Day of the Dead (Remake)

A Review By Nick Peron

What's in a Remake? That Which We Produce a Film By Any Other Director Would Smell As Sweet:

Unless that remake is Day of the Dead. Which begs the question, why do a remake of Day of the Dead ? Well, they remade all the other ones. Night of the Living Dead ? Remade. Twice. Dawn of the Dead ? Remade. So it stood to reason to somebody to do a remake of Day of the Dead. The one thing that filmmakers who make a living remaking somebody else's movie don't seem to realize though, is that there are assholes like me, who are ready to rip the shit out of their work for even the slightest infraction against the original. Now, take a look at all your previous Romero zombie movie remakes. The first remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) was directed by Tom Savini. It stands, to date, as one of the best of the remakes. You want to know why? Because Savini had the foresight to hire Romero as the executive producer. What better way to insure your remake is not a total fuck up than to hire the guy who wrote the original to be the executive producer. The second remake of Night of was not so lucky, Night Of The Living Dead 3D (2006) was a steaming pile of shit. In fact my fellow Micro-Shocker Michael O'May reviewed said movie and gave it the prestigious polished turd award, I don't think I need to explain any further how much that movie sucked. Dawn of the Dead (2004) was directed by Zack Snyder, Now not only is Snyder a kick ass director (he did direct Watchmen) but the writer on the film was none other than James Gunn. James Gunn, you may remember brought us Slither and Tromeo and Juliet (And yes, he wrote the screenplay to Scooby-Doo ) Gunn knows how to write, and he knows his horror films. What made the Dawn remake good? Simply put, even though it was one of those damned "modern reinvisionist" piles of crap Hollywood churns out, at least it kept the same premise, the liberties and changes they made also fit with the plot, and at the end of the day, they still had an entertaining movie.

This is where Day of the Dead begins to lose it's marks as a remake. This is because this movie does not have any sort of connection to the original. Period. The only connection it does have, is the zombies (which should be a fucking given) and the fact that the characters in the movie have similar names to the characters in the original movie. This movie may have well have been an entirely different movie, totally unrelated to Romero's movie (remake or otherwise) with the amount of liberties and changes to the plot they made. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Chew on My Box.... Art:

The first thing that I'm going to have to critique with this movie is it's box art. The box art to your film, boys and girls, is what is ultimately going to sell your movie to people who know nothing about it. As a consumer, you are going to take the adage "don't judge a book by it's cover" and fuck it up the ass until it bleeds. Because, fuck you old adages, I'm out buying moving pictures, I am going to buy whatever looks good. And what better way to make that selection then by how awesome the cover looks. Just ask all the pissed off people who bought my pal Chris Seaver's film Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker! . Now that's not to say that every movie needs to have good box art, but there is something very wrong with this films art. Let's make a comparison between the box art of the original Day of the Dead (For the sake of this review, I'm using Anchor Bay's most recent DVD release of this film) and the remake. Let's take a look shall we:

On your left we have the box art to the original Day of the Dead on the right, it's remake. First thing I'd like to point out is the font usage on the title of the film. The original decides to go with a tide and true graphic, that says, the movie is what it is. Day. Of. The. Dead. Nothing fancy about it, it's pretty straight forward. Now taking a look at the remake, it looks like your graphic artist decided to be a little flashier... but oh... look at this, that font looks awfully familiar, where have I seen that before? Oh right, it's the same font they used for Diary of the Dead, Romero's most recent zombie film.

The next thing I'd like to point out is the fact that the movie is called Day of the Dead. Day of the fucking Dead. The original movie pictures Zombies roaming around in the daylight, in fact, keeping in the theme of the original movies (Night, Dawn, then Day) they even have a little sun in the top right hand corner to signify that. The remake? Gee, the movie is called Day of the Dead, what do you put on your video box? A fucking moon. That makes sense.

The next item I wanted to point out about this movie is what is depicted on the video box. The original shows the movies star, Bub the Zombie, looking at us as if to say that this is a character to watch for. The other thing that you notice is again, zombies roaming in broad daylight. So you know what this movie is going to show, zombies that are out in broad daylight. The remake? It has a picture of their version of Bud, vomiting up a bunch of crap. What does that say? That it's a movie about puking zombies. Having seen Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, which is about dolls that vomit while they are being slaughtered, and also seeing vomiting zombies in 28 Days Later , both of those movies spell out to me that movies about vomiting zombies are boring. Another thing, that I'm drawn to look at is what's in the vomit. A finger, an eye, an ear and a..... chicken foot? What the fuck? A chicken foot? Did this zombie decide that he wanted to go and get some Colonel before he went on his zombie feeding frenzy? And all these body parts are so obviously put into the picture with Photoshop. Which is fine, but you should at least make these severed body parts look like they've actually severed from a human body. They are clearly cropped pictures from without making any attempt to make them look like they've been bitten off or chewed up. I mean, unless this zombie is the only zombie in existence that swallows things whole. And why is the puke green? If he's been chomping on human beings, wouldn't his stomach be full of blood, sinew and other flesh which would make the fluids in his stomach appear red?

Lastly, they added the phrase "The Need to Feed" right underneath the title of the film. It sounds as though that this is another "sequel" to Day of the Dead like the awful Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (which I have reviewed previously), that's essentially what I thought I was buying, I didn't know it was the remake of Day of the Dead (which I knew existed.) Why are you, maker of a remake, going to put a subtitle under the title of the movie?

I have to wonder where the graphic artist who came up with this box art was hired from? The 10th grade? I'm not exactly a Photoshop merlin, but come on, even I can do better than that. But proof in the pudding, all the graphics on this site? All me. And I did a little more than cropping pictures and using a few Eye Candy filters.

A Veritable Who's Who of... People:

The movie stars Mena Suvari, who we all remember from American Pie , American Beauty , American Virgin , and AAmerican Pie 2 , and possibly other movies that doesn't have the word "American" in the title. I think she might have appeared on a tin of Prego American spaghetti once, but that could have been the model glue. The film also features Nick Cannon, who has a really great porno name, but one could only wish he could act as something better than a pathetic black caricature (more on that later) , you may remember him from such films as American Son... OR... um... Well that's the only movie he's been in with "American" in the title. Fuck him. Mr. One-Movie-With-American-In-The-Title-Guy. It also had Michael Welch, who is going to live the rest of his life with the shame that he was inTwilight , which is certainly a movie to be more embarrassed about than this movie. In fact, when he's probably trying to pick girls up in bars, he's telling them that he's in this movie, instead of saying he was in Twilight, for fear that the girls he's trying to pick up would offer him a tampon. It's also featuring AnnaLynne McCord, who was in Amexica and 61 episode of American Heiress. Stark Sands, who plays the role of Bud Crain in this movie, did a voice for American Dad! , and was in Flags of Our Fathers (Hey, that's kinda on the same vein, fuck you.) And the icing on the fucking cake, Ving Rhames, who as we all know was in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, also appears in the this remake for a brief role. Dawn of the Dead, the remake, had cameo roles by characters who were in the original movie, Day of the Dead remake? A cameo by the guy who played a character that was in the remake of the prequel of the movie this remake was based on. In fact, none of the original actors from the original appear in this movie. None. Not even a single zombie extra.

Homages? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Homages:

That's the other thing that sticks out with this movie when compared to it's remake contemporaries. The first remake of Night of the Living Dead, and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, all have homages, references, and cameo appearances that tie into the previous film. Shit, even the fucking terrible 2006 remake Night of the Living Dead 3-D, had a reference to the film it was based on (Granted it was the main characters watching the original Night of the Living Dead on TV.) The remake of Day of the Dead? Could it have hurt that they have some sort of reference to the film, other than vague connections? Yes, it's been said that there are "similar" scenes in the movie, the missile silo, the who Bud sub-plot, but they have been perverted enough that they aren't the same scenes anymore. The movie doesn't even take plans in a bomb shelter, they completely overhauled the movie.

There are is not homage-one to of it's predecessor. I'm not going to rhyme off how the remakes are full of references to the movies they are based on. Just go check it out for yourself. Go on the IMDB, look up Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, select their remakes and click on the "trivia" link. You see that? Like a whole pages worth of material, now go and look at the trivia of Day of the Dead, not even a paragraph full of references.

Would it have hurt them to maybe Sherman Howard to make a cameo appearance? Or what about a scene where Joseph Pilato running around shouting orders? It wasn't like Pilato was doing anything more important, he had an open calendar from 2003 to 2008. But no, whole lot of nothing.

You would think, that if they gave a shit about making a decent remake, that it wasn't more than a cash grab because Romero's popularity is through the roof, they would have taken more care to make the movie a little bit like the original. Or have something for fans of the original could identify with. Look, I understand the point of a movie studio is to make money, and okay so they had the rights to make the remake.... But come on, you have to do a little better than giving the movie the same title, and slap the phrase "Based on the film Day of the Dead by George A. Romero" and call it a remake.

That would be like making a movie about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , and saying "Based on the animated film created by Walt Disney" and then have seven 6' tall men all named after the Seven Dwarves, and Snow White turns out to be the reanimated corpse of Judy Garland, and the plot involves shitting on each others chest, with a grand finally where they travel back in time to the late Mesozoic era to fight the frog king and beat him by vomiting in his mouth, and calling that a remake.

Zomedy of Errors....

Not only does this remake have almost zero in common with the original version of the film, it also is rife with issues that are in start contradiction to the point of Romero's zombie films. Here is the shit list of things this remake totally screwed the pooch on:

1.) No Social Commentary: The whole purpose of the original Day of the Dead was Romero's commentary on how being cut off from humanity and living in isolation in a hostile environment leads to a breakdown in human behavior. Who was more savage in this film? The zombies, or the people that were living in the missile silo?

2.) No explanation for Zombies: Romero's zombie films never get into why there are zombies running around, it was always left to speculation. This movie totally kills that speculation and says it was a biological agent (isn't it always?) Which takes away from the zombies mystique firstly. The other issue is that this moves the focus away from the human characters and focuses on the zombies. Day of the Dead in and of itself was a survival story about the humans, the zombies were incidental and were never the central focus of it. Yes, they did the bit with Bub in the original film and touch on the fact that the zombies are re-learning things, but again it only accounts for a small portion of the film. This movie focuses too much on the zombies than on the survivors.

3.) It's the third film in a series: The biggest annoyance with this movie being a remake of a movie, is the fact that it's a remake of a sequel. The third sequel in a series. This remake completely ignores this fact, and starts from scratch with showing a zombie plague hitting a small town and then evolving to the town being taken over by zombies. Why did they do this? If they were doing a direct remake, they should have followed the original: The zombies had won, they were the dominant species and there is only a small amount of survivors tucked away in a bomb shelter. How many people were they expecting to go and see this movie that hadn't seen any of the previous movies (either original or remake)? Honestly? And the fact that you plastered George A. Romero's name on the cover of the DVD case, that should friggin' tell people that, you can have a whole shit load of zombies in a movie without an explanation because -- it was covered in an previous movie. So why start from scratch?

4.) Lookit them Zombies Move!: This is a minor argument when it comes to zombie movies, because really it's a matter of taste, but look at how these zombies move! Romero's zombies lurch and limber around, they were never very fast and the reason they got you was due to sheer numbers. In this movie, they run, they jump, they even climb on ceilings.

Blaxploitation Revisited:

One of the biggest gripes I have with this movie is the main black character played by Nick Cannon, and I think his character is just cause to go and bludgeon the writer of the film. First of all, the guy is constantly talking in stereotypical "street" talk, and comparing stuff to hip-hop and rap videos that he's seen. For example, when they end up in the secret CDC bunker he compares it's appearance to a Puffy video. Right, because we can all remember that Puff Daddy music video where he was in a CDC bunker fighting zombies. I know I remember that one. Why is there this need in movies to have the black character speak the popular slang and make pop culture references? This is another thing this movie does not have on par with the Romero zombie flics. Romero, right from the beginning, wrote his African-American characters with some brains, he never degraded them to mindless caricatures. Fuck, did you see the Duane Jones in the original Night of the Living Dead speak in an "aw shucks massah!" kind of voice? No, you didn't. Did you see Ken Foree start talking jive in Dawn of the Dead? No, you didn't. And finally in the original Day of the Dead, while Terry Alexander spoke with a very convincing Jamaican accent, you did not see him break into the typical stereotype of a Jamaican stoner.

So why, for the love of god, are you going to make a remake of a film, who's writer always writes his characters to be intelligent people, who do not follow racial stereotypes, and create a character that is the 21st century's answer to the minstrel show? Honestly.

Another thing that totally grinds me about this movie, is that it has two endings. The first one, Cannon's character gets eaten alive by the zombies, and our pretty white people save the day by blowing up all the zombies and escaping. The alternate ending, it's implied that Cannon's character is killed, and then at the end he suddenly jumps out and goes "I'm still alive, they didn't bite me!" and the film ends with them driving away and him complaining about how they left the black man behind. This would have been a slightly redeeming ending for the portrayal of the character, you know kind of giving the writers of this shit feast a tongue lashing, because really after writing some of the dialogue they did, they should be sending apologies to Jesse Jackson. But insult to injury, they go with the token black-man-gets-killed ending, and stick the black-man-tells-the-white-people-off ending for a bonus feature.

What, did the test audience not like that as a viable ending? Or were you just dicks?

Wait, They Beat the Zombies?:

So the movie has a victorious ending, which again is another deviation from the Romero story from which it was based off of. It is also deviating from the remakes as well, as none of the remakes end in a way which the humans manage to destroy all the zombies. The original Day as I said was a significant time after Night of the Living Dead, the zombies had pretty much won. It ends with the zombies breaking into the missile silo that the surviving humans are hiding out in and the surviving humans make their escape. They effectively lose their only shelter from the zombies and make their escape. While Day of the Dead doesn't end in such an ambiguous a fashion as it's predecessor. Dawn of the Dead, where the heroes ride off in a helicopter that's low on fuel to an uncertain future, the cast of the original Day of the Dead manage to escape to a deserted island where they presumably live happily ever after. But they by no means save the rest of the world (or try) from the zombie apocalypse, because it's already too friggin' late.

The remake however, takes a huge liberty on that note. Firstly, they established earlier in the film that apparently zombies are highly flammable and will pretty much explode when lit on fire. So by the end of the film when they are being chased through an abandoned missile silo, they setup a trap that sends a jet of flame down the tunnels and kill all the zombies by incinerating them. They then escape in a jeep where they hear over the radio that the "contamination" has been stopped. There is one last scare at the end of the movie where a zombie quickly jumps in front of the camera and screams at the audience, but -- really -- it's just one of those "one last scare" moments that they toss at the end of the movie. It's the cinematic equivalent to a hooker tossing you a quick fuck.

Bub VS Bud:

The movies have their token zombie that everyone is supposed to love. The iconic character from Day of the Dead is BUB the zombie (played by Sherman Howard) he spends the entire movie chained to Professor Logan's lab where Logan learns that the zombies can slowly re-learn what they used to remember from their previous life. Bub has almost no back story, it's suggested that he might have been a soldier, but still him having a back story does not effect the over-all aspect of the character. Bub is the heartwarming zombie that is more than just another mindless flesh eater, but you can bet there was a learning curve. It wasn't just a sudden "Hey, I like you humans because you chain me to a wall, let me listen to music on walkmans!" He probably started off very savage, and learned that "Hey, if I do what these guys tell me to do, they'll feed me, this is better than just eating them!" Ultimately in the end, Bub ends up facing against the evil Captain Rhodes (played by Joseph Pilato) shooting him with a gun and leaving him for the zombies to rip to shreds, he gives a solute and walks off into cinematic history.

BUD (played by Stark Sands) is a goofy private that gets a boner for Sarah Bowman (played by Mena Suvari) and he follows her around like a lost puppy for most of the movie. He then sits down with Bowman's mom and goes on about how hot he thinks her daughter is before mom turns into a zombie and goes ape shit. Bud eventually gets bit and turns into a zombie, who (presumably) because he has a boner (which will be embarrassing once rigor mortis sets in) he is loyal to her and does whatever she tells him to do. Ultimately in the end of the film, Bud doesn't do a whole fuck of a lot, until an army of zombies is about to kill Bowman, he then tries to defend her and gets ripped to shreds and eaten by the other zombies. It is this movie reviewers assessment that if your fellow zombie hordes rip you apart and eat your corpse, you fucking suck as a zombie.

The Case Against:

The case against this film is first of all, you remade my favorite of the Romero zombie movies, and you fucked it up. You have evoked my wrath and that is something you should never do. This remake is so unlike the movie it's based on, it makes the Friday the 13th remake seem so faithful that it never took off it's chastity belt. The second thing against this movie is that it's spent most of it's time trying to play off and blatantly cash in on Romero's resurgence in popularity that it should have known better than to deviate from what the original film was about. Were the writers retarded monkeys or what? I mean seriously, did this not occur to them when they first tried to type out the screenplay? What sort of hack writer are you, when you're told to write a screenplay that's a remake of a previous film, and you botch the job so thoroughly that the movie you've written has no semblance to the original film it was based on? Have none of these people ever seen a remake of a movie before?

The Case For:

I will give the movie this: It has good special effects, and some nice camera work. It's a shame that this movie was not faithful to it's source material at all. It makes for a passingly entertaining zombie movie if you don't try to think about it too much. In fact, if you removed any reference to George Romero and Day of the Dead, and called it... I don't know... "Picnic With the Zombies" or "Here Comes the Zombies!" or maybe even "Mrs. Zombieworths Adventure in Candyland" maybe, just maybe, you might have found the movie entertaining. And when I say entertaining, I mean that you aren't bored and pulling your hair out for at least 25 minutes of the movie. The bowl of Kraft Dinner and hot dogs I had for lunch when I was watching this movie was only slightly more entertaining than this movie.

The other thing going for this movie is that at least it's not Day of the Dead 2:Contagion. So if all else fails, at least it's not that piece of shit, with it's zombie bacteria thermoses and mentally challenged characters.

In summation, Day of the Dead the remake? Is it worth watching? Well as long as you can view it without thinking of it as a Romero remake, and you don't mind being bored for about 75% of the movie, then have at her. At least get a good laugh at the shitty graphic arts on the video box cover.