Dead Season

USA • 2012 • 85m •

• Directed by: Adam Deyoe. • Starring: Scott Peat, Marissa Merrill, James C. Burns, Corsica Wilson, Marc L. Fusco, Todd Pritchett, Grant Beijon, Kevin O. Matta, Anna Vawser, Greg Weisman, Leishla M. Perez Figeroa, Sean McDonald, Dave Wilhoit. • Music by: Louis Chalif.

When a worldwide viral outbreak leads to a plague of zombies scouring the earth for the living, two survivors flee the chaos of America to a remote island, hoping for a chance to start a new life. What they find is unrelenting horror. Beyond the hordes of the flesh-hungry undead, the other people already on the island force the pair into a fight-or-die battle amongst themselves. Armed only with crude weapons, they must descend to savagery and cutthroat tactics just to make it through each day.

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2:10

Review:

Dead Season is a mediocre rip-off of George A. Romero's Day of the Dead (1985, not to be confused with awful Sean S. Cunninhgam remake in name only from a few years back). We've got the tropical island (check), stupid, horny military dudes (check), mad doctor experiments (brief, but check), fenced-in compound (check), and zombie gore (check). What we don't have is a good movie. Oh, and the other film it rips off is Romero's terrible Survival of the Dead (by setting people up to go to an island of presumed safety).

The acting is okay, as are the zombie makeup and gore effects, and the music and cinematography are pretty good (a little too much shaky-cam here and there, however).

The weak link is the script, which is not only slow and predictable, but frequently makes no sense. The most egregious example being that the cast spend the whole movie fighting slow zombies and then, for no reason at all, all the new zombies that get made out of the survivors at the end are super-fast 28 Days Later-style killing machines (complete with bloody eyes). This would have been okay if it were explained, but it isn't. It's just sloppy writing.

There is pretty much zero character development. Unlike Romero's Day of the Dead, where even the lamest of the military goons had at least a scene or two spent developing their personalities and maybe giving them a memorable line or two, the goons here are completely forgettable, interchangeable zeros. So who cares when they die? And the two leads aren't very interesting. The redhead is annoying, and the paramedic dude is too nice. They don't grow or change or do anything cool, at least not enough to make me root for them. The screenwriters need to read a copy of Blake Snyder's Save The Cat! andor Jeffrey Schechter's My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! to learn how to write a good screenplay.

Dead Season takes itself seriously (a bit too much so, as there are not enough lighter moments to give you a break from the overall grimness). It's not a bad movie, just not a very good one. It's better than any of the nonsense the SyFy Channel produces, but that's not saying much. Zombie fans will no doubt be able to sit through this film and be moderately entertained if they have nothing better to watch.

Review by Logan-22 from the Internet Movie Database.