Dead Mine; is a 2012 Indonesian horror film directed by Steven Sheil and starring Ario Bayu and Joe Taslim. The Film was produced by Infinite Frameworks and HBO, the production house before working on the musical animated film Meraih Mimpi (Achieved a dream) in 2009. Filming and production of the film was done in the filming facility integrated in Batam Island.
The story resolves around a group of researchers and mercenaries stumbling across an Abandoned Mine, unaware that it was a former Imperial Japanese research lab and disposal facility of horrifying experiments and bioweapons during World War II. Worse yet, these monstrous test subjects still inhabit the mine. The treasure quest turned into a mission of life and death, the team must face these mysterious and deadly enemies.
Dead Mine provides the following tropes:
- Abandoned Mine: Doubles as a research facility and a branch of the infamous Unit 731, Japan's biowarfare division during World War II.
- And Then John Was a Zombie
- Anyone Can Die: Not one character survives by the end of the film.
- Curb-Stomp Battle/No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: One mercenary tries to hold off an army of experimented samurai with just a combat knife. He dies quickly.
- Downer Ending: Everyone dies and the samurais have now reached the surface, ready to wreack havor across the area. Who knows what happens next.
- Dwindling Party
- Good Guns, Bad Guns: The pirates/rebels uses AK-47s while the Mercenaries use military grade M4A1s/HK416s and MK. 48 light machine guns.
- Hope Spot: Rie successfully escapes the mine using underground tunnels connected to a river to the surface. Unfortunately, the samurais follow her to the surface.
- More Dakka: Unfortunately not used against the monsters.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Averted. The creatures are not zombies at all, but are rather experiments kept alive for many years due to a component in gold.
- Really 700 Years Old: While not really 700 years old, the characters come across a masked human Japanese straggler pointing a Wakizashi at them. When the they unmask him, he is shown to resemble anything but human due to the time being spent underground for the past 70 years or more. The said straggler could not understand modern day technology such as an iPad.
- The Reveal: Viewers are led to believe that the mythical Yamashita treasure was literal gold, but instead the Yamashita treasure is a modified gold said to give immortality to those who consume it.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: Basically, the Japanese tried to research how gold turns anyone immortal, just like how alchemists did over hundreds of years before.
