The movie is set in a small town in Colorado that becomes infected by an unknown virus that turns people into zombies. As the virus takes its toll on the townspeople, a group of soldiers and towns folks must survive until dawn. Characters include Corporal Sarah Cross (Mena Suvari), Private Salazar (Nick Cannon), and Private Bud Crain (Stark Sands). Ving Rhames (who was in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead) plays a short part as well.
The zombie creation method in this version of Day of the Dead totally differs from Romero’s version. Instead of some unknown cause turning people into zombies, the movie explicitly shows that its some type of engineered virus. Interestingly enough, they never really explain why some townspeople are infected and some are not. Anyways, the zombies do retain some part of their former life. Like the original, one of the zombies (Pvt. Bud) ends up helping the survivors. Also like the original, the movie does involve a missile silo.
The movie has “B-movie” written all over it. The acting was not that bad (I’ve seen worst acting). Plus the special effects was pretty good.
AP Fuchs puts together a miasma of 4 different characters to absolutely drive this novel into 6th gear. It’s not all gore and gutmunching, although there is plenty of that, this is an actual character driven zombie novel that will have you caring for each and every person. There’s no real villian in this novel, the first of a trilogy, other than the zombies. That’s quite a refreshing take for the zombie genre novel and Fuchs pulls it off very, very well.
Our team of crack historians has uncovered the truth you never learned in school: the living dead have walked among us since the dawn of time. In this collection of gruesome tales from throughout the ages, the ravenous undead shamble through bloody battlefields, plague-ridden cities, genteel country estates, and dusty frontier towns. They emerge from foggy cemeteries, frozen barrows, loamy bogs, cursed mines, and gore-spattered operating rooms to prey on the living. But these zombies don’t just eat people. They help painters and writers save their faltering careers. They unwittingly push humankind on the quest for fire. They topple evil capitalists and their corporate empires. They fight crime. They fall in love. Join us on a journey into our zombie-filled past… Neither history nor the living dead have ever been this exciting!
It doesn’t take long for the hilarity of Fido’s central idea to kick in: the world is reeling from the Zombie War, and the undead are being contained in two different ways. Some of them are roaming loose in fenced-off wilderness zones. The rest are, thanks to the good people at the ZomCom corporation, docile and domesticated–indeed, available as house servants for the upwardly-mobile. Such is the case with the Robinson family, a suburban clan who seem to have stepped straight out of an old episode of Lassie. Little Timmy is happy about the new manservant, whom he promptly dubs “Fido,” and Fido himself is fine as long as the mechanical collar around his neck doesn’t malfunction (in which case he will revert to being a cannibalistic brain-eating zombie). Fido is played, in a stroke of inspiration, by the Scots comedian Billy Connolly, although you wouldn’t be able to recognize him without already knowing he’s in the movie. Dylan Baker and especially Carrie-Anne Moss are just right as Timmy’s parents, who have accidentally wandered out of a John Cheever novel and into a George Romero world. Director Andrew Currie skillfully gets the 1950s satire and the zombie action right, although there’s no way to disguise that this premise is too thin to spread out over feature length. For a while, though, Fido hits a stride–a staggering, vacant-eyed stride.
