mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Dale dug a hole!"
...But this is irrelevant to Dead Mine because Dale didn't conduct unspeakable experiments on prisoners of war and somehow create an army of undead samurai.
I have a friend who is a compulsive DIY-er. He's always building something or fixing something. He digs a LOT of holes. If this friend of mine lived in a horror movie, he would have been dead ages ago. In horror movies, you should steer WELL clear of large holes, caves, mines, any space under the surface of the earth. Nothing good awaits you in those places.
This is pretty middling Indonesian genre fare, but Indonesian genre cinema rules, so that means it's still pretty watchable. Trigger-happy pirate mercenaries on a remote Indonesian island are probably a fair reason for escaping into a WW2 Japanese army bunker, but searching for the legendary Yamashita's Gold is not - it's foolhardy and greedy and is obviously going to be punished by the horror movie gods.
Sam Hazeldine is a solid British character actor and he makes a decent lead. The foolhardy rich guy reminds me of my old boss so I enjoyed seeing him suffer. The overly muscly member of the troop lasts longer than I expected but gets no memorable lines (sad). Joe Taslim lasts nowhere near long enough before being massacred by zombie-mutants, and that's an egregious underuse of his talents (he didn't even fight them with some awesome pencak silat - just stood there firing his gun at them, even after it ran out of bullets).
It makes no sense that boosting the most elite of the Japanese soldiers with whatever the hell it is the mad scientists were using would turn them into undead samurai, but it's an acceptable plot development in a film like this. But I can't condone the lack of dismemberments when you have a bunch of undead samurai wreaking havoc. There's not even a lot of blood. This stands as Dead Mine's gravest mis-step.
It's still OK. I find it very difficult to dislike movies about people running away from scary things underground. I'm expecting a job offer from The New York Times any day now.