Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

15 February 2008

Day of the Dead, dir. Steve Miner (2008)

NIKKI says: In George A. Romero's new Diary of the Dead, a student shows his zombie movie to a friend, who chides him: "How many times have I told you? Dead things don’t move that fast."

Good one. I wonder how pissed George was at Steve Miner for using super-fast zombies in a remake of George's own Day of the Dead. He might have been okay with it, actually. Because there's too much other stuff to hate to really worry about that little point.

Why did they do this? Why did Steve Miner do this? And is Mena Suvari really that hard up? This felt like a companion piece to Dead and Deader -- low budget, bad acting, half a script. I couldn't believe I was watching actual actors in some scenes. They felt out of place in such a shlocky piece of work. The make-up was awful, the jump-cuts and swooshy camera moves were derivative and un-scary. None of the major themes ever came to a satisfying conclusion (zombies with memories, the army's use of human guinea pigs).

The whole thing started out crappily but with a tiny bit of promise. Not all the characters were insufferable, and we felt like perhaps we might care about Mena and her family. She was also doing real well in the Kick-Ass-Horror-Chicks stakes, a la Sarah Polley in the Dawn of the Dead remake. But the story, the direction (sorry Steve), and a complete lack of purpose from the entire creative team here, let her down. Way down.

Another shitty remake that does more to kill the genre than keep it alive. And now that we have George himself making socially relevant zombie flicks, why do we need the imitators and copycats at all?

1/5

STEVE says:
Okay, so Zombies can run now. Fine, I'm over it. But when the fuck did they gain the ability to crawl on the ceiling?

The original Day of the Dead worked as both an extension of Romero's original idea, and a stand-alone film. This new one works as neither. It's just embarrassing.

1/5