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OK. I just finished watching Bio Zombie, which, while fairly entertaining, and featuring the awesome option of having both an english subtitle track, and an engrish subtitle track, honestly does not seem to have elicited particularly entertaining thoughts from me. Plus I sealed the envelope before I remembered I still needed screens. So now we're going double jeopardy with the "remake" of Day of the Dead. Now, the actual Day of the Dead is generally considered to be hands down the worst of the George Romero zombie series, with the only real saving graces being good mid-80s zombie makeup, and Bub, the trained pet zombie. The "remake" of DAWN of the Dead, while not a bad movie on its own merits, absolutely cannot be considered a remake, because it totally threw the plot premise and characters out the window and making a totally unrelated movie about "zombies" which so weren't zombies, that happened to take place partially in a mall... and calling that the remake of the second movie in a trilogy. It's like releasing Star Trek 2 and calling it a remake of The Empire Strikes back. Right genre, it's in space, there's father-son issues, there's a kidnapping, but, that's about it. So anyway, point is... I have no reason to expect to enjoy anything about the movie I'm about to watch! Good news for you!
A film by Steve Miner. A worker in the harsh unforgiving Steve mines it seems. Hey wait... that's not the guy who directed the "Dawn" remake, let me ignore the movie for a while and see what this guy did on IMDB... let's see. Prior experience seems to be directing a surprising number of episodes of Dawson's Creek and such and... House!?! Not the Doctor show everyone else thinks when I say that, but the totally awesome movie from the 80s that everyone needs to watch along with its sequel. That would suddenly be causing to re-evaluate this movie's prospects, but it's the WRITER of House who went on to make House 2, and then kinda got tossed out of Hollywood for having just made a movie where some guys hang out with kindly old zombie grandpa and his pet caterpuppy and team up with an "Electrician/Adventurer" played by John Ratzenburger to raid the ancient aztec temple hidden behind the table lamp. Anyway, it's still a cool thing to have directed, particularly when you can couple that with not having had anything to do with the crimes against awesomeness that are House 3 and 4.
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Anyway though, yeah, the movie I'm actually watching. Our main character would appear to be this here Army Girl who's patrolling around this town which has been quarantined due to an outbreak of, I think it's pretty safe to assume, the "zombie" virus. Possibly the same "zombie" virus from the Dawn of the Dead "remake" I was rambling about earlier. I suppose that's a fairly novel perspective on this sort of thing. Which of course also means that again, there is no way you can claim this as a remake. The actual Dawn of the Dead is set in a military base that may actually be Gitmo come to think of it being on an island not too far from Miami and all, set well after zombies have happened, to the extent that the characters generally believe that aside from a few other isolated military installations, they're pretty much the only survivors of zombies happening, and the whole thing is basically just about how the army is stupid and lame and how strict governmental procedures and record-keeping are ultimately pointless when society breaks down, and bullies still beat up nerds when the nerds have lab coats and the bullies have camo fatigues.
So anyway, yeah, people are being shipped out to the local (within quarantine) hospital because they're mysteriously sick. Nobody's wearing masks, or gloves, or avoiding close physical contact with people who are sweating profusely and coughing wetly, and it's just generally a really great example of the opposite of how these things are properly handled. So anyway, the symptoms of the "zombie" virus apparently go, flu-like symptoms for, oh, let's call it half a day? Then all at once, your eyes turn milky, half your skin falls off while the rest turns grey, you become insanely homicidal, gain super strength, and speed, the ability to leap a couple stories straight up, and preposterous wall climbing abilities. So... the only difference between these "zombies" and, say, Spiderman is a massive overdose of caffeine, violent tendencies, and a merciful lack of the compulsion to make constant "witty" remarks about everything.
