A young boy watches his father do an impression of George Eastman pulling his guts out like on the cover of Anthropophagus. Then the father develops some eye problems. Years later, the boy has grown into a man and he's trying to fix up the family home where the incident occurred. A zombie infection begins to spread through the small town, and as is to be expected, the undead eventually trap our hero and his friends in the run down house.

Dead Life features amateurish acting, which is to be expected, but also has a script and thespians who think they're funny when really they're not. Sometimes they are amusing, but that's the highest calibre on hand. Fortunately most of the humour is done early on. The film is slow to get going until the Night of the Living Dead-esque situation sets in. Maybe that's the 70s feel the blurb on the back of the DVD cover is talking about, the inexcusable slowness that 70s movies so often have. Dead Life also suffers from padding, most notably in a phone call in a hardware store. The commentary track describes this as funny, but in context it just kills the pace of the film. Surprisingly, the characters in Dead Life actually do intelligent things sometimes, except for one guy who literally walks right into a zombie.

The zombie makeup is mostly just latex and grease paint, and more often than not, people's zombie infection appears to stop at their hairline. Except for one particularly messy zombie, who gets some quite good, unique makeup, but she is only on screen for a few moments. The film uses schizo editing to cover the FX flaws and limitations, but also uses this type of editing as a style choice in other places, so maybe hiding boo-boos wasn't the editing intent.

Dead Life also has a very metal driven score. I understand that metal and horror go together (when metal's not about dragons, kings, and fairies, that is) but if all the source music is metal, it gets boring and clichéd. The commentary actually says the film has been called 'Dead Life: The Musical' because of the amount of metal music. Another huge problem is that all the metal is provided by one rather generic band, Kitchen Knife Conspiracy. Some diversity, like maybe the use of TWO bands, would've really helped here.

Dead Life does break out of the Night of the Living Dead plotting, but never strays too far from Romeo's quadrilogy in terms of ideas. If you want an innovative, cutting edge zombie movie, look elsewhere. If you want an okay, homegrown effort, here you go.

There's also an Easter egg. In the special features menu, press left on scene select to highlight a quare on the zombie's flannel. Press enter to see a short film by the director of Dead Life.