Customer Reviews

Dead Meat

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Who knew that Ireland would come up with a funny low budget zombie flick I certainly didn't. The directing was brilliant and the film was like an homage or tribute to Romero's living dead trillogy, chaos ensues across the country when a rare strain of mad cow disease turns people into flesh-eating zombies. I thought that the small zombified kids at the birthday party was a nice touch and there were alot of other great scenes like that which makes this film uniqe and different from the other straight to video garbage that just ends up being the same over and over again. I highly recommend this film and two thumbs up!.

Old school fx, at least 6 or 7 beheadings, dudes with really thick Irish accents chopping zombies up with shovels. One lady even gets eaten by a crazy cow... If you like zombie movies what more could you want?

MAD COWS AND ZOMBIES!!! Finally a Zombie Movie Done Right! I Would place this in the Top 3 Zombie Movies from the past few years (...or ever for that matter...) right up there with "UNDEAD" and "SEAN OF THE DEAD". Non-Stop Zombie action from start to finish, Cool Zombies and Lots of Them (although not as cool as the zombies in UNDEAD) Plenty of Gore (I don't think I have ever seen as many be-headings in one zombie film...) and Just the right amount of Humor! The Vacuum cleaner scene will go down in Zombie History!!! The Final Zombie Horde scene is Great, and just the way a Zombie film should be. Good Story, Excellent Acting by all (the old cursing Irishman is hilarious!) Good Pace and a heck of a Good Time watching! As soon as I was done watching it, I watched it a second time. This will Defenetly become a Favorite with Zombie Fans! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - MUST HAVE IN YOUR ZOMBIE DVD COLLECTION!!!

I really was expecting rubbish. How many utterly dull horror films have we endured? Yes, like me, you have sat through some shockers. Brrrrrrrrr. Here was another with a lousy cover, but I was forced to try it (like all the others - why do we do it to ourselves?) in the hope of a pleasant surprise. A miracle, the film is Irish, and quite okay. Nice mad cow. Nice zombie action. Entertaining and worth the trouble. Not likely to be a classic . . . but perfectly watchable.

If you ever wanted to see a low-budget shot on video flesh-eating zombie movie that takes place in rural Ireland, Dead Meat is for you! The director moves his camera around constantly; as a result, it's shot with more style than most SOV flicks. The zombie make-up is passable. Gore FX are good and plentiful, but the idiotic comic book way the heroes kill some of the zombies knocks the film down a peg (such as the heroine throwing her high-heeled shoe into the eye of a zombie). There are some major inconsistencies in zombie mythology: The heroine bites a zombie on the ankle to get it to let her go -- why isn't she infected? Why does the zombie react to such a minor wound? Many zombies use weapons (yet none can figure out how to break into a car), and one runs away to avoid getting killed! Dead Meat alternates between taking itself too seriously and not seriously enough. This ends up being its major flaw (that and sometimes the accents are so thick you can't understand the actors). The film is jam-packed full of zombie action so you won't be bored. I'm looking forward to seeing the director's next film; he shows a lot of promise. Dead Meat is definitely worth a look for zombie and low-budget horror/gore fans, as well as anyone interested in low-budget filmmaking. DVD includes the director's cool short film Brain Eater, trailers and a making of.

Okay, if you've seen "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie", there are similarities: country setting with zombies, survival of a woman and those she meets.

Mad Cow disease takes a rare form, turning people into zombies. Only about six survivors in a countryside of about seventy zombies, scattered about. The gore is decent, the directing has a documentary feel, the acting works. Not much story other than run, but it's not bad, filled with plenty of daylight and night scenes, Dead Meat is a good, watchable zombie film, though LSCL is still a better film. Plenty of slow moving zombies and passable make up give it a point. The country atmosphere really helps keep this unique.

Although not perfect, this is one of the better and more original stabs at doing a low budget Zombie film today.
Good tension scenes and a serious tone unlike the "witty and funny" zombie films that the independents seem to feel compelled to make these days.

Much better than garbage like WICKEDS and FEEDING THE MASSES (these last 2 films were crap !!)

Dead Meat is a great example of how a talented director can make an effective zombie/horror movie on absolutely no budget.

Written and directed by Conor McMahon and set in Ireland, there's really nothing out of the zombie norm here to set it apart storywise. As it goes, farmers have been feeding ground up animal parts to their cows which has led to a strange illness. Strange illness leads a cow to attack a farmer which leads to zombieism. Okay, I admit it's a little corny, but as long as the movie delivers some thrills before it gets to the end I'm not going to nitpick over how the virus gets started.

The main reason this movie worked for me was because the writer/director didn't try to make another in an overlong line of Dead Alive/Shaun of the Dead slapstick, ultra-gore, zombie knockoffs, but instead decided to make an old fashioned zombie horror movie. Relying heavily on camera angles, lighting and shading instead of jokes and cheap jump scares to create tension worked for me. At times Dead Meat reminded me, and this is a good thing, of Night of Living Dead. While the low budget was obvious, there was a goodly amount of gore and there was also a sense of suspense and atmosphere that helped to make me forget anything else.

Oh, Dead Meat also has a zombie cow and how many other zombie movies can say that?

I recommend Dead Meat only to fans of the genre. And to anyone who buys this movie, be sure to check out the extras and the director's short film, The Braineater. It's great!

and sharpen my shovel. Or maybe get me one of them hurleys. Or maybe both. Yeah, that's the ticket! The main difference between an Irish zombie flick and an American zombie flick is the lack of firearms in the former. Why, even in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, set in pinko liberal Wisconsin, everybody and his dog is packing heat about ten seconds after the zombie outbreak hits the fan.

Seriously, Dead Meat is a good, old-fashioned, violent, gory zombie flick. If you liked George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, you'll love Dead Meat. It's action-packed, it's in color, and the special effects are excellent. What's not to like? Well, the dialogue might be a bit hard to follow in places, unless you're fresh off the boat from County Leitrim yourself. I give it five stars anyway.

Dead Meat (Conor McMahon, 2004)

Yes, it's true: every country on the planet, with the possible exception of Togo, has now made a zombie movie. Dead Meat hails from Ireland, the land of such incredibly scary things as William Butler Yeats and St. Patrick. Never fear, though; Conor McMahon (since responsible for the must-see short The Blaxorcist) isn't trying to scare you. Not really, anyway. The humor in this movie is usually a lot lower-key than we've gotten used to in zombedies, but rest assured it's there.

You'll recognize the plot from a number of other, mostly more recent, movies; a mutant strain of mad cow disease gets into the food supply and causes human beings to turn into zombies. (For an even funnier take on this conceit, check out Johnny Kalangis' movie The Mad, which I cannot praise highly enough.) As is usually the case with zombie movies, the populace then gets divided into two segments--the living dead and the survivors. The living dead want to eat the survivors, while the survivors want to stop the living dead from eating them.

Pretty basic stuff. And, honestly, it doesn't really help that most of the people involved in this production were not professional actors. (Or, as some wags would undoubtedly say, even amateur actors.) And while McMahon is brilliant at directing shorts (his second-longest movie, the documentary My Daughter Does Madonna, runs fifty minutes), the jump to feature films does require looking at pace in an entirely new way, and the movie has a number of problems in that regard as well. Make no mistake, Dead Meat is not as good as most zombedies out there, but then it was also made on a fraction of the budget given to the best of them, and that labor-of-love feel really comes across. I know I've said this about a lot of movies recently, but you have to take Dead Meat for what it is in order to appreciate it; it's not meant to be Citizen Kane, and if one watches it with that expectation, one is in for guaranteed disappointment. On the other hand, if you compare it to other microbudget horror comedies, of which there have been a slew over the last decade or so, it acquits itself rather well in some ways and doesn't hold up in others; in that regard, it's just like (almost) every other decent microbuget horror comedy out there. If that's your thing, then by all means give Dead Meat a try. If you're not sure, see if you can hunt down some of McMahon's shorts first to get a sense for the guy's directorial style, and graduate upwards. ** ½