The Dead Outside (2008) Reviews

• Indie horror gem

  julessimmond2009-03-02

  While I must admit that I wasn't expecting much, this film turned out pretty good! Story was more complex and psychological than I expected. Left me wondering how such a low-budget effort could resonate more than the last 5 big-budget films I've watched combined. The ending in most films lets them down, there's nothing worse than a bad ending. Dead Outside pulled out all the stops and tied it all up with a bow, great little atmospheric film. Oddly creepy at times with them surviving in the old run down farmhouse, waiting for something bad to happen. This film is similar to The Fog in its atmosphere of dread but set in the Scottish Borderlands.. with the infected acting as the backdrop for the narrative.. and some ghosts for good measure! Haunting and well worth a watch.

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• An honest attempt, but seriously flawed

  yeah_sure2010-04-12

  A small budget, a few unknown actors, a secluded farm, a global epidemic that turns people into violent lunatics. It COULD work. But it doesn't. The script has serious problems: it moves too slowly, and ultimately goes nowhere. We have the troubled guy, and the troubled girl. Both have issues. They have to depend on each other to survive, while overcoming their ghosts. All this is established early on, but dragged through ineffective flashbacks and poor dialogue, for far too long. The infected are too few and far between, and never seem like a real menace. Two people with a crappy rifle and some barbed wire manage to fend them off easily. The doors and windows aren't even reinforced. Most of the time, they could as easily be there on (a very very boring) vacation, rather than in the middle of a world apocalypse. The characters are not interesting. The guy is dull and clueless. The girl is always annoyed AND annoying. The other girl is just as dull as the guy, and doesn't bring anything new. Their past stories should give us new insights about them, but don't. The (possible) immunity subplot is never properly explored, or settled. Its just thrown in for the sake of it, like too many things in the movie. Overall, "The Dead Outside" does have some upsides (for a post-apocalyptic movie) - a sense of isolation and lack of hope, a few (very few) mild scares, and the cinematography isn't great, but its watchable. But by the end, you're wondering which is worse: being infected, or being a part of this sad, boring bunch.

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• Bleak House—The Dead Outside provides a better than average post-apocalyptic siege scenario

  Big Man-62009-06-16

  The first feature from music video director Kerry Anne Mullaney exists in world even bleaker and farther north than 28 Days Later, and a little deeper inside the art house. The director makes a benefit of the lack of finance, with gritty visuals and an excellent performance from Sandra Louise Douglas (in her first role), as April, a girl soaked in horror, whose anger may have more meaning than mere teenage angst. The two lead characters exist on opposite sides of a moral divide—Daniel, a good man who still sees the infected as human beings, is haunted (it seems literally in a couple of scenes), by what he couldn't bring himself to do, whereas April shoots on sight, and is almost catatonic from the things she has seen, the people she has lost, and those she has killed. Shot in two weeks, and self-financed on a micro budget, which is hardly an issue, the production team of Mullaney and producer/co-scripter/cameraman Kris R Bird (who together created promos for Drive-By Argument and Cosmic Rough Riders), demand a lot from their audience, which is refreshing in an age where the horror film seems designed to evoke nothing beyond revulsion, and their debut shows immense promise. Add another strong, intelligent team to the new league of British horror auteurs. Stick through the final titles to hear the excellent "Evacuate" by indie upstarts The Boxer Rebellion.

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• Inside out

  kosmasp2009-01-29

  Bear in mind, if you haven't watched this movie, that we're talking about a mean, low-budget, in your face little movie. You won't have seen the actors before (unless you know them personally) and there is nothing "fancy" to be found here, neither in the camera work, nor in the story department. But it works for the movie. Not bloody, but suspenseful and with a dramatic story, that tries to stay as real as it can be (with a story like that). The actors do a good job, carrying the job, which plays mostly at one location. It might be slow at times (or might seem not moving story-wise), but it really is good, if you let yourself immerse in it.

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• Decent Indie Flick....with HORRIBLE editing!

  lindsaytomcat2013-06-12

  Really this movie wasn't nearly as bad as some of the reviewers are saying...(It's not as bad as, let's say, Birdemic or something like that) It's a pandemic type movie but really more of an atmospheric thriller that just uses as pandemic as the background. My main issue with the movie was the editing - it was so poor and left a lot of things scratching your head. As an example, in one scene one of the main characters is kidnapped while one sleeps. It literally cuts from that to the sleeping character going out looking for her. It doesn't show him waking up, or hearing something that wakes him up, or him realizing what had happened and freaking out. There were a lot of similar gaps that unfortunately made the movie hard to understand in some parts. I'm assuming the director wants the audience to simply infer certain things about the plot and tried to use flashbacks to parlay important pieces of information regarding the back story, but it was done too choppily and poorly for that to work. However, overall it is still a decent movie. I love horror flms but the zombie genre has pretty much died out for me, and I appreciated that this was a pandemic style movie that really took it in its own direction. It's probably really worth a 6/10, but I felt bad looking at some of the other poor reviews so I gave it a 7/

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