Dead Zone (USA, 2022)

Not to be mistaken David Cronenberg's Dead Zone (1983 / trailer), from so long ago that no one really remembers it. This Dead Zone was initially broadcast on Tubi in the US and then released as a cutout DVD in Europe. It is, in all truth, pretty stupid in almost every way, but, oddly enough, also far more enjoyable than it has the right to be. Regional genre filmmaker Hank Braxtan (of Chemical Peel [2014 / trailer] Unnatural [2015 / trailer], Snake Outa Compton [2018 / trailer], Jurassic Hunt [2021 / trailer], Dragon Soldiers [2020 / trailer] and Glowzies [2023 / trailer]) won't win any prizes for his overly direct and unadorned style, but he does a good job with his actors and manages to wrought the little he has into an oddly satisfying if overly familiar (and ultimately inane and forgettable) slab of virile action.

Supposedly it took four guys — Michael Lurie and Jeffrey Giles wrote the story, while Michael Klug and Tim Ogletree did the screenplay — to scribble the script to this masculine but mindless B-movie, but one gets the feeling that all four spent more time cracking open the brews than they did putting any effort into the narrative. One wonders that any of them managed to see far enough over the rim of their cans to allow a little estrogen into the story, in the form of a female character, Goodman (Whitney Nielsen of Behemoth [2021 / trailer], Alien Expedition [2018 / trailer] and Mercy Christmas [2017 / trailer]), who unexpectedly pops up midway... The general feeling conveyed is that the part was first written for a man (Dead Zone is, after all, a really manly flick) and then, suddenly, suffering a brief flash of woke guilt, they decided to give the character breasts and a vagina. (None of which you ever see on screen.) 

Trailer to

Dead Zone: 

The headlining stars are, of course, Michael Jai White, Chad Michael Collins and Jeff Fahey, but as any regular viewer of D2DVD-worthy movies knows and expects, Jeff Fahey* (of Psycho III [1986 / trailer], Corpses [2004], Planet Terror [2007] and so much more) is around just long enough to do about a day's worth of shooting and collect his check. In other words, probably not even five minutes screentime: just long enough to explain the mission to the film's elite team of brawny soldiers, send them off, smile, walk off screen, and never be seen again.

* Fahey is not known to say "No" to a job, and has never been a favorite here at a wasted life, but he's definitely an actor that has gotten better with age. Nowadays he comes across as a true thespian even when sleepwalking or in parts not half as small as this one. To get an idea of how much he's improved — or, perhaps, to see how bad he used to be — give his 1995 fiasco The Lawnmower Man (1992 / trailer) a gander.

 

And what a muscular, strapping, cis-gender team of mostly six-packed young DILFs the elite soldiers are! The oldest is probably BBC team leader Boss (Michael Jai White of Spawn [1997], Black Dynamite [2009 / trailer], Black Friday [2021 / trailer] and so much more), who can save us any time he wants: the singular man on the cusp of GILFiness, he not only can still kick martial arts ass but has a killer smile and fantasy-worthy bod. (But then, so do all the men in this flick; the only thing that varies is the size of their biceps, chests and, probably, the weapons they never show.) His virile team of red-blooded expendables — come on, you know that's what teams in movies like this are: fodder waiting to die — are the strapping fellow BBC Ton (Antuone Torbert of Karate Kill [2016 / trailer]), the slimly sturdy and dreamy-eyed Danner (Tarkin Dospil), and the robust redneck-looking Sinclair (J. Michael Weiss, who always seems to play characters that die early). They get joined by the cocksure Ajax (Chad Michael Collins, he with the oddly untrustworthy smirk, of Legion of the Dead [2005 / trailer], Room 33 [2009 / trailer] and Howlers [2019 / trailer]), whose past beef with Boss gets settled in a properly macho, two-fisted way and then they are reliable best buds again — nothing like a respectable fistfight to get old scores off the table. (It's a bit of a shame that they didn't top that scene off with them comparing sizes.)

Dead Zone is nominally a zombie movie, but barely. The future present in which the film is set is one in which a zombie virus has long broken out, resulting in big swathes of the country (now radioactive due to bombing) being quarantined. Damn if a possible vaccine wasn't left behind in a lab in the titular "Dead Zone" (which, oddly enough, still has electricity), so our elite team gets sent in wearing high-tech armor — a shame they didn't also get high-tech weapons — to retrieve the serum. But although fast zombies do pop up now and then, the true danger is a man in a rubber suit, a mutated blood-sucking humanoid creature (James Markham Hall Jr. of Laguna Ave [2021 / trailer]) with a long, blood-sucking tongue (we're talking tentacle-porn length).

 

The script is grunt-level intelligent and holds water about as good as a popped condom, but Dead Zone isn't out to be intelligent: it aims to offer some hardy, two-fisted entertainment for guys that want to zone out and relax in front of the tube. In that sense, the movie works perfectly: if you are not one to be bothered by stupidity — most men are not, as is evidenced by our tendency to go for airheadednness — Dead Zone is truly a slab of agreeable if unimaginative celluloid testosterone. The hunky, elite team has good chemistry, and the video-game level CGI is oddly appropriate to the video-game narrative. The last barrels single-mindedly ahead without thinking once about anything, sort of like beer-drinking men on the way to the toilet during a piss pause.

 

Okay, the black-op suits the team wear are slightly annoying, as they make the individual men pretty indistinguishable (Iron Man-like POV shots are continually edited in to clarify who's doing what or what's happening to whom), and there is a bit too much pointless walking around. But that said, on the whole Dead Zone works for what it is: an obviously low budget, blatantly brainless but brawny B-movie. (To its advantage, that is also all it sets out to be.)

About the only thing that would have truly made Dead Zone better is copious amounts of gratuitous nudity, but, as we all know, those days are long over.