Dead Meat (2004)

Plot Outline: An farmer has been feeding his cattle dead animals which soon leads to an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. Soon the infection has spread from animals to humans, which causes the dead to rise and feast on the living.

The Review: An independent Irish zombie film? First time I've ever heard that attributed to any film but if this is the standards that they can produce, then bring on more! Dead Meat sounds just like your generic Night of the Living Dead rip-off and it begins in exactly the same way as the rest. There's an ordinary couple travelling along the countryside in Ireland when they run over a man who has stumbled into the middle of the road. The man is killed but turns out to be not-so-dead when the couple try and take him to a hospital and thus begins an assault of blood and guts and lots of Irish people swearing. I like simple films like this. It makes a change from real head-scratchers. I like to slip a film in my DVD player and be given just a simple set up on how and why things are happening before unleashing hell with blood and guts and violence. That's exactly what Dead Meat is all about. It's not going to win awards for originality, acting or writing. It's just a fun zombie film which entertains and delivers the necessary ingredients in a rather large dose. There's plenty of zombies being clobbered with shovels and other objects. Unfortunately that's pretty much all the film is. The characters run (or drive) for a bit, meet some zombies, fight and then run off again. It gets rather tiresome after a while and that's where this film loses some serious points. In giving us all we want from a zombie flick, director Connor McMahon has seemingly forgotten to present us with a reasonable stab at a story and some characters we care about. There's little characterisation given to anyone here so there's no one to really get behind. I'm guessing we're supposed to root for the Spanish chick, the gravedigger and the thick-accented Irish farmer but there's no real reason why we should care about them. Even the story just stops and fizzles out. The first twenty minutes or so promise a great deal with this infection spreading quickly and turning into some Dawn of the Dead-style mayhem. But that's soon out of the window as the film is content to keep us out of populated areas for as long as it can. Then the ending throws up shades of The Crazies and is doesn't really fit in here. There's also an effective scene during the night inside the car where the headlights reveal a children's birthday party turned zombie nightmare which had me freaked out for a minute as you don't really get to see zombie kids a great deal. Maybe a bit more of this creativity should have been shown for the rest of the film.

Final Verdict: Dead Meat is quite happy to rehash old material and present it in the same way. That's all well and good when the blood and gore quota is high. But when it detracts from everything else going on, it's a little more unacceptable. Ireland's first horror film is a decent effort and shows plenty of promise however.

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