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Film: Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation
Year: 2012
Director: Jeff Broadstreet
Writer: Jeff Broadstreet
Starring: Andrew Divoff, Jeremy Combs and Sarah Lieving
Review:
This film is a prequel to Night of the Living Dead 3D and it fills in the back story of what happened in the first one. The official synopsis is after inheriting the family mortuary, a pyrophobic mortician accidentally exposes hundreds of un-cremated bodies to toxic medical waste. As the corpses re-animate, the mortician’s inheritance-seeking younger brother unexpectedly shows up, stumbling upon a full zombie outbreak.
For this film, Gerald Tovar Jr. is played by Andrew Divoff in this version. He has inept employees and a failing business. He has a receptionist named Aunt Lou (Melissa Jo Bailey) who lies for him. DyeAnne (Robin Sydney) who does makeup for the body, but she is really bad at it.
This film is worse than the first one they made in my opinion. The acting in this one is horrible. I wasn’t bothered by it at first, but hardly any of the characters and their motives make sense. The only one who was worth anