La notte dei morti viventi

The dead have risen in a small town and group of people take refuge in a farmhouse weed farm.

With the original film never properly copyrighted and in the public domain director Jeff Broadstreet wastes no time in trying to cash-in with a 3D re-imagining.

This is best viewed in 2D as the 3D shots are gimmicky and are few and far between. The 1968 original appears on TVs scattered across the movie reminding you how superior it is to Broadstreet's offering. The opening is quite interesting following to the tropes of the original (the "Coming to get you, Barbara" line absurdly phoned in via text message). It has a bit of atmosphere but over all its all tongue and cheek stuff, suffering from a TV feel and low budget production values. It's on par with its 2012 follow up Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation but not a touch on Tom Savini's superb Night of the Living Dead (1990).

Horror character actor Sid Haig appears but even with its short running time and Brianna Brown, Johanna Black and Cristin Michele it's still totally forgettable.

This movie is a pale imitation of George Romero's original. Giving characters the same names isn't enough, pitting characters against zombies isn't enough. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead was outstanding, while this one fails almost completely on every level. Remember Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho and Roland Emmerich's remake of Godzilla? This turd is somewhere in between, trying to step in the footsteps of greatness, but, like a zombie, exhibiting no life of its own. This zombie movie is simply, well, dead.

I suggest you go rent the original Night of the Living Dead, or either version of Dawn of the Dead, or Return of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later. These are the zombie movies that will stand the test of time.

Ill make this short, no reason to go on and on about how bad this movie is because anyone that has heard about it has probably heard all the same things.

So basically this movie was horrible, the only reason i watched the whole thing was because sid haig had a role and it was 3D, yup, thats it. Sid haig has done great work and continues to and i felt i owed it to him to watch this piece of crap regardless of how bored and disinterested i was.

The 3D in this movie is only JUST 3D, it had that cheesy 80s attempt at 3D that was cool back in the day but come on, 2006, we have better ways now. The red was bleeding out all over the screen and not in a good way. If that red had been from the zombies or victims, then the gore level of this film would have at least reached satisfactory, but no...the makeup, effects and gore were just so low budget and poor that i actually thought maybe this was supposed to be an ironic type of zombie movie.

The acting was sub-par at best, the characters put no real emotion towards their dialogue or actions, it felt like they didn't even care that there was a horde of flesh eating undead trying to rip there skin from bone. "Oh no, ah, its a zombie, im going to feebly try and get away but not really because i just don't care, ahhh...". The only character that brought any kind of entertaining dialogue was sid haigs' character (of course, he always delivers great screen play) but even THAT was not enough to keep me attentive.

To me, the scariest thing in the world is the thought of our family and friends returning from the undead to chew our brains out thru our skulls, but i could not get into the story at all or imagine these lumbering, lethargic corpses to be true zombies, they had every opportunity to eat the characters, hell, sid haigs character has his arm up in one zombies face and the thing is just moaning and shuffling around, not even snapping its teeth at him. A zombies main goal is to feed, thats it, it is going to have so much gumption and determination to eat you that its not going to stop for anything short of having its skull caved in. But these "zombies" stop coming with a (what i considered) a very poor and staged looking clothesline (from the college kid on the bike in the beginning) if that had been a real zombie (or any zombie from any other respectable horror film) it would have grabbed that suckers arm and ripped it off like a chicken wing.

OK, so not so short, im sorry but im sure you were more disappointed in this movie than finding out i went on for quite a while, at least this was more entertaining right? I don't care if you hate my review or agree with it, i just had to get my disappointment vented out there somewhere.

This pointless rehash of the Romero classic sees the original story retold as a modern-day Z-grade effort, replete with amateur night acting and Halloween masks. Yes, it really is that bad, and the biggest surprise is that cash-in king John Russo – a guy who's made an entire career from the fact that he wrote and produced the 1968 film - is nowhere to be seen.

The story diverges little from the original, except to introduce an extra, extraneous character – played by B-movie stalwart Sid Haig. The zombies are so ineffectual here and the gore so tame that two things happen: first, an extra villain is introduced to little end, and secondly, their origin has to be explained in depth. Both take away from the eerie impact of the Romero original, where the horror came from the fact that the world ended abruptly with the 'what if?' scenario of zombies arriving at your door.

The film's hook is the 3D, but anyone going in looking for guts and entrails flying out of the screen (a la the MY BLOODY VALENTINE remake and the latter FINAL DESTINATION movies) will be disappointed. A 3D spliff and subsequent smoke ring are all you're going to get (way to take advantage of the technology, huh?). Speaking of spliffs, the awful dialogue is loaded with stoner jokes and a far cry from the terse exchanges we all remember from Romero's classic.

The acting is terrible, aside from Haig, an actor who always seems to be enjoying himself (complete with ghoulish chuckle) in his recent B-movie outings. The story is so slim that at one stage we take a softcore detour to the barn, where a sex scene between two unappealing characters plays out in all its nude detail. Incredibly, the end result is a film that feels more dated and less grisly than the film that inspired it, made all those years ago; making me appreciate Romero all the more is the only thing this movie does right.

Barb (Brianna Brown) and her brother Johnny (Ken Ward) travel to the country for the funeral services of their aunt, but they arrive late and drive direct to the cemetery. They see the location empty, but sooner they are attacked by zombies. Johnny escapes in his car leaving Barb alone, but she is rescued by the drug dealer and college student Ben (Joshua DesRoches). He drives his motorcycle to the Cooper farm, and the patriarch Henry Cooper (Greg Travis) does not give credit to Barb. When the farmhouse is under siege of a group of flesh-eaters zombies, the local mortician Gerald Tovar Jr. (Sid Haig) arrives and tells a scary story about the origin of the zombies.

I do not like remakes, but every now and then I see good ones. I bought this "previously-seen" DVD in a rental expecting to watch a good remake of the George Romero's greatest classic. My first deception was in the beginning of the movie, indicating that it would be necessary a pair of glasses to see in 3D that was not delivered with the DVD. After watching this movie, I realized that it is an offense to the original "Night of the Living Dead". The insulting story is absolutely stupid, with terrible dialogs, unnecessary nudity and a ridiculous conclusion; the direction is awful, with an inadequate pace associated to some weak performances. When the group is trapped in the farmhouse, most of the windows have glasses, and the group never protects with wood or wardrobes or whatever. In the end, better off watching the classic again, and I do not know how George Romero could authorize the release of this crap using his name and the original idea. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Noite dos Mortos Vivos 3D" ("The Night of the Living Dead 3D")