La notte dei morti viventi

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.

First off: I like zombie movies, I really do. I like them that much that I rent zombie movies which are almost definitely bad.

That said, I simply had to rent this. Only when I started the movie I noticed that this was NOTLD 3D, as it was just labeled "Night of the living dead" here. Even though the notion of "3D" implicated that this one would be a pretty awful remake, I simply wasn't prepared for this. It's pretty damn courageous to begin and end your film with the the opening scene of the original and also have the original running on TV during the movie when the remake is such a pile of garbage. From terrible acting over just plain awful special effects and missing wounds, everything here. The worst thing though is that the script only bears a slight resemblance of the original's story. True, it begins at a graveyard. True, at some point in the movie some guys are trapped in a house. The names of the main characters are the same. That's it. All the other things that were good about the original (and even about the first remake) are gone and replaced by a completely generic "horror" story, centered around Sid Haig. There is no reason why this movie should be called "Night of the living dead". It has nothing to do with NOTLD... well, about as much as any other zombie movie has.

Problem is: Even most really, really low-budget zombie movies I've seen were far more enjoyable than this one. Simply stay away from this one. And if you're like me and simply can't stay away from it, don't say you hadn't been warned.

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")

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.

I'm sorry, but I cannot really summarize my feelings more than to say that I was ready for this to be sort of bad, you know, in a so bad that it's hilariously funny sort of way, but I never knew that a movie could loop its way around again to just plain bad. And just to let you know, this is not the only zombie movie, or "remake" of a zombie movie that I've seen. --I guess I was just spoiled by the leetness of "Dawn of the Dead."

This movie IS a "remake" true, but the effects were so ill done, that except for times the actors were using something like a cellphone in a scene, you could have sworn this was made at the same time as the original. Which, seriously is not necessarily THAT bad, but really, come on... The "3D" could have been way more effectively utilized as well. Truly, if you KNOW you are making it 3D, you could do way cooler, and way more terrifying things than, "Ooh look! A Doobie!". *sigh*

But the "horrifying" zombies were the absolute least of this thing's problems. Oh yes, I AM speaking of the acting. Let me just first say, I think I lost about one IQ point per minute (maybe second) of watching these people try to act. Now, that's not that I'm saying that I thought this was supposed to be an Oscar worthy film. When I walked in, I knew I wasn't going to be enlightened. But dang! The crappy delivery of the "witty" lines that the script offered was the only thing in the whole movie that was worthy enough to make me gasp in horror. COME ON PEOPLE!! Absolutely everyone watching has fairly low expectations of you and yet you decide your mission in life is to lower them even further?!?! There was not ONE person in the entire cast (including the lead actress) that you could EVER feel for enough to root for THEM against the zombies. I myself, was cheering for the zombies. If they could have eaten everyone in the first 15 minutes, THAT would have been worthwhile.

I'm not going to say more because no more is needed. It was bad and that is it.

You can hate the review, or agree with everything. I don't truly care. I just wrote this because I needed somewhere to vent. I had already used up my boyfriend, who by the way agrees with me.