I was thrilled to find "The Dead 2: India" by sheer luck, as I enjoyed watching the first "The Dead" movie and had no idea that there was a sequel available. It was picked up and watched immediately.
It is a good movie, but it wasn't fully up to par with the previous movie. There was just something missing in "The Dead 2: India" to make it that much more special. Or perhaps it was because of some really stupid mistakes and goofs in the movie that were bringing it down a notch.
Let's start with the story. The movie starts out with letting us know an Indian man named Rajiv having returned to India from Somalia, where he was bitten by a mad woman. Right, so here we have the source of the zombie outbreak. Good enough. Then we follow Nicholas, a foreign contractor working on wind mills in India when society collapses and he finds himself in the midst of a zombie outbreak and he has to return to Mumbai to get to his pregnant wife.
The storyline is good and it does follow up on events immediately after "The Dead", which was good. But, yes there is a but here, we learn that Nicholas is 300 miles away from Mumbai in the movie. Then I wonder how did the zombie infection spread from Mumbai to where he was (300 miles distance) in such a short time? And from just a single bitten man. It just didn't make any kind of logistic sense.
And the other thing that worked against the movie was the fact that about 90% of all infected zombies were walking around with their heads tilted and craned to one side. It just looked too staged and too orchestrated, as if some 'zombie instructor' went "alright, you have to walk like zombies" and gave an example with his head tilted, and the majority of zombie actors just copied that pose. It brought the whole zombiesque atmosphere down a lot.
The zombies in the movie were good, just as in the first "The Dead" movie. However, while there is a good amount of blood and wounds here, then don't expect to see macabre stuff such as missing limbs, shredded bodies and the like. But still, the effects worked to the extend that they were supposed to.
And it was nice to see a zombie movie take place in India and actually manage this well, and not be a classic, major Hollywood production. If you enjoyed the first "The Dead" movie, then you most definitely should watch "The Dead 2: India" as well. And while on the topic of Indian zombie movies, then you should watch "Go Goa Gone" as well.
"The Dead 2: India" is entertaining, but has some flaws that were just too stupid and should have been caught in pre-production already. While I rated the first "The Dead" 7 out of 10 stars, then I will have to settle for 6 out of 10 stars for "The Dead 2: India".
