Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Really Surprised!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

THE DEAD OUTSIDE is probably the worst non-zombie zombie film I've had to sit through in recent years. It's a real dog's dinner of a film, shot on zero budget and in a hurry, and it has no story or sense of intrigue or mystery or suspense to propel it along. Any incident that occurs during the movie is ruined by incessant shaky-cam work that means when stuff finally happens, you can't see it happening anyway.The film is about a couple of people holed up in a remote Scottish farmhouse after an epidemic of sorts. It sounds a bit 28 DAYS LATER-ish, but it's nothing like that or any of the other zombie movies made recently. It's just two dull-beyond-belief characters and somebody filming them with a camcorder. The acting is non-existent, the script lacks creativity, and the whole thing is a waste of time from beginning to end. It's not often that I feel angry after watching a movie for having had my time wasted, but I did so in this instance.

I saw this titled in the movie store with a few festival nods printed on the front and thought it might be a good, indie, low-budget watch. How wrong I was. The writing/story, or lack there of, is drawn out, packed with dialogue that is there for the sake of having dialogue and allows for no surprises. This is fine because the repetitive score is, more often than not, drowning out the actors thick accents. We are supposed to invest ourselves in a meandering, rarely-active protagonist and a grumpy, tweaked out young lady who occasionally allows a small detail about her past to slip. Other than that, the story is told mostly through randomly placed flashbacks or when the characters directly explain their pasts to one another in one on one chats. The cinematography is clunky, jarring, and while the location is beautiful in a 'barren-farm-hills' sort of way, it becomes tiring, recycled and bleak. Any action sequences are too dark to see and the 'dead' are really just rambling, raving infected people who can't seem to climb fences, or pose any real threat at all. I tried to love this movie, then I tried even harder to like it, and as my last resort I attempted to see it as a minimalist film, but even that failed tremendously. The only aspect of this movie that I can give credit to is the overwhelmingly bleak and isolated tone it creates. But then again, that could have just been in my head as the credits rolled after what can only be described as a bad film. A bad movie is a bad movie and nothing about this flick escapes that label.

Some movies are so bad you can't help but wonder what the hell the filmmakers ever though they were doing. After watching The Dead Outside, I can only picture Kerry Anne Mullaney and Kris R. Bird sitting in an empty room and having the following conversation..."Let's make a movie like 28 Days Later, except we'll pick up the story long after all the exciting stuff has happened and just have the characters stand around and mumble to each other.""You're a genius! But let's also not explain any of the particular details of the story, fill it with fragmentary flashbacks to further muddle things up and then have a character lie on a sofa and describe the plot of what would essentially be a prequel to the film we're actually going to make.""I like where you're going but let's also have the storytelling and filmmaking get worse as the movie goes along. The dialog should become more insipid, the performances should go from minimalistic to practically coma-inducing, pieces of the plot should start to fall off like the film has leprosy and the editing must turn completely into crap.""The more you talk, the more excited I get about this project! I also think there needs to be an important scene where the soundtrack is so loud that no can understand what the actors are saying.""I couldn't agree more. It's like the two of us have only one brain!"After a neurological outbreak in Scotland which turned people into murderous, retarded hoboes, Daniel (Alton Milne) runs out of gas on the road and must take shelter in a seemingly deserted farmhouse which turns out to be the home of April (Sandra Louise Douglas). They sort of hang out and have dueling flashbacks to much more interesting periods in their lives until another person shows up. Kate (Sharon Osdin) seems about to drive a wedge between the deeply f'd up April and the whiny Daniel, then the Almighty Plot Hammer pounds Kate into the ground like a circus tent pole and the whole thing sputters to an ending that will leave you staring at the screen and wondering "Wait. Where did that come from?"This cinematic stinkburger is spoiled at the most basic of levels. Let me give you an example. A big plot point of The Dead Outside is that April is supposedly immune to whatever is turning folks into violent and unhygenic vagrants. However, the script never bothers to explain what is infecting people or how they get infected. The big revelation of April's immunity is in a scene where she's been handling the bodies of some infected dead and gotten their blood on her. But at no point is it established that the virus or whatever is transmitted through the blood. So, when April turns to face the camera with blood on her, this film is going "Ah ha!" while the audience is going "Uh…what?"After suffering through this thing, I decided to indulge my masochism and flipped over to the DVD extras to watch the trailer. I was expecting to see one of those trailers where you can tell the movie is going to suck, but this one kicked 37 different varieties of ass. It makes The Dead Outside look complex, dynamic and unnerving, which is about as big a miracle as Jesus doing that whole bread and fish thing. The person who made this trailer should have made the film instead. If Mullaney and Bird actually made it, they should be paid extremely well to create trailers for other movies but never allowed to make another motion picture themselves.The zombie apocalypse genre doesn't exactly have the highest standards, but this dishwater dull production can't even make it over that very low bar. Don't bother with The Dead Outside.

*SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* *SPOILERS* I thought this flick was 'average'. Not bad at all for it's budget, but it has some big flaws.No originality at all: The soundtrack sounds almost as if it was taken straight from 28 Days/Weeks later. There's nothing to bad in this, but it just makes you constantly remember that you are watching something that's not even in the same league.Overacting: The male lead was decent enough, but I found the two females really irritating. The main female overacts WAY too much, and to make it worse she acts like a 13 year old sulking because she can't have the new Miley Cyrus DVD. Put yourself in the characters situation - knowing that you are possibly the only cure for the disease, the only hope for mankind's survival...yet you choose to be alone and isolated in a farm house somewhere. Eventually the bullets/generator will run out and you are done! There's one scene where she's recalling what her grandparents did and it was painful to watch. Almost as if the character was supposed to have some mental deficiency, or actually supposed to be around 13 years old? The other female was a slightly better actress, but it just felt like she was in the wrong movie here. Actually, none of the cast really gelled together, which was what made it so uninteresting to watch.The way it was shot: I, quite frankly, got sick of the 'artsy' shots being filmed at a slight angle. The director filled the alarming lack of dialogue with constant shots of chickens, planks of wood, trees, fences (whilst slowly zooming in to the background), or the dog barking - which was a pointless 'part' of the film, as they even forget to take him at the end. Take out those parts and the film would have struggled to reach 50 minutes.The story: We get flashbacks of the males history, yet it's ultimately totally irreverent, as it leads to nothing. We get told toward the start that the drug he's taking only prolongs the infection to make it worse, so surely you'd have to end the movie with him 'turning'? Nope, we get the movie ending with the girl looking as annoyed as ever, and the guy just going into a house and shooting somebody. Earlier on he says something along the lines of "I could never become one of those vigilantes, it's sick". Errr? The infected also still seem to be able to think rationally and be quite coherent, so the barb wire to keep them out obviously shouldn't work, as I assume they'd be quite capable of walking up to the gate and opening it? if it was so affective, then why not just put more where the gate was smashed down by the van and stay at the farm house?I give it 5/10. Watch-able, but not something I'd end up recommending, or watching again.