The Lost Tape: Andy's Terrifying Last Days Revealed

This supplement for the Dawn of the Dead DVD is pretty enjoyable. It's not supposed to be scary or frightening, it's supposed to be funny in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It's also interesting to watch if you liked the movie or if you like zombies in general. It's very amusing to watch Andy try different things to deter the zombies trying to get in or describing how he found out that headshots were fatal. Bruce Bohne as Andy is excellent. He seems like someone you could hang out and have a drink with, if the world wasn't being overrun by zombies, of course. The only part that I didn't really like was the intercut scenes of Andy's wife and his daughter. All in all, a great extra on the DVD.

Bruce Bohne was the perfect choice to play the gun salesman named Andy, who is pretty much alone in his gun shop fending off the zombies overwhelming the world in the film. This bit of footage is a pretty convincing way of showing how he struggles to survive and retain his sanity. I found it pretty funny that the only other thing he could really talk to was his fish. This was a good extra and I still enjoy watching it. I didn't give it a perfect 10 because of the fact that he drinks and swears. But whatever. This was still pretty good and I can't wait for a sequel to the actual film.

9/10

ALL the extra "films" on the DVD for "Dawn of the Dead" are incredibly lame, with horrible production values and questionable acting. This one is the more unwatchable of the two (if such a thing is possible), because it points a camera at a not-particularly-talented actor and has him improv for like 40 minutes.

It's not a comedy, it's not a drama, in fact it's not anything at all, it just happens to have the same actor who played a (non-speaking) role in the film. Is that supposed to entice me to watch? Ed Wood made better "films" than this one. This was just someone's bored afternoon that they tried to pass as a DVD extra so they could charge an extra ten bucks. Don't fall for it.

Watch the movie, not the extras. Awful... and what's worse, boring. The backstory it purports to "explain" isn't even consistent with the movie. Or zombie lore. Or technology, since he uses a VHS tape in 2005.

This is found on the DVD of the Director's Cut version of the Dawn of the Dead remake of 2004. Like the other extra features on there, it kind of underwhelms. The way it's produced is fine... they couldn't market it as a video diary if the camera wasn't just placed somewhere in front of Andy. This also sort of does the Cloverfield thing, with there already having been something on the tape, that occasionally pops up briefly when he stops recording for a while. That's all perfectly acceptable, if it does put the entire weight of carrying it on the shoulders of the actors, and of those, mainly Bohne. And that's where the real problem arises: None of these people are very good, convincing performers(the kid was by far the worst, then again, few children are that compelling, and they are typically considered OK if they can deliver lines and attempt to enunciate), and Bruce simply neither possesses the charisma or the talent to be the lead in a short anywhere near this long. This is only fifteen minutes, but with no real drama, horror or comedy(which they may have been going for here and there, though it's so vague that I can't be certain), you're gonna feel *every single second of it*. Yes, this does try to give back-story, flesh out "that gun store owner" we see in the film. If it didn't, there'd obviously be absolutely no justification for this at all. And it's still not that interesting. Heck, some of this takes away from the enjoyment of the movie, and one or two things may outright contradict it. At least this is pretty psychologically accurate. There is moderately frequent strong language in this, and disturbing content. I recommend this mainly to the biggest fans of the flick itself, and of this type of thing. 5/10