THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

An amateur TV crew heads to the site of the battle of the Somme in France to mark the centenary of World War 1. However, what they find there is far more deadly than the story of what happened in the unassuming field 100 years ago. What they find, is the living dead.

MY VERDICT:

This small-scale, found footage movie is surprisingly entertaining and barring a few negatives that can easily be overlooked, I would highly recommend it to Zombie fans that prefer slow-build horror to out-and-out action. The movie starts quite slowly, introducing its characters and they all just seem to belong on the crew of an amateur film-documentary; the cranky director who pushes his staff too hard to try and get the ultimate film shots, the various cameramen who just want to film things - they don't really care about what it is - and the expert historian who desperately wants the film to keep to the facts and be respectful, begrudgingly going along with the sensationalism demanded by the director. There is obvious tension in the air as the movie progresses and the characters begin falling out only for that tension to be reduced when a mysterious object is discovered, bringing a sense of wonder to the group, and then finally shattered completely when the Zombies show up. You never really know, throughout the entire film, where the ravenous dead come from or why they suddenly appear, and this is a major draw for me - harking back to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead where the origin of the ghouls remained a mystery. The Zombies themselves share this old-school reverence by being shambling horrors, often, moving stiffly and clumsily. They all look like soldiers from World War 1 (as fitting for the subject material) and, for the ones you see up-close, have very impressive make-up for a clearly low-budget movie. Now for bits I don't like so much. First of all, the acting is not great all round - you could say this makes the film's characters more believable but a little more enthusiasm would have been nice to see. I did struggle to hear what the characters were saying at points, though, admittedly, the dialogue is not that important in understanding what is going on. Secondly, the film does mix 'camera distortion' into the footage, particularly later on, to show scenes shot on badly damaged cameras - there is just no need for this and it does get annoying.