Day of the Dead

I saw the screening for Day of the Dead in LA in September... I wanted my money back, but i didn't even pay for the movie.

Cardboard acting, completely ridiculous character traits that defy all sense of realism (Marines do NOT act like that, ever), and very odd casting that didn't work out (Mena Suvari and Nick Cannon? Come on). Also, there was definitely no style to this movie at all! Dawn of the Dead had style, Grindhouse (although not a Zombie flick, but of a similar genre-style) was greatly stylized, Sin City was exciting visually as well, but this movie could have been shot in daylight outside of LA over a weekend. It had no "Feel" to it. I love Zombie movies (James Gunn's Dawn of the Dead, awesome), but this one was true Hollywood schlock and a big disappointment.

Who ever thought a ZOMBIE movie could be Boring?

Well, the only big mistake of that movie was to pretend to be the remake of a classic, when it was not. That must have disappointed and angered a lot of people.

Actually "Day of the Dead" is a highly entertaining Zombie-Flick that delivers everything one expects: good trash, gore, humor and well-known main-actors who act, well, lets say "okay"...

The story is not really important, as we saw it dozens of times (Virus, Transformation, Out of Control, group trying to escape,....and so on) and there were elements of "Resident Evil" and "28 Days/Weeks later" as the "life to death transformed" corpses behave the same hysterical way as the sickos from London, only that Americans must be way much hungrier as these zombies are feeding on flesh. And how....

Anyway: "Day of the Dead" was fun, a little thrilling, entertaining and better than a lot of other genre-movies BUT somebody in the marketing-department blew it up by having the idea to sell it as a "Romero Remake".

Some Zombie should bite this person....

Day of the Dead (2008)

1/2 (out of 4)

Remake of George Romero's film has a small town in Colorado being shut down for what they're told is some sort of flu virus. Of course, the government is lying and they're actually turning into zombies. It's no secret that I'm not a fan of the original film but it's a masterpiece compared to this thing, which is just another cheap rip off that ranks as one of the worst remakes out there but, to be honest, this isn't nearly as bad as the name-only sequel to Romero's film. I'm not one against remakes so that's not my problem with this film. My problem is that it's so incredibly cheap and poorly written that you can't help but be bored throughout the entire film. Once again we get horrid CGI effects, which are among the worst I've ever seen. The effects are so fake looking that you can never take them serious and why producer's opt for this poor effects is beyond me. Another problem is the direction, which makes for one incredibly ugly movie that never has any sense of direction. The movie also uses CGI effects to speed up the action and this again just makes the film look incredibly poor. The cinematography will certainly give you a headache as it moves around with no sense of what it's trying to show (or not show). The performances are all pretty standard and that includes Ving Rhames in his small role. As bad as the movie is there are a couple good moments including one where Rhames, turning into a zombie, eats his own eyeball. As for the zombies, they are all incredibly bad and lame. When the humans turn into the zombies, we get more CGI effects that transforms them in the matter of seconds but none of them have anything going for them. The gore effects are equally bad as well. This is more of a reimagined version of the Romero film but there are a few hold overs from that film including the character Bub, although he's called Bud here.

Zombie movies are more popular than ever since the beginning of the new Millennium, and we particularly notice an undeniable revival of George A. Romero's legendary trilogy of the dead. The Man himself released two more genuine sequels to his own franchise ("Land of the Dead" and "Diary of the Dead", which can't live up to the older movies but are still very much worth checking out) and no less than two of the three original classics already received modern makeovers. Actually, they aren't prototypic remakes to be honest. Zack Snyder added a lot of personalized style and ideas to his interpretation of "Dawn of the Dead" in 2004 and, well, to link this straight-to-video reworking of "Day of the Dead" to Romero's legacy would be blasphemous and a complete disgrace. This isn't a remake of the brilliant 80's milestone, but a mundane and inconspicuous splatter B-movie that simply needed an eye-catching gimmick in order not to dive into oblivion straight away. So what they did here was steal the title and borrow a couple of story elements from Romero's film (like the obedient zombie and the underground laboratory), but otherwise this is just a lame and uninspired zombie movie like there are thirteen in a dozen nowadays. Nearly the entire population of a small Colorado town overnight becomes infected with a hideous virus that causes their bodies to rapidly decompose and inflicts an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The army is called in and young soldier Sarah Bowman, who's from around the area, discovers a link with scientific experiments that took place in an abandoned factory nearby. There's absolutely nothing original about "Day of the Dead", unless you consider a vegetarian zombie to be innovative. To me, that was simply the most ridiculous and embarrassing moment of the entire movie. The CGI-effects look horrible and this is yet another film that doesn't comprehend that zombies need to move slowly in order to look menacing! The rotting cadavers here run faster than African athletes and, for some reason, they can even walk upside down on the ceiling! I mean, were they actually trying to make the movie look stupid? Just trying to imagine Mena Suvari as a hard-boiled and stern army girl is already impossible and, even though his name parades on the DVD-cover in thick bold letters, Ving Rhames' role as Captain Rhodes is hardly more than a cameo. That was perhaps the biggest disappointment of all, since the Captain Rhodes character of the original movie is one of the notorious "bad guys" in the history of horror. This is by far the worst thing Steve Miner ever got associated with. Otherwise he's the respectable director of several modest competent horror movies, like "Friday the Thirteenth Parts 2 and 3", "Warlock", "House" and "Lake Placid".

If you're a fan of Romero style zombies then there's a good chance you wont enjoy this. If you prefer the more 'active' style of zombies then perhaps you will discover a gem in this film.

Its not great by any standards but it does have a few surprises in store. Don't expect too much and I doubt you will be disappointed.

I believe this film was made for TV (could be wrong) and in that respect its not a bad effort. Better than some I've paid to see for sure. In fact I have to say that I preferred it to Land Of The Dead.

Don't pay to watch this film but by all means catch it when it airs on TV - assuming you don't have anything better to do! 5 out of 10 for effort