Dead Sands

Dead Sands (2013)

Runtime: The version I found online was 86 minutes long

Directed by: Ameera Al-Qaed

Starring: Mohammed Junaid, Razan Jamal, Fatima Dincsoy, Nujood Al Mahmood, Zeeshan Jawed Shah

From: FANtasy Features

I don't have much of an intro to say. I explain it all in my Letterboxd how I saw an unknown to the Western world Bahrain zombie movie, and how it's pretty terrible: 

I realize that in the past week I hadn't been paying much attention to continuing my list of watching foreign movies this month; I got tied up with other things. Well, last night a mutual liked a list from someone else and they had compiled 181 different movies from 181 different countries and put it all together. The title of this and it being from what is figuratively a backwater (Bahrain) in the filmmaking world captured my attention. I imagine there are some that don't know where in the blue hell Bahrain even is. I can tell you it's in the Middle East, a small island country located between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is a zombie picture, and many people-me included-are already tired of that trope. I was hoping that this would do something different with that.

Well, I discovered what a zombie movie would be like if it was filled with unlikable bitchy whiny characters, and the weakest most basic gore effects. You certainly don't see anybody get eaten. I know it's not the first to do that, but this showed that it can be done in any setting in any country. Whether they speak in Arabic or English (subtitles are provided for both languages, and I understand many people there speak both), most of the characters-of course, almost all of them are young adults-you see throughout are pretty terrible people, Bahranian asstagonists. The movie namechecks “Romero movies” (I don't think I need to explain how much better even the worst ... of the Dead movie is to this), references Nightmare City in that they visit a hospital-but don't go in-and they end up in a cinema, I guess because it happened in Demons. I swear to Allah, there's even a visit to a mall. Sigh... those films are also superior to this. I did not get much of an impression of how live in Bahrain is... unless all of the youth there are raging A-holes.

Basically, a bunch of random things happen to characters that you couldn't give an F less about, and then the movie stops rather than ends... and they got the idea from American films that you have to threaten a sequel, even if it's likely it will never happen. It's not satisfying for the gorehounds either as like I said, what you see is only the most basic effects and you see no one actually eaten. Really, this is a giant waste of time; as hardly anyone has said they have seen this in the Western world, I guess I have to be the one to tell (potentially) millions of people that this really sucks and there are seemingly thousands of similar motion pictures that are more worthy of a watch or rewatch. According to the IMDb this was made for not even 15,000 American dollars and the country is not experienced in motion pictures; even then, they should have come up with something better than this, and create characters who aren't gigantic pieces of dung.

Still, in case anyone wants to know, think Nightmare City or Planet Terror when it comes to these zombies. They don't wield weapons but they are of the fast-moving variety and at the beginning, they are talking about it as if it was a virus, so the comparison is easy to make.