Dead Mine – no zombies included

With so many horror B-movies with the word ‘dead’ in the title, you could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Dead Mine’ would contain hordes of cheaply-made up flesh-eating ghouls hunting down a cast list of annoyingly-attractive drama students.  It doesn’t though.  Instead it’s more one of those films where a group of surprisingly unattractive platoon of soldiers encounter a bunker of undead Nazis (with disastrous consequences).

And it’s always Nazis.  It seems you can’t tunnel more than two feet below Europe without unearthing a secret World War II experiment of some kind or another.  But not here.  Dead Mine is completely different.  Here we’re in an island off the coast of Japan and there isn’t a single psychotic World War II scientist to be found.  They’re Japanese instead.  Here, our hapless treasure hunters get trapped in (guess what?) a mine, only to be stalked by what can best be described as Samauri Golum gimps.

It’s like if ‘Decent’ and ‘Outpost’ had a child, then ‘Dead Mine’ would be their offspring.  Only it’s not really as good as either.  That’s not to say that it’s (that) bad.  It’s no classic (not even a cult classic), but, if you’re in the mood, it’s watchable enough.

Performances aren’t anything special.  You’ll pretty much guess who’s going to die and in which order from the beginning, as most people’s motives are pretty self explanatory.

There’s not as much gore as you might think, which will annoy some people.  The budget obviously didn’t allow for that much in the way of special effects.

The story is as you’d expect and starts off pretty well, however the final act gets a little weird and may leave you wondering what happened.

All in all, if you haven’t seen Outpost or Decent and you find this film on some movie streaming website and you don’t have to pay for it, then it might fill an hour and a half.  As I didn’t have to pay to watch it I’m being more lenient on it.  I wouldn’t say it was worth the price of a cinema admission though!

6/10 May just keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights