Dead Country (2008)

A low-budget zombie movie is nothing new. A zombie movie made by someone on their own DV-camera is nothing new either, but Dead Country makes the hours burned watching fellow home-made efforts such as Deadlands: The Rising or Bone Sickness feel like time well spent.

On a scale of terrible to abysmal zombie films, Dead Country struggles to even make the bottom. Really, to call Dead Country a "film" is giving it far too much credit. In reality, Dead Country is nothing but a series of short scenarios shot in Australia by Andrew Merkelbach and his friends that occasionally deals with zombies.

There is a story here. A space traveler (Merkelbach himself) arrives in the small town of Romero after exploding his own space ship, inadvertently releasing a zombie virus into Earth's atmosphere. Believe me, I have made that sound far better than the shoddily constructed and incoherent way the plot is delivered in the movie.

In fact, watching Dead Country, it hardly seems like there's a plot at all with the way it moves from Merkelbach as the space traveler to other, random characters dealing with zombies. While Merkelbach gets a ride from some guy in a car, random characters pop up never to return again: a female cop is seen not able to shoot one single, solitary zombie; a woman takes a bath with her dog then talks to her gardener (horror director Bill Malone); a girl in a negligee gets attacked by some hard-rocking goth zombies in a barn; a soldier (played by an actor who had already appeared as a zombie) starts walking around a forest for no reason; and many more useless moments.

Audio issues plague the entirety of Dead Country, with the dialogue going in and out of audibility. Merkelbach must have used a tape recorder to ADR the movie with the way dialogue will go from sounding natural to sounding like it is being spoken from the far end of a cave. When the dialogue was too hard to fix, such as a car scene where the wind blowing in from an open window is affecting the camera mic, Merkelbach just turns up the movie's hard rock "soundtrack." Meanwhile, the movie's "score" is made up of random, hollow sounds that are reminiscent of a dripping faucet. Yes, Dead Country's score is water torture.

If Merkelbach can be congratulated for anything, it's on his ability to convince a variety of women to appear either topless or close to it in the movie. Merkelbach may not have been able to charm a film crew to get involved in the production, but women seem all too ready to get naked in front of his home video camera.

A sequel, Deader Country, has already been completed, proving that Merkelbach's ability to persuade people to work with him is somewhere near superhuman. Either that, or there was a sale on DV tapes.