October 21st

Day of the Dead (2008) directed by Steve Miner

Maybe, not counting homemade low-budget affairs, the worst zombie movie I've ever seen.  The Night remake took place in the same setting and intensified the characters' personalities.  The Dawn remake took place in the same setting and intensified the action and danger.  This Day remake takes a couple of character names (one of which is copied wrong, the other for a character who dies 20 minutes in) and the idea of a zombie firing a gun and dances merrily on its way into a host of horrible ideas.

This zombie apocalypse is caused by a plague, which is first released in a small town (yep, just like The Crazies).  It's an airborne virus, so it spreads like the flu.  The beginning of the movie resembles the beginning of The Stand a little, with the sick flooding the hospitals and the town quarantined.  Once the virus really kicks in, though, the people turn into zombies.  No, really.  They turn into zombies.  Within seconds, their skin rots in places and their eyes turn milky white.  It's like the filmmakers think being a zombie is like being a werewolf: it has a set of physical characteristics you just have to take on once infected.  Pro-tip: zombies have rot in their skin because they were previously dead and rotting.  The idiocy of this makes my brain want to get up and leave.

Other things in the film that make my brain want to kill itself: in a very small nod to the original, there's a zombie who seems to be more civilized than the others.  His name?  Bud.  Not Bub.  Bud.  I would bet a million dollars that the screenwriter has always thought they were saying "Bud" when he watched the original as a kid and never realized he had it wrong.  The main character Sarah had a bit of crush on Bud before he was infected, so she zip-ties him to the car and keep him with the group.  Yeah.  She forces her fellow survivors -- including her own brother -- to sit next to a guy with a deadly infection who may try to bite them.  Luckily for them, Bud was a vegetarian before infection and -- sigh -- doesn't want to eat people meat.  So, Sarah is keeping her boyfriend safe even though he's a zombie.  When she spies her zombified mother walking in the road, what does she do?  Of course, she rams her mom with the SUV at top speed, exploding her zombie body all over the place.  No reason to keep her zombie mom around when she has a zombie boyfriend, right?

The vast majority of the film is just the characters running from and shooting at zombies, while the zombies do bad CGI crawls on ceilings and jump out of hiding spots.  Every decision the characters make is horrifically stupid.  It's all mind-numbing and feels like nothing other than a bad Sci-Fi Channel movie.  Way to ruin the "good Romero remake" streak, Miner!

Watched: stream on Netflix.