It’s always kind of interesting to watch student film.  After all, it’s not like it’s a big production or anything—it’s shot on whatever budget a college kid, or group thereof, can beg, borrow or steal on whatever equipment happens to be near to hand.  Given those extreme limitations, how can quality survive, even for short film?  And that’s what we find out from things like Dead Street.

And in Dead Street, a young man wakes up, goes looking for pancakes, and discovers that his mother has been recently killed.  Oh, yeah, and the bodies of the recently dead are wandering around outside his house.  By the time he turns on the radio he discovers that the whole world is pretty much crawling with the walking dead.

It’s pretty standard stuff, really, and if any of these geniuses took a stage combat class you’d never know it from watching.  Seriously, guys, learn to choreograph a fight scene, huh? I had a hard time buying a single one of them.

But aside from that, they didn’t drop the ball any too badly, even for short film. And making allowances for what they had to work with I think they really did the best they could.

But the Screenhead Ten Scale functions on objectivity only, and thus hands out a three out of ten for being a low-budget and highly predictable flop.  A good script can always save shoddy effects, but nothing short of miraculous effects can save a mediocre script.  This is proof positive.