Following the success and general nods of acceptance of Zack Snyder and James Gunn’s 2004 remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ a subsequent remake of Romero’s ‘Day of the Dead’ was greenlit. Initially I must admit I was pretty darn excited.
The original ‘Dawn of the Dead’ is one of my favourite movies of all time and I was hesitant at the news of a remake. But I was more than surprised to find myself enjoying the update throughout. It was a worthy and well executed remake. So of course news of a remake of ‘Day of the Dead’ was more than welcome. However, this movie isn’t vaguely on par with ‘Dawn’. It’s not even a double bogey – it’s off the course, splash down in the lake and sunken into the murky depths never to be found again.
A small group of military survivors from an unprecendented outbreak of a science induced virus capable of turning all souls who get bitten by an infected person into a flesh starving zombies, strive to survive and escape the town of outbreak. You know – one of those truly original ideas.
It’s a bit rich to even claim this as a remake of the original. I would have preferred an attempt to sequelize the 2004 ‘Dawn of the Dead’ instead to be honest. And things aren’t helped by the re-appearance of Ving Rhames playing a different character in this movie after his solid performance as a survivor cop in the the fore-mentioned remake.
The camera work in certain scenes was dizzying. There was quick cuts and flashes I assume placed in there to feed the audience that sick, disorientating feeling to help enhance the scares and gore on screen, however, it just makes it all the more unbearable as a movie. As announced as a direct-to-DVD I shouldn’t have expected anything less than satifying special effects and there wasn’t anything here that changed my mind.
The dialogue was awful and I felt more like siding with the flesh-eaters than hoping the survivors would make it. In fact certain aspects of the movie were just bordering on farcical. Exploding zombie heads, zombie ceiling spiderwalks and teenage civilians with sudden full knowledge of weaponry is pretty much all eye-rollerble!
OVERALL SUMMARY
I’m struggling to think of one saving grace for this movie Im afraid to say. Possibly the biggest let down in quite a while. Never engaging, not really scary and more definitely not memorable. And dare I say it, it’s not much better than ‘Day of the Dead 2: Contagium’. My advice, however, would be to stay away from both.
