Literally. You wouldn't believe it. I hope.

I took a night off from the book—which I suppose was my fault—to get round to watching some stuff I'd been ignoring. Most of it was unimportant. But, also, I got the remake of Day of the Dead.

I've seen bad zombiefilms. Probably, you haven't. I'm talking about things you can never guess why they were made at all. Things which are zombiefilms only in the loosest sense, in which anything undead which can't be classed as a vampire or Frankenstein's Monster tends to default to zombiedom. Simple LivingDead films, for those who can't allow that a pre1968 drugged slave constitutes a zombie, or that the things in Lifeforce or 28 Days Later or I Am Legend functioned as zombified. Also, I'm excluding films clearly made to spoof zombiefilms—Night of the Comet and Dead Heat and Shaun of the Dead and so on. I'm thinking about films made by people who apparently thought they were making real films, but failed to the extent that the real disappointment is that their products can't even be laughed at on the order of Plan Nine from Outer Space or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm talking about films the guys behind MST3K may have known about, but realised were too stupid even to heckle.

That established, let's talk about this meaningless waste of plastic.

Given that the film is regarded as a remake, I suppose the first thing to discuss is its unrelated prequels.

Starting in 1990 with Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead, which people at the time called unnecessary; I always disagreed with them, since to be honest the original film was a bit boring and handmade and its ending always seemed like a contrived excuse to hide the probability that they'd simply run out of film. I was okay with that, including its preemptive strike against the sprinting zombies awaiting ten years in the future; I always considered that something of a concession: that the undead were so slow and stupid that most reasonable, selfaware people could outrun and outwit them.

That of course brings us to 2004 and Snyder's loose remake of Dawn of the Dead which had for no good reason been the most popular of Romero's trilogy to date. It was shorter and more aggressive than its prototype, awkwardly trying to cram the social commentary of Romero's sequel into a handful of oneliners nearly but not quite as insulting as the internal gags dropped into that Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy mess a couple years ago. And of course it had sprinting zombies. Why? Why not. Having suspended the disbelief that a virus, bacterium, parasite, or whatever could kill most of an organism while keeping it mobile and bent on eating everyone, it doesn't take too many more drinks to buy that the reanimated dead might retain the ability to move as quickly as anyone trying to catch the lift before the doors close; and of course it acknowledges and eradicates the issue brought up in Savini's remake: that you'd have to be an idiot to get caught and eaten by Romero's anthropophagous migratory sponges. I'm good with sprinting zombies, because zombies are just people whose brains for whatever reason no longer work properly; to the extent that they're also technically dead, that they remain able to blink and moan and do other things less dead animals do, I'd allow that they could run. In fact, when I wrote a book about this sort of thing, I did allow that they could run, at least until the muscles and tendons became too putrefied to withstand those sort of shocks to their knees. Which is to say that I personally was writing about zombies, not mummies.

So, some idiot thought it would be a good, unfunny, serious, clever, important idea to remake Day of the Dead. The odds were against him all along, of course, since Day was certainly the best and most intelligent of Romero's trilogy, remains better than Land of the Dead, and in a lot of ways still pulls ahead of Diary of the Dead, whether that's properly part of the whole Romeroverse or just something of a RetCon yet again remaking the original from 1968. In 1985, Day of the Dead was the real turning point in the series, beyond the downplayed confusion of the first film in 1968, beyond the optimism of the sequel in 1978; the walking dead outnumbering the survivors something like 400,000:1 [in today's numbers, that's seven billion zombies planetwide to the approximate population of the Mall of America: 17,500], a dozen such survivors hiding in a secured underground network in the Florida Keys had stopped thinking about preventing or even curing the pandemic, ready to accept that the Age of Zombies had begun, one slightly crazy doctor hoping to go skinneristic on a planet of the undead to teach them something like manners. Twenty years later, Land of the Dead would extend that premise to suppose that the zombies themselves were coming into their own and building something of a society. But, for me at least, Day was always the real zombiefilm in the series: the undead controlling the planet, a few thousand unassociated survivors accepting the reality and futility of basic natural selection and pondering viable options far beyond reclaiming the world.

Not this time.

This time, an idiot thought it would be a good idea to remake a film. He failed. He failed to make a remake, certainly; in a lot of ways, he failed to make a film at all.

That guy, incidentally, would be Steve Miner. If you haven't heard of him by name, maybe you've seen some of his work to date: the second and third Friday the Thirteenth disasters, House [that's not HouseMD, but that inane thing in 1986 with The Greatest American Hero (and, yeah: I happened to catch the weirdness of seeing William Katt on HouseMD twenty years later)], Warlock [ahem: WARLOCK], uh, Lake Placid [law of averages: suck for fifteen years, and you'll probably accidentally make a film worth talking about], and then various television episodes for a decade, until Day of the Dead.

