Follow the Dead is an award winning Irish comedy zombie film that has picked up nineteen wins and twelve nominations, including Best Feature award at the Kerry International Film Festival and the Disappear Here Film Festival. It was written and directed by Adam William Cahill (Inertia), and the original pitch was to tell a story about how Millennials would deal with a zombie apocalypse.
Viral videos have spread online of Dublin falling to a zombie outbreak, something that Robbie (Luke Corcoran), his sister Liv (Marybeth Herron - Inertia), and cousins, Chi (Tadhg Devery) and Jay (Luke Collins) aren't quite sure whether to believe, or if it is fake news. However, when the local Garda in their rural town hold a town meeting to state they have been unable to establish contact with anyone from Dublin, it seems things may be true. Robbie is surprised to see his ex-fiancée, Kate (Cristina Ryan) has returned, with the two having split up when she had wanted to leave the town to pursue her career of being a Garda, but her duties now bringing her back home. As the zombie plague slowly makes its way across the country, Robbie and his family must also deal with an uprising of masked maniacs who see the unfolding chaos as a way for them to establish a new order.
I enjoyed my time with Follow the Dead, though the balance between heartfelt comedy and zombie horror film was a bit of an uneven split. Ignoring the online found footage that appeared to show zombies in dublin, it was a good fifty minutes into the ninety five minute movie before the protagonists actually saw the undead with their own eyes. This sets things up nicely for a relatively action packed third act, which has a bit of fun playing with the expectations of the undead. Thankfully, the heroes of this film were a likable bunch, who are given a bit of heart by their unified tragic backstory. The family are all shown to be lazy and flawed individuals, and there was more than a hint of Shaun and his friends from Shaun of the Dead with the group. Robbie has used the excuse of looking after his family for why he couldn't stay with Kate, Liv is convinced that social media is going to be her gateway to success, while Chi and Jay are lovable idiots. There was a nice dynamic between the group, and while I would be lying if I found a single bit of dialogue to be laugh out loud funny, it was low level amusing, such as how Chi is constantly getting words mixed up.
The first two acts of the movie are more drama based, with regards to Robbie dealing with the return of his ex. There are several neatly inserted flashbacks that give more weight to this main plot thread, showing characters back before their personal lives fell to bits, something instigated by the death of Robbie and Liv's mother. I thought the subplot of a masked gang using the zombie outbreak as a way to take over the country was underdeveloped. It wouldn't have taken much tweaking to remove this subplot entirely and not really loose anything, a focus purely on the zombies themselves would have been better served as there wasn't really too much on that in the first two acts. I guess it did lead to one of the more amusing lines when one of the group refers to these masked people as 'Slipknot'. There is a little bit of zombie action and it results in a couple of good scenes, one that takes place out in a large field was cool, and there was a scene later on from that, that felt more brutal than expected, thanks mainly to some nice sound effects.
Follow the Dead may take its time getting the actual undead making an appearance on screen, but I did like the characters enough that it was still fun hanging out with these characters during the long build up to horror finally occuring. Occasionally parts could be slightly hard to follow, with at least one key character dying and me not initially realising that had even happened, but mainly, the low level humour, combined with the emotional thread the characters shared, had me interested to see where this would end up. Wild Stag Productions' Follow the Dead has just found distribution with Indie Rights and is now streaming on Amazon.
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