Charlie Steeds is a British filmmaker who has produced some passable efforts in low budget filmmaking. This early effort shows some moxie to be sure but doesn't live up to expectations. Many have made much of the fact that the movie's budget was 1500 pounds. What was put up on screen for that amount was the admirable part. The rest of the movie lacks. A claustrophobic effort, the action is severely lacking--there aren't a lot of choices when your set consists of low, narrow tunnels constructed from wooden pallets. Clearly, this is supposed to be some coming of age epic backdropped by an apocalyptic event that destroys the world and forces humanity underground to survive, as we see when a special ops team enters the tunnel system to retrieve some stolen water. This may have worked if the script was better, but it isn't. This movie is too talky for the set--who wants to listen to half-baked exposition while actors struggle to crawl around in these halls of pallet? And if there was a way to make exciting action sequences in these tunnels, the filmmakers didn't have it. This one gets rather tedious until the characters manage to break free from their underground hell, but by then most viewers will have lost interest. Check out Charlie Steeds' latter efforts like WINTERSKIN to see the man's vision realized well.
Review of Deadman Apocalypse
