Genre Horror

Gone with the Dead (2024)

Item: Gone with the Dead
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Gone with the Dead (2024)

There's a version of "low budget" that's charming, scrappy, full of heart, where you can see a bunch of passionate people throwing everything at the screen and willing it to work. Gone with the Dead is not that version. This is the other kind: shoddy, amateurish, and frankly a bit of a chore to sit through.

I want to be fair here, because I don't think budget alone is ever a valid excuse for a bad film. I've written before about Night of the Living Dead, and George Romero made that on roughly ten thousand dollars. Ten. Thousand. Dollars. And yet it's tense, it's atmospheric, it has something to say, and the performances carry genuine weight. So when somebody trots out the low budget defence for a zombie film in the year of our Lord 2024, I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it. Budget is an obstacle. Talent and effort are how you get around it.

Gone with the Dead doesn't feel like anyone was trying especially hard to get around anything. The acting is flat across the board, the kind of flat where you can practically hear the director saying "okay, that'll do" after a first take. The script gives nobody anything to work with, which might be a mercy, because when the dialogue does arrive it lands with a dull thud. The story meanders without any real sense of purpose or dread, which is a fairly spectacular failure for a horror film.

Then there are the effects. Zombie films live and die on their effects. Even on the tightest of shoestrings you can do something interesting with practical makeup, with clever framing, with editing that hides your limitations and plays to your strengths. None of that thinking seems to have gone into this. The gore and creature work looks rushed, unfinished, and it pulls you right out of any atmosphere the film might have been building, not that it was building much to begin with.

What makes it sting a little more is that the zombie genre has real potential for low-fi filmmaking. There's a reason so many indie horror directors have used the undead as their canvas. The rules are simple, the stakes are primal, and if you've got a decent location and a committed cast, you're halfway there. Gone with the Dead has none of that working in its favour. It doesn't feel like a labour of love. It feels like a project that nobody quite finished thinking through before the cameras started rolling.

I'll watch almost anything in this genre, and I've got a reasonably high tolerance for rough edges when there's something genuinely interesting underneath. Here, there isn't. The whole thing, acting, story, effects, scripting, every single element, falls short not just in the way that cheap films sometimes do, but in a way that suggests the craft and care simply weren't there in the first place.

One star, and honestly that feels a touch generous.

Rating: ★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-06-13

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