“Dead Rush” (2016) isn’t quite as bad as other reviewers have made it out to be; it’s a passably entertaining zombie feature that I’d rate a 6 out of 10. It occasionally rises above its central gimmick to create a few moments of suspense and emotion. (The gimmick here is that the entire film is shot from the point-of-view of one man in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.)
That point-of-view device does wear a little thin by the end of this feature-length film … and I’m a found-footage horror movie fan who usually doesn’t mind that sort of thing. This movie might have been better overall if the viewer weren’t required to follow those “shaky-cam”-type visuals for quite so long; my understanding is that it was adapted from a well received short film.
If there was one thing that bothered me the most, though, it wasn’t the POV. There is a recurring shot in “Dead Rush” that I liked a hell of a lot, involving the main character’s memory of a loved one. It’s made even better when it is rather creatively used as a framing device at the film’s end. A little reflection, though, made me remember that this shot seems to crib a little too much from a similar effective recurring shot in 2011’s “The Grey.”
What the hell … if you need a zombie horror fix, you could do worse than “Dead Rush.”
