Dead Life (2006) — Triskaidekafiles

DEAD LIFE

WRITER: William Victor Schotten

DIRECTOR: William Victor Schotten

STARRING: Michael Hanton as Maxx

Jayson Garity as Rick

Joseph J. Zetts as Dave

Bruce Taylor as Mike

Lindsay Gerish as Kim

Ashleigh Holeman as Brianna

Jeff Robek as Kyle Richards

QUICK CUT: Some good ol’ boys chill out on the porch and work on a house, and eventually people get hungry and break for dinner.

THE MORGUE

Maxx - A young man who is kinda chill, just inherited a house from his dead drunk dipshit of a dad, and he has some trauma in his past that’s never really delved into.

Brianna - Maxx’s girlfriend who works at the hardware store.

Rick - He knows kung fu.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! Summer is heating up, and this week I decided I'd turn to a movie I heard about thanks to the fine folks over at the podcast, Horror in the House of Sammons. They love obscure horror as much as I do, and Brian and Jamie are always talking about movies that just make me itch to check out. Now granted, they tend to come with "do not watch" warnings, but that's never stopped me. But, that's how I heard about Dead Life, and here we are.

The movie opens up with dramatic music of a dramatic scene as the camera moves in a possible POV shot down into the basement as a child watches his father drunkenly rage. And it's all drowned out by that dramatic music. Jesus, fix your levels.

Daddy Drunkest is losing his shit, yelling about feeling 'them inside him' and slicing open his guts, and gouging out his eyes with a box cutter, while baby Maxx watches. And yes, that is how they spelled it.

This is why you shouldn’t stare into the sun during an eclipse.

Maxx wakes up, because it WAS ALL A DREAM, and fair warning, this doesn't have shit to do with anything else in the movie. Dad makes another appearance or two, but did it mean anything? Is it explained? Nah.

Once the credits are done, Maxx returns from his time in the Outback and visiting his friend Julie, and hangs out on the porch drinking beer with his friends. Which, quite frankly, is like...a solid third of this movie.

Meanwhile, some girl comes home to find her dad in a mood, and fortunately, he's not about to follow the box cutter route. Instead, he talks about an encounter he had with some rando who got violent and bit his finger off. He's not looking great, but has to head in to work, and says so long to his kid.

After a bit, Maxx heads inside to work on the shitty house his dad left him, and has a nightmare vision of his eyeless, lifeless dad. This is the extent of where this stuff goes, really. It's something that haunts Maxx, and that's about it. Doesn’t even haunt him very well.

Elsewhere, the dude who lost a finger is NOT looking good, and stumbling around in a daze. He starts spitting up blood, makes his way down to the lake, and collapses on the dock.

And thankfully they do an insert shot, because otherwise it's SO dark, you couldn't see his black blood being bled into the black water. Good move.

Looks like he just stumbled out of the Simpsons.

We see some cheesy cheap CG effects that are supposed to show the infected blood whooshing through pipes, and since that wasn't clear enough, they show the town's water treatment plant, so this is going all throughout the town.

The zombie outbreak kicks off at, in all places, a local hardware store. People are just going about their business, buying screws, but one guy looking like Simpsonized shit, is wandering around complaining about being hungry.

Now, this scene COULD be used to set up the impending horror, but instead it's played for laughs with everyone ignoring the guy and casually telling him, "Well go EAT something then!" which kinda undercuts the whole affair. Which could have STILL worked if they'd at least shown him then eating someone, ANY one, but instead they just bop along to the next scene showing us zip.

On the way home, Maxx blows out a tire, and we fortunately jump cut through him fixing it. But as he is putting his tools back in the trunk, we see he is about to be accosted by...A KILLER SMURF!! No wait, no, just a zombie with very purple makeup. At least, where they applied makeup, and didn’t miss spots…

He quickly clobbers the guy with a crowbar and books it back home.

Brianna shows up as Maxx is talking to the cops on the phone, and he sends her and another friend to get more beer. Since they've already spent most of the movie sitting around and drinking it. they better restock!

Meanwhile, we meet a new character looking for more new characters, and he hears some garbled nonsense on the radio that freaks him out.

