Army of the Dead

It wasn't as awful as lets say, Hide and Creep, but it was close. By the way, Hide and Creep is the worst movie of all time!! Not even as good or as campy as Plan 9 from Outer Space--don't rent it, ever! Special effects department on Army either didn't have much money or they fell a sleep on the job. Interesting skeletons, but really really bad acting. (The skeletons hissed like cats.) Weren't enough naked women running around either to justify the $1.07 rental cost. The guy who played the "professor" was just terrible. Really an amateur. He must've been an investor that demanded a part. This movie may have been good if they only had a new cast, new director, new special effects, new writers, new producers, so on and so forth. Just skip renting it--not even worth the buck at RedBox.

Although you can tell there was genuine effort put into making "Army of the Dead" the results are unfortunately incredibly mediocre. The acting ranges from passable to pretty bad, the special effects range from okay (such as the skeleton army, which is often show and cut in ways that look good despite the low budget) to laughably bad (some effects such as blood spurts and explosions are computer generated instead of being practical and those are some of the easiest effects to do in live action films). From a low budget production you can forgive the bad effects but the real problem with the film is that it isn't paced or written very well. At times you'll be wondering where the film is going and questioning whether what happened makes any sense or not. The only reason to watch this film would be if you yourself were thinking of doing a low budget movie and you wanted to see how it shouldn't and shouldn't be done because both aspects are seen in this movie. For everyone else, this isn't even "so bad it's good" territory. (Dvd, September 18, 2012)

The premise of reanimated skeletons on the rampage is as imaginative as "Army of the Dead" ever gets.

The characters are telling ghost stories at the campfire. Naturally, one recounts the film's backstory. The next day a greedy man tries to steal the treasure along with some mercenaries.

Naturally, to establish the mercs are terrible people, their boss pushes the greedy archaeologist to promise more riches, both from the treasure and otherwise, then tries to murder him after reaching the gold anyways, apparently his previous antics didn't qualify as obviously evil.

One of the expedition is rescued by the central characters, of which some exist solely to provide more deaths - literally, some people are only on screen in group scenes.

If you intend on watching a film almost interchangeable with many other horror movies, try viewing this.

At some point this must have seemed like a fresh idea, an army of C.G.I. skeletons defending a treasure. Unfortunately the skeletons, who do not speak, are more interesting, and have far better acting skills than anyone else in this movie. With stupid unnecessary female conflicts, ridiculous dialog "What the hell is that,blood?" "Yea this is not good", and "Indiana Jones" nonsense, "Army of the Dead" is a wannabe spectacle of awful proportions. What starts out as a dune buggy adventure, winds up with a possessed professor and illegal treasure plundering. BAD, and not good bad . "Sharks in Venice" is a masterpiece, because it's so bad it's good. This is just BAD. - MERK

A group of archaeological students travel to the Mexican desert for a weekend of dirt racing in honour of their friend John Barnes' birthday. But the professor has an ulterior motive – along with some mercenaries, he plans to locate & loot a massive treasure of gold that was left by the Anasazi, an ancient people who lived in the area. But once he finally finds the treasure, he accidentally releases the treasure's guardians – an army of undead skeletons led by a feared conquistador who wanted to steal the treasure but died in the process. As the skeletons attack the students' camp, Barnes & his friends must find a way to defeat the hundreds of killer skeletons that are assaulting them.

The killer skeleton film is a rare subgenre in the horror field. The most notable ones to use them were in a supplementary fashion – the old 1950s stop-motion fantasy films like Jason & the Argonauts had some awesome stop-motion skeleton warriors & more recently the Sam Raimi Evil Dead sequel ARMY OF DARKNESS, which was technically not really a horror film but had some brilliantly funny moments & a great battle scene with knights up against an army of skeletons. Since then, the idea of killer skeletons has been mostly dismissed… until now.

Army of the Dead is a 2007 attempt to give the idea a whole feature airing. Of course, stop-motion is so passé so the producers used cheap CGI to animate a whole army of skeletons, which looks pretty good until you realise that the skeletons are just one model being cut-&-pasted several times to resemble a whole army. The scenes where the skeletons directly interact with the humans are shoddy & the CGI blood & explosions used are even poorer CGI creations.

The story is a riff on the recent Pirates of the Caribbean films, most notably the first one – an ancient but cursed treasure with an army of undead guardians protecting it for eternity – but with that source franchise making a lot of money to the point that at time of writing this, a fifth instalment is being produced, this film's novelty value will be eroded significantly. The characters are reasonably well drawn – an advantage over some of the other horror films coming out of the independent sector as of late – and the acting is also quite good, but the film fails to generate much in the way of suspense & the skeleton attacks are quite hokey.