Review by Ben Bussey
One thing we can categorically state about Britsh writer-director Steven Sheil is that he is doing his utmost to avoid pigeonholing. Having made his name with the dingy kitchen-sink ordeal horror of Mum and Dad, which was set for almost the duration in a squalid two-up two-down in the shadow of Heathrow airport, one might not immediately anticipate that he’d follow that up with an HBO Asia co-production set in the jungles of Indonesia, following a ragtag team of mercenaries, academics and wealthy financiers on a mysterious and invariably dangerous treasure hunt involving a long-lost World War 2 bunker. And I love that; I think it’s great that Sheil chose for his second feature something so diametrically opposed to his breakthrough. Sure, the fact that I was not especially enamoured with Mum and Dad may be a factor there; give me the choice between miserabilist torture and gung-ho boy’s own adventure, and I’ll be off swinging on a vine with Tarzan every time. (Freudians, do your worst.)
That said, I did head into Dead Mine with at least a little trepidation given that, as I noted when we posted the trailer recently, the whole set-up does seem more than a little reminscent of Outpost, the men on a mission/Nazi zombie chiller which has thus far spawned one sequel and looks to have at least indirectly inspired a number of movies in much the same vein, such as War of the Dead. Dead Mine may stand apart in that it uses Japanese Imperialists as the big bad instead of the Nazis, and takes place in the humidity of the Far East rather than the chill of Eastern Europe – but we might be forgiven for regarding that as little more than slightly different window dressing on a store that’s selling the exact same stuff. That said, when we get right down to it there’s never going to be anything especially new about any kind of adventure into the heart of darkness (see what I did there?), and all that really matters is how well the familiar material is handled. Happily, Dead Mine does indeed handle it well – up to a point. Sadly, it fails to deliver on the full potential of its evocative premise; a premise which, I might add, is very badly undersold by yet another instance of lacklustre and rather misleading cover art, which stresses only the horror element without conveying any sense of the action-adventure element. Poor show. Alas, in a way that is indeed a fair approximation of Dead Mine, in that it is the film’s failure to fully develop its epic action elements that is its undoing.
On the plus side – the set-up is great. We have the requisite bunch of mismatched personalities bouncing off each other in all the wrong ways, from the overpriviliged snobbery of American rich boy Les Loveday and his girlfriend Carmen Soo, to the bravado of grunts Bang Tigor and Joe Taslim (kind of the biggest name here in the wake of The Raid, although his is very much a supporting role), and the world-weariness of military veterans Ario Bayu and Sam Hazeldine. As in the best of these kind of stories, these are people you’d struggle to envisage getting along under normal circumstances; plunge them into an abandoned mineshaft facing who knows what kind of peril, and obviously things are only going to get worse. For the most part it’s compelling and well acted with a nice chemistry between the cast, in particular the comradery that develops between Hazeldine’s philosophical ex-soldier and Miki Mizuno’s inquisitive historian. As they uncover more of the mine’s dark and weird secrets – experimentation, supersoldiers/hideous monsters, you know the drill – it all seems to be building toward a powder keg of a climax…
And then it just stops. Yes, the real kicker with Dead Mine which keeps me from being able to recommend it is that just as things look to be getting really exciting, it comes to a painfully abrupt non-ending, leaving a barrage of unanswered questions and an undeniable sense of being short-changed. I mean seriously – and this isn’t really a spoiler given they’re shown in the trailer (and I’ve even included a picture of one above) – why introduce an army of zombie samurai if we’re not going to see them do serious battle? Imagine if Neil Marshall had chosen to end The Descent within about fifteen minutes of the Crawlers being introduced, with the women making little or no effort to fight back; the film wouldn’t have been half as effective without those climactic bloody brawls. Unfortunately this is very much how the finale of Dead Mine plays out, meaning that all the tension and conflict beforehand amounts to nothing. Maybe they ran out of time and/or money, maybe they hope to carry on to a sequel – the potential is certainly there for them to do so – but as it stands, Dead Mine is almost certain to leave the viewer feeling cheated. And it really does pain me to say so, as it came so close to being a great bit of action-horror entertainment.
Dead Mine is out now on Region 2 DVD from Entertainment One.