British Tv channel
E4 has recently aired the first of 5 episodes of a Zombie Series called "Dead Set" Now for the people who haven´t heard about it already: The main idea of Dead Set is to put Zombies and Big Brother together.
And theres already where my problems with this series start. The people in the bigbrother house are over the top stupid. I mean I never watched Big Brother out of principle so it could be that Im wrong, but the acting of the residents for me felt almost sarcastically which makes dead set feel like comedy at some points, which I guess wasnt the directors intension. Fortunately once they get aware that theres something wrong they actually start using 1 or 2 brain cells, which felt like someone used them for a brain activity increasement experiment while they weren´t shown, but I found myself not caring a lot about this.
Saying it looks like the cameraman was drunk when he recorded the Zombie scenes is a understatement. Which brings me to the next problem, running Zombies.
Yes, there are running Zombies in Dead Set.
If any director who´s planning to make a Zombie movie is reading this review, PLEASE stop the running undead shit. This is what seems to be the last nail in the coffin of the are of good Zombie flicks.
Making Zombies run isn´t making them any more scary. In fact it makes them less scary and somehow even funny. Remember the good old days of Dawn of the Dead? Did you see any running Zombies in that movie? No, you didn´t, because there were millions of them everywhere. This is what makes them scary, they don´t need to run! Seriously, the guy who came up with the running Zombie shit needs to get a bullet to his head himself.
Another minor discomfort I had with the first episode was the obvious product placement. For example: guy gets out what I think were patches for stopping smoking and the product box is literally everything you see for a good 2 seconds.
By now you must think, wow sounds pretty bad, right?
No. There are good things about Dead Set.
The acting is mostly solid (except what you read above) especially Kelly (Jaime Winstone) the production runner who seems to be the main character makes you hope that she doesnt get killed.
There is just enough gore. Seriously, seeing a Zombie getting its head crushed with a fire-extinguisher was fucking cool.
And last but not least, there really hasn´t been anything like it been done before and I really like the concept.
If you are a Zombie fan go watch it!
Dead Set can be watched here if you are located in Britain. If not use a proxy or get it somewhere else :)