Nicholas is a lineman for the county, or rather a wind-power technician climbing towers in the barren lands surrounding Mumbai, India. He's working hard to do right by his controversy-laden love in Mumbai, sweating and suffering through a temporarily lonely life in the desert. Little does he know that all hell has broken loose in the city, where thousands - if not millions - of the hungry dead have begun to enact the end of civilization as we know it. The Dead 2 rolls out a troubling road movie as Nicholas fights his way across the countryside to save his woman.

The Ford Brother's sickly confection works well as a horror movie, with more than enough practical, and practically effective CGI gore, to turn your stomach. This somber bloodletting, and many scenes fraught with serious tension, mark the movie as a cracking resurgence of undead terror. However, it's all in service to a think piece that belies the genre's settling into the ranks of direct-to-digital horror. (Yes, though zombie movies continue to litter the landscape on a monthly basis, most of them head quickly to DVD and Blu-ray, if they ever hit a movie screen at all.)

The Dead 2 is not content to yank your rental or streaming dollar from your pocket, it wants to make you pay for it in other ways, ways that might not sit well with you for a number of reasons. Clues indicating intent are there from the get-go. While these monsters do indeed only want to eat you, turning you into one of their army, they are on the surface ineffectual. These dead make Romero's original revenants look like Usain Bolt - the world's fastest runner. They shamble, heads tilted vertiginously, with relaxed laziness. You can see them a hundred yards away, dotting the arid landscape like cacti. All one needs to do is find speedy transport, and safety is almost assured. Where they get you is their implacable inevitability. They are there, just waiting. And if you make it past the first hundred, there are another hundred, equally scattered, but waiting for their chance; waiting for you to slip up.

This movie is by no means perfect. Nicholas' girlfriend in the city seems hopelessly passive and bound by her parents to an ancient code of conduct. She's no prize, and one wonders why Nicholas is so crazy to do right by her. And she whispers a lot, in a thick accent. When Nicholas picks up a lost boy in the desert, becoming his defacto protector, the boy whispers in an equally impenetrable accent. That is, to pick up on what the Brothers Ford are laying down, you need to crank up your speakers and replay scenes. It's your choice if you wish to do so, which is apparently an unintended affirmation of the Ford's thesis. Though Nicholas' young charge Javed intones that, "we don't choose our paths, it is pre-planned," everything hinges on our character's choices, and how they internalize those choices. You live or die by your choices, not by speed, or skill, or having as many bullets as God will allow.

By movie's end, when your heart's been ripped out - not by the undead, but by the collapse of family values, by the sundering of the family unit, by your choice to sacrifice in the service of self, or of others - then you'll hopefully know why the zombies have come. Either that or you'll meet your inevitable death, rendered utterly hopeless because no matter how hard you tried, maybe you simply didn't do the right thing. We don't know if the Ford Brothers are brow-beating us with an agenda, or just throwing in the fucking towel on humanity, but we still find The Dead 2 Recommended. In the world of zombie horror, there's not much else like it.

The DVD

Video:
This 1080p widescreen presentation, in a 1.85:1 ratio, really highlights the savage beauty of desert India. Details are sharp when they need to be, but there is plenty of focus pulled, leading to atmospheric depth, rather than one based on tons of digital information. There is also a lot of jittery camera work to challenge the processing power of your set. Black levels aren't that big of an issue due to the nature of the film, but in darker scenes detail is sometimes lost. Colors are warm, saturated and not all that naturalistic.

Sound:
Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound is effective and mostly robust, with a nice depth of range for the music soundtrack, and some good, though not incredibly dynamic, placement of sound effects. Things liven up during scenes of mayhem and carnage, of course. My main complaint comes from the dialog, which is mixed adequately as far as Nicholas is concerned. Some of the Indian characters tend to mutter and whisper, which often makes them hard to understand, especially as these bits of dialog are placed fairly low in the mix. Young Javed in particular is hard to hear, and often sounds to be speaking with reverb further obfuscating his musings.

Extras:
English SDH Subtitles and Spanish Subtitles come standard, as well as a scant 12 Scene Selections. Trailers for this and others are offered, and two other extras are present. A brief two minutes of Deleted Scenes don't add much, and a half-hour Making of The Dead 2 featurette conducted by Billy Chainsaw will both illuminate and confound you with a mix of blithe answers from the Brothers, interspersed with bits of un-narrated, grotty, 4x3 ratio, behind the scenes footage. All in all, just an OK effort as far as extras are concerned.

Final Thoughts:
The Dead 2 presents a brutal, meditative look at sunlit zombie horror that goes well counter to most of the zombie fare spewing onto your screen these days. Fairly gory and tense, the movie really trades on the road-movie dynamics of heroes Nicholas and Javed, while ultimately slapping you about the head and shoulders with a bleak, angry, and hopeless message. Mostly average picture and audio quality, and too few extras, don't, however, mean this is a movie that can't shamble by without at least a Recommended rating.

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