Have you ever wondered what happened to the guy who played the lead singer in That Thing You Do? Me either, but Day of the Dead: Bloodline is here to answer a lot of questions no one asked. I feel like there should be an Oneders (o-neders) joke in here somewhere, but I’m not going to force it. This is spoiler filled, but let’s be honest. You’re not going to watch it anyway. Well some of you might, but it’s on you. I’m going to give you plenty of reasons to skip it, but consider this your last warning.
Obviously the biggest question is why would they call this Day of the Dead when it has little to nothing to do with the Romero classic? I can only guess that someone thought it would get more play with a recognizable name attached. It seemed to have worked though since Sharron and I watched it recently. We usually check IMDB before choosing a crappy horror movie so we knew it would be bad. We just didn’t know how bad. I never go solely by reviews since I’m a weirdo, and love terrible movies. This was so bad that I’m glad we waited to watch it until Sharron’s husband had gone out for the night. His tolerance of shit is way too low for him to have put up with it.
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the 2008 piece of crap with Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames. Nope this is a whole new piece of crap that stars…well no one really. It does feature the aforementioned actor from That Thing You Do, a girl who’s the dumbest scientist ever, a guy who’s too much of a pussy to be a soldier, and some other people are there too. No one stars in a movie like this. They’re either happy not to be working in porn for a change or they’re just happy to be working period. The 2008 version was a work of art compared to this.
The plot (such as it is) revolves around a young college science student who’s studying blood or something. She’s got a test subject with super special blood, and is also super special creepy. The kind of creepy that has her name cut into his arm in what is actually some rather fine penmanship for an arm carving. Zoe is kind of a stick in the mud (thank god he had her name on his arm or i would never have remembered it), but her idiot friends talk her into going to a party. A party where they’ve stored their kegs in the morgue freezers. As she goes to retrieve one she is attacked by her stalker Max. He’s supposed to be the Bub character from the original movie, but there is no similarity between them. Bub was sympathetic, and you felt bad for him when Colonel Rhodes tormented him. Max is a stalker turned attempted rapist. There’s no way I’m pulling for this guy to evolve, or even survive for that matter. Max’s assault is thwarted when a corpse jumps up and grabs him. The zombie apocalypse begins.
Some number of years later (I wasn’t paying enough attention to care) Zoe is in an underground base where the refugees have fled to. She plays doctor to the huddled masses living under military control. When a little girl gets sick it’s up to Zoe to organize a trip to go out foraging for medicine. In a zombie infested wasteland. With only a handful of soldiers. At night. Makes total sense to me. Of course, one of the trucks breaks down. The fast zombies come a runnin’ and people start dying. Do they decide to head back to base rather than risk another life? Nope, that would the smart thing to do. No one in these kinds of movies does the smart thing. Eventually they get to town, and find the medicine so that the survivors can get back to camp. But not before the zombified Max finds them though. He was a douchey creep when he was alive, and apparently being dead hasn’t changed that about him. He’s now able to track Zoe back to camp using his amazing zombie sense of smell. He manages to sneak into the heavily fortified army bunker, and then starts snacking his way through more soldiers. After he’s caught Zoe realizes that he’s not like the other zombies – he’s just misunderstood. Actually, something about that special blood of his has allowed him to retain some semblance of his former self. In the only scene that just sort of reminds you of the real movie he gets chained to a wall. They start taking blood samples to try and find some sort of a vaccine from his blood, but it can’t be that easy. It’s never that easy. For some reason Zoe needs blood from “real” zombies to complete the cure. And obviously that goes off without a hitch. Max breaks free, tries to rape Zoe again (can you get the zombie virus through sex?), and even starts talking to her while holding a child hostage. Because why not? Eventually Zoe kills Max, and makes the vaccine just in time to save her infected boyfriend, and the base is secure again. And they all live happily ever after. Trapped underground in a bunker filled with corpses, and finite supplies. But hey, they have less people to worry about keeping alive now so that’s a plus.
If this had been called anything besides Day of the Dead I would have probably been okay with it. The acting wasn’t any worse than any other direct to VOD/Redbox/Netflix movie. The makeup and special effects were certainly better than most of what SyFy does these days. Maybe if you start this up, hit yourself on the head with a brick so that you forget the title, and have a few drinks you could enjoy this movie. If you’re a glutton for bad movies like me you could give it a go, but I’m not promising anything. But tune back in over the next few weeks as I give you more Halloween nonsense. I promise I won’t just write reviews of terrible movies all month. As much as I love talking shitty horror there are far (hopefully) more interesting things to come.
NEEDLESS THINGS 