I honestly have no idea what to make of “The Digital Dead,” other than it’s at least worth watching for experimental horror fans. It’s surreal, unusual, disjointed, and incredibly unfocused, and yet it seems like beneath the head scratching moments, director Wendell Cowart has ambition to create something interesting. With a bigger budget and more resources perhaps “The Digital Dead” may have been good, but as of now it looks incomplete, is woefully under developed, and really needs to trim twenty minutes to its run time. “The Digital Dead” is part slide show, part computer generated opening for a computer game of some kind, and part loose use of public domain.
It’s mostly all animated with a lot of the focus on a group of prepubescent girls and their transformation from zombie killing super team to blood obsessed vampires. During a funeral for a woman, while her paul bearers are taking her out, she breaks through her coffin and rises from the dead, thus unleashing a zombie apocalypse. Just then a group of preteen girls are recruited to live in a top secret compound equipped with shelter and supplies, all the while fending off the dead from their strong hold. They’re known as “K4.” Meanwhile, there’s something about a witch, a vampire, and a nifty computer animated rendering of Peter Cushing, who is performing experiments on corpses in a lab somewhere. Really, much as I tried to enjoy it, “The Digital Dead” felt like a bunch of sequences patched together in an effort to unfold some kind of cogent narrative.
To make things ever more awkward, the animation is surreal, paired with dialogue that used the automated voice on the computer. If that’s not enough, Cowart implements word bubbles, which is very redundant. So rather than actors voicing these characters, we have stilted variations of the text speaking computer device delivering dialogue that’s supposed to add to the tension and suspense of zombie apocalypse. There are so many awkward moments and turns in the story, I wasn’t sure if they were intentionally weird, or given genuine sincerity. The group is given the specific task of fighting zombies, and yet they complain when a news report interrupts Spongebob. And why put them in a secure bunker if they have to go out and forage for supplies, anyway? There’s also the final ten minutes that were just too uncomfortable to even dissect. “The Digital Dead” and director Cowart seem to have a lot of ideas, but the movie just doesn’t provide a watchable format to express them.