For a low budget zombie movie, then "Dead Season" wasn't actually bad. It combined elements from both the Romero type zombie movies and the "28 Days Later" type zombie movies, and it worked out well enough. Initially, the movie is a bit halting in the beginning, but once they get to the island, the movie picks up and actually becomes rather interesting.
The story is about a zombie outbreak, duh!, that has left most of the world dead and hungry for flesh. Three survivors meet up by chance and decide to set sail for an island, where they find that other survivors are holding up.
Sure, the story is fairly average and 'generic' in sorts in means of a zombie movie, but "Dead Season" doesn't focus on the zombie outbreak or bloodshed, it is a character driven movie, and it actually pulls that off nice enough.
I will say that I could have wished for more zombies to appear in the movie. Being a zombie aficionado there just wasn't enough zombies in the movie for my liking. The zombies that was present, though, well they looked alright, good enough make-up, a small amount of gore and mayhem (again, something I could have used more of), and they also combined the slow, stumbling zombies from the Romero type movies, as well as the fast, agile, running type zombies from the "28 Days Later" type movies (and those familiar with my reviews, will know that I am not keen on these running zombies).
What impressed me the most about "Dead Season" was the soundtrack. They had really put together some great music for this movie. Again, it was heavily influenced by the music that was in "28 Days Later", but still, it worked out quite nicely. The music score really added a lot to the overall of the movie.
As for the acting, well I wasn't familiar with anyone in this movie, so that was a plus. No associations to other characters or movies that way, which I enjoy. People were doing good enough jobs with their characters and their given roles, but just don't get your hopes up for academy award winning performances though.
One thing that the movie had working against it, was that the mood and feeling of this being a cataclysmic event never really shone through on the screen. It seemed that people were fairly relaxed and laid back despite most of the world's population was dead and had returned as zombies. If they had managed to put in that panic sensation and the sensations of overwhelming dread and doom, then the movie had worked better and on a whole other level.
"Dead Season" surprised me, because I hadn't expected much from it, to be honest. And as a zombie aficionado, then I can warmly recommend this movie to zombie fans everywhere. It is not one of the best low budget zombie movies I have seen, but it was far from being amongst the worse.
