User Reviews

Dead Meat is set Leitrim county in Ireland where Helena (Marián Araújo) & her boyfriend Martin (David Ryan) are driving through the countryside when they hit a man in the middle of the road, the man dies but doesn't stay dead for long as he comes back as a flesh-eating zombie who takes a bite out of Martin's neck. Helena seeks help in a nearby cottage but also finds zombies there as Martin dies & comes back as a zombie too. As Helena desperately searches for help she meets local farmer Desmond (David Muyllart), they both decide to team up & work together to try & escape the zombie infected countryside...

This Irish production was written & directed by Conor McMahon & jumped on the bandwagon started by the likes of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Dawn of the Dead (2004), 28 Days Later... (2002) & Resident Evil (2002) all of which saw an upturn in the popularity of zombie films. Having said that Dead Meat probably owes more to the George A. Romero 'Dead' series of films, to be honest I have to say that while Dead Meat isn't the worst example of a zombie film it's hardly anything to get excited about. The script starts off like a straight Night of the Living Dead (1968) rip-off with a man & woman attacked by a zombie, the man is killed, the woman runs off for help & finds a farmhouse as the zombie menace increases & there's not that much more to it as Helena & Desmond spend the majority of the rest of the film wandering around the countryside fighting the odd zombie in order to get to an old fort which seems like an idea used by the filmmakers because of the location rather than any meaningful narrative reason. The so-called twist ending makes little sense, it's never clear why help wouldn't arrive in Leitrim for six to eight hours since Ireland really isn't that big & if there are flesh-eating zombies everywhere why would you just stop in the middle of the night, light a fire & just sit there? At under 80 minutes at least it's short & has a good pace about it but it's all rather forgettable with flat character's including one who has a horrible thick Irish accent which makes it virtually impossible to understand what he is saying.

The set-pieces are dull with a few boring zombie attacks & the gore is disappointing with a few decapitations, some impalement's, someones eye is sucked out with a vacuum cleaner & some blood splatter but nothing w haven't already seen before & the special effects are fairly poor with some terrible zombie make-up. McMahon clearly pays homage or rips-off other (better) films such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (1978) as a zombie is killed with a screwdriver in the ear, Day of the Dead (1985) as a character has his arm chopped off after being bitten & the wound is burned shut, there are several gliding POV shots like those seen in The Evil Dead (1982) & when Helena nearly gets a pick-axe in the face you can't help but think of Lucio Fulci's zombie flick The City of the Living Dead (1980). This isn't scary, there's no tension or suspense & with the bare minimum of story (people walking around countryside for 80 minutes) there's not much here to recommend beyond one or two gore effects, a decent pace & a thankfully brief duration.

Filmed on location in County Leitrim in Ireland the film does at times look quite nice & fairly professional but at other times it screams cheap low budget shot on digital video camcorder eyesore. The acting is poor although none of the actors are given anything to work with & the character's are very one dimensional.

Dead Meat is alright, it passes the time & it has one or two reasonable moments but a complete lack of character's or story doesn't help, neither do the poor make-up effects & a seemingly random ending set inside a castle. Hard to recommend but I've seen worse.

~Spoiler~

Dead Meat is an Irish zombie film released under Fangoria's GoreZone banner. I kept my expectations as low as possible and was very pleasantly surprised. If Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was remade with the humor of Peter Jackson and the style of Sam Raimi, you would have Dead Meat. And it has that great low budget gore. You know what I'm talking about. A vacuum cleaner sucks out an eyeball, a man is clubbed to death by...The Club, zombies are killed by high heels, and much more. The cinematography, again surprisingly, is also excellent. It has an odd compressed look, but it fits the film and they showcase some great scenery. Director Conor McMahon may steal a few too many pages from the book of Sam Raimi, but that frenetic style is perfect for this movie. I also loved the characters, especially Mr. Cheunt. I actually had to hit the subtitle button after he showed up but he had me in tears laughing. My only problems with the film were the abrupt ending and the running time of 75 minutes. It actually left me wanting more. I'd suggest checking this out, especially if you enjoyed the recent Undead.

When a movie is categorised as Horror/Action/Comedy you can be forgiven for assuming it will make you recoil in fear/marvel at the action/laugh at the funny bits. The scariest part of this film was the idea of being stuck in the Irish countryside for the night with a bunch of inbreds who speak some rural off shoot dialect not dissimilar to Brad Pitt's pikey in 'Snatch'. The action comes in the shape of an old woman trying to change the tyre on her husbands land rover and some suspense shots, er, borrowed shall we say from 'The Evil Dead'. I must admit though we did get one good laugh at the end of the film, as the credits rolled to the sound of one of the directors mates band's I turned to my friend Steven and asked "So how much did you pay for this?".

