THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Following a devastating attack on their compound, a man battles to keep his family alive. When he is bit, the fatal infection slowly running through his veins, marching steadily forward to turn him into one of the monsters that brought civilisation to its knees, the race begins to teach his daughter everything she needs to know in order to survive.

MY VERDICT:

The Driver is, despite a premise not usually tackled by the movie genre, a fairly 'flat' and uninspiring film. There is very little action, the Zombies only rampage through a survivor settlement once in the whole movie and when they do, it is over too quickly and is too dark to actually see what is going on. The violence, when it does happen, is usually at a distance with gunfights between the living or occasionally, with the dead, never in full-blown hordes though. There are absolutely no creative kills or "eurgh" moments which is extremely disappointing for a genre known for these superlatives. In fact, there is next to no blood or gore in this action-horror flick (I was actually surprised to learn this movie was rated '18', as despite the "non-gory" walking dead folks, I fail to see what may shock or offend). There is also very little story; the survivor compound is attacked, and very badly damaged, by living humans but, what the attackers planned to gain from this reckless act is anyone's guess. It seems only to setup the next segment of the film which leaves the overall experience feeling a bit pointless; again, disappointing. What the film does have though, is actor, martial artist and John Wick 3 co-star, Mark Dacascos - and, man, does it love this fact. Most of the film is centred around him and, later, his character's slightly annoying yet ultimately forgettable, daughter - a quality decision by the director as Dacascos provides the only credible acting in the entire movie. There is even one two-minute scene entirely of him walking round the survivor colony in slow-motion (obvious hero-worship). Another thing the movie has is a car, a gleaming, new automotive vehicle that looks fresh out of the garage and completely out-of-place for the Zombie apocalypse. However, it is actually explained in the story why the car looks so spiffy and new - the main character takes extremely attentive care of it; cleaning it after every trip, driving relatively slowly on the badly maintained roads and siphoning the excess fuel out of the tank when returning it to the compound, avoiding the risk of thieving hands. I wish they did more with the car; show roadside maintenance after parts brake forcing moments of tension while time-consuming operations are performed in hostile territory. They have bandits in the movie, unscrupulous people without any moral compass or sense of community so I would have loved to have seen some more contests around ownership of the automobile - after all, driving a shiny, flash car around in a world where there are very few working vehicles left, no matter how secretly it is driven, is bound to attract unwanted attention.