Day of the Dead (2008)

Today in our week of films to avoid we take a look at proof at how bad remakes can be.

In the wake of the successful remake of Dawn of the Dead and the remake of The Crazies comes the very ill advised remake of George Romero's Day of the Dead. This film is so ill as to be gasping it's last breath as it's pulled off life support.

The work of the usually reliable Steve Miner (House, Soul Man, Warlock, Lake Placid, and Halloween H2O) this turd ball is easily the worst film he's done by a long shot. It's also the worst thing that the normally on target Ving Rhames has done. Its a film so bad that I was forced to ask what catastrophic event happened to force Rhames to take part in a poop pile like this.

In three words: THIS FILM SUCKS.

Because of some military accident a small town is quarantined because the dead are coming back to life.Focusing on a young woman in the military from the town (who has returned home as part of the army force) and her friends and family.

Directed by Steve Miner, a man who can make some enjoyable if unremarkable films this is clearly the work of a man on auto pilot and a man who's too long in the TV trenches (Miner has been producing and directing for TV a great deal over the last decade). There is no tension and no passion. The film is put together reasonably well but you can tell no one really cared. A case in point is Ving Rhames, as the head of the military force. For the first time ever he phones in his performance and is such a non-entity that I wasn't even sure it was him.

As a remake of or compared to, the Romero film of the same title, (which is not mentioned anywhere that I could see on screen), this film is beyond bad. It simply takes the idea of the military and zombies and mangles it.

Its awful. Its completely unconnected to any of the Romero originals or remakes and exists purely in its own twisted little world.

This is one to avoid at all costs.

(Lastly, and this is a serious question, are we at the point where any grade "C" actor and actress can be put into a uniform and called soldier? Apparently they can because thats what the cast is. No one in this film looks like they were ever in the military or even on a military base. Maybe its seeing all the soldiers on TV, but no one really looks like a soldier even remotely.)