I'm sorry but I cannot understand how anyone, even the director's mother could write a positive review of this film. I had to sit through this god-awful mess of a film last night and it was so horribly bad it actually offended and depressed me that a script this awful could have ever received funding.

The acting is atrocious, The camera-work and lighting inconsistent within single scenes. Big chunks of completely pointless dialog scenes whose sole purpose seemed to be to drag out the running time to feature length. It was a mish-mash of poorly executed rip offs of other horror movies like The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead etc. Apparently the director is a huge horror fan, which really makes me wonder how he could show a blatant disregard for most of the unwritten 'rules' of zombie movies. For one the zombies use tools, and seem far too intelligent. Also there's a scene where a big horde of zombies just simply give up and walk away.

The effects were serviceable, nothing special, but they were repetitive. If I had €1 for every time a zombie got stabbed in the eye by a stick or something similar I would have made my money back from renting this awful awful film.

There was barely enough material in this film to make a sh*tty short film never mind a full feature. I am completely dumb-founded how this film has received any positive comments on this site. It even failed miserably at falling into the 'So bad it's good' category.

I have to end this review now because otherwise I'll vomit from the bad taste this film has left in my mouth.

The tourist Helena (Marián Araújo) and her mate Martin (David Ryan) are traveling by car through the County of Leitrim, Ireland, when Martin hits a man. He brings the body to his car, and the corpse returns to live and bites him. Helena looks for help in a cottage and is attacked inclusive by Martin. Sooner she realizes that the place is infested of zombies. She meets the gravedigger Desmond (David Muyllaert) and they cross the countryside trying to find a safe place. They meet another couple and they become aware that the mad cow disease has infected humans transforming them in living dead.

"Dead Meat" is a sort of Irish remake of "Night of the Living Dead". Gore and cult, it works very well, with an excellent camera, frantic in the movements, and great make-up and special effects. In some moments, this trash movie is so bloody that recalls Peter Jackson's "Braindead". My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Dead Meat – O Banquete dos Zumbis" ("Dead Meat – The Banquet of the Zombies")

A very low-budget Irish film with partly incomprehensible accents. However, it's just a zombie film so the dialogue hardly matters. Time isn't wasted in getting on with the mayhem, no long dull introduction here. But there is nothing new and revolutionary, either (nor does it have to be). And how can there be? Unless you consider the new concept of "sleeping zombies" worth a celebration. The violence is quite silly. I've never seen such soft zombies in any movie before! The blunt end of a mere shovel can be thrown at a zombie – and will PIERCE him straight through, as if he's made of butter. The heroine uses her high-heel shoes to launch them at a zombie's face – and the not-so-sharp heels cut through the face as if it were made of wax, not skin and bone. Apparently the human body softens up, turns to jelly almost, after it's been zombified. These are not meant to be criticisms, I'm just mentioning them for the hell of it.

Mad cow disease finally gets its own horror flick with this latest offering from Fangoria and the Irish Film Board. In this case, this ultra-violent strain of mad cow disease can be passed on to humans, turning them into zombies. It's hard to think of this set-up as being anything but a rip-off of 28 DAYS LATER with cows instead of monkeys being the initial carrier of the infection.

So this bovine infection starts causing people to attack each other in rural Ireland. Maybe I'm just getting numbed by all the zombie movies, but this one seemed like a weak attempt to capitalize on the zombie craze. Unfortunately, I think that the expiration date on zombie movies may be coming soon, if it's not already passed.

There's one pretty good moment where this girl sucks out a guy's eye with a vacuum cleaner, but otherwise this is a pretty standard zombie flick. You just can't make the same old zombie movie and expect people to be scared. You have to find a way to make it unique. Look at poor George Romero, who returned to the genre that he helped create, only to find mediocre box office success. As much as I hate to admit it, it might be time for filmmakers to take a little break from zombie movies, at least until they can find a fresh approach.

This dead meat is not fresh or very nutritional. It's more like meat loaf. When you've got meat that's about to go bad, sometimes the only thing you can do is mix it up with other ingredients and make it into meat loaf.

