Bullet Points: Dead Zone (2022)

Knowing what type of movies that you like is crucial when you’re trying to navigate the current landscape of streaming services. Never in film history have we had so many options right at our fingertips. It used to be that I would question what to watch for 10 minutes and then put on Predator. Now I have thousands of options right in front of me and sometimes that means taking a chance on something that feels right in my wheelhouse.

Synopsis: To stop the collapse of humanity, an elite team of soldiers using high-tech armor and weapons must descend on a radiation-poisoned town and perform the ultimate stealth mission. But they need to be careful – with Hell on Earth, they may just meet the Devil.

• Not another Zombie movie: If I’ve learned anything over the past 20 years, it’s that we don’t need just another zombie movie. The genre had already been running strong in the early 2000’s around the time of the Dawn of the Dead remake and then it exploded with the success of The Walking Dead. Now there are about 10 million different zombie movies around and you just have to do something different than what is expected in order to stand out a bit.

• The Team: When you have veteran actors like Jeff Fahey and Michael Jai White leading your team, you just need to find places to put them. From Fahey’s third billing on the poster, I had expected him to spend very little time on screen and I was right. MJW, however, is the star of the movie and it’s only Chad Michael Collins who even comes close to the minutes in front of the camera. It’s MJW’s show, though, and his character leads a team of tough dudes who seem to fit the part. They work like a team and sound pretty good while doing it. I’m always a bit critical of these types of things movies but I was pleasantly surprised with how these guys turned out.

• The Mission: With any zombie movie, the world is obviously in some shit. This is no different. MJW’s team is being sent into a “dead zone” (an area hit with radioactive bombs to kill the infected) to gather up an expericmental vaccine that may or may not work to cure the zombie virus spreading around. It’s a pretty big deal to only send in a small team but they cover it up with some explaining and then quickly jump to a fight scene so we’ll forget about logic.

• The Infected: A zombie has to eat. I say that because I’ve seen many zombie movies in my day and there are so many that are absolutely terrible but still have great scenes of undead hordes feasting on the bodies of the living. It’s a must have in any zombie apocalypse movie. Dead Zone really dropped the ball on making the infected seem difficult to handle. They do have a mega-zombie that causes some damage and is a real thorn in the side but for the most part, the undead are just speed bumps in the road.

• Never out of the fight: A good portion of the film is spent with them running around the dark-lit town trying to find a way out. Once they get their hands on the vaccine (which isn’t that hard, tbh) they then find themselves stuck behind enemy lines with a bunch of the undead. It should have meant a couple of scenes of utter destruction but we mostly get them sneaking around and eventually have one decent gun-battle.

• Time to get vaxxed: If I took any message away from this film it would have to be that vaccines save lives. Their entire mission is based on a secret CDC experiment that could potentially set things right when it comes to the infected in the world. It’s not lost on me that we don’t know any background information on what this infection is and why it is around but we do know that the vaccine that was created by the CDC in a secret location is “A-OK” for people to use.

The Verdict: I have very mixed feelings about Dead Zone. It is truly a mixed bag of good things and not so good things. Mixed in are a couple of actors who I have grown to love and a plot which is 100% up my alley. I should have enjoyed it more if not for the endless time spent walking around doing nothing, but DZ really needed that George Romero touch where he just killed a whole bunch of people. MJW and Chad Michael Collins felt right in their roles but there just wasn’t much to chew on in this movie. Just POV shot after POV shot of them talking into the screen. I like my zombie movies with a massive amount of death and destruction. Throw in an elite military team and there should have been some serious fireworks. Sadly, this one didn’t do it for me.