. The first gut muncher we come across
is traditional picture perfect. He gets run over, his pulse is clearly marked
as past-tense, he rises again devoid of humanity and takes a bite. The second
however is a little more refined. He can wield a weapon, use a tool to break
down a door and knows enough to stand on a hand to keep his victim in place, while he un-sticks said weapon
to take another swipe. He's more homicidal crazy with a modicum of self-awareness and
intelligence than primal gut muncher, as are the weapon wielding
Irish-hill-billies that suddenly come tumbling into the arena to join the chase.
And it's like this through the film, one minute it's a Romero plodder slowly
and inevitably closing in, the next it's a screaming gurgling crazy (who might not actually be dead). Add to this the hint that the cows may actually be
some kind of bovine-puppet-masters with the ability to organise the infected to
group and attack en masse and we're left with an enemy that feels a bit thrown
together at the last minute; I should add they look that way too.
A bit of a confused
mess Conor McMahon's film making and core narrative do manage to salvage the
film enough to be above the usual mediocre low budget zombie cash-ins. It's not
a film I could hand on heart ever recommend, but if you happen to find
it on and can't be bothered to stretch for the remote to find something else,
rest assured you will be entertained, the action is well scripted, the gore and effects show attention to detail, the acting is solid and there are more than a few moments that will stick in your head once the credits roll. An
unspectacular amateur action / horror, Dead Meat is overall okay, and sometimes that's enough - 4/10.
Steven@WTD.
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