Day Of The Dead: Bloodline Review – Those Damn Zombies Just Keep Marchin’ On
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Sophie Skelton, Johnathon Schaech, Jeff Gum
Directed by Hector Hernandez Vicens
As much as I’ve ranted, raved, babbled and bled on about the friggin’ zombie movie overload during the past 4-5 years, it just seems as if this train is running on greased tracks, unable to stop regardless of how much blockage is stacked in its way. Tonight, Hector Hernandez Vicens’ tweaking of the Romero classic Day Of The Dead is on the chopping block, and I think it’s relatively safe to say that the onlookers to the execution in the front row will be going home with some serious spray on their supper clothes – let’s delve into this nugget, shall we?
First of all, let me get this right out of the way now: as inept as this film was, it was NOWHERE near as gutturally painful as the 2008 shit-fest using the same name. This film, however, is titled Day Of The Dead: Bloodline, and it uses that tried and true undead blueprint to exhaustion once again. Sophie Skelton stars as Zoe, a medical student whose burgeoning medical career takes the precipitous faceplant once the zombie apocalypse rolls into town, and if that weren’t enough, she was being stalked by an uber-creepy fella named Max (Schaech) before all hell broke loose. So we forge along to 5 years after the devastation has taken full toll, and the remaining survivors have been shuttled off to an underground bunker, acting as a shelter and research facility to those hoping and praying for a cure. Zoe has a hunch that the next available supply-run needs to cross past an exclusion zone if you will to obtain an antidote for the undead process (all this medical jargon just makes my head spin).
As fate would have it, Zoe’s deader-than-dead stalker friend has made his way to the bunker (smart guy, that he is…or was), and quickly becomes the template for the Bub of the new generation. While I’ve always admired Schaech as an actor, this role was a bit too unsettling for me, as he basically played a violent, unhinged rapist of sorts while he was alive, and after his death he took on an even more sadistic stance, while not wanting to cause harm to his beloved Zoe – just a very odd construction of sorts. The circumstances in the film just couldn’t hold up a house of cards, with its bland plot-pathing and lamentable usage of CGI. The characters are as stiff as a laundry basket full of starched-shirts, and the dialogue is downright painful at certain moments.
Overall, if you’re a fan of the genre and are willing to let miscalculations run wild across your screen, then by all means give this one a go, but I’d just as soon let Mr. Romero’s 1985 slice of fried gold spin in my Blu-ray player over and over again before the day turns into night.
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Film
Summary
Stumbling worse than a drunk after nickel-night at the local pub, this undead calamity never gets its rotted feet firmly planted long enough to make a bloody splash.
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