Dead Creatures – review

Director: Andrew Parkinson

Release date: 2001

Contains spoilers

We are very much in contested territory for this film. A gritty British low budget horror, I can see why people would call this a zombie film, indeed a couple of the film credits mention zombies, and perhaps cannibalism. However, the creatures of the title are compos mentis, infected flesh eaters (and blood drinkers – we see a reaction to blood, at the very least) so I am declaring zompire.

It starts at a door to an industrial unit. In it a man is strapped to a chair. We then get views of tower blocks, placing this in that modern British gothic exemplified by hoody horror. An image of urban decay. In a flat, whilst a radio speaks about incompetent doctors, we see a woman, Ali (Lindsay Clarke), sat in the corner of a room smoking a cigarette, blankets round her, she looks like she is decaying. There is a shot of a cattle bolt and then a man, Reece (Brendan Gregory), sat in a bloodied white coat. Two women, Jo (Beverley Wilson) and Ann (Antonia Beamish), leave the tower block, with suitcases and a wheelchair in which they push Ali. It appears they are moving.

left arm gone

The three women we’ve met are all infected – though by what is uncertain. As the title suggests, they might be dead – when we meet a newly infected later coldness is described as part of the turning process and the wound that is the point of infection doesn’t seem to ever heal but no longer hurts. Indeed, we see a body left, where an arm has been removed, who subsequently awakens and attacks someone; this is a trope from both the zombie and vampire camps of the victim rising and immediately attacking.

deterioration

Once infected they develop an overwhelming need to eat human flesh. If they deny the need then they become violent and (one guesses as we don’t really see it) feral. If they eat enough they can stave off the decay – which is less decay and more open weeping flesh that looks pretty darn unhealthy. We see Ali at the advance stage (with associative cognitive decline) but we also see one at the earlier stages with several open wounds. We see a male infected peeing against a wall and they pee blood. The infection is low key, in that the world is going on around them as though nothing has happened. However, they suggest a shadowy government conspiracy and infected people being vanished if found.

Brendan Gregory as Reece

Reece is a zombie hunter (or, from our viewpoint zompire hunter); not associated with the government conspiracy, he seems to be searching for a specific infected (his daughter). He kidnaps infected and questions them, starving them to get them to speak and then killing them. He does this with the cattle bolt through the brain – whether this is necessary is unclear but it obviously calls back to the standard, Romero, shoot them in the head. He releases one captive – presumably because he wasn’t actually infected.

Ann and Jo

Also in the film is Sian (Anna Swift) a young college girl who decides to go on the wrong date with Christian (Bart Ruspoli) and is bitten for her trouble and subsequently found (in A&E) by Jo, and taken in. Through her we see the start of the infection for an individual. This, all in all, might prove to some to be a tough watch. There is little story and the dialogue of the women is around life in general (or more precisely, their lives, which have been suspended as they step out of normal society into their twilight existence). However, I was rather taken by them. The infection can be read as sexual (Sian is infected on a date, Ann hunts by prostituting herself and does indulge in random pickups for sexual gratification) but is passed through the violence of a bite.

With budget but, in places, rather effective SFX, this is not cheery and celebrates its dourness, but I was taken by the characters' extraordinary ordinariness. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK