THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

On the tail-end of a failing marriage, a down-on-his-luck musician accompanies his nephew on a school trip to a petting zoo in Australia. Alongside the teacher and a popular children's TV personality, he must struggle to protect the young kids in the midst of a very unexpected, Zombie outbreak.

MY VERDICT:

Despite the very encouraging words of praise this movie has received, I really, really do not like it. It starts going downhill at the very opening of the film with two people in a disastrous marriage constantly arguing - which is, in all honesty as this bickering continues, simply unpleasant to watch. However, it's not all doom and gloom as things do pick up when the Zombies appear, but, unfortunately, not by much. The deadheads look extremely convincing with remarkable make-up for such a clearly low-budget film and one concept I really like is how the story is advanced through army chatter heard through the walkie-talkie attached to the belt of a Zombified soldier. There are also a few funny moments too - none really laugh-out-loud - although, for a movie billed as a comedy, these are disappointingly infrequent. The film is not afraid to throw believability out-the-window either; at one point, a spade effectively becomes a katana as the heroine slashes the heads off Zombies using the simple garden tool and no apparent effort. My main complaint though is how criminally underused the "cool-looking" Zombies are; nearly the entire second half of the movie consists of several annoying children and three, slightly less annoying, adults trapped in a gift shop, the Zombies ineffectually banging on the walls outside - which, to be honest, is fairly boring. There is actually so little action or anything other than the 'school trip gets caught out in a Zombie outbreak' gimmick that, in the end, I was eager for the film to end - there can be no harsher criticism than that!