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Amid the Dead
USA 2004
produced by Kate Duffy, Erik Osheim for Shameful Axe, Drama Board
directed by Kate Duffy
starring Ben Ewen-Campen, Blair Cochran, Anna Headley, Dave Haendler, Samantha Crane, Christine Smallwood, Jonah Gold, Arthur Chu, Micah White, Ross hoffman, Rachelle Isip, Holice Kil, Arpy Saunders, Suzanne Wu, Martha Hoffman, Erik Osheim, Kate Duffy
concept by Erik Osheim, Kate Duffy, screenplay by Kate Duffy, music by Dan Consiglio, Erik Osheim, gore effects by Dan Consiglio, Paula Guillain, Cameron Higby-Naquin, Zach Pezzementi
featurette
review by Mike Haberfelner
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18 years ago, Ben (Ben Ewen-Campen) was born during the
zombie-outbreak, right when his mother (Christine Smallwood) was attacked
and killed by the living dead. But when she returned to undead life, she
didn't eat her own offspring but brought it up anyhow, as best as she
could. Now Ben is a young man, accepted by the zombies as one of theirs,
and still a living human, self-educated and perfectly grasping what's
going on - and hating it, even if the zombies treat him well, let him eat
with them (he has no problems reverting to cannibalism once he's hungry),
and he even has a zombie girlfriend (Anna Headley). Then though he
stumbles upon Barbara (Blair Cochran), a living girl about his age, and
the two fall in love almost immediately. He tries to teach her how to
avoid zombie-attacks, too, but when she hears the people she has been
travelling with being killed by zombies, she panics, attacks the zombies
and is eaten up in the process. Seeing the girl he has loved being eaten
up by those who raised him including his mother somehow is too much for
Ben, he comes to the conclusion there is no reason in life, reunites with
his zombie girlfriend, and lives happily ever after - or not, in fact ... A
student film that's at the same time a gory piece of genre cinema and a
philosophical excursion about the meaning of life - and while that sounds
like a recipe for disaster in theory, the film as such is actually pretty
interesting, a featurette that carefully outbalances genre mainstays and
intellectual hindsight and really tries to entertain without coming across
as too brainy or dumbing its content down too much. That said, Amid the
Dead is far from perfect, it could have done with a tighter pacing, a
more imaginative direction and a better cast, but even as it is, it's
interesting to say the least.
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