It seems weird that I find myself complaining this movie is too short, given how many movies are at least an hour too long these days, but Dead Meat really needed more space. It's tiny 70 minute run time barely gives it time to introduce characters, let alone explain it's whacked-out plot-line.

While Dead Meat is getting itself cracking, it's pretty cool. For one, it's daylight, which is a little different for these movies, and the sprightly camera work recalls movies like Braindead and the Evil Dead series (if a little less proficient than those two.). Still, it already has problems. The plot suggests that it's trying to be funny, but aside from a few bad taste laughs at gore shots, you won't be finding this movie remotely funny. It's got more in common with Night of the Living Dead than Bad Taste, and almost all the laughs come at the expense of the gore-shots, which are messy but very derivative (aside from one fantastic instance involving a vacuum cleaner and an eyeball.) and no gore-hound will be particularly impressed with what's on offer, originality wise.

It sucks at being scary too. Zombie attacks are badly handled, with no real scares to speak of and shoddy lighting and direction leading to a lot of confusion as to who's fighting who. Not that you'll care, with the exception of undertaker Des, the characters are weak and badly written, not that you'd notice given most of them are packing effected accents that garble half their lines. I'm not talking about the Irish guys either. Main character Helena is indecipherable for a lot of the run-time.

I wish this film had carried through on it's excellent first half, but once a plot has to come out, it just doesn't have the goods. The only real joy you can pull out of this movie is if you view it as a cheap gore flick and go in for the blood, as it has a lot, and it's surprisingly nasty for a 15. If you REALLY dig gore and don't care how bad movies are if they have good gore shots, check this out, if not, I'd avoid it. Oh, and on a side note, the ending sucks. Do yourself a favour, avoid this and rent Versus or Undead instead.

All I can say about this movie that it's a great for an Irish , So if you want a real horror and enjoyable movie , you've got to watch this movie , It contains a good music effects than any other movie has like Dawn of the dead and also great graphic and nice environment. this horror flick will live for a while i'd think . Don't miss it , go and pick it up.

I don't want to tell you a lot about the movie so you can watch it , you can feel it just like me , and my god you will love it.

Finally , All i can say for you , Enjoy the movie.

Thank you.

Pretty cool little horror film from the land of green valleys & the wee folk.No Name stars acted well. The rugby or whatever kind of coach he was, was funny through most of it. And the mad Cows killing & eating the humans was a cool way to change the usual zombie story lines. Is no way near as good as Shaun of The Dead as it follows in the same vein & is not a scary horror/zombie film at all. The plots is a cool spin on how the zombie plague starts with the dreaded "MAD COW DISEASE" as the cause of it all. Had a lot of really humorous to downright funny parts too it.If you like really gory horror there's may-be 1 to 2 parts that may wet your appetite. Other than that the gore was light for a zombie film. *** out of *****

CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.

Ireland's lush countryside has been hit by a mutated strain of Mad Cow Disease, turning anyone who is exposed to it into flesh-eating zombies. A group of survivors – a young Spanish tourist, a young girl, a couple & the local gravedigger – attempt to make it to a rescue station whilst dodging attacks by the zombies now roaming the countryside.

Ireland – the land of leprechauns, four-leaf-clovers & Guinness beer on tap – finally joins the world's brotherhood of nations that have made zombie films. Granted, it's nothing particularly special, but it does mean something to the world's zombie fans. Dead Meat is Ireland's entry into the genre, directed by Conor McMahon.

Dead Meat is fairly much a routine zombie film in a flood of similar films that have come out over the past decade. It seems to be nothing more than just another production made to honour the genre but doesn't have anything grand to add to the genre, aside from the location.

The film's first act is nothing special – with a young Spanish woman & the local gravedigger trekking through the countryside while avoiding zombies – although it does have some decent gore on display. The second act is much better, with the survivors travelling through the countryside at night (if you've ever wondered whether zombies can sleep, that question is answered here – although the Irish undead do it while standing up!), a setup that has some modest atmosphere to it. But McMahon drops the ball again when it comes to the third act. Despite much gore, the climax follows zombie tradition to the letter but doesn't do anything particularly special with it.

The actors are clearly professionals & all give good performances. There were some surprise zombie attacks, particularly the young girl, & some seriously ticked-off cows, as well as a downbeat ending that has the sole survivor placed into a containment pen with other survivors while their 'rescuers' clean up the infestation. Oh, & if you've ever wondered about the merits of fighting zombies using a vacuum cleaner, you'll be pleased to know that vacuum cleaners can work quite effectively on the undead.