Well, I received a screener for Day of the Dead yesterday and watched it last night. I'll write the following and try to avoid spoilers but if it takes spoilers to make you decide not to watch the movie, then I'll give you spoilers.
First off, the cover art (zombie vomiting, eyeball in middle of mess) is deceptive. It never happened in the movie and would only have made it worse if it had.
This is NOT a remake of the Romero classic Day of the Dead. The zombies aren't zombies. They're infected, much like 28 Days/Weeks Later. Whatever they've got, they don't go into it much during the movie, just a trite ridiculous explanation and some graphics showing cells being infected.
Now, before I get into it, the good. The movie looks good. The DP did quite the competent job on it. Its well lit, the scenes are well composed and there are some very nice shots, particularly of sunset/sunrises over Colorado. Ok, that's the good. I mean that ALL of the good. What they did with the movie was terrible.
The script is terrible but let's face it, scripts in zombie movies are less important than having a sense of story. I know they're supposed to go hand-in-hand but they don't alway. In this case, there seemed to be a lot of improvisation, a fair amount of after-the-shoot-is-wrapped ADR/storylines implanted. One example is the whole 'he was a vegetarian while alive so he won't eat me when he's dead thing.' There was 1 line (ONE!) in the middle of a conversation and it was a complete nonsequitar. Except that it set up that plotline later. His mouth was obscured when he said it...I think it was added in later.
There's all kinds of bad storytelling here. Its not that there's no story, just hamfisted storytelling.
A good example is the 'hot girl' (I think that's how they identify her in the end credits) who decides to walk home through the woods. After about 20 shots of the tattoo around her belly button, she's attacked and pulled off screen. Wow. Rather than show the obligatory splash of blood to show something bad happens to her, a big wad of flesh is thrown into a puddle. Hey! Its the tattoo! And the bellybutton!
The actors are fine, just not given much to work with. Mena Suvari (who is actually an excellent actress) is given a thankless task. I'm guessing she saw what Sarah Polley did in the Dawn remake and thought that was a plan. Having said that, its a little ridiculous that anyone expects her to kick arse and take names but that's the role. Hope she didn't thank anyone for it. What made Polley's part so much better was that she didn't kick ass. She was just trying to survive. Polley was good. Not Suvari's best work. Probably her worst.
AnnaLynne McCord, fresh off a stint of the now unwatchable Nip/Tuck. In the show, she is Portia Rossi's daughter who is Anally-Obsessed-Because-She-Wants-To-Be-A-Virgin (henceforth referred to a AOBSWTBAV which really doesn't seem shorter) and who poisons Julia by putting mercury in her fruit cake and serving her slices over the whole season. Heck, I've wanted to poison Julia more than a few times, but doesn't anyone in Hollywood know...NO ONE eats fruitcake. AnnaLynne looks good just standing around. She really is a beautiful girl but its a good thing that she can't act her way out of a bag; No one expects her to in this film. If the film had a more competent director, they'd have convinced her to at least skin off her clothes at some point and give the viewer something to see, something that Nip/Tuck's been trying to hint at all season.
Ving Rhames, also a fine actor, is mostly wasted. Just when I thought he was going to get kind of interesting, he vanished in the movie. Won't spoil what happens to him; Its already rotten.
The 'zombies' become infected and their eyes turn white. Their skin instantly becomes porous and shredded and they get hungry. They'll apparently eat anything. One of them grabs his own eye out and downs it. Its the Zombie Ourobourus. They also get superpowers. They jump, leap, crawl on ceilings. They jump out of buildings from four stories up and keep going. The film editors use a BS technique to make them scary where they accelerate their movements by 50% and then jumpcut their motion so, fast as they seem, they look like they're on top of you instantaneously. Its editing room nonsense, but that's the movie.
Summary: Walk, don't run, away from this movie. Do not pass it and decide to grab it in the pile of rentals. Do not buy it. Avoid it. There are some things that you can't unsee and there are some moments in life you'll never get back. Here's a gift. 1 1/2 hours to do anything you want...don't waste it on this dreck
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by Sir James Forbes
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