To cut to the point, there are two sorts of elements to this film. The sort which actually get me to understand the little geeks whimpering daily that ZOMBIES DON"T RUN!!!1 and the sort which I already wrote. If I cared enough, and wanted to admit more publicly that I'd even seen this stupid thing, I'd be a little curious to hear the opinions of a jury regarding the points of similarity between this remake and Paroxysm; I noticed a couple dozen, after I actually started counting. It's always fun to see that someone's read something I've written, even if he didn't evidently understand it.

The stuff I didn't write would include all the reasons this film may actually be worse than Revenge of the Dead was. And, if you've sat through that, A) sorry and B) seriously: worse.

Let's take this from the beginning. And I do mean the beginning. Because, while the original Dawn of the Dead established that the plague had been raging for weeks or months [Snyder's loose remake restarted the plague, it having nothing to do with Savini's remake], and Romero's Day of the Dead obviously took place minimally years after the outbreak [maybe not quite seventeen years, but long enough that the world had begun to decay to dust beneath its ruling class of animal], this intellectually lazy mess seems, without making it clear, to begin about five minutes after the outbreak appears in Leadville, Colorado. Why? Lots of reasons. Because Alien v Apology took place down the street recently; because DeadRising took place a zipcode over from that; because, if I'm not assuming too much, the American outbreak in Paroxysm began and was contained in DenverMetro. Leadville, incidentally, exists, like Gunnison, and unlike Willamette; having been to Leadville, I'll grant that zombies would be about the best thing to happen to it; Gunnison also sucking, aliens tearing it apart could be a lot of fun too; Willamette at a glance could really be Boulder in reality, which has been arguably overrun by zombies since about the time Mork and Mindy bugged out. Hippies; zombies; whatever you call the terminally stupid who can't drive and to their credit often don't try, electing instead to walk everywhere and save the planet from progress.

Of course, there's a reason the twits pretending to be in the army despite having the wrong uniforms are there sealing off the town at the instant of the outbreak. Not a good reason; but we'll get to that toward the end of the film.

In order to be as close to a remake as it was, the film recycled a couple names from Romero's original. Including Rhodes, now a fairly boring sleepwalker called Ving Rhames. To qualify that: I tend to like Rhames, including his larger role in Snyder's remake of Dawn. Why's he in this? Because his character in Snyder's film had a brother in the army? Not really. He's in it to allow for a character to be called Rhodes, and to suggest that Rhames was in this meaningless film. He's killed and zombified quickly, going weirdly autophagous for no explained or precedented reason, just before that scene about crawling above the hospital's ceiling above zombies you first and last saw in Paroxysm.

But that's getting ahead of the boring pace of the film. First, we've got to learn that the first symptom of zombification seems to be nosebleeds. Which I'll grant, since the agent allowing for zombification is at least at times the microscopic brainworms from Steve King's Home Delivery. Though, personally, I'd go more with Gary Brandner's The Brain Eaters. Apparently, I read more than the guy who made Warlock. Also, before anyone asks, I'm fully aware of Dicrocoelium dendriticum, think they're really cool, considered something like them when writing Paroxysm [I also considered genetically modifying rabies to cure cancer or AIDS or something, even leaving a slightly authorintrusive hint about that early in the novel], dropped them, and see nothing that clever anywhere in the mutating backstory of Day of the Dead.

The armychick whose name is at times Cross and at other times Bowman, having no idea why the army are guarding Leadville, being from there by some unexplained coincidence, has to rush home because her mother is sick before it's been established that anyone is sick. That moves the lack of plotline to the local hospital, where everyone's suddenly sick. Meet also Doctor Logan. Why? Because the slightly crazy smart guy in Romero's film was Doctor Logan. The thirtysomething idiot in this film resembles the wizened nut in Romero's in that his name is the same. Cos it's a remake, see. His purpose is primarily to ask why CrossBowman hasn't got any bullets in her gun. Which is a fair question. Which is never, ever answered.

Then, suddenly, all at once, there are zombies. And I mean that literally. Not only does the population of Leadville amplify pretty much all in the same instant, but people dead for three seconds now instantly decay and putrify in what may be the worst CG I've seen in a film since The Last Starfighter, which had the excuse of being made in 1984. Imagine if the SciFi Channel sacked that one guy who comes in every other Tuesday to remind the people making their original films that, y'know, someone might actually see this someday; maybe bothering with, like, lightsources when 3DStudioing smilodons could be worth discussion. In any case: really, people alive one minute are within a small percentage of the next minute wasted and decayed more severely than the zombies in Land of the Dead had become after years of wandering the planet.

Now's our chance to have our zombies so decayed and dusty that they can't run! Instead, they crawl along the ceiling. Not above it. Our zombies, formerly invalid sick people, formerly common, boring Leadvillains, scurry along the ceiling, upsidedown, using their fingers and shoed feet to hang on. Remember that scene in Aliens [itself a tragic misfire compared to Ridley Scott's original] with Hudson looking above the ceiling and seeing the monsters crawling upsidedown along the cables up there? That. Minus the cables. At forty miles per hour along the underside of acoustic tiling. Zombies don't run: they become SpiderMan overdosing on guarana.

So, again: I'll buy that zombies can run in the first hours and days—maybe weeks—after death. Zombies shrivelling into Skeletor faster than Fred Krueger unshrivelled in the fourth Elm Street and then fluttering across a ceiling and leaping like Robin attacking Freeze [for those following along with RiffTrax: 'Physics!'] are maybe...a little...kinda...no: bullshit. Just: bullshit. Not buying this. I'll buy that the undead returns three days after being nailed to a telephone pole to forgive its creations for operating according to design before I buy this; it's bullshit.

And it's not over yet.

New manufactured bullshit issue. VeganSoldier [more, and yet oddly less, on that idiot in a moment] has lost his keys. You know: the keys to the HMMWV. Ever seen a key for an M998 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle? Me neither. Know why? They Don't Use Keys. They're military gear. Turns out that, whatever you wanna say about the babykilling overfunded army, they're not in fact stupid enough to take a car requiring keys into combat. Someone tell Warlock here. So, we waste time and footage and the last of the stupidest of viewers' suspension of disbelief tracking down ZombieRhodes for the keys to his keyless M998 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle; then it's off to the carpark for more flying zombies and Logan's unimportant escape from the group. In the second HumVee, we discuss VeganSoldier having got bit by a zombie and how that might prove to be something of a problem. So we ziptie him to something, limiting his range of motion to—in my experience—pretty much the entire car and head for the radiostation where CrossBowman's brother is broadcasting that they're in there and need help. Fun. A notquickenough whodunnit about the survivors in the station harbouring this parasitic bacterial virus, and they all die and reanimate and learn to fly. Boring; let's move on.

Back to the car to meet VeganZombie. And now, for those of us who saw Romero's film, we really get that Warlock wasn't listening closely enough when Logan called his pet zombie Bub; this is instead Bud, not unlike Bud the Chud, except that it's in far less of a film. Really. It's that bad. But, Bud doesn't eat people. Why? Vegetarian. See, because, in death, zombies retain their moral imperatives, confirming my suspicion for decades now that the citisenry of Leadville, vegans notwithstanding, are in life cannibalistic sociopaths; only those misidentifying meat as murder are uninclined to eat everyone they meet; also, they can't fly. Flying isn't about throwing yourself at the ground and missing, though swimming might be; flying is about wanting through subjective morality to eat everyone you meet once you've learned what a cheeseburger tastes like.

This is why I'm in no hurry to go to court to discuss any elements lifted from a book I wrote a couple years earlier: I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea about which elements were stolen.

Now that everyone alive is in a HumVee, let's go to the Nike Factory. This incidentally is the only thing in the film which I didn't write which isn't entirely stupid. It's not about shoes; it's a forgotten missileplant. Which I found funny since, six weeks ago, looking at shoes, I mentioned to Hunter, who hadn't known [and hasn't to my knowledge seen Warlock of the Dead yet] that Nike, before being shoes, was first a deity and then a type of missile; I guess I'm not the only guy on the planet who ever knew that. Anyway: now we're in the fabled underground bunker from the original, in approximately no way whatsoever. It's pretty much just a couple of corridors in the backstairs of any given mall, with some overlit offices where Doctor Logan is shredding the evidence that the parasitic bacterial virus began as a weapon meant to paralyse the enemy for several hours, removing the need to shoot them. Works for me; the boring debate about the morality of stunning an enemy into zombiehood instead of killing him can be fastforwarded through. What matters now is that, for the slowest of you, Logan's now been established as a badguy, not just that guy who like the rest of us thought CrossBowman was a fool for carrying an unloaded pistol and who like the rest of us wasted no time in getting to his car and leaving the stupid little twat behind.

Which is not to say that he's the evil mastermind behind it all. Because that would be Doctor Muttermumble, now a zombie, retaining the awardwinning intelligence it takes to overlook the probability that a parasitic bacterial virus could mutate once released, and therefore the greatest threat to the human race since the supervolcano. He basically hides in ceilings and eats people walking by beneath.

One hastily improvised flamethrower tossed together from compressed rocketfuel [yeah: really] later, Mumblemutter and the ten million zombies hanging out in the bunker are dead again. And those who lived all lived happily ever after for a couple minutes.

Then, Warlock dropped all attempts to look like a real director, and ended the film amidst the radio report that all was well with a generic zombie flying up and eating the camera. Pass the fucking popcorn: I intend to try breathing it now.

Curiously, the film went straight to video. I guess someone somewhere watched it and thought that maybe it couldn't compete with the intellectual quality of the latest Will Ferrell shitfest. I guess someone was probably right.

I'm now looking forward to the slightest possibility that someone even less worthy will eventually claim to have remade Land of the Dead. Simply because, at this point, it can't prove any worse.

More later....

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