Bullet Points: Bullets for the Dead
I consider myself something of an expert on foreign cinema. I haven’t seen any of those artsy French flicks where the two girls dye their hair and scissor each other and I don’t watch all those ghost kid movies from Japan, but if there is an action movie on some other continent somewhere where characters are forced to either shoot/roundhouse kick their way out of trouble then by God I’m going to watch it!
My recent fascination has been with Australian movies. I’m not going to list all of the ones that I’ve reviewed over the past couple of years but it has been far too long since I’ve watched one where a man gets his head cut in half by a bear trap.
Synopsis: A crew of bank-robbing outlaws gets apprehended by a bounty hunter and dragged to a train so he can pick up his bounties. Upon finding the train they discover that it’s been turned into a hellish locomotive of death as a horde of zombies have feasted on the inhabitants and are now chasing the survivors across a Western landscape.
- Romero it isn’t: George R. Romero has always spent a great deal of time making statements about society in a not so subtle kind of way. Director Michael Du-Shane doesn’t spend a lot time talking about the after effects of the Civil War in America. He doesn’t mention the struggle of the newly freed slaves or the industrialization of America thanks in part to the railroads. What he does show is a man get his head cut in half by a hatchet and a woman sneaking away in the dark at night to flick her bean while under constant risk for zombie attacks. Bullets for the Dead is more the fun type of zombie flick that doesn’t need to make a bold statement about whatever is hip nowadays. It’s a Wild West zombie movie with a bit of a twist.
- Hell is Where the Money is: Bounty hunter James Dalton, played by Christopher Sommers, comes across a preacher on the train full of dead people and gets a new partner in their quest to not die. He has a brief late-night conversation with the holy man, as they are often wont to do, and lets us into a little bit of the personal hell that he is going through. We slowly learn more and more about the main characters of the film. The bounty hunter, the outlaw Annie Blake (Vanessa Moltzen), and the preacher (Hugh Parker) all flesh out their parts as the film progresses towards an ending that has enough flesh to fulfill any zombie loving fan.
- Talking Zombies: We’ve seen zombies who run around like their hair is on fire but I can’t recall seeing a zombie say anything other than “brains”. I could be missing some great zombie flick out there not named My Boyfriend’s Back where the undead actually have memories and remember people’s names. Tell me if I am.
- Tools of the Trade: They are outlaws and a bounty hunter so they have plenty of weapons. Hell, the name of the movie has “bullets” in it so you know they aren’t gonna run out of them. My favorite kills, though, were when Annie Blake pulled out her hatchet and threw it like she was in some lumberjack competition at the State Fair.
- Zombie Must Haves: You’ll rarely see a zombie movie these days without the gratuitous dead baby or sacrificial bite scene. Maybe I haven’t been keeping up with the genre like I used to but I’m not seeing much in the way of ground-breaking shit in newer undead films. Bullets for the Dead isn’t going to set the zombie world on fire, although that might be a good way to kill it, but it does have a couple of scenes that I found very cool. They use a number of zombie nuns to drag around their stagecoach for a time. There is also a pretty creepy Last Supper type scene with some zombies feasting on the entrails of a poor sap.
- How the West was Won: I can’t think of one zombie movie that has a happy ending. It’s hard to be hopeful when a large portion of the population has died, come back to life, tried to eat you, and then died again. I’d like to think that the zombie apocalypse for me would be hiding out in the mountains for a long enough time to let the zombies run out of food and then I could just roll into town and move into a Toy R Us like I always wanted. Bullets for the Dead doesn’t exactly leave the viewer cheerful at the end either, but let’s be honest, life was probably never very cheerful in 1870.
Not even a bullet to the head will kill these Bonus Bullet Points:
- I pulled up the IMDb page for Bullets for the Dead before watching it and saw that it was listed as an action/adventure/comedy. Whoever wrote that has a very sick sense of humor.
- The bounty hunter tries his best to be Two Face.
- Get a spin-off series about the old lady bank teller who doesn’t take shit from anyone!
- The weirdest graveyard in history makes for a very implausible escape scene.
