I had fun getting angry at this movie.

Rating: 6/10 (17 November 2004)

(Possible Spoilers)
Mildly interesting film plagued by "wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments, poor character decisions, and many more negatives. Normally I don't write reviews, but I feel the need to p*ss on this movie a bit. It should have been made under its own name and attempted to be its own movie, because as it stands, nothing matches up to the original. Whatever royalty money George Romero receives from the making of this film, he should use it to have those responsible for it shot.
I'm sick of hack horror directors using strobe effects (think 28 Days) to make the zombies appear to move at high rates of speed. If it works in the haunted houses... Now, I'm not a fan of fast moving zombies, but they do bring something to the zombie movie genre, but it isn't something that is necessarily good. Why make them zombies at all? Why not people under the effects of a substance that makes them go crazy and attack others. It seems unrealistic to have these zombies behave the way they do after considering the damage done to the body. After a person is ripped to shreds, or succumbs to the disease after being bitten by the zombie, they would be reanimated with a seriously damaged body. Muscles and the brain would be deteriorated, it isn't plausible for the reanimated bodies to get up and start sprinting like Carl Lewis. As opposed to the machine like zombies in this film, the zombies in Romero's films are convincing. You expect a dead person to move with difficulty and in a state of confusion, once you accept that they can move at all. I'm extremely turned off by the herky-jerky motion, and feel that it takes the viewer out of the reality of the situation. The movie becomes slick and like something out of a video game. One second the person is dead, the next, they are alert and running around. Another major problem I have with the movie is the noises made by the zombies. The zombies have all have a generic computer generated (artificial) way of moaning and hissing. A genuine, expressive, human cry of pain is much more terrifying than a zombie who runs his voice through an amplifier hooked up to a distortion box and an echo pedal. A zombie could easily front a NuMetal band should the whole running around killing thing get boring.
The characters are rather thin, and not just the ones we see and hear a line of dialogue from every 25 minutes. I never really believed that Andre (or anyone, ever) would do what he did. Take the standard cliché "I know she is going to turn into a zombie, but I love her, so I will hide it from everyone" and add "wouldn't it be cool if this happened?". I don't see why he would accept the baby that burst out of his dead/zombie wife and then shoot another person to protect it. By the way, the baby's awful scream was cringe worthy. Another major problem is the event that brings about the climax. Nicole takes a truck and places herself in a situation involving certain death, and she does this all for a dog she just met. I could accept this as an example of someone losing their mind under the stress, but why does the group, who up to this point was reluctant to save anyone, rush out and put themselves at risk. This event leads to a situation where they must flee their sanctuary, they do save the girl but lose some of their team, and the zombies are allowed to enter the mall. They must evacuate the mall without time to prepare a proper escape. Never mind the ridiculous propane bombs, why didn't they use fire and bombs to clear the crowd of zombies out earlier? They could have been lobbing molotov cocktails down into the packed crowd and the fire would have easily spread among the infected. This would have cleared the way to the ammo shop, providing them with a ton of ammunition and cleared a path for the gun shop guy, Andy.
Well, this is going pretty long. Let me just to list a few more annoyances; the girl shooting a shotgun from the hip, stick through a zombies skull, inappropriate music accompanying awful montages, not so clever used of a Disturbed song (2 counts), and the end credits interspersed with short clips of what is happening to the characters at the end of the movie..
My final conclusion is that the film is interesting enough, not only to compare it to the original, but as a zombie movie. Even though it is hard to like a movie that goes so far to take a crap on one's suspension of disbelief, it is worth watching. Fortunately for it, the total is greater than the sum of its hack parts.