By Ben Bussey
A movie with Danny Trejo and volcanic zombies was only ever going to go one of two ways. It might have been a cross between Dante’s Peak and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with epic lava FX and full-on zombie attack sequences – or, it could have been yet another half-arsed Sharknado type movie drowning in shitty CGI, bulging with overwritten subplots no one gives a toss about which try and fail to distract from the fact that the film has neither the budget nor the creativity to make good on its concept, with Danny Trejo in fact only appearing for about five minutes just so his picture can go on all the promo art.
I’ll give you a massive hint: The Burning Dead is not the former.
Yes, I’m afraid to say The Burning Dead is yet another of those tepid puddles of piss that leave you feeling sorry for everyone involved in the production who threw away time and energy into something so utterly worthless on every level. Like with all these Syfy Channel type films, the core concept is fun, and seems to promise 80 odd minutes of cheesy goodness, but in fact we get all of 15 minutes of fun scenes whilst the running time is padded out with the usual stock characters: well-meaning sheriff who kinda has a thing for single mom of vaguely rebellious daughter with cantankerous estranged grandfather who cross paths with nerdy old volcanologist and his vaguely hip young apprentice, yadayada… Trejo, meanwhile, pops up intermittently as a Native American patriarch telling the legend of the mountain to his grandkids, in scenes which feel like they belong in a totally different film and indeed have very little bearing on what goes down other than to give us a bit more exposition.
But believe me, if there’s one thing The Burning Dead didn’t need more of, it’s overwrought dialogue. All we want to see is volcano-born zombies chowing down on this boring ensemble, but instead all we seem to get is them sitting around and talking, not making a great deal of haste considering they’re meant to be evacuating town due to the local volcano being on eruption alert. Factor in the fact that said eruption has the curious effect of raising zombies, and you’d think they’d be getting their skates on doubly quick. No such luck – nor does their inability to get move on hasten them to their deaths any quicker, more’s the pity.
About the one thing that does feel like a break from the norm with the current wave of sub-Corman SyFy creature feature shite is that they didn’t use sharks as the monsters and call this Sharkruption or something. Zombies are comparatively rare in this particular arena, primarily as they tend to result in more graphic bloodshed than the SyFy Channel can get away with – and, sure enough, The Burning Dead is indeed a fair bit gorier than the umpteen shark-based flicks of recent years, and even boasts a bit of agreeably gratuitous nudity from a ‘blogger’ taking topless selfies in front of the erupting volcano before becoming the main course. However, these moments are sporadic, and seem presented in such a way that they could quite easily be edited out for television. It’s that same old ‘unrated’ trick Hollywood keeps playing on us, putting out slightly reworked versions of PG-13s with a little more swearing and (most likely digitally painted on) blood. More often than not such efforts fail to save movies which were already worthless, and guess what: they don’t make The Burning Dead any less of a waste of time either.
The Burning Dead is out now on VOD and On Demand services in the US, and comes to DVD from April 7th, via Uncork’d Entertainment.