Dead Heist (2007)

The opening shots promised Zombies, the first thing to upset me was that I had to wait for nearly 45 minutes to actually see zombie's lurching into shots and causing mayhem. Basically some stereotypically gangster geezer (Ackson played by D.J. Naylor) wants out of a gang, but he is made to do "one more job" for the crime lord who seems to have his own empire including a clothing line (adverts and slogans for 'Avirex' are everywhere like a product placement parody) and a lesbian porn factory. The job is to check up on and supervise another crew who want to rob a bank (the four man crew is headed up by Brandon Xavier's Ski character). Upon Ackson arriving he finds the crew have changed their plans because they are inexperienced and impatient idiots; instead of the robbery being planned for a day or two they decide to rob it whilst scoping it out. Things go wrong (as with all rush jobs like this), cops, security and patrons are threatened and in some instances shot in cold blood, the silent alarm is triggered and a police/SWAT team turn up and surround the bank. To make things worse their get-away driver panics and flees the scene with the get-away car!! Despite Ackson trying to put some controls in place and have a smooth robbery Ski has caused mayhem and there is no apparent escape. Scene set, queue the Zombies….. These zombies aren't regular zombies, they are vampiric zombies, this is actually explained by Hunter (Big Daddy Kane) who advises they are a result of cross contamination of mutagens - of course they are. The vampire-zombies break through the police line and begin to infiltrate the bank queueing up Hunter's arrival. Hunter is an ex-government agent and he wants to save the handful of people who have so far survived but they have to listen and follow orders, which of course has been proved as difficult already with Ski not listening to Ackson. The group manage to slay an awful lot of vampire-zombies leaving blood splashed everywhere but who will survive and what will be left of them?This film thought it was "Boyz in da Hood" crossed with "Shawn of the Dead" but wasn't close to being as good as either. It felt like a lot of style over content at times as the story was fairly weak, it just seemed like a lot of peacocking to prove how cool the 'gang/thug life is". There were times where the narrative/dialogue was too 'street' and it was difficult to understand what the actors where talking about unless you have a degree in gang thug-o-nomics, even after watching lots of typical 'street/gang' films there were some things I was baffled by - none the less I figured it out eventually despite the script calling for a curse word apparently every two words. Saying that though I have seen a lot worse films, this film didn't try to be big - it's not like there was a big budget and they blew it trying to make something epic. It's more that there was little to no budget and the production crew just wanted to make something fun - in that sense it succeeded, even with the sometimes difficult dialogue. The biggest let down for me was the zombies, Bo Webb the directory obviously wanted to combine random film folklores and bring something new and original with these vampire- zombies but at times it was too mixed up. Things like the vampire- zombies only coming out at night on a full moon, the varying ways to kill them, the biology and strengths/ weakness of them. As mentioned the zombies didn't get enough screen time and rather than being a threat they just came across as mildly annoying.The big question then, did I enjoy the film? I guess I didn't hate it, but that doesn't necessarily confirm that I enjoyed it does it. I tolerated the film and it wasn't a waste of 90 minutes of my life, but likewise I wont be writing home to tell everybody to watch it immediately.

Story 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.

I don't usually like horror movies about criminals or delinquent types (e.g. "The Wilderness"). I know there is an audience for films where everyone's constantly swearing, threatening each other and generally being unpleasant, but I don't really understand that.Here, the characters have some motivation for being thieves, one's the admittedly cliché type who's trying to get away from this lifestyle but is required to do one more job. The other members aren't exactly against living like that but this heist will improve their lives. They might have wanted out also, not because of moral reasons however.However, obviously this plan doesn't quite work - partially because the more moral guy doesn't get along with the other members, but also because there's vampire zombie critters running around.There's also another character hunting these critters, and, well, the film feels more ambitious than standard zombie films, with some surprising developments occurring throughout. Definitely better than I was expecting.

Zombies, our times jack-of-all-trades movie monsters return once more to plague a bunch of gangsters who happen to pull off a heist in the wrong night. That's more or less the complete storyline. Not that I protest too loudly, because most b-grade zombie flicks don't offer much more in the line of storytelling. Alas, Dead Heist, while at least struggling to patch some back-story onto the main characters in the first half, totally abandons anything but pointless dialog in the second and forgets more or less what the heck is the point of a storyline anyway. The cast of course is not exactly 1st class material: Big Daddy Kane is okay, Brandon Hardin manages to pull off quite an okay performance while D. J. Naylor seems way too nice to be the battle-hardened veteran and Traci Dinwiddie – dunno, she mouths the gun-blasts in the final battle, as if to dub them ... meh. And the zombie extras – we'll get back to them. Director Bo Webb at least manages to do some nice shots and the movie's picture quality is better than others in this class of film-making.The first thing that is somewhat dolorous in Dead Heist is that the zombies are nicely introduced while rolling the front credits, but then forgotten for about an hour – and when they are brought back you'd wish the wait would have been worth it. You are wrong. Overall, the zombies were in fact the biggest problem in this flick. That is because Anghus Houvouras (the writer) seems to fancy himself imaginative when he makes them a hybrid from the "fast dead" (as seen in 28 Days Later) and vampires (they drink blood). So far, so yawn – but what's with the "you have to shoot them in the heart to kill them"? Headshots are overdone or what? Surely, zombies usually need a good 12-gauge to the head to keel over – but while it has been of course done a hundred times it is a far more "believable" than killing them with a shot through the heart. But maybe the guys were out for virgin soil or whatever. Then again, the back-story of the "governmental experiments gone awry" sounds somewhat familiar ... but who cares? Nobody but Kane's character as it seems – which is total bull if you follow the background story of them vile undead (or whatever they are): they move south for some time, killing their way through the US of A. Yeah. And nobody knows. Good zombie cinema usually is themed the Zombie Apocalypse way (i.e. the world is overrun by them) – but here all is quiet and the hordes of undead are traveling unmolested far and wide. Makes no sense. That they burrow into the ground for the day (as far as the explanation from the zombie-hunter goes) doesn't help. All this of course wouldn't have troubled the seasoned b-grade movie-fan if not for the total swizz the zombies turn out to be when they finally make their appearance. Not only did they get astonishing numbers of bad extras for the zombies (many stumble around like straw-puppets not sure what to do), they are also totally not frightening and not able to kill four people who are armed with knifes when coming at them at a 25:1 ratio.The final battle is one of the great anti-climaxes of the year. Not only do the movie-makers want us to believe that – as it seems – the whole small town in which the heist takes place is turned into undead morons (which of course nobody seems to pay mind – the place is all but deserted apart for the zombies), but also that the "great plan to eradicate them all" of Mr. Kane's character is, well, to shoot them all with handguns and stab them with knifes. In one of the most silly fights in zombie-flick history they of course succeed (with small back-story interplay and demise of the zombie hunter) and then walk away in the morning sun. Not that anyone in the outside world would have had noticed the nocturnal undead massacre or maybe the missing neighbors. If that final folly would not have been that paining – and the zombies would have been more than totally harmless duds – the movie would have been much better. The undead were never that toothless as here. And that's sad.All in all an underwhelming gangster flick, but a total washout when it comes to being zombie horror. Zombie-maniacs might sit through this one, but they will be disappointed. People who like gangster-movies will more likely stick to it, as the part without the zombies is the better one. This one doesn't hurt, but rather leaves you with a stale taste.(And what's it again with the "Dead" in the title? Any damn zombie flick now more features it, or the equivalent "... of the Dead". Show some imagination, lads.)