Rent The Dead 2: India (2013)

Spoilers follow ... - The Dead 2: India review by NP

This wonderfully directed zombie film is the sequel to 2010’s ‘The Dead’ which featured an army of the living dead making their deadly way across Africa. Here, as you might imagine, a similar cataclysm has infected India.

What I really enjoy about this is Directors Howard and Jonathan Ford’s worthy use of the incredible landscapes, and the clever way in which such sun-drenched open spaces can either be breathtakingly beautiful or deadly and remote.

The casting is very good, with Joseph Millson as the only Westerner Nicholas Burton – a refreshingly likeable, ego-free central character – and Ishani Sharma (Meenu Mishra), his pregnant girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, her condition does not please her father (Sandip Datta Gupta), who is otherwise concerned with his own infected wife (Poonam Mathur).

Where this stumbles a little is in the actual storyline, which is basically Burton and the appealing orphaned boy Javed (Anand Goyal) with whom he meets, continually attempting to escape the attentions of unthreatening, lurching zombies. Instead of a progressing narrative, certain set-pieces stand out – Ishani’s questioning of Hinduism and its teachings of reincarnation which is in direct contrast to the walking cadavers causing carnage around them, for one. Another involves a mother and daughter trapped in a car with the corpse of the husband and father, with the living dead trudging ever forward. Telling them to cover their ears whilst he shoots away the lock to the seat that traps them, Burton then shoots them both dead instead. And, although the zombies are not always the most frightening or energetic, scenes of them standing, swaying, waiting, scattered across the unforgiving landscape while Burton attempts to escape them are very effective.

See it if you like the genre, but it's not a patch on the first one - The Dead 2: India review by RP

It's a follow-up to the rather good zombie film 'The Dead'. That was set in Africa; this one is set in India.

The good thing about the original film was that it was a 'proper' zombie flick, with hordes of shambling, flesh ripping, entrail eating creatures. This one has more of the same, but this time round they seem a bit boring. And unfortunately, like most films that attempt to capitalise on a successful formula, it's just not as good.

The story, such as it is, has an American electrical engineer working on a wind farm who has to make it across a zombie-infested Indian landscape to rescue his pregnant girlfriend and along the way picks up a little orphan boy.

There is a small sub-plot about how falling for a Westerner isn't as good as an arranged marriage, there is some really excellent photography and the aforementioned flesh-eating critters to avoid, but it's a bit of a let-down after the first film. And sad to say, I found the small boy so annoying I would gladly have seen him become zombie fodder...

It is better than many zombie films I have seen but that's not saying very much. See it if you like the genre, but it's not a patch on the first one. I'll give it an over-generous 3/5 stars.