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 A news crew investigates an explosion at a chemical plant and comes across a bunch of zombies at a game developer's building. 2002, 21 minutes, Widescreen DVD
One of the beauties of MonsterHunter (and there are lots as regular readers will attest) is that you can be sure that we aren't unduly influenced or in any way beholden to any sponsors. We aren't a group of fancy boys who get sneak previews of unreleased movies or have access to free DVDs or kiss up to genre companies in the hopes of getting interviews or news tips or T-shirts or whatever. In fact, the MonsterHunter charter adopted back at the end of the war in 1946 expressly forbids such a practice. Therefore, you can probably guess what our reaction was when a company from the Netherlands, Twisted Pictures, wanted to know what if we would be interested in reviewing a free copy of their zombie DVD, Deadline. Free crap? Bring it on! I think we can all agree that our charter had long since served its purpose (back when we weren't getting free crap) and that it was ripe for change (since we starting getting free crap).
I'm not easily impressed, but we were plenty excited here at the MonsterHunter campus as we anticipated the arrival of our free DVD. You see, back when I was younger my dad abused me by forcing me to collect stamps. The mere mention of the ultra-rare upside down Jenny biplane stamp still causes me to get the shakes. Most days though, I'm okay with my past as a junior philatelist, but the prospect of a package arriving from a foreign country with strange and unusual stamps on it undid years of therapy in minutes. Would they feature some funny looking leader that resembled a knock-off of George Washington? Commemorate some sort of freakish tradition of that particular country (like cannabis coffee shops in the case of the Netherlands)? Or celebrate a commercial property like all those island nations you've never heard of that act like their founding fathers were Mickey, Pluto, and Goofy?
The package arrived in very short order in a padded white envelop with no return address making me think that it was those pictures and negatives of last year's office Christmas party that I had paid top dollar for. Handling the package with extreme care so as not to get my flop sweat all over the exotic stamps that surely awaited my inspection, I examined them with an eye experienced from four years of weekly meetings at the stamp club my dad was vice president of. As I scanned the eight stamps affixed to the envelope a look crossed my face like my dog just ripped a really wet fart. Staring at me were stamps uglier than the flag stamps my post office insists on selling constantly (the only choice at my post office is either a book of flag stamps or a roll of flag stamps). The stamps were blue and white and contained the Euro symbol and the number "0,39" on it. Thank you, European Union for taking a dumb hobby and making it worse.
But you're probably saying, what about the freaking movie? I'm pretty sure that Twisted Pictures who sent it to me for free to review is wondering that as well. Well, let me put it like this: This movie manages to do in twenty minutes what most zombie movies do in about ninety. Whether you consider that a good thing or not depends on what you think about all those full-length zombie movies we've been exposed to in the last thirty years. I have often complained that some of these zombie films seemed to go on for way too long (see Dawn Of The Dead and Hell Of The Living Dead for example) so you would think that this twenty minute short film would be perfect for the genre.
It's perfect in that it crystallizes the problems most of these movies demonstrate. Though Deadline was only twenty minutes long, it managed to hit all the story elements you would expect to find in a movie about corpses running around eating people. It neatly sets up the reason for the dead coming back to life by opening the film with a pair of seemingly unrelated news reports. Of course we know better (especially since in a twenty minute movie, they aren't going to waste time showing us news stories that don't have some bearing on the plot). First of all, there's an outbreak of mosquitoes causing problems. The next story is the explosion at the local chemical plant. I don't know about the Netherlands, but here in the U.S., I'm fairly confident that the big blow up at the chemical plant wouldn't be secondary to a bunch of bugs biting people.
To the newscast's credit though, it's the story involving the chemical plant that merits some team coverage from the field. You've got a female reporter and two male crew members. She reports that there isn't any information about the explosion and then wanders away from the chemical plant until she comes upon the local video game developer building. The door is open and she decides to go in and check things out. This never made much sense since the story was the explosion at the chemical plant, not the video game building. I find it difficult to believe that someone on that particular story would just walk around downtown until they saw an open door and go on in "just to see what was going on."
Let's just chalk this gaping plot hole up to her nosy reporter's nose for a good story and move on. Once in the building she finds that the crew of game developers working on the hit video game Final Flesh II has left the office in total disarray. They find a guy all bloody and wounded and do the only thing you would expect them to do in that situation - interview him.
In a couple of flashbacks, he relates how some of his co-workers went crazy and started attacking people. Meanwhile, the news crew wisely splits up so they can be killed by zombies still on the loose. Everyone eventually gets killed, even the girl reporter (it's not as wrenching as all that since we only knew her for fifteen minutes) and the movie ends with a shot the takes us back from the window of the video game building out across the city showing the nearby chemical plant (complete with nuclear reactor towers and a guy on the rooftop being harassed by glowing mosquitoes!) which wasn't really necessary since we already knew the explosion combined with the mosquitoes was the likely cause of all this.
There isn't all that much to the story and that sums up all the full length zombie movies out there as well. You establish the cause of your zombie outbreak, introduce your band of survivors and watch as they run into zombies and more often than not get killed in a variety of grody ways. Surely there must be some room for innovation in that formula, but I haven't seen it. And you certainly won't find it here. It's not that this is a bad zombie movie, it's just that it's a zombie movie that offers nothing over any of the other ones, except for its brevity.
To give credit where it's due, the movie looks professional enough, it's just that the story is so routine and slight. And do we really need a bunch of flashbacks in a movie that's less than a half hour long? Just get on with telling the dang story! We can pretty much guess what went down during the debugging of Final Flesh II. The time allotted also doesn't really give any characters the chance to register as much more than bodies to be ripped up by the zombies, so who cares if they get chomped or not?
The DVD itself is quite the impressive package. It's packed full of extra features you would expect to find from a DVD from one of the main studios. In addition to the movie, you get behind-the-scenes footage (in Dutch), two audio commentaries (also in Dutch), a trailer, a short (even shorter than Deadline) film about a guy who gets drunk and wakes up with one of those "boots" they usually put on cars on his head, a photo gallery, and details about how three different digital effects shots were accomplished. It gives the movie a major league feel and probably helps take the sting out of the ten buck or so price tag the DVD seems to carry. What we've got here is the promise of things to come. The group that put this together has the ability to put out a good looking product that could easily fit in with bigger budget efforts, but what they need now to go with their technical ingenuity is a script with equal ingenuity to put them on the map, so that their movie lives up to their supplemental materials. Only hardcore zombie fans need to make this Deadline.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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