Knight of the Dead

With the exception of some lovely Snowdonia locations and a couple of decent costumes, while not the worst zombie movie out there(Vampegeddon, Zombie Night and Dead Men Walking for examples are far worse) Knight of the Dead is a disaster. The special effects are wisely sparsely used but that wasn't an excuse for them to be as cheap as they were- yes even for the budget the movie had, they looked hastily slapped together and made-at-last-minute quality. The gore and decapitations looked silly and felt excessive at times, and there is no better news about the photography and lighting, which takes bleak to extremes to the extent some of the action is not easy to see and there is the very odd effect of the zombies' heads looking like they were floating like balloons. Aside from a couple of the costumes(not all, others did look fancy-dress remains), there was very little sense of the medieval atmosphere or atmosphere in general. The script certainly sounds like a rough draft and has so much cheese it makes the eyes roll. Again it doesn't very little like how medieval speak, a lot of it is very bad modern talk that fails to make sense. The characters are basically archetypes lacking in any kind of personality and development, plus they annoy with how nonsensical a lot of their actions are, and the acting is very going-through-the-motions and mannequin-like from the whole cast with no spontaneity or enthusiasm whatsoever. The worst thing to me was the story, which is so thin it's barely there and it's made worse by a pace that begs for a steroid shot of a very large dosage, some slower-paced scenes barely even move. The scenes with the zombies are very under-populated, the horror is cheaply done and predictable that they are no scares, the movie is far too dull to be fun and it is difficult to be excited when everything just seems so half-hearted. To me as well, the medieval vibe and the use of zombies had a very two different movies feel which was really jarring. To conclude, not the worst zombie movie out there but apart from two halfway-decent things is a disaster. 2/10 Bethany Cox