Gone with the Dead 2024 (Krusade Motion Pictures) Review
Three Directors. Six Writers. Sixteen Producers. Eight Cinematographers. Five Editors. Taking a look at the credits for Gone with the Dead is quite crazy. This collaboration has been in development since 2017 since my knowledge and finally sees the light of day. How did it turn out? It's a bit all over the place.
Strangely enough, the opening credits are the most polished and exciting part of the movie. The shots of zombies and opening new casts dialogue does set a nice tone. They give you hope that you are about to watch something exciting, but alas, once we get past that, the quality of the film quickly becomes clear. The opening credits make it appear the world is already in a apocalypse type of state, but then it turns out everything is pretty much normal for the most part. This is not a global zombie attack, but one that takes part in a town. We get to see how the virus starts, although very clumsy, as it appears there was already a zombie just hanging out in the building where our thieves break into where the science was being done.
Despite the good looking zombie, these scenes ends up being way more comical due the lack of tension and sound design.
One of the main problems is the huge cast of characters that the plot structure can't accommodate. The movie goes from scene to scene, character to character with no clear direction or purpose. In one part the characters mention going to the hospital yet we end up somewhere else. One scene has the characters casually driving down a neighborhood streets as they try their best to act with the dialogue lines saying how crazy it is they are in a zombie apocalypse. We see stock footage of locations that we know the crew did not have access to.
The film suddenly gets a VHS static filter placed on it at random parts. There are even clips of "missing footage" shots here and there, but they feel out of place here since no one is really filming the events that are taking place. Are we watching a digital recording or an actual film print? It seems to be both in this case.
There are small moments which work, and the twist ending had potential.
The zombies themselves are fairly decent and honestly don't look to bad from a indie movie budget. The sound design and stock blood VFX don't help sell them however. These zombies are not scary or seem that intense. One part of the movie the characters just chill in the house and the zombies don't even try to break in, instead just standing outside lightly tapping on the walls. There is a bit of that low budget charm where a zombie tackles someone off screen and they end up spraying blood all over the lens, but these moments are far and in between.
However, despite the short runtime, the movie does drag a bit. It stumbles into the low budget tropes and does not offer anything to different from a more polished zombie movie. Maybe there were to many cooks in the kitchen on this one.
