Action Horror review now from Shawn Francis who takes a look at DEAD MINE from HBO and Director Steven Sheil. This looks action packed, with some great make up FX and starring The Raid and Fast & Furious 6's Joe Taslim. Check out Shawn's review after the jump...
Written By Shawn Francis
I
can’t exactly recall how I ended up seeing the trailer. Being a
movie collector and DVD news disseminator Dead Mine. And I’m not sure why
I watched it either, the title alone screams SyFy channel movie
and/or any low-budge flick where you’d assume some undead thing(s)
would be attacking and devouring a bunch of people most likely
trapped in some kind of confined location. Well, you’d be half
right, if that’s what popped into your head; it’s what popped
into mine. I’m assuming I must have read a description of this
movie that subsequently activated those “curiosity synapses” in
my brain, because there’s no way I would have watched a trailer for
a movie called, Dead Mine, cold. I just wouldn’t.
The
trailer indicated it was about a group of treasure hunters traipsing
around some unknown jungle and coming upon a mine. So far this is
panning out to be exactly what I thought it was, but something weird
happened as the trailer came to a close. I was expecting to see
images of jungle zombies on the attack, well, they did show
“something” humanoid, but it didn’t look like a zombie, what
made me do a double take were the images of samurai warriors putting
their lethal moves on the poor treasure hunters.
What?!
Samurai Warriors?!
Wait,
a minute, this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
A
perfectly good clichéd trailer being interrupted by something out of
the ordinary and dare I say original?
Yeah,
it was those damn samurai warriors that had me hooked. It just looked
so weird. A bunch of people trapped in a mine being picked off
by—samurai warriors?! The trailer was good; it set up the
mystery but did not explain the reason behind these bygone sword
wielders. A completely different story, however, when the DVD
arrived.
Sometimes
the descriptions on the back of DVD cases can contain spoilers. I
haven’t come across a lot of them—one, come to think about it. It
was when Ti West’s The Roost was just coming out. Every
review I ever read about that movie gave me the assumption it was a
nature run amok flick about a bunch of kids being attacked by bats.
Cool. Great. I love nature run amok flicks. It wasn’t until after I
had unwrapped the DVD and was seated in a chair next to one of my DVD
cabinets, looking for a spot to put it, since my Nature Run Amok
shelf was all filled up, that I realized it wasn’t a nature run
amok flick at all. Right there in the description, on the back it
clearly states; “Once they sink their fangs into the
warm-blooded flesh…their prey become THE UNDEAD!”
Oh,
wow . . . I thought, this a vampire movie!
Same
thing happened with Dead Mine. Clearly stated on the back is
this spoiler: “…and an army of mutant samurai warriors.”
That’s
right, you read that correctly. Mutant. Samurai. Warriors.
I quickly came to
the conclusion this movie was either going to be a stroke of original
brilliance or a misfire the likes of which I have not seen since
Ishtar. Thank God it ended up being the former rather than the
latter.
The only problem I
had with it is that it does exhibit a cliché I have seen in many
movies where the focus is on a group of people trapped in a confined
location. It seems there must be some law in Hollywood that states
one of them has to be a douchebag.
What you’ve got in
Dead Mine is a nice international cast, and it’s the
American that turns out to be the douchebag. Makes sense, I will
admit, he’s the son of a CEO, got money trickling out of his
asshole, and he’s here in this jungle being escorted around by some
highly trained men that he paid for. Classic one-percenter mentality.
And he remains a douche throughout the whole movie, it’s just when
he gets severely wounded during the course of it, he no longer has
the strength to throw around his douchiness. Surprisingly, the rest
of the cast does not display any douchiness whatsoever, which is rare
for a film where the majority of the characters are highly trained
military and ex-military types. They are one hundred percent likable
and it actually bothered me to see them perish.
There’s this one
guy, who’s incredibly muscled, who doesn’t say a lot in the
movie, but has this scene where, for a brief moment, suddenly bursts
into hysterical laughter in response to that something that’s said.
It was so unexpected that I burst into laughter the moment he
did, too. I liked that guy even more after that, and he got a
memorable death scene. If he had just shut that door a little bit
faster.
Before I get into
the meat of the tale, and I start spoiling plot points (you’ve been
warned), I need to state that even though Dead Mine carries
obvious horror elements within it’s narrative it is not a movie
about the supernatural. In fact, once the layers start peeling away,
it’s more of a science fiction/horror movie.
On an island in
Indonesia that douchebag son of a CEO I mentioned above, whose name
is Price, (Les Loveday), is hunting for the treasure of Yamashita.
He’s not alone. He’s come with his girlfriend, Su-Ling (Carmen
Soo), a female photographer by the name of Rie (Miki Mizuno),
ex-Australian military man, Stanley (Sam Hazeldine) and armed
protection in the form of four local officers led by a Captain Tino
Prawa (Ario Bayu).
Only Price, Su-Ling
and Rie know they are hunting for treasure, Stanley and their armed
escorts know nothing about this. The title of the movie is a term
Stanley uses when they come across the mine, describing it as a “dead
mine,” he tells them, “…they’re all over the island.
Abandoned when the Japanese occupied in ’42.” But the one they’ve
come upon has been re-purposed, Prince notes, reinforced by the
Japanese and made into a military bunker.
During their
preparation for investigating it, Stanley and Rie have an important
conversation. Basically he wants to know why she’s here and
associating with this CEO dickhead, and she tells him she’s
interested in what makes a soldier tick. This is when Stanley,
basically, reveals the underlying theme of this whole movie:
“The
way you make a soldier is you take a human being and you re-engineer
him. You break him down to the essence of what he’s made of and
then you build him back up again, except this time you leave
something different at the heart of him. Duty. Obedience. Whatever
you want to call to call it. It’s something that tells him it’s
okay to kill a man. More than okay, it’s his purpose. You take a
man and turn him into a weapon. That’s what a soldier is. He’s
not just a man anymore; he’s a weapon waiting to be fired.”
From out of nowhere
they are attacked by opposition and driven into the mine for cover,
but it ends up being permanent cover when a thrown grenade collapses
the entrance, and severely wounds one of Prawa’s men.
Now Price is forced
to tell them what they are really doing here, and no one likes it one
but, basically because they don’t believe the legend of that gold
is true. Circumstances turn deadly when the wounded soldier they’ve
laid upon the makeshift bed is sucked into the ground by some kind of
freakish humanoid.
While Stanley, Rie
and another soldier go looking for him, the others discover the rest
of the bunker and find signs medical experimentation was conducted on
the POWs kept there, but it’s not until the lone, surviving
Japanese soldier, from seventy years ago, is found alive that things
get even stranger. He’s not normal looking and he tells Rie, who
translates, that he too was experimented on, but, like those freakish
humanoids, it wasn’t successful.
These freakish
looking beings are also hostile and murderous to any other living
being they encounter. It’s not clear whether they are cannibals,
despite the two soldiers they kill deep down in the mine, which
reminded of that scene from Rodan (1956)—that mine worker
lost in the cave in, who stumbles around until he sees the giant
pterosaur eating those giant insects. The set had that kind of vibe,
even with the poor solider stumbling around as the freaks close in on
him.
It is explained the
botched experiments do have a way out, and routinely go into the
jungle to hunt animals.
That surviving
Japanese soldier continues to explain the experiments eventually did
pay off—they worked! Enter the “mutant samurai warriors,” which
have a very impressive reveal towards the end of the movie, as they
are now nothing more than “weapons waiting to be fired.” And they
are accidentally triggered into action.
Concerning the gore,
it’s not a heavy gruefest by any means, but there is gore. The most
impressive, which is what CGI does best, augment “small things”
in a scene, is three to four samurai sword impalements, all to the
same person. Clearly CGI was used for the sword is seen going in one
side and coming out the other.
The only effect in
the movie that “bothered” me was the setting of the broken leg of
the soldier who was wounded by the grenade blast. They show the bone
setting, too, and you hear the subsequent scream of pain. The only
problem I had with the scene was the scream; it wasn’t high pitched
enough. He should have been told to scream like a girl. I was in a
car accident back in 1996; among the injuries I sustained were a
shattered kneecap and a broken femur. The doctor in the ER told me he
was going to have to shove a pin in my leg to set it. He told me it
was going to hurt. I think he actually said, “This might hurt,”
but I can’t be sure, since I was weaving in and out of
consciousness. When he did it, I had a moment when I felt like I was
disassociated from my body, and then I heard a woman scream. I
remember asking myself, is there a woman in the ER with me? Once the
dissociated sensation went away (it only lasted a second) I realized
that woman’s scream had been my own.
The movie kind of
acts as a slow burn, leading up to the eventual release of the
“prefect soldiers.” On Dead Mine’s Facebook page, under one of
the albums, it’s casually mentioned that this movie is HBO Asia’s
debut film. I have cable, but HBO Asia didn’t sound familiar, so I
looked them up on the web. Basically, they run movies from Hollywood
in the Asian territories, which makes Dead Mine an HBO
original movie. I can think of other HBO original movies that I have
enjoyed over the years, Cast A Deadly Spell (1991), it’s
sequel, Witch Hunt (1994), the werewolf cop movie, Full
Eclipse (1993) and the Daryl Hannah remake of Attack Of The 50
Foot Woman (1993).
Production value on
the movie is excellent. It was filmed in Indonesia, and the area
where they come upon the mine was terrain I’ve never seen captured
on film before.
Now we come to the
part of the review where I need to discuss the ending. I’ve read a
few reviews and comments where people just don’t like it. To put it
plainly, it’s a cliffhanger. As long as I could come up with my own
theories as to what eventually became of two characters whose fates
are not one hundred percent wrapped up, I personally, did not have a
problem with it. I was, however, curious if it was an artistic
decision or one that was created because a sequel would be coming? To
find out which it was I searched for director, Steven Sheil, on
Facebook, and got lucky. I sent him a message asking him exactly this
and here’s how he replied:
“…the
ending - we went back and forth a lot ( we being myself and the
producers who had originated the idea) and there was originally a
slightly different plan, wherein we'd see what happened to Stanley.
Unfortunately we had a production problem and lost that set only a
few hours before we were due to shoot so had to improvise. In that
sense, the ending is probably more open than originally planned ( and
looks to be setting itself up for a sequel more than originally
planned). As far as I know there are no current plans for a sequel
(although I have sketched out a story...), so we're just let with the
cliffhanger. It works for some people and some people hate it - and I
can kind of understand that - but there we are.”
Xlrator
Media is the distributor of this in the United States. In the UK,
it’s Entertainment One (aka eOne Entertainment), and they only have
it in standard DVD form. In the states you have both options, DVD and
blu-ray. I was not able to get a blu-ray copy, so these following
remarks are for the standard DVD only, but speaking generally both
versions have the film in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, no subtitles, and
the only extras are the movies trailer and trailers for other Xlrator
releases (Outpost:
Black Sun, Thale and The Thompsons).
For the DVD, audios options are as follows—English 5.1 Dolby
Digital and English 2.0 Dolby Digital
I
started out severely skeptical about Dead
Mine,
but came away pleasantly, almost shockingly, surprised how much I
enjoyed it. Here’s to hoping HBO Asia actually decides to put a
sequel into play in the future.
(Note:
Big thanks to Steven Sheil for allowing me to share his insights into
the film’s ending).
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