He hears noises from the basement, thinking he's found his friends, and rushes downstairs, asking if they heard what they're saying on the radio. NO! And neither did the audience, because your audio is trash!!

When he gets down in the basement, he finds a zombie woman chewing on his friend, and he's all...rather calm about it.

In fact, he is SO CALM about it, he is staring at her rear sticking in the air while she feeds and goes, "Yeah, yeah I'd like to tap that!" and strips off his pants, and BANGS THE ZOMBIE.

As if that wasn’t enough, once he's done, the undead woman turns around, gets on her knees as if to give him a blowjob...and we get to watch a zombie dickchomp as she tears it off.

So that is now a thing I have seen.

As the zombie apocalypse goes on around them, Maxx and his friends continue to sit on the porch and get drunk. At least they're consistent.

Following a good night's sleep though, the zombie apocalypse finally comes knocking...literally!

A knock at the door wakes one of them up, and when he answers the door, a flannel zombie bursts in. The zombie trucker tackles him to the ground, and gets in quite a few chomps. Fortunately none on the dick…but close!

They clobber the zombie with a frying pan, and then Maxx pops a cap in his face. They check their friend's pulse, and start to work on getting the dead bodies out of the way. And are amazingly chill about all this, still.

More zombies start coming for the house, like this is Night of the Living Dead, and as the discount Thunderstruck music builds, Maxx heads outside to blow some more holes in the invaders.

They figure out pretty quick the people outside are covered in bites, and realise they need to take care of their corpsey friend. But they're not fast enough, and he takes a bite out of Brianna's sister.

Someone gets the tv working, and they all sit around and watch some news infodump. That's one way to get it out of the way.

Don’t mess around with colloidal silver, folks.

Unfortunately, they find out too late that, despite being scalped and bitten, Brianna's sister isn't dead. They only suss this out when she wakes up screaming in the front yard where they left her, thinking she was dead.

When they find this out, Maxx blames the one who was supposed to check her pulse, but didn't care once he knew she was doomed from the bites. To teach him a lesson, Maxx throws him outside to meet the same fate.

The rest of the group urges Maxx to do the right thing, and let him back in. Eventually, he relents, before the zombies have even more to eat.

Hey guys, Grant Mazzy is still broadcasting!

One thing I've not mentioned at all yet, is that they keep showing the zombies doing the very silly rapid head shake thing from movies like, Jacob's Ladder. I have never find this scary, and it instantly takes me out of a movie. So that’s not helping.

The group decides to hunker down and sleep through the night, and make a break to try and get Brianna in the morning. Who is, unfortunately, having her home invaded by zombies.

She ends up getting overwhelmed and eaten, all on her lonesome.

Once the sun comes up, Maxx and his crew storm out of the house, guns blazing and feet swinging, as they fight through the horde...well, the half dozen or so zombies outside his house.

As they drive off, the movie just fills time for a bit by showing us some random zombie shenanigans. It's fine, but feels pretty disconnected from everything.

While our zeroes are driving along, they hear some music, and decide to stop and check it out. I mean, Maxx's girlfriend is out there somewhere, but sure, let's stop to wander for a bit.

Inside, they see a little child playing on a xylophone. Oh, the kid is also a zombie, so...why?

They poke around some more, and down in the basement they find a few more zombies, much less friendly, and some random dude wanting to know why they're in his house. Which is a fair question.

Introductions go around, and the guy says he's trying to get some answers...but he has none to give. At least, not until they push Professor Infodump to spill.

He goes on about his son, how he doesn't feed, and that he thinks it's because children are innocent, and don't know hate or prejudice. Insert eyeroll here.

The professor is sure the town where Brianna is, has been completely overrun, and she is surely dead. The group insists otherwise, and they have to save their friend.

Mike, the guy who previously got a time out with the zombies, goes off. He yells he doesn't care about her, he barely knew her, fuck her, etc etc...and he backs right up into one of the pet zombies, getting exactly what he deserves.

The guy pleads for the doc to give him something, he has to have a cure, and sure! He has just what the doctor ordered, he says distractingly as Maxx shoots him in the head

With that taken care of, the group leaves, letting Professor Infodump get back to his research, and decide to head to the desert because there's not as many people. Yeah, good luck growing crops, dumbasses.

Despite their misgivings, they do stop to check on Brianna, hoping for the best, and fighting their way through the zombie tens to get to her.

Unsurprisingly, they find zombie Brianna, and Maxx takes a moment, before finally blowing a hole through her shaky zombie head

Before they leave, Dave gets bitten, and Maxx puts another bullet in another head, and takes a moment to sit on the porch. If they cracked a beer at this point, it would not be out of character.

...Instead, they have a smoke.

They decide to try and get ahead of this, and warn people, and sure, great, good idea, but we've already seen and heard national news reports talking about it, this doesn't seem like a "get the word out!" situation, when it's already happening supposedly worldwide. It's just a cheap attempt to make it all feel important.

We've still got 14 minutes to go, but if you thought the movie had a little more gas in the tank, with that much left to, surely there's one last thing to do, you would be dead wrong.

Maxx and Mark just chill driving along for awhile, find a farm, and sit around. Seriously, if the plot has ground this much to a halt, just have them drive off into the sunset.

If you got time to sit, you got time to finish it!

A group of zombies approach, including children so I guess that theory was wrong, and the movie shambles towards the inevitable conclusion where everyone is shot or eaten.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: This is shot on 8MM so I can’t say it’s “shot on video” shittiness, but it sure does have that look to, it, doesn’t it? It’s just ahead of the wave of cheap and easy digital cameras and phones being readily available, probably one of the last films to do it the hard way, but it is so grainy and rough, I can’t really get past it.

Audio: I pointed out several times how the audio gets garbled, but for the most part it’s aggressively all right. It could be worse, it could be garbled all the way through. It gets done what it needs to when it needs to, fortunately.

Sound Bite: “The things that cause us to feed on each other in life, now do in death. A fitting end for humanity."

Body Count: At least this part it gets right. The body count is decent, with some good gore effects.

1 - Maxx's dad dies from self inflicted wounds in the nightmare flashback

2 - Dude dies on the docks 17 minutes in.

3 - Dude getting eaten in the basement

4 - I'm gonna say getting your dick torn off is a life ender

5 - Greg gets eaten

6 - Zombie Bruce gets shot in the head

7 - Another zombie shot in the head

8 - Zombie Greg gets shot

9 - Kim dies from eating

10 - Brianna gets eaten

11 - Mike backs into the basement zombie and then gets shop

12 - Brianna gets shot in the head by Maxx

13 - Then Dave gets shot before he can turn

14 - Another zombie shot in the head

15 - Rick gets devoured

16 - Max shoots a zombie in the head

17 - And another

18 - And then himself with his final bullet

Best Corpse: Their friend who answers the door is probably my favourite. He gets some good bites and chunks ripped out, and doesn’t make me question my life choices.

Blood Type - B+: You know…if there’s one thing worthwhile in this movie, it’ the gore effects. Some good tears, great blood, and the graphic tearing apart of a dick, are all highlights. The zombie makeup is GOOD, but they do such a poor job applying it anywhere but the face, it takes away from the overall effect.

Drink Up! every time they sit around and have a drink or smoke.

Movie Review: This is a rough watch, make no mistake, but I sure have seen worse. At least the plot is broadly coherent. There’s some questionable details, but it’s a solid enough zombie story that has a few unique ideas. It doesn’t DO anything with them, but I appreciate the swing. This is clearly “Hey guys, I got a camera, let’s film a movie in the backyard!” and if you take it purely on that level, it works. It doesn’t even come close to a real Hollywood or even mainstream indie zombie movie, but I give a lot of credit, as always, to anyone who gets the resources together and makes a movie. It’s not the best made movie though, there’s questionable bits all through, but it pulls out enough to at least show they put effort into it, that I still give it a two out of five zombie bites. A huge “A for effort” here.

Entertainment Value: Like I’ve said, the gore is the highlight. Some solid work, and sitting people down who have no idea what’s gonna happen with the zombie blowjob…ah, fun times to see. This really isn't a TERRIBLE movie, but it takes its time getting anywhere, and that drags things down. And if they had lopped off the last 10 minutes, and had the last two die quicker, maybe even get us under 75 minutes, I'd be more forgiving. It’s bad, but fun, in some all right ways. Three out of five cans of beer.