Deadline (2002)

Posted on Oct 13, 2004 under Horror |

Directed by Jonathan Kray
Written by Michel Bonset, Jan Willem Peters, Ruben Taneja and Jonathan Kray
Starring
- Cas Jansen
- Anjali Taneja
- Javier Guzman
- Wende Snijders
- Willem Emo

As I mentioned last week, the normal path to market for a short horror film is to hook up with one or two others that can collectively be billed as an anthology feature.

On the other hand, you could do what the filmmakers behind Deadline did: Finish their 23-minute short, work up some behind-the-scenes features, and release it as a self-contained DVD. Sure, it’s barely bite-sized, but as long as anyone who pays for it knows ahead of time that they’re getting less than half an hour of film plus extras, there’s no harm and no foul.

“XP Service Pack 2 — it burns!!!”

It does put reviewers like me in a bit of a bind, though — and by “reviewers like me,” I mean folks who blather on at length as a matter of course. I don’t have a designated short film division, which means that even though it’s a short film, I’m planning on giving you a full-length review. Most of the time, I can usually finish a review in less time than it took to watch the movie; in this case, I doubt you’ll be able to read the review in less than the running time.

Of course, I could cheat and quote extensively from the DVD cover, but if I did that, you’d get this:

Jenny Visser, verslaggeefster bij Nieuws Net Negentien, bereid om voor een primeur over lijken te gaan…

No, I’m not letting one of my preschoolers do the transcription for me; that’s Dutch, which makes perfect sense for a movie is from the Netherlands. (Dutch is also spoken in parts of Pennsylvania, but I’m guessing you’ll be waiting a long time before you see any Amish-made horror movies on the new release shelves.) The first Dutch-language zombie flick? Actually, no; as far as the IMDb knows, the 1997 Belgian-made short Striker Bob bears that distinction. Having not seen Striker Bob, I can’t tell you how close the contest is for the best Dutch-language zombie flick yet. [Note: Yes, I've been informed. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are actually of German descent. Please don't email me about it anymore.]

Hey, maybe I ought to start talking about the film itself sometime soon, huh? Fine.

“I tried to wear a shirt… that would properly accent the blood…”

As reported by the matronly anchorwoman of Channel 19 News, there are two problems afflicting the Netherlands at the moment. One is a bizarre plague of annoying mosquitoes causing no end of consternation among the locals. The other is a recent explosion at the Beta Chemicals complex, on which company officials aren’t commenting. Reporter Jenny Sisser (Anjali Taneja) is doing her best on that latter, but no one will let her in the company gate; all she can see is the aftereffects of the explosion glowing in the night.

Jenny takes her cameraman Ed (Willem Emo) and sound man Sjaak (Dorus van der Meer) to find a better vantagepoint, and it looks like the multistory building housing the game software company Powersoft fits the ticket. But they find the front door of Powersoft puzzlingly hanging open. They creep inside to investigate and find the main programmer’s bullpen thoroughly trashed. (And despite what you may know about professional techno-geeks, that’s not the normal state of affairs.) The only sign of life they find is the bloodied and near-catatonic supervisor Mike (Cas Jansen), who tells them in fits and starts the events of the night up to that point…

Seems that the Powersoft personnel had been pulling an all-nighter in preparation for a presentation on their new videogame, Final Flesh 2, sequel to their bestselling zombie shooter game. Mike, of course, is riding his programmers’ asses like the cocaine-powered despot that he is, but even that doesn’t explain (at least, not entirely) the sudden disappearance of one of his staff who went downstairs for some coffee. The good news is that, when a second staffer goes downstairs to find the first, they both come back. The bad news is… they’re both flesh-hungry zombies!

Hey, wait, didn’t I just show a vidcap of this face?

In case you were wondering, the rationale is that mosquitos + chemical explosion = green glowing mosquitoes whose bite turns the bitten into the living dead (with green glowing eyes of their own). It doesn’t take long before Mike finds himself beset at every side,as even those barricaded inside the office suite with him succumb to random bites.

Mike finally dies at the end of his recap (or at least lapses into unconsciousness), but the news crew finds that by that time, they’ve inadvertantly committed a high journalistic sin: Instead of merely observing the story, they’ve now become a part of it. Along with a security guard (Javier Guzman) who gets trapped with them, they helplessly try to find an exit not already swarming with the dead.

Ah, those refined European manners…

As you can imagine, 23 minutes is scarcely enough time to render the necessary setup, much less put together a full-fledged story. What we’ve got her is a promo piece, something that should be shown to investors to convince them to pony up for the real movie. Too bad, too, because there are plenty of details here that get shortchanged. The fact that Powersoft is coincidentally working on a zombie game is almost wholly unexploited, except for offering a rationale for horror posters all over the walls — Re-Animator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a whole slew of cheap Italian zombie flicks. (You can imagine easily enough how this story angle could have played out: the programmers use their encyclopedic knowledge of zombie movies and strategy games to find tactical solutions that other people like the news team wouldn’t think off. For added fun, the computer geeks find to their detriment that sometimes a real-life zombie attack doesn’t work the same as when it’s confined to your PS2.)

Heightening the impression of this movie as a portfolio piece is the sheer technical excellence. Yes, it’s shot on video, but high-end digital video with (gasp!) professional lighting and sound. Makeup effects are uniformly credible (bonus points for relying on gelatine-based appliance, whose natural translucency better mimics the look of real flesh than foam latex). And there’s plenty of digital trompe l’oiel work in here that earns the highest accolade one can give to CGI: You think it’s real. Sure, the digital backdrop of the news studio is identifiable, and it’s obvious that the zombies’ glowing eyes weren’t present on set… but other effects, like a computer monitor being used as a headcrusher or a victim being pulled apart at the midsection, are wholly believable and unidentifiable as digital effects unless you explore the behind-the-scenes footage (into which, alas, the subtitling available for the main feature does not extend).

**This week on Smallville: Kryptonite-powered mosquitos!**

Between the well-shot picture, the picture-perfect digital effects, and the truncated storyline to fit everything into a short, Deadline is more than a little bit reminiscent of Y2K: Shutdown Detected (1999), a similar American-produced portfolio piece I reviewed some years back. Alas, if Y2K is any precedent, then Deadline will probably never be expanded into the feature that it deserves to be. But if nothing else, at least Deadline teaches us in the U.S. of A. that we really ought to stop whining and moaning about West Nile virus in our mosquitoes.