Dead Earth is a cheap, dull zombie movie. It doesn’t work at all as a scary movie because there are no scares. It is a weirdly good tourist ad for Thailand, though.
A whole lotta nothing happens in Dead Earth. It focuses on a lesbian couple in zombie apocalypse Thailand. The couple consists of Sylvia and Rose. Neither have much personality. The two spend at least half the movie just sort of walking about and spending a lot of time in bathing suits. They don’t encounter any other people, alive or dead until late into the movie. Once they do, it’s a pretty standard avoid and/or kill the zombies plot with little original ideas.
Dead Earth is weirdly nice to look at for a cheap zombie movie. The cinematography is competent, but for an entirely different genre. There’s a languid pace to the film, a lot of shots of nature and aesthetic close-ups of details. The film making here would be something I’d celebrate in a meditative coming-of-age film. It’s a damn shame that’s not even remotely what Dead Earth is. Even looking at this as an atmospheric horror movie, the cinematography is still out of place. The film is decently nice to look at but still doesn’t offer a particularly strong atmospheric vibe. It certainly doesn’t offer an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, dread or any other vibes a horror movie should provide.
This slow, isolated film about a contagious and dangerous illness could’ve had the benefit of hitting harder post-2020. But again, it’s not inherently competent enough to get there. There’s a way to do the monotony of fear, especially in regards to trying to avoid horror. Dead Earth doesn’t do that. I’m really running out of ways to explain that nothing happens in this movie for basically the first hour. I love a slow-burn horror movie. Dead Earth is slow, but there’s no burn. It’s just an hour of absolute tedium with deeply two-dimensional characters and then a third act of standard zombie nonsense. And it’s not particularly well done zombie nonsense either.
It’s not just that nothing new happens in Dead Earth. It’s that nothing much of anything happens at all. Dead Earth is a wildly unambitious film. It’s cheap and leans heavily into just showing beautiful women onscreen as opposed to any sort of horror. This isn’t a case where they tried something and failed. Dead Earth spends 80 minutes resolutely refusing to try anything.
Overall rating: 2.5/10
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