Nigel P
This wonderfully directed zombie film is the sequel to 2010's 'The Dead' which featured an army of the living dead making their deadly way across Africa. Here, as you might imagine, a similar cataclysm has infected India.What I really enjoy about this is Directors Howard and Jonathan Ford's worthy use of the incredible landscapes, and the clever way in which such sun-drenched open spaces can either be breathtakingly beautiful or deadly and remote.The casting is very good, with Joseph Millson as the only Westerner Nicholas Burton – a refreshingly likable, ego-free central character – and Ishani Sharma (Meenu Mishra), his pregnant girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, her condition does not please her father (Sandip Datta Gupta), who is otherwise concerned with his own infected wife (Poonam Mathur).Where this stumbles a little is in the actual storyline, which is basically Burton and the appealing orphaned boy Javed (Anand Goyal) with whom he meets, continually attempting to escape the attentions of unthreatening, lurching zombies. Instead of a progressing narrative, certain set-pieces stand out – Ishani's questioning of Hinduism and its teachings of reincarnation which is in direct contrast to the walking cadavers causing carnage around them, for one. Another involves a mother and daughter trapped in a car with the corpse of the husband and father, with the living dead trudging ever forward. Telling them to cover their ears whilst he shoots away the lock to the seat that traps them, Burton then shoots them both dead instead. And, although the zombies are not always the most frightening or energetic, scenes of them standing, swaying, waiting, scattered across the unforgiving landscape while Burton attempts to escape them are very effective.
Scarecrow-88
Not too shabby Ford Bros. sequel to their sleeper zombie hit, The Dead (set in Africa), has American electrical engineer of wind turbines in India, working on one such turbine in a rural area many miles from where his pregnant Indian lover awaits his coming. Her city is being overrun by flesh-eating zombies (brought on by an infected worker off a boat from Somalia), with the military trying to evacuate the uninfected and kill off those infected. While Ishani (Meenu) is trapped in her home with her Brahma-preacher father (Sandip Gupta)--who disapproves of her relationship with engineer, Nicholas (Joseph Millson), believing he'll just "have his fun" and leave her--Nicholas tries to transport by whatever means are at his disposal (including a paragliding escape off the top of a building, a window-less, barely-operational station wagon, and a motorcycle) to get to Mumbai so he can rescue her to safety. On this journey, he meets an Indian orphan boy, Javed (Anand Goyal), after narrowly escaping from a tree where his paraglide was caught, and the two (with Javed claiming to be an ideal guide for Nicholas) try to get to Mumbai without being bitten or eaten in the process. India is in many ways like Africa of the previous film with its sandy, desolate, sunbaked locations, a kind of dead-land travelogue where locals are spread out enough, sparsely emerging here and there, often eventually forming into a collective group of zombie flesh eaters. Among the more memorable scenes include (my favorite) a night motorcycle trip where the small light illuminates the dead walkers on each side of the dirt path Nicholas drives (with Javed his passenger), Nicholas having to waste bullets on a trapped mother and her child (who are caught in a crashed car, as the dead accumulate and approach in close proximity), the aforementioned paragliding escape (with the dead almost grabbing hold of him), Nicholas narrowly avoiding certain death when he eventually starts a car that has a troublesome engine, Nicholas grappling with loneliness after Javed is rescued by a military chopper, and the finding of a thief who drove away on Nicholas' acquired motorcycle, the guy being eaten by the very family he was needing to get to. Emphasized is the steadily growing number of the dead in India, a landscape of poverty and simple living, with the backdrop eventually consumed by more and more zombies. While the mission's success as far as Nicholas getting to Ishani may never be in doubt, the Ford Bros. recognize that the dead will almost certainly overtake the living. As a film about one man's drive to get to the woman he loves, The Dead 2 offers quite a hero in Millson, and he is good at emoting what anyone would feel during situations he encounters. Mixing things up a bit by having Javed with Nicholas does separate India somewhat from Africa, although the same rural trek, with the dunes, hills, water- drought slopes and valleys is rather similar. Sometimes the film stretches plausibility (like Javed's mother realizing he is in the building housing survivors with her; the likelihood of Nicholas making it to Ishani despite so many obstacles; Javed getting to a chopper, and Nicholas eventually seeing him again; Nicholas' ability to have so much ammunition for his handgun), and the ending leaves a sour taste (why put us through all this only for Nicholas to find his sanctuary but have it bombed by jet planes overhead?). Still, in a situation like this film posits, the idea that it can end well is rather unlikely. This doesn't quite stay still enough or really allow us to soak in the dreary, hopeless atmospherics of the barren India like the first film did with Africa, but there are instances where you can still understand the despair of Nicholas' dilemma, and on a few occasions, it doesn't look promising he'll make it to his desired destination. This might have worked a little better had the film focused on a local character needing to get to his lady love so far away, but casting an American seems like an old hat strategy that is hard for many productions to break away from.
poe426
With the current spread of Ebola (there are already cases turning up here in the United $tate$), it might pay to take notes when you watch a movie like THE DEAD 2. There are some very effective slow motion shots early on in the movie, but no sooner are they done than they're dropped completely. This was a HUGE mistake, because it was one of the few things the movie had going for it that most zombiegeddon movies don't: the feeling that Death is slowly but inevitably moving your way. In THE DEAD, there were a number of shots of slow-moving and even stationary zombies in the background in some shots and they lent an atmosphere of DREAD to the whole thing: in this movie, the dead are clustered together everywhere and stagger, arms at their sides, toward whoever happens to come within their line of sight. They hardly seem dangerous (and we've seen zombies dispatched with such ease so many times in so many movies and TV shows, that they hardly seem dangerous at all, any more) and the fact that the hero has weapons that never seem to run out of ammo only exacerbates the problem. The white contacts are always effective, in my opinion, but what impresses me the most about THE DEAD 2 is the motorcycle that never runs out of gas and the guns that never need ammo.