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I should probably point out about now that a big point was made shortly before all the sick people simultaneously turned into "zombies" that Army Girl here refuses to keep any ammo in her gun. Because, I guess, she's a pacifist. Who enlisted in the army. For the discipline I guess. So anyway, she and a couple friends start crawling around in the hospital's air ducts to get away from the "zombies," who all temporarily forget their crazy vertical leap and end up just banging on the air ducts with brooms... which is odd. Except for the "zombified" version of their old commander, who, after pulling his own eye out and eating it, forgetting he can jump, AND that this movie has lame fast "zombies" but manages to slowly crawl around in the ducts a while anyway. After way too many scenes where Army Girl's leg gets grabbed and she gets free, our 3 heroes here, Army Girl, Army Guy, and Doctor Guy end up in a medical supply closet. Doctor guy gets his fingers bit, and they immediately pour some disinfectant on there. Army Guy wants to shoot him in he head anyway. The whole thing is a scene actually lifted from the real Dawn of the Dead, so, credit due there I guess. Of course, that version involves amputating the whole arm. I'd love to ramble on here a bit more, but there's kinda stuff happening.
OK, so, Army Guy McGuyvers up this crazy makeshift spear. Doctor Guy compliments it, so he goes "Oh, so just because a black guy has a sharp thing on the end of a stick that makes it a spear huh?" I suppose it's technically more of a halberd, but that still doesn't make it any less of an incredibly stupid line. So yeah, they all fight their way out to the parking lot by way of a HORRIBLE action scene with bad low frame rate slow-mo, a complete disregard for anatomy (to the extent that someone slices people's heads in half repeatedly with a saw blade loosely taped to a plastic pole), and REALLY REALLY PROFOUNDLY BAD CGI. I mean, it looks really bad compared to stuff from the early 90s. It's pathetic.
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Oh, and we also have this B-plot going on, where Army Girl's brother and some other people are holed up in a radio station, with suspicions that someone is Infected. See, it's hard to tell who, because NOW we're saying there's no sign at all of being infected except that you develop a nosebleed shortly before you go RAR! and there's blood on something. This resolves surprisingly fast, and the main party pick up the brother after everyone else dies since it turns out most of them were infected. It really does all resolve in about the time it took to read this paragraph, kinda sad really.
I should probably also point out that a tiny bite on the knuckles that was immediately doused with an entire gallon of bleach apparently IS enough for you to turn into a "zombie" and with way way way less turn around time than basically everyone else. BUT! For some reason, he just sits there quietly and doesn't try to attack anyone. Oh, and his name is Bud as it turns out. Gee, isn't that "clever." So they, for completely arbitrary reasons, decide not to kill, ditch, or otherwise deal with having a zombie in the car, and it's really just wall-bangingly stupid. The character theory of why he's a nice polite "zombie" by the way? "Well, he's a vegetarian, and clearly some part of people's original personality is maintained here." Except that, you know, it isn't. All "zombies" are just interchangeable leaping rar-monsters here. And even if they weren't that is just SO STUPID of a handwave! Argh! They clearly only included this as some sad attempt at an homage but it is just so infuriatingly stupid that I can't even laugh at it. Dear gods! If for some insane reason I had been in a theater watching this movie, I would seriously be stomping out now to demand my money and time back. Even with the assumption that I was watching it for purely ironic reasons. Of course, that would require it to have been in theaters at some point, which it clearly wasn't, having so much of that clear direct-to-DVD stink to it. If the budget were just a little lower, I'd be assuming it was a Sci-Fi Channel original honestly, but then it would most likely at least have the decency to be funny.
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Anyway, they uh, drove off into the woods, abandoned their car, Bud there did the whole noble sacrifice thing to defend everyone from a spontaneous "zombie" horde out of nowhere. Somehow, everyone winds up inside a mysterious abandoned research bunker in the middle of nowhere. I really am not sure how that happened exactly, and I don't think it was just because I was too busy foaming at the mouth. Inside they find a jerk scientist who helped made the "zombie" virus and a video tape of another scientist who did so just to make it clear that we can blame the jerk here. Apparently they were trying to make a virus who's only effect was making you fall asleep for a little while, to capture dangerous people without harming them. Oh yes. That's plausible. Especially since there's kind of already a lot of stuff that does that, and is way easier to transport and disperse than a virus. Anyway though, the lead scientist is a "zombie" and apparently he's Smarter than the Av-er-age Zombie. Which he demonstrates by dodging a hail of gunfire from 4 machine guns, a shotgun, and a pistol, all fired at once, in a narrow hallway. And... where did they get all these guns anyway? They didn't have them earlier, were they all lying around the bunker? The bunker full of scientists researching knock-out gas? And Army Guy has a frelling sword too.
