Dead Set - E4 Big Brother Zombie thing!

Because otherwise it's literally just 28 Days Later outtakes.

It'd be great if at the end of it all, Bobby Ewing walks out of the shower and it was all a dream.

It is all very uninspired, wasted opportunity etc.

I think my expectations of it were so low that I'm one of the few people enjoying it.

I like it, because I was expecting zombies and I got zombies.

I like it ('er indoors hates it), but with Brooker's involvement as, y'know, The Writer, I expected some satire. The Big Brother component looks to have been a way of getting funding from E4 on the grounds that the set's already been built.

Terrible pabulum.

Been enjoying this so far, last night's scene of the Producer reduced to shitting noisily into a bucket was highly entertaining. My main gripe is with the horrible quality of the DV cameras used to shoot it, or whatever filter they have applied to make everything look like it's in semi-darkness, even when outdoors. Considering they issue the "best watched in widescreen with surround sound" notice at the start it looks v. crappy.

the shakey cam gets a bit overdone too, i feel.

that shit scene wtf lol

last night's scene of the Producer reduced to shitting noisily into a bucket was highly entertaining

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/Rogermellie.gif

really, though. can't believe i missed that. what am i thinking of, etc.

Aww, it's not *that* bad - the bucket shitting was a moment of light relief amidst the carnage. I also figured it was a little wish-fulfilment thing for Brooker, given his (likely) experiences in getting TV shows made.

yeh, OK, i'll grant him that.

still haven't seen it. have i been in it yet?

that was ep3 last night

ah ok. i shall wait till tomorrow then ;-)

Someone on the other thread mentioned that they were surprised that they didn't play out the 'Big Brother with nobody watching' angle for longer, and I think that is a big problem: the Big Brother group dynamic was lost almost immediately. Seeing as that was the main selling point leading up to the broadcast, it is a massive anticlimax. I like it for the same reason ailsa likes it (it is a zombie flick, pure and simple), but can't help feeling that they've left the main thing they set out to do mostly unexplored.

Yeah. For all Brooker's excitement about a group of deliberately mismatched people locked in a fortress and having to fight together against the omg horror masses, it's become two generics in a house slamming doors behind zombies.

Odds on the experience of making Dead Set will be the centrepiece of this year's Screenwipe. It may be worth watching for that reason alone.

Also, was Brooker one of the zombies in episode two?

lol @ Shami Chakrabati gag, also zombie Brian. Back on a Big Brother tip again now, with zombies as eviction crowd, "i'm coming to get you" etc.

that was a goodun, nice cliffhanger

Yeah, liked that a lot tonight. Poor Kelly's boyfriend, possibly.

Have just downloaded first 3 eps--how many will there be? And when on?

There are five eps, the penultimate one went out last night, the last one's tonight at 10pm.

10.00pm GMT (in case you're not in UK) so if you're looking for torrents will be a few hours later I guess.

Last night's was the best so far - some proper jumps with cardboard Brian etc, decent gore level too. I agree that they should have played out the housemates' obliviousness for longer. Would have been nice if the eps were an hour each really for added chomping and running fun because it's definitely felt a bit rushed at times.

will be interesting to see how it plays out in the omnibus edition.

i thought the cutting up scene was well done, not for the laughs but for the pure insanity of the situation.

I hope some of them survive, like in the Omega Man.

also, the voice presenter at the start said 'best watched in a darkened room' which i obliged to and it definitely improved the viewing quality.

Davina looks to be not dead! Dead cert for the climax.

If you're able to ignore everyone's obvious expectations of the satirist who wrote the show, it improves out of sight.

i have no idea who Brooker is, perhaps that's why i'm enjoying it.

http://unseenscreen.com/

You all absolutely have to do this, it's brilliant.

when i said i had low expectations, i meant because of the trailer really and that it was BB. I thought it would have a much lower budget tbh, i'm quite surprised at how good the effects have been.

I liked the actual proper horror ick of Alex getting beheaded against the utterly weird sight of Comic Relief Bastard Producer filleting Grayson and Angel while going slightly loopy. I do wish I'd waited and watched it in movie-length though. Also, it is v.v. gory for a relatively mainstream show, which people seem to be forgetting through tons of "not enough BB satire" Brooker expectation.

bah i'll have to wait until i get home to view that site

big brother has turned us into zombies. I got this insight from the metro. Satire is wasted.

Eldon referred to it slightly last night, equating the zombies need to get to the BB house as "this is like a church to them", which somehow also parodies Dawn ot Dead when they refer to the zombies returning to the shopping mall because it was a familiar place, i guess.

That unseen web link is brilliant btw.

I thought the zombies up against the gates were a bit reminiscent of the baying hordes on eviction nights as well.

What a rubbish ending!

