DAY 22-DEAD MEAT

When I wrote last week's review of DETAINED, a short zombie film from Ireland, I heard about a similair movie called DEAD MEAT, which is also a short zombie film from the Emerald Isle. A quick trip to YouTube yielded the following film, but I couldn't find any info on it--the movie has no copyright date, nor did IMDB give me any clues. So if this is the same DEAD MEAT, it'd be news to me. What I do know about the film is that its directors, Miles Roper and Tuesday Bassen, made a slight vignette that lacks an actual story.

DEAD MEAT attempts to endear itself early by playing some (unauthorized?) classic Misfits songs as its soundtrack (since the movie has no dialogue, Glenn Danzig's voice is the only one we hear). The plot, so to speak, is simple. A man tooling around in a van sees a zombie shambling on the side of the road. He gets out, shoots it, and wanders around for the next eight minutes, killing additional zombies and stockpiling them in the van.

That's it. Nothing else happens during the meager running time. And though a day in the life of a janitor-like zombie killer would probably make for an interesting movie, a little interaction with, I dunno, something would've made it actually watchable. There's no suspense or drama, since we know nothing about our hero (who would rather toss his shotgun into the weeds when out of shells rather than walk back to his van for more). A brief tussle on the ground with one of the zombies is as close to conflict as the movie gets. (Also, the undead on hand here are rather disappointing.)

During the end credits the filmmakers thank several people, including George Romero, Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, Akira Kurosawa, and Takashi Miike, yet not a single trace of any stylistic influence from these directors appears here. You'd think they'd have at least cribbed a couple of camera angles, or some dialogue . . . anything to help their movie resemble those of their idols'. Instead they gave us something that looks more like somebody's morbid home movie.