Day of the Dead – Review

Sitting alone in a holding cell with nothing but a calendar is Dr. Sarah Bowman (Cardille). She investigates it closely… this wakes her up out of her sleep with a jolt as the dream gets creepy. She is on a helicopter with John (Alexander), Bill McDermott (Conroy) and Miguel Salazar (Dileo Jr.) as they surveil the land below for usable supplies. The zombie plague has long ravaged the planet below.

Finding a landing spot, Sarah and Miguel pop out. Streets are desolate and ravaged. Dipshit Miguel immediately stirs up every zombie in a 10-block radius by screaming out on a bullhorn non-stop, and then is shocked when they show up. Quickly flying the hell outta there back to a fenced in survival camp in the Everglades reflects how humanity is surviving for almost a decade after the last film.

But wait… there is an underground bunker, so definitely a cool survival outpost. As the movie begins to advance storyline, there is typical horror action to go with, but this one does a more psychological zombie dive into behavioral analysis.

Day of the Dead explores typical zombie carnage, but also evolutionary moral dilemma associated with heightened undead ability and recovery of cognitive skills lost when turned to flesh eating corpse. These are not everyday film explorations, so it’s nice to have a little bit of a deeper dive into some spin-off ideas in zombie genre storylines.

Where the film falters a tiny bit for me is some of the goofiness in the overacting, and that is from the humans, the zombies were fine. I suppose the acting didn’t add a ton to the experience, but I did appreciate the practical effects which were the usual expert craft. For zombie classics this one is a fine follow up to the last, even fi you root for the undead more than the humans.