Very disappointing, no twist, no coda, nothing.

great ending!

final installment made it a quality piece of work as opposed to mildly amusing zombie diversion. thought the producer screaming "go on, eat me" was a bit much, but that was redeemed by the spinal chord, which made me laugh.

well done. satire kept to a minimum for a most part, which is good. big brother conventions really played into it at the end, but in a serious way, which I think was the right choice.

no twist, no coda makes it better!!! x-post

Aye, was very bleak. Convincing The Actor Kevin Eldon of his lack of real-world popularity in a choosing-sides battle was a bit too DO YOU SEE for my liking, but otherwise it was pretty good overall.

Hmmm, well as I said at the beginning of the thread, I've always thought zombies were rubbish. If it had been a one-off I wouldn't feel so cheated. So that's the satire, event TV is often a non-event. Should have read a book instead. Clever.

You should have waited and watched it tomorrow in one long film-length version instead.

yeah, I should've. Oh well!

i think zombies are great. i prefer the slow moving ones to the fast moving ones, because there is a degree of "false sense of security leading to hopelessness", and surely the terror of no hope is the scariest thought of all.

it was on par with recent theatrical zombie films, shaun of the dead aside, which is a complement considering the budget. shakey-cam and faster shutter speeds were excused because of the budget, but the (restrained) cleverness and solid horror makes up for it.

I suppose a brief round-up of my thoughts on the zombie films I've seen recently might help understand my thinking:

Dawn of the Dead (remake): Brilliant opening 15 minutes gives way to a solidly, and occasionally brilliant, directed film. Not terribly clever in any way, especially compared to the original, but enjoyable.
28 Days Later: though not technically zombies, I'll count it. It was okay, but the "WE ARE TEH EVIL" ending was far more DO YOU SEE than anything in Dead Set.
28 Weeks Later: Reliance on shaky-cam aside, not bad, though ridiculous plot developments hampered in the end (YOUR FATHER IS IN THE TUBE TOO???)
Land of the Dead: Coasted on Romero's past work, not that great on it's own. Starting to form thoughts and a new breed of intelligence half-interesting, but poorly executed. Still, compared to
I Am Legend: Final half of film (the "zombie" stuff) very poor indeed.

So yes, Dead Set was decent and worth the time. Probably would better all together, or possibly in two parts, but still.

would be better*

For me, this got better and better during the run and final ep was easily the best, primarily because I'm a sucker for a good, horrible downbeat ending. In full agreement that the last ep took it past being just a fun satirical chomp-chomp show and into something a bit more substantial. I had no real expectations of this, despite liking Brooker's columns a great deal, and was more than pleasantly surprised. The overall tone put me in mind of Day of The Dead ie. gorier than "Dawn of...", bleaker, with more of a sense of creeping dread and doom. Good stuff.

Top ending. So nice to see the obvious outcome actually happen in one of these stories.

I really, really dug this. Nice one.

ooh gukbe's exhortations have changed this from an ignore to a dl for sure

pls excuse my challopprobrium but I'm not normally into the cult of zombies but I'll def give this a go now

Yeah, I'm not normally a zombie chap either. What I liked about it was, it was basically 'what happened in the Big Brother house when the events shown in 28 Days Later started'. Of course, if you didn't like '28 Days Later' you may not enjoy it so much.

Yeah, 'cept Brian Belo hadn't won it then.

ok glol at the scottish girl saying "was tht davina?" and "omg you killed davina"!

"You bastards!"

?

ahhh just realised why the scots girl is so good; it's her from morvern callar

i suppose i'd better watch this now...

fkn hell ain't half gruesome

Dead Shit

It's taken a month to come up with that?

Dick Set

i bought it on DVD expecting great things. Instead I got something that provided very little that hasn't already been covered by Shaun of the Dead or 28 Days Later between them, except not as funny as the former, nor as exciting as the latter. Once the initial "look it's Davina McCall going rabid insane" and "LOL TV producer doing a dump in a bucket" thing has subsided there's very little left to hold the attention. Whole episodes go by without anything happening, the character behaviour is off (why does Kevin Eldon open the zombie gate at the end?). And the funniest line in the show is "he ate an egg" (or something like that). I like Charlie Brooker's columns, and NAthan BArley was great, but what was the point in this?

As iterated by someone else in the other thread; I do wish, in a satirical zombie 'thing', that someone would go "fuck me; zombies", and the failure of Brooker to do so makes him a poor man's Simon Pegg.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, October 29, 2008 5:32 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://rocktimists.blogspot.com/2008/10/current-affairs.html

well that blog post was on the money.

what gets me is the pointlessness of it all. there have been something like at least three hand-made zombie films shot in our locale over the last five years, and without subverting that genre it's the same idea done on a bigger budget with the inclusion of Big Brother. I had high expectations from the online teaser which made it look like a very clever gore movie, but really it's no different from the aforementioned student movies.

The last episode was quite good.

It was all a bit pointless