Directed by Steve Miner
Review based upon the Optimum DVD release
In 2004, Zak Snyder directed the remake of George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, which despite outcries initially from many fans has gone on to become widely regarded as a great horror film in its own right. Snyder updated zombie lore by making the undead fast, gory and vicious, helped massively by a great screenplay from James Gunn. It was only a matter of time before the same thing was attempted with “Day of the Dead”, the direct sequel to “Dawn” in the Romero canon. The original “Day of the Dead” took place almost entirely in a military bunker, with the world outside overrun with zombies. Romero agonised over the validity and futility of life, and again creating a brilliant allegory to life and military control in the mid 1980’s. But how does the remake of this flick compare to the original vision as well as the Zak Snyder reboot of “Dawn of the Dead”?
Sarah Bowman (Mena Suvari) lives in a small town in Colorado, where she joins the armed forces. Called in to enforce the quarantine for a mysterious outbreak, her commanding officer Captain Rhodes (Ving Rhames) partners her with new recruits Bud Crain (Stark Sands) and Salazar (Nick Cannon) to keep the local public in order. But as the virus turns all the infected into ravenous zombies, the three are forced to fight for their lives while Sarah is desperate to rescue her brother Trevor (Michael Welch) from the other side of town…
Unlike Snyder’s “Dawn” remake, “Day of the Dead” bears almost no resemblance to the original source material, and is all the worse for it. Directed by old hand Steve Miner, who seems to have spent his whole career drumming up sequels that are nowhere near as good as the original (the first two “Friday the 13th” follow-ups and the dreadful “Halloween: H20” for instance), he applies the same law of diminishing returns here. Miner clearly has talent but doesn’t use it enough, choosing instead to saddle himself with some truly awful scripts like this one by Jeffrey Reddick. His screenplay for “Day of the Dead” is filled with clichés and non-existent scares, and Reddick obviously twists the lore to suit his own agenda just because he t
hinks it’ll look cool. A classic example here is the way that badly rendered CGI zombies can for no apparent reason run along walls and ceilings. Not only is it insulting to the genre fan, but it also looks dreadful when completed on such a low budget. Some of Reddick’s dialogue is laugh-lout-loud funny at the most unintentional moments, characters spouting drivel like “the virus… I can feel its malevolence spreading”, and talking about killing zombies as “kinda gangster”. Romero wrote with such pinpoint accuracy in the original, but dialogue like this undermines the characters and tensions completely. Reddick even throws a creepy scientist into the mix as well, just to be even more predictable.Unfortunately, the problems don’t just start and end with the printed word. The cast is a very strange mixture that doesn’t gel, with Mena Suvari totally out of her depth as Sarah Bowman, never convincing as an army officer even when she spits orders at people. Ving Rhames seems cast just to create a tenuous link with Zak Snyder’s remake, as his character serves no real purpose and isn’t even the same as it was in “Dawn”. Overall the acting is almost as shoddy as the zombie makeup, which when combined with cringe-inducing dialogue results in characters that no one cares about.
The most obvious similarity between this version of “Day of the Dead” and Romero’s original is the concept of a zombie evolving to retain memories and links to the human survivors. In the original, the medical team within the bunker used the character of Bub to try and find a cure while attempting to understand his need to feed on flesh. In Miner’s remake, the friendly zombie serves no other purpose but to conveniently save the cast at a key moment, and his reluctance to eat living flesh is supposedly addressed through the original character’s vegetarian tendencies before he became infected. This is perhaps the most disappointing moment of all, and where I felt my intelligence was so insulted that I was on the verge of stopping the flick and going to watch the original instead. In Romero’s “Day of the Dead” the character of Bub was sympathetic, but in Miner’s hands the w
hole concept simply becomes pathetic instead.This version of “Day of the Dead” is at best insulting, and at worst a travesty. Building to a ridiculous A-Team / McGuyver conclusion where they conveniently manage to get locked into a room with all the tools needed to wipe out the zombies, the whole picture is predictable and by the numbers. Miner’s overuse of dutch angles and jump cuts between scenes is still evident and becomes rapidly irritating, and the cast are wasted on a dumb script that could’ve been written on the back of a napkin (and probably was). Some of the production values are solid, especially the moments where the hospital is besieged by the undead, but even that sequence can’t save a film that’s so badly executed.
“Day of the Dead” is one of the worst remakes I’ve seen, and should have the title stripped from it, as it bears no similarity to the seminal 1985 classic. Somehow Steve Miner still manages to keep working in Hollywood, but hopefully this’ll be the last script we see from Jeffrey Reddick who is the worst culprit here. It might look nice in parts, but this is a horror film without the horror, and that makes the whole exercise futile and misguided. Avoid at all costs, and see the original instead.
1.5 out of 10
Apart from one or two scenes this all goes spectacularly wrong… funny when it should be scary, this is a terrible film and exhibit number one for those who want to stop Hollywood’s incessant need to remake classic horror
