The Dead 2: India (2013)
"The feeding continues"
Plot
The zombie infection that has gripped Africa reaches India and starts to spread rapidly. Nicholas Burton is an American engineer who has come to India to build wind turbines and has an Indian girlfriend, Ishani, whose fiercely protective father wants him to stay away from her. When he finds out she is pregnant on the day the zombie onslaught reaches their city, Nicholas sets out across fifty miles of hostile, zombie-filled terrain to rescue Ishani and their unborn baby.
The first ever international zombie movie set in India, The Dead 2: India follows on from 2010’s sleeper hit The Dead, a rather routine zombie flick which had the novelty factor of being set and filmed in Africa (Burkina Faso and Ghana to be exact). Amongst the never-ending undead hordes that have graced DVD and cinema almost weekly for the past couple of years, The Dead received a whole host of positive reviews. For what it was, The Dead was a solid, if unspectacular zombie film, which ticked all of the right boxes but didn’t really get the pulse racing. Switching continents across to Asia, the Ford brothers were clearly hoping to recreate the same success with The Dead 2: India.
The first thing that has to be said about The Dead 2: India is its excellent cinematography. Filmed on location really adds something different to the tried-and-tested zombie formula. This isn’t just some small town, a shopping mall, a big city or any of those other Western settings that filmmakers tend to set their epidemics in. Capturing the beautiful landscapes of the Indian countryside in one breath and then unleashing an atmosphere of dread and terror within the next, the film does a great job of selling the natural splendour of the expansive vistas and also the desolation and feeling of helplessness that being stranded in the middle the desert with a horde of zombies heading your way. The rich reds and oranges of the landscape give the film a unique look amongst zombie films and a lot of early scenes bask in the background glow of the countryside, in particular a shot where Nicholas is hanging from a wind turbine watching a farmer being attacked by a zombie in the distance.
Aside from the novelty of the Indian location, there’s nothing remotely original about The Dead 2: India. The narrative is very flimsy – basically a road trip movie where Nicholas must get from A to B to save his girlfriend from the zombies and along the way he encounters different survivors and, of course, lots of zombies. If this sounds all too familiar then its virtually the same narrative from the The Dead. Since he doesn’t get to talk to a lot of people, there’s not a lot of dialogue for a lot of the running time and so these endless scenes of him running into and then escaping from the zombies quickly become tiresome. Even then, his character isn’t the most developed main character to grace a horror film and we know little about him and are given little reason to care for him.
He’s not the only one though and across the board the characters are thinly-sketched and rather bland. When you don’t feel a connection with characters, you don’t really care about what happens to them on the screen and we get that a lot here. The acting is pretty bad too that’s to be expected from the bunch of Indian supporting actors who destroy the English language with their soap opera-like performances. It’s no surprise to see that two years after this was made, both Meenu Mishra (Ishani) and Sandip Datta Gupta (her father) hadn’t starred in anything else. The family-orientated sub-plot that they are given to work with is terrible and the human drama seems contrived and forced. Given that there’s a zombie apocalypse on the way, a father arguing about his pregnant daughter having a relationship with a white man should be the least of his worries.
The zombies themselves are of the old school Romero variety which means that on their own, you could easily outpace one. However the problems arise when you become trapped or surrounded by dozens of them who overpower you. The make-up is decent, better than I was expecting in all honesty, and the gore effects are adequate. This isn’t a film where every character is going to be ripped apart on-screen every few minutes but the few attack scenes are effective in delivering the necessary threat. The zombies are at their most effective when they’re lurking in the background, slowly approaching the camera as the human characters struggle to deal with a problem. In particular a scene in which Nicholas attempts to rescue a woman and her child from their car is fraught with peril as the zombies slowly but surely close in for the kill.
Final Verdict
If you think that in 2015 a zombie film will offer anything more than the same old entrails that have been served up and reheated time and time again, then think again. The Dead 2: India does exactly what it needs to do to pass the time but we’re all too familiar with the flesh-eating material to fully invest in it.
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The Dead 2: India Director(s): Howard J. Ford, Jonathan Ford Writer(s): Howard J. Ford, Jonathan Ford Actor(s): Joseph Millson, Meenu Mishra, Anand Krishna Goyal, Sandip Datta Gupta, Poonam Mathur, Coulsom Sujitabh Duration: 98 mins |  |
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