There's something beautiful about the African countryside, beautiful and dangerous, besides all the usual dangerous animals the countryside in The Dead is filled with zombies. A plane filled with Americans is leaving some unnamed African country. Things have fallen apart and they're in a rush to leave. The plane isn't totally fueled and they crash off the coast about 40 miles from the border of Sierra Leone. That could be Guinea or Liberia. After the plane hits the drink the only survivors of the crash wash up on shore. A couple of them get eaten right away. Lt. Brian, played by Rob Freeman, gets away and heads across country looking for someone who isn't dead. The zombies are the slow shambling type and they are everywhere. If you don't see one, just wait a minute, he'll be there, with a hungry friend or two. They just wear your ass down by sheer numbers. Prince David Osie is a soldier who gets back to his village only to find his wife dead and his son gone. His dying mom tells him soldiers took his son and he might be alive at a camp 200 miles north. His mom dies and Daniel has to shot her. Bummer, huh. The movie moves these guys along a path that intersects and they team up to have a better chance of survival. That works for a while but eventually it all goes to hell and that's pretty much the end of the world as we know it. Despite the dispair of it all, it's a pretty entertaining zombie movie. The movie is filmed in Burkina Fazo and Ghana by the English writing & directing team of Howard J Ford and Jon Ford. They made a couple of movies and a hundred commercials before this. I don't know about their previous work but here they do a good job creating an adult horror movie. It's well filmed in a style that makes me think the movie is older than it is. It doesn't rely on excessive gore or frequent short scenes with violent startles to scare you. I thought it was almost poetic. It's kind of slow moving at times and while we were yakking a bit we were all still watching. There's a lot of time spent looking at scenery, the desolate and isolated countryside is a big part of the story. Well worth checking out for the horror movie fan.
The BluRay of Pirates Of The Caribbean - On Stranger Tides was pretty darn good looking. There's the usual big set pieces and noisy soundtrack you'd expect in a Jerry Bruckheimer production. Johnny Depp is still pretty entertaining as Captain Jack Sparrow in this story of the race to the Fountain Of Youth but there isn't anything new here and the story is pretty sparse. Geoffrey Rush returns as Barbossa, minus his lower leg. Ian McShane appears as Blackbeard and Penelope Cruz plays his daughter. There's lots of amazing scenery though some I figure is made up. Most of the CGI looks good. The sailing ships are pretty nice, expecially the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's magical ship. The Spanish are also racing to the Fountain of Youth. The groups converge on the Fountain, people die, and things get wrecked pretty well. There are murderous man eating mermaids on top of all that. You need a tear from one to make the Fountain work. There are many twists and turns along the way but eventually the movies gets done and we all rushed off home. It's not better than what went before, and it got panned a bit, but it's not unwatchable. It would be nice if it was shorter and moved a bit quicker. I'll want to watch it again, as part of the series, sometime in the future. I was thinking as I watched the movie, oh, that's where the LEGO set came from.
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