Tales from On Demand 2

Day of the Dead(2008)

So Zombies are in fashion now. I get that. Zombies are cool. I've been a big fan for a lot of years. Thanks to Zack Snyder and Danny Boyle and the Resident Evil frachhise, we even have a new breed of super-human zombies that rely less on over powering their victims with sheer numbers and more on kicking ass. And running. These new Zombies can run really fast. The new breed are also not really dead. It's a virus all the time now. This has shifted the idea of what to do about Zombies. Every Zombie movie is basically the same. The survivors have to fight them off long enough to get somewhere and hole up until they eventually break in, or you run out of food and had to leave or there is enough in-fighting among the survivors that they all kill themselves. Regardless of which, you are eventually fucked, and this is the basis for every climax of every Zombie movie. The difference being that before, the dead stayed undead forever. Until you put a bullet in their head, they are here for good. With a virus, Zombies could either die of Starvation or old age or decomposition and as long as you had a big, heavy door and enough cans of Spaghetti-O's you'll be alright. The purists hate this, and think the dead should be lumbering, brainless masses that use sheer numbers to over power whatever defenses the survivors managed to piece together. I can see it either way. I like gigantic swarming masses of Zombies. Always awesome. But fast, super-human Zombies make for some really spectacular death scenes. I guess it comes down to how much gore you like.
Day of the Dead is not much of a sequel to Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. It has Ving Rhames in it, I guess to add some street cred, but that's where it ends. It follows Mena Suvari, who is supposed to be believable as a military officer as Zombies over run her home town of Leadville, Colorado, where her unit just happens to be dispatched. That's really all the plot you need to know. The rest follows basic Zombie protocol. There is a sibling who needs rescuing, a family member who has to be killed, a remote bunker, and a government conspiracy that needs exposing. And there you have it.
The movie is perfectly serviceable as a Zombie movie. It offers nothing new. And this is where I have a problem. Not so much with this movie in particular, but with the last few years worth of Zombie movies. With the notable exceptions of Zombieland and Land of the Dead, all of the recent Zombie movies only deal with the initial out-break. I guess that's more exciting, but having the characters deal with a world already overrun with the undead seems like it would be more interesting. The original Day of the Dead was about a bunch of scientists living in a bunker, doing experiments on the Zombies, trying to find a cure, or at least a way to stave off the infection. Way cooler of a scenario, if you ask me. If the remake had gone that route, it would have been not only a more interesting movie, but could have had served as a better sequel to Dawn of the Dead.


-JP