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STUDIO: Hart Sharp Video
MSRP: $14.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 80 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• International Trailer
• Making Of
• The Braineater (short film)
The Pitch
“With a pitch like The Mad Cow Zombie Movie, we don’t even need to write a script! This shit sells itself!”
Eat mor chikin, bitch.
The Humans
Bessie The Acting Cow and a few dozen Irish people you’ll never hear of again.
The Nutshell
Farmer Vincent’s Irish cousins have been feeding dead animal flesh to their cows. The cows freak out and go totally flesheating nuts. Have you ever chewed roadkill cud? Can’t be good. Some Irish guy and his bitchy Euro tourist girlfriend run into farmers who’ve fallen victim to the cows, and then the whole emerald isle goes to hell.
The Package
According to Amazon, the disc has a short film (The Braineater) by director Conor McMahon, as well as a documentary on the making of the film. But neither of those things were on the review disc, so to hell with ‘em. The transfer and sound ain’t bad, but there’s a lot of fluctuation in the color balance of the flick, probably due to video shootin’. And that cover…Christ. I don’t know that I ever saw that thing on the right in the movie, and if he was in there, the shot definitely wasn’t as clear as the cover. And where the hell are the mad cows? They must have run away when the male lead recorded the song that’s used in the end credits, which is the best awful metal tune I’ve heard since Metal Blade Records stopped sending me free shit.
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Whenever the Melvins played County Cork, they always stopped for Ma McFaddin’s rib roast.
The Lowdown
Every country seems to get it’s own post Evil Dead/Dead Alive zombie flick, so Dead Meat has arrived to rep Ireland in the Zombie UN. You get a bunch of cheaply-made up zombies, a pretty decent birthday party gone dead (complete with clown!) and a fucking tiresome female lead who doesn’t even have the grace to die.
Now, in a movie about zombies created from mad cow disease, there’s one thing I want: Mad Friggin’ Cows! Dead Meat has two, if you count the close-ups and demonic moo-ing that’s meant to suggest the first one. The second comes at about 52 minutes into the flick. So if that’s all you’re waiting for, just hit that fast-forward. At least when that nefarious bovine shows up, he’s funny as hell and almost worth sitting through a very routine 52 minutes to see. Almost. Cow aside, the only decent violence is by vacuum cleaner, which makes an additional 45 seconds worth watching.
My bad. Make that three mad cows.
The rest of Dead Meat just hangs there like torn muscle after a surprise attack. The shot on video landscape looks kinda icky and interesting, but when the camerawork isn’t aping Peter Jackson it doesn’t manage to do anything else at all. Like Versus, most of the flick was shot in the countryside to take advantage of free production design, though Mother Nature once again gets the shaft in the credits.
3.5 out of 10