Film Review: DEADSIGHT (2018)

 DEADSIGHT (2018) Canada 1hr 21mins

Director: Jesse Thomas Cook

"I woke up in the middle of nowhere in the back of an ambulance. Everyone was gone." - Ben

"I won't survive with you." - Mara (to Ben).

"We thought we were ready for this." - Gator.

Ben Neilson (Adam Seybold) wakes up in the back of an ambulance, partially sighted due to a previous and unknown accident, he awakes with his eyes bandaged and is handcuffed to a stretcher. He manages to free himself but still has the stretchers handrail attached to his handcuff which actually comes in handy as he tries to figure out what is going on and starts to make his way around. Making it outside the ambulance, which has been abandoned in front of a cemetery, Ben gets attacked by a zombie paramedic. He manages to get away but has no idea what is going on. After realising the ambulance still works he considers driving away but due to the fact that he really cant see he chickens out. Finding some eye drops in his pocket he puts some in and walks away from the ambulance, wandering the roads for a while he comes across an old farm house. Meanwhile, a heavily pregnant Mara Madigan (Liv Collins) wakes up also oblivious to the pandemic spreading around her. After a brief phone conversation with her mother who explains they cant come to see her because her father is really sick. Mara gets on her uniform and hops into her police truck to head into work. On her way to the station Mara finds a very sick woman in the middle of the road. She gets out of the truck to get a blanket for the woman only to find her holding a gun to her own head, with wild eyes, blood running from her mouth and incoherent babbling the woman steals Mara's truck leaving her stranded. Mara finds herself at the same farm house as Ben and saves his life just in time as the zombies make their way in. Ben and Mara form a shaky friendship at first but discover the need for trust and teamwork is warranted if they are both going to make it out of this mess alive.

This low budget Canadian film with a small cast and crew is an effective and eerie straight up horror based zombie movie. I think the twist of having the main protagonists both with real physical conditions that are not always easy in normal circumstances let alone during the start of the zombie apocalypse is a great touch and something a little different to your average zombie movie these days. Seybold and Collins are pretty good together although at times mainly towards the end they both tend to hyperventilate quite a lot. Seybold does a brilliant job in his role as the partially sighted Ben and is very convincing. The zombies are the slow type and are made up really well. Their acting is spot on and even though it is mostly just individual zombies going up to about half a dozen at any one time they are very violent and intimidating. They show a few hapless victims succumbing to the virus, which appears to be airborne, in great detail. The FX are not bad at all for a low budget with some effective fake blood and heads popping off at various intervals. The whole feel and atmosphere is fairly dark and gloomy mind you which works to the film makers advantage as you don't get to see the kills all that clearly and they like to have quite a few POV shots of what Ben can (make that can't) see but that is a clever way to go about things so I'll let them off. 

The plot is fairly standard; two people in difficult situations stick together to fight the zombies and protect each other from more unsavoury humans, so in that respect it is nothing new but with the fact that one is almost blind and the other is about to have a baby it gives it all a more urgent edge to seek help and safety so the underlying panic is ever present which I liked. It was well executed and thought out right up until about the final third of the movie when it kind of fizzled out a bit. I felt that they copped out of a good ending by not being as bold as they could have been which was a little disappointing. However, the background score composed by Adrian Ellis had a great synthwave edge to it at times and in places it reminded me of the score in COLIN (2008) which is highly enjoyable.

Of all the similarly named "..... Of The Dead" type zombie movies that seem to be coming out in their droves these last few years I am thankful to DEADSIGHT for trying to be something different. DEADSIGHT is very new to me and it totally passed under my radar when it first came out, I'm not even sure it has had an official UK release but I am glad I have finally seen it, it has some promising moments, the zombies are awesome (though I am going to do my usual thing and say I would have preferred at lot more of them) and it all flowed pretty well together... yes the ending lets it down but I did find it eerie and entertaining all the same. I score DEADSIGHT 3 brains out of 5!

DEADSIGHT (2018) is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime. I watched this on the Horror Channel, now known as Legend, and it is available on DVD or Blu Ray but do check the region before buying as there is currently no UK distribution so they're either Canadian/US versions or there is German version floating about.