THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY
**
Directed by Loren Yaconelli, Kevin Dowling, Gandja Monteiro.
Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Gaius Charles, Mahina Napoleon, Željko Ivanek, Logan Kim, Karina Ortiz.
Horror TV, Certificate 15, 262 mins.
Released in the UK on Blu-ray on 7th October from Acorn Media
DEAD CITY was the first spin-off out of the rotting gates after AMC’s THE WALKING DEAD concluded its epic run in November 2022. Created by occasional late-period TWD writer Eli Jorné, it opens with a splendid bit of squishy bludgeoning gore courtesy of resilient widow Maggie (Lauren Cohan), now leading the “Bricks” in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan packed with “roamers”. The first disappointment given the new setting is that no one thought to punctuate such grisly highlights with those electric bass riffs from SEINFELD. Or feature an undead version of Newman. For shame!
Maggie’s old nemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) happens to pop his head round the corner while she’s winning a bar room brawl and voila, we have two old faves back together again! After leaving the Commonwealth with his wife and finding some level of redemption, the former Big Bad killed several people from the New Babylon Federation, putting Marshal Gaius Charles – himself no stranger to a bit of good old fashioned sadism – on the warpath. Negan, who has a (mostly) mute, fatherless teenage girl named Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) in his care, ultimately hooks up with the understandably embittered Maggie to rescue her own sadly personality-exempt teenage son Hershel (Logan Kim in a role that has changed actors more often than Lucy Robinson in NEIGHBOURS). He’s been kidnapped by an ex-Saviour known as “The Croat” (Zeljko Ivanek), leader of “The Brothers”, whose unpleasant acts included stealing the Hilltop Colony’s grain.
DEAD CITY reminds us of Negan’s atrocities via flashbacks to the most visceral sequence in THE WALKING DEAD’s history: his protracted slaughter of Maggie’s husband Glenn. Stripped of his trademark baseball bat Lucille, he believes he’s paid for his past sins, reminding Maggie (and us) of how, in this new world order, everyone is guilty of perpetrating seemingly unforgivable acts: “After all these years, you still think I’m the bad guy? How many husbands and fathers have you killed?” Given how otherwise humourless and dour DEAD CITY is, Morgan’s charismatic portrayal of this anti-hero is a major asset, cracking infectiously bad jokes while gutting disposable characters in scenes that, once upon a time, would never have slipped into the “15” certificate category in the U.K. Cohan, saddled with a largely one-note character arc that runs out of steam, is sadly far less engaging.
At the core of DEAD CITY is a potentially fun, retooled ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK scenario in which the military have destroyed all of Manhattan’s bridges and exits to contain the virus, and Maggie and Negan have to break in to the zombie-ridden city to find Hershel. There are impressive set pieces in Madison Square Garden and the city sewers, along with strikingly eerie nocturnal images of the desolate city, while the John Carpenter homages extend to Negan’s Snake Plissken-inspired gun and a pulsing, evocative score by Ian Hultquist. With earlier genre credits including Alistair Legrand’s underrated THE DIABOLICAL (2015), the composer has fun channelling the iconic 80s scores Carpenter composed in association with Alan Howarth.
Alas, this gets bogged down in familiar TWD stalling points: unnecessary flashbacks, pace-killing musings on people lost. Some of the dialogue engagingly captures the spirit of comic book speech bubbles (“You gotta skip all the coping shit and get to the staying alive shit!”) but too many episodes meander. It also has a disappointing antagonist: Željko Ivanek is a great, Emmy-winning actor whose extensive C.V. includes unique early 80s chiller THE SENDER and a memorable guest spot on THE X FILES (“Roland”) but he’s let down by the material here. Cast as a “Slavic psychopathic nutjob” whose wife and daughters met a horrible fate, The Croat comes off as an underwhelming Bond villain, harnessing methane from the dead into liquid fuel to power the future, having made his money in alternative energy pre-apocalypse.
Much more satisfying are the ever-reliable KNB EFX Group’s exceptional make-up effects. They adorn the show with a typically impressive array of zombies in various states of decomposition, while relieving the often ponderous pace with spectacular decapitations and disembowelments. A terrific sewer sequence involves both an enormous “Hell’s Kitchen” fatberg and a battle between Maggie and a suitably hideous multi-headed crawling undead thing that proves to be the season highlight.
The sole extra feature on Acorn’s two-disc set is a 35-minute filmed panel discussion at WonderCon 2023, hosted by an enthusiastic / grating (delete as per personal taste) Chris Hardwick. Joining him are Eli Jorne, Lauren Cohan and Gaius Charles; Jeffrey Dean Morgan was unavailable due to filming commitments to THE BOYS. The trio talk about the novelty of getting away from the woods, the claustrophobia of the new backdrop, the shifting relationship between Maggie and Negan, and the different “look” of DEAD CITY.
Steven West