So... they come up with this plan to get rid of all the hundreds of zombies that are spontaneously in the bunker for some reason by taking the giant room full of propane canisters and... spark shooting device which can serve no other purpose than to build their ultimate weapon, to construct a "giant flamethrower." OK, movie? That is SO not how a flamethrower works! A flamethrower is really more of a super soaker that sprays out a flammable but fairly slow burning slime. What you have the materials for here is more of a giant bomb. But, sure enough, after Bud comes in out of nowhere to heroically sacrifice himself again, they light it off, by ripping the valve off each container in turn after pointing them at the door, hiding behind the canisters, and firing their sparky thing off, a huge explosion magically bursts forth, goes out the door, out into the hallway, spreading out around at least 5 or 6 corners, filling the entire bunker with bad CG explosion except for the room the gas that's being ignited is all actually contained in, then after literally vaporizing the outmost zombie in the giant horde, the whole fireball retracts back in on itself to go back inside the canisters. Our heroes are not even sweaty. That's... that's a really creative interpretation of uh... no really, what the hell movie? That was just surreal!
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So apparently, this magical fireball spell killed every single person in the entire quarantined area, because I guess every single "zombie" decided to go hunt down the main characters, and apparently, the roadblocks set up around town that were having trouble keeping cars contained at the beginning of the movie had no problem at all from the "zombies" who also didn't decide to attempt to run through all the open forests about the area, because we end with a radio announcer explaining that the outbreak of "flu-like symptoms" (their actual words) has been fully contained and travel to the area will resume in a few days. Then, you know, one final zombie pops out on an abandoned road to scream at the camera because directors of awful movies have that kind of sequel hook so deeply embedded into their brains that it's a total autonomic response to shoot it.
The ONLY positive comment I have to make on this movie is that when they were explaining how they were trying to make knock-out gas, there's a throwaway line explaining that yeah, this "zombie" virus actually is airborne, and anyone who isn't showing symptoms by this point in the movie just has a natural immunity to it... unless they bite you. That magically deactivates your antibodies apparently. Because the brain-dead idiots who write this drivel don't know anything about zombies except that it's bad if one bites you... and now you're getting that speech I was going to get into before but was distracted by that first bad CG fight scene. Here's the thing. That whole "if a zombie bites you, you become a zombie" bit? That's not even a real thing. If we're talking about a virus, well, OK, sure. I mean, if someone with chicken pox bites you, you get chicken pox. Or AIDS. Or anything really. That's a really good way to spread diseases in general. If we're talking about proper George Romero flavored zombies though? What it is is that if you die, from any cause, you become a zombie. Being bit by a zombie and not receiving proper medical treatment will presumably cause you to die, but, you know, not really any more so than being bit by a regular ol' living breathing human will cause you to die. Seriously, bites from humans get all kinds of crazy infected. People are like, second only to gila monsters in terms of nasty septic stuff in our mouths that you totally don't want getting into an open wound. So this whole "if they bite you you turn into one of them!" bit is just this weird misunderstanding from people severely underestimating how much it messes you up to have someone bite a big chunk out of your arm.
OK, down off my soap box now. Seriously, that was just a terrible terrible movie. I mean, aside from all the stuff I specifically mentioned here? There was like, no actual dialog or characterization. Aside from a conversation between Army Girl and her brother at the beginning about how he's a jerk for not checking on their sick mom? If I didn't mention it, they didn't talk. Just a lot of running around and screaming with no characterization. Awful special effects, even by low-budget standards. Heck, ESPECIALLY by low-budget standards. Massive plot holes. The brother's girlfriend was suddenly around for the whole bunker hunk of the movie despite not being there when they picked him up at the radio station. Plus all the weapons out of nowhere. The inconsistent jumping. Just bad all over. Ugh. Not even anything to laugh at bad! Gah!
