Crew
Director – Hank Braxtan, Screenplay – Michael Klug & Tim Ogletree, Story – Jeffrey Giles & Michael Lurie, Producers – Arielle Brachfeld, Jeffrey Giles & Michael Lurie, Photography – Marshall Douglas, Music – Whiplash, Visual Effects Supervisor – Justin Rader, Production Design – Mike Legate. Production Company – Automatic Entertainment/Photonic Media.
Cast
Michael Jai White (Boss), Chad Michael Collins (Ajax), Tarkan Dospil (Danner), Whitney Nielsen (Goodman), Antuone Torbert (Ton), Jason Weiss (Sinclair), Jeff Fahey (Master Chief), James Markham Hall, Jr. (Creature)
Plot
A viral outbreak has created zombies across the country. Each area of infection is attacked by the military with radiation bombs, leaving them as ‘dead zones.’ A small unit of soldiers is recruited to go on a mission into one such dead zone to retrieve what is believed to be an antidote to the zombie infection. The area has been hit with a radiation bomb, but it is also believed that a number of the zombies have developed an immunity. The team are dropped in and almost immediately the mission starts to go wrong as they come under attack by the dead.
Dead Zone was the eighth film for Hank Braxtan, a former soldier turned filmmaker. Braxtan started with the fan film Return of the Ghostbusters (2007) and then went on to assorted low-budget horror films with Blood Effects (2011), Chemical Peel (2014), Unnatural (2015), the comedy Snake Outta Compton (2018), Dragon Soldiers (2020), Jurassic Hunt (2021) and the subsequent Glowzies (2023).
Dead Zone seems like a poor choice of title for the film. It is one that you immediately associate with the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone (1979) or perhaps the David Cronenberg film adaptation The Dead Zone (1983) or at a stretch the tv series The Dead Zone (2002-7). Or for that matter the subsequent low-budget android bounty hunter film Deadzone (2024). Braxtan seems to assume that dropping the article in front of the title makes for some kind of differentiation.
When you get past the title, the even bigger disappointment is that Dead Zone is no more than a standard Zombie Film. And one that comes with little to distinguish it from the vast horde of others out there. The one difference is that Hank Baxtan served in the military and so Dead Zone becomes a piece of military combat porn more so than it does a zombie film. It is chock full of operational jargon, men in full combat gear moving in in coordinated tactics and a good deal of shooting. The actors’ faces are hidden behind the visors of tactical helmets for most of the film, although we do get occasional glances inside their hi-tech suits to see their faces surrounded by glowing readouts. Braxtan is clearly in admiration of the camaraderie and gives us shots of the team walking towards the camera in slow-motion. There is certainly little doubt that what we are seeing is believable, authentic military maneuvers.
In truth though, Dead Zone is just another zombie film cliché. In recent years, zombie films have borrowed the basic set-up of Escape from New York (1981) where a group of armed individuals must go into a walled-off zombie infestation zone to retrieve something or somebody of vital importance. See the likes of Zomblies (2010), Battle of the Damned (2013), Quarantine LA (2013), Pandemic (2016), Transit 17 (2019), Redcon-1 (2018) and Peninsula (2020). Indeed, Dead Zone came out not long after a similar set-up was used in Zack Snyder’s more high-profile Army of the Dead (2021).
The whole of Dead Zone consists of little more than this military double-talk and people racing about shooting at zombies. There is little time in between for plot or even individuation of the characters. A mutant creature that looks as though it has stepped out of one of the Resident Evil films turns up for some hand-to-hand combat at the end. That is about all there is to the film.
Trailer here