Dead Mine

In an isolated island in Indonesia, an expedition is apparently seeking the legendary Yamashita's Gold. Out of the blue, they are attacked and seek refugee in an abandoned Japanese bunker. Soon they discover that the place was a secret laboratory in the World War II where the prisoners were guinea pig in weird experiments. Further, they are trapped inside with strong and resistant creatures created by these experiments. Will they succeed to escape from the dead mine?

I really do not understand how producers (HBO, not Sci-Fi) can spend their money in garbage like that. The story is a terrible rip-off of "The Descent" and I believe anyone who read it would have at least some doubts to make a movie. The dialogs are extremely poor and the motive of the expedition is a mess. Who are the guys that shoot the expedition? How the Japanese survivor had eaten and drunken along all those years trapped in the bunker with the creatures? How someone could inject a rusted syringe with a sixty and something year-old substance in another person with the intention of healing him? The group splitting to be more easily killed is one annoying clichés. The awful lack of conclusion seems to show the intention of a sequel, meaning more wasted money. Last but not the least; the acting is more dreadful than the creatures. My vole is two.

Title (Brazil): "Mina Abandonada" ("Abandoned Mine")

With so many horror B-movies with the word 'dead' in the title, you could be forgiven for thinking that 'Dead Mine' would contain hordes of cheaply-made up flesh-eating ghouls hunting down a cast list of annoyingly-attractive drama students. It doesn't though. Instead it's more one of those films where a group of surprisingly unattractive platoon of soldiers encounter a bunker of undead Nazis (with disastrous consequences).

And it's always Nazis. It seems you can't tunnel more than two feet below Europe without unearthing a secret World War II experiment of some kind or another. But not here. Dead Mine is completely different. Here we're in an island off the coast of Japan and there isn't a single psychotic World War II scientist to be found. They're Japanese instead. Here, our hapless treasure hunters get trapped in (guess what?) a mine, only to be stalked by what can best be described as Samauri Golum gimps.

It's like if 'Decent' and 'Outpost' had a child, then 'Dead Mine' would be their offspring. Only it's not really as good as either. That's not to say that it's (that) bad. It's no classic (not even a cult classic), but, if you're in the mood, it's watchable enough.

Performances aren't anything special. You'll pretty much guess who's going to die and in which order from the beginning, as most people's motives are pretty self explanatory.

There's not as much gore as you might think, which will annoy some people. The budget obviously didn't allow for that much in the way of special effects.

The story is as you'd expect and starts off pretty well, however the final act gets a little weird and may leave you wondering what happened.

All in all, if you haven't seen Outpost or Decent and you find this film on some movie streaming website and you don't have to pay for it, then it might fill an hour and a half. As I didn't have to pay to watch it I'm being more lenient on it. I wouldn't say it was worth the price of a cinema admission though!

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By now we are used to seeing all sorts of horrors coming to us from Asia, but they all had one thing in common, they were seriously messed up, with rare exceptions. Dead Mine, an Indonesian medium budget movie takes an almost textbook approach to storytelling, and while graphic violence is present, it isn't sick or anything, but just as I said more classically bloody that we are used to seeing in American horrors. The movie itself is nothing special, but the exotic locations,cast and story make up for that. The director Steven Sheil managed to make the movie look really good, with some innovative camera angles and relatively suspenseful scenes, sacrificing reality for looks. Although when the movie's about zombies, Second World War and strange things lurking in the depths of the mine, reality discussion is really not a valid one.

An expedition led by a very wealthy, I guess scientist, called Price has finally found the thing they were looking for in Indonesia, an old abandoned bunker from WW 2. Price, accompanied by his girlfriend, a Japanese journalist on a quest to find out more about the war and a bunch of mercenaries in charge of their safety, decides to take a closer look. As soon as he said it, they were attacked by a local gang and forced to find shelter in the mine that has been converted into a bunker. After the cave in, they find themselves trapped in the mine with only one option, to push forward, into the darkness. What they don't know is that the mine is not abandoned, but far from it...

Fascination by Nazi zombies is something that has kept filmmakers in Europe occupied for quite some time, but now we are seeing this trend in Asia with Japans soldiers. While the directing was good and they managed to make Dead Mine look visually great, the story and the dialogue needs to be better. The thing that I missed the most is the suspense building up as they go deeper and deeper into the mine... Check out Dead Snow, a movie with a similar subject if you liked Dead Mine. It's not the best movie out there, but it's worth a watch...

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There is a nice little introduction to the movie (the first scene), which the rest of the movie does not really live up to. Even though there is a scene later on, that almost exactly copies it. Then there is another great shot from above on one of the characters that is really good. You can also enjoy the movie, but I think there was more there. And I'm not talking about the stupid reason our group gets themselves into a "trap" (logic almost never applies when it comes to horror).

I like movies that put different characters together and a sort of survival game begins. This movie is up that alley. Most of the characters are not as nicely defined as they could be though and the movie drags a little bit. Cinematography is good as mentioned, but there could be more, especially if you consider that the movie actually has some highlights.

I wish I could say this review contained spoilers because it would suggest there was something to spoil about this film. However, it was so abject that the director and assembeld cast have already done that for you. I won't bore you with the details of the risible plot because there are plenty of other reviewers who have done that. What they have not told you is that this film is a cheat. Yes a cheat. I don't care if you haven't paid a penny to watch it, if you watch it to the end, as I stupidly did, it will cheat you out of almost two hours of your life. You know that when a horror film starts out with a group of six, the monsters/ aliens/ zombies/ evil incarnations et al will pick them off one by one. Par for the course. Except in the final scene, we have one character turned into a zombie/ living dead figure another who submerges into a lake to escape the ridiculous Samurai warriors and a plaintive girl struggling up a beach with the warriors emerging behind her and.........roll the credits. Seriously, as the warriors approach her, it goes to black screen and then credits. So what happened to our hero who dived into the lake, the zombified character and the girl? Don't know. I am only writing this because I feel so angry that the film didn't even offer a cop-out ending. There wasn't even an ending! Did they run out of money? Did they become as bored as the rest of us and thought "Hey what, y'know everyone let's call it a wrap because there's a great cocktail bar near here and it's gotta be more fun than doing this." Cheats!