Day is no Dawn

From AICN, The Helper Monkey here. I just got back from a screening of the Day of the Dead remake staring Mena Suvari, Ving Rhames and Nick Cannon, written by Jeffery Reddick, and directed Steve Miner.

One word: Wow.

Three more words: This movie sucks!
Again this is more of a warning than anything else. They are going to try and trick you into seeing this flaming turd. The ads are going to try and make you think this is another Dawn of the Dead.

It's not.

It's barely a remake of Day of the Dead. It takes place in Colorado. The zombie apocalypse has not happened yet. They are not studying zombies. Technically it's a remake but the only thing they have in common is a title and a zombie named Bud.

Starts out with some teens in a creepy old, abandoned building. Hot young teens getting it on. Awesome! Except it's strictly PG-13. No tits. No Ass. Boring. They leave for some contrived reason and the slutty chic is left behind to walk home. Oooo I bet she's gonna get eaten by zombies because the scary music is playing.

Cut to people trying to leave a small town that's under quarantine. Ving Rhames is the head Army guy in charge. Mena is the most unrealistic second in command ever. Nick Cannon is the wise cracking black private.

Mena is worried that her Mom is sick so she goes home to take her to the hospital. Private Bud tags along. He has a crush on her and is a vegetarian (ridiculously enough this is worth mentioning). Turns out Mena's brother is one of the horny teens. So they all go to the hospital and find Ving's there with Nick Cannon.

The hospital is overrun with patients. They all have colds and nose bleeds. POOF! All of a sudden everyone with the sniffles turns into zombies.

But these aren't regular zombies. These zombies are fast! They run, they climb up walls and crawl across the ceiling. They even drive cars. When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will drive the earth. These zombies even dive out of the way when you try to hit them with a car. I'm pretty sure several were having a book club meeting. And in an inspiring bit of fancy, they burst into ash like cheap CGI vampires when they're set on fire.

So Ving gets eaten at the hospital and is a zombie for about 6 minutes. There's a less than thrilling chase through some air vents. Ving bites Bud. Nick Cannon wants to shoot him. Sgt. Mena says no. The group gets separated. The teens end up at a radio station and the army guys end up in a humvee. Bud turns into a full blown zombie but doesn't want to eat his friends because he's a vegetarian. I shit you not. He won't eat people because he's a fucking vegetarian. At least I now know I'll be say in LA when the zombies come because everyone here is a vegan.
So the survivors get supplies from a gun store where Nick Cannon finds a magic shotgun that shoots fire like a flame thrower, but it only has two bullets. A flame-throwing shotgun. How did no one at any point from script to screen not say, "Hey I know it's a zombie movie but a magic shotgun that shoots flames seems a little far fetched."

They rescue the teens and head out of town only to crash the humvee into a tree when a zombie flies through the windshield. Now they need a place to hide, but where? How about that old abandoned building from the beginning? Perfect!

The building turns out to be an old missile silo. And guess what the government's been secretly researching in a hidden underground lab. If you guessed "How to waist 2 hours of my life," you're correct! You'd also be correct if you said chemical weapons that mutate and turn people into zombies.

Nick Cannon gets eaten. The remaining survivors realize they are trapped underground, surrounded by zombies and the only way out is to use some old rocket fuel to set the Z's on fire. Mena tries to lure all the zombies to one place by running really fast. She gets caught. Zombie Bud saves her with the magic shotgun. They blow up the rest of the zombies and drive away in a Mercedes SUV.

You'll ask yourself how did the remake of Dawn of the Dead turn out to be so good and this one turn out so shitty? It's simple. This is not a sequel to the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Even though it has Ving Rhames in it playing a character that is kinda supposed to be the brother of the character he played in Dawn. The two films have nothing in common other then they are both remakes of classics and Ving. Zack Snyder has nothing to do with this movie. Neither does Universal or Strike Entertainment who made the Dawn remake.

The whole time I was watching Day of the Dead I kept thinking this is a lot like one of those unwatchable Sci-fi channel tv-movies, and now that I've seen the director's IMDB page I'm not surprised. Steve Miner may have started in films but he's spent the last decade slumming on TV and the scariest film he's ever directed was Soul Man.