THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

The world (or at least Britain) is engulfed in a Zombie apocalypse. A single survivor of the onslaught has remained hidden in a secluded hillside fort - he's been lucky. However, when a strange traveller wanders up to the protective walls and immediately collapses, the lone survivor discovers a book among the traveller's belongings. This is no ordinary story though - it charts the entire undead uprising, revealing its hideous perpetrator. As the survivor reads the battered pages, his luck takes a change for the worse.

MY VERDICT:

This movie is a real rollercoaster ride of quality - starting well, becoming abysmal, steadily rising to greatness and then dropping off again at the end. It's quite a strange movie; instead of one over-arching narrative, you get three short sub-plots within the whole Zombie apocalypse theme held loosely together by the survivor reading from the titular Book of the Dead he collected from the passed-out traveller. The film does quite well at relating each 'story' to the others with returning characters appearing in each one and it does mimic the literal 'journey through a book' mentality though I would have preferred more action outwith the book's universe, in the real-world where the main character is reading. This sub-plot approach, also results in the quality varying substantially. The acting in the first 'story' is dreadful - and I mean real "turn it off and watch something else" style bad. It picks up in the second 'story', before nailing it with the third. The conclusion of that third and final story shifts the focus back to the lone survivor and mysterious traveller, revealing the truth behind the dramatic events though, unfortunately, it's just not that exciting - a bit anticlimactic and disappointing compared to the rest of the film. Still, the film does provide one really cool and fairly original, yet miserably underdeveloped, concept - the Zombie uprising is the product of a seemingly unstoppable human-like demon, the embodiment of evil and darkness, awakened from its awful slumber beneath the ground by mankind not fearing the night anymore, a leader to the unholy army of the dead it has created and the singular terror that will return fear to a world of electricity and endless light.