The Dead Don't Die (2019)

I'd rather sandpaper my gonads than sit through this again. And I mean that with every fibre of my being.

Let me give you some context, because I need you to understand the depth of my disappointment here. I love zombie films. Genuinely love them. The Romero classics are some of my all-time favourites. Shaun of the Dead is a masterpiece. The 28 Days Later series (yes, I know, not technically zombies, don't @ me) is brilliant. So when a film comes along with a strong cast and the bones of a decent zombie premise, I'm not walking in cynical. I'm walking in hopeful. Excited, even.

And then The Dead Don't Die happened to me.

My bald mate recommended it. Genuinely thought he was doing me a favour. I will never, and I mean never, trust a word out of his mouth again. Not about films, not about restaurants, not about the weather. He's done.

Where do I even start? The acting is lifeless, and not in any deliberately stylised way that you could generously chalk up to artistic choice. The cast look like they genuinely didn't want to be there. Like they'd been promised something else entirely and just decided to collect a cheque. When you've got recognisable, talented people on screen and they can't muster a single moment of genuine energy between them, something has gone very badly wrong, either on set or in the edit, probably both.

The pacing is a disaster. This film crawls. It doesn't build atmosphere, it doesn't build dread, it doesn't build anything. It just sort of... exists, slowly, without purpose. I kept waiting for it to find its gear and it never did. Not once.

And then there's the fourth wall breaking. Now, I'm not against a bit of meta-humour. Done right, it's brilliant. Done here, it's the cinematic equivalent of a comedian explaining their own joke. Every time the film nudges you and winks about the fact that it's a film, it's not clever or charming, it's just the director and cast having a little in-joke at the audience's expense. About as fun as plucking my grandad's arse hair. I sat there stony-faced every single time.

The whole thing seems to have absolutely no idea what it wants to be. Is it a spoof? A straight horror? A deadpan comedy? A meditation on something? Pick a lane. Please. Because watching a film flounder around without any sense of identity for an hour and a half is genuinely exhausting. I've seen Only God Forgives and understood the argument for deliberate, distancing style, even if it divides people. At least that film commits to something. The Dead Don't Die commits to nothing.

And then, just when I thought it couldn't get any more baffling, a UFO turns up. An actual UFO. For absolutely no reason. No setup, no payoff, no thematic justification I could find even if I'd wanted to be generous. I wasn't shocked. I wasn't intrigued. I was begging for it to end. Pleading, silently, at my television.

I've seen some properly bad films in my time. Films that are boring, films that are offensive, films that are just poorly made. But there's something particularly grim about a film that clearly thinks it's being clever and isn't. The smugness of it all makes the failure sting that much more. At least a film that doesn't know it's bad has a kind of innocence to it. This one seems very pleased with itself, and that's the bit I can't forgive.

Worst film I've ever seen? It's fighting hard for that title, and I can't think of much that would knock it off the top spot any time soon. Avoid it completely. Tell your bald friends too.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-02-12

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