Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
In other words,this film is a surreal ride.
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
View MoreExcellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
View MoreStory Synopsis: Ex-soldier Ackson is getting tired of the babysitting jobs his boss, the rap mogul Hustle, gives him, intending to quit for a better lifestyle. Hustle agrees, promising to give Ackson one last job. Meanwhile, a group of young hoods are planning a heist, working on a tip from an imprisoned uncle who was a master bank robber, targeting a banking depot in a small town south of Miami. They approach Hustle for support, Hustle agreeing to the deal on two conditions – they must give him a sizable cut of the profits & they must take Ackson along for insurance. Arriving in the town, Ackson tells the gang to lie low in a motel while he cases the bank. But the hoods, being the impatient boneheads they are, hit the bank while Ackson is still inside. As is expected with all rush jobs, the plan goes awry with the robbers shooting a cop in cold blood & their getaway driver panics & flees with the car. But that is not the worst of it – once night falls, an army of the undead stages an assault on the town.Film Analysis: Sometimes you just don't know which direction a genre will go. After coming back to life in the early 2000s, the zombie film has produced some pretty wild combinations. There have been films about zombie soldiers, zombie cops, zombie vigilantes & so on. But until 2007 there has never been a film about zombies & hip-hop. Before I continue, I must admit that I'm not a big fan of the whole hip-hop / rap scene. In saying that, I don't mean the gritty urban poetry of the late Tupac Shakur or even Eminem's clever self-depreciating lyrics. I mean the whole gangster rap genre, with various untalented rappers trying to glorify a life where women are treated as objects, pimping, illegal substances & drive-by shootings are seen as fashionable things to do & so on. Here's a tip for those hip-hop stars: if you want to make it big, try holding down a good blue-collar job & support your various families by renouncing gang life & stop treating women as sex objects – they are human beings too.Dead Heist is a rather strange mix of horror film & crime flick, with a group of bank robbers trapped in a bank with an army of zombie-like vampires roaming outside. As far as plot goes, it is really an uncredited adaptation of the classic novel I Am Legend marketed for the hip-hop crowd. In that regard it is hard to fault. But what really stands out about the film is the fact that horror & hip-hop don't go too well together. One of the most notorious attempts in this field was Da Hip Hop Witch, an extremely infantile filmic experiment where a bunch of rappers (including a young Eminem) would tell off-the-cuff improvised stories about encountering a witch, their stories being completely nonsensical & unintentionally hilariously inept. And the less said about the later Leprechaun sequels, the better.While its marketing might be hard to fault, what makes Dead Heist strictly a mediocre film is that the film doesn't do anything other than to put a cast of young hoods in a tough situation & have them deal with it solely by acting tough, shooting at anything that moves & overusing F-words. There is no innovation here (despite the novelty value of the plot) or even cohesive filmmaking, just a routine zombie film.Which brings me to the zombies. The creatures shown here are not exactly zombies – instead they are generic undead. Their traits are quite interesting – the creatures come out at night & only on a new moon; they can only be stopped by a shot or blow to the heart – but don't make any sense biologically. Particularly their weakness, which brings them closer to being vampires than zombies. Director Bo Webb mishandles the action scenes a few times, most notably in the climax where the survivors take on the dozens of 'zombies' by shooting their pistols wildly & swiping away with their knives – this is probably the least convincing (& most flatly directed) human versus zombie fight in the whole of the 2000s.On the acting front, the cast give some okay performances, in particular D.J. Naylor, who manages to get the mix of hard-headed professionalism & perpetually-annoyed irritableness down perfectly, making a pretty good hero (for a white boy!). Traci Dinwiddie makes a nice heroine as the female deputy while Zach Hanner makes the most of his limited role as the bank manager. As for the black members of the cast, E-40 does the usual stereotypical role of the rap mogul who plans criminal acts while making lesbian porn on the side while rapper Big Daddy Kane actually does a good job as the ex-government mercenary who has hunted the creatures since the beginning.
View MoreI rate movies on how they perform compared to what they are supposed to be. For instance, Jason X is almost a 10, because it is bad and intended to mock the Friday the 13th movies. So that being said, this gets a solid 8. That is an 8 out of 10 for B Zombie movies.SO when I saw the title and the description on my cable system, I had to watch. I said to my girlfriend, "I have to watch this. It has Zombies and bank robbery. Two great movie themes in one. What could be better?" Well, the titles started and I realized this was a Ghetto,Zombie Bank Heist movie. OMFG, it just got better. Kinda like Dead Presidents with Zombies.When I saw this, I then said to my GF, "This could only get better if there was a spy or secret agent or something." Well, halfway into the movie we are introduced to a government agent character whose job it is to kill the zombies. PERFECT! So yeah, this is a B movie. But, as was said before by others, you can tell they tried. This is a fun romp. The acting is weak, but not terrible. Some of the characters are engaging, but not the ones that are intended to be.The camera work is pretty good and the movie flows. It follows the formula for a zombie movie, but that is the point. This isn't avant garde, this is a zombie movie.It is good for a laugh with some zombie loving friends.
View MoreFour small time gangsters go to pull off a bank job in a small town out in the sticks that turns into over the top video game type killing of flesh eating zombies. Video game type movies can get away with bare bones no real story line plots like this. Just look at the previews for Resident Evil: Extinction. It's not like they need to write a story for the movie. All they need to do is figure out places for zombies to get slaughtered.D.J. Naylor wasn't good or bad. He was just kind of there trying too hard to be Vin Diesel. E-40 only being shown in the movie on a cameo type role stole the whole movie. Been nice to have him as one of the gangsters fighting the flesh eating zombies. Big Daddy Kane was like a plastic man out there on some parts, then got down on other. The action scenes he looked on his game. When he had to explain the flesh eating zombie story to D.J. Naylor it was painful. Two mellow characters on screen don't work. The rest of the actors didn't stand out either way.The picture was clean. Director Bo Webb did a hell of a good job on calling the shots. The cuts he used to show money, guns, zombie faces, and blood was off the hook. All the time you see one big shot of all the actors like you're outside looking in. In this movie Director Bo Webb brought you in to the movie full on. The camera showed all kinds of detail.DEAD HEIST was right on the money trying to roll a urban movie into a horror movie. It's been done in other movies put out by bigger studios like Tales from the Hood and Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood. The different thing on this movie was it wasn't preachy or silly. It just wasn't pulled off. Good plan. Poor execution. Check it out to see E-40 and what Director Bo Webb did. Both got more movies in the future.
View MoreThere are two kinds of b movies out there, the ones that are jammed together in the most cynical fashion to wrench out a few bucks and nothing more. then there's movies like 'Dead Heist' where you can just tell that people with little to no budget got together for love of making movies and had a great time in the process. The dialogue is foul and quite hilarious for it, and while the plot is meager at best, there is something infectious (truly no pun intended) about the way everyone involved gives it their all. The small town locations are put to good use, and the violence is never anything but comic book bloody. This movie is nothing but fun and that is all it was ever meant to be. By the way, Zach Hanner rocks.
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