The Dead Reviews
Dread Central
The Dead reveres the films that came before it and wears its love for them on its sleeve.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
KPBS.org
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.
Charlotte Observer
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A long, chemistry-free slog through the zombified countryside.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
The Dead, with its vast, pitiless landscapes and moral seriousness, is Night of the Living Dead reimagined as a Sergio Leone western. It's a knockout.
Slant Magazine
The ironies of the white man having to face potential extinction in a country infamous for racially tinged violence is too neat.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Austin Chronicle
The film provides a whole new way of looking at the same old dead things. Eat up.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Los Angeles Times
Top Critic"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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Beyond its auspicious premise -- survivors fighting a zombie outbreak against the continent's scorching vistas -- there's little else to chew on here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Total Film
With its desiccated plains and rotting crops, the Africa depicted in the Ford Brothers' zombie flick proves an evocative setting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Observer [UK]
The film's rough edges contribute to the film's disconcerting rawness.
Daily Telegraph
More marks for effort than achievement are notched up here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
This is London
Film-makers Howard J Ford and his brother Jonathan have shot the scenery well, but since the undead are everywhere the quest for safety becomes repetitive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Guardian [UK]
The low-budget zombie movie market may have long since reached saturation point, but this one displays some talent, style, intelligence and imagination, proving that in the right hands there's still plenty of life in the genre yet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
FEARnet
The directors do a very fine job of keeping things creepy and consistently unsettling while trying to make their larger points.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Little White Lies
The Ford brothers' zombie apocalypse is the better for being told so straight - although its adherence to Romero's shuffling conventions does not extend to the film offering any coherent contemporary social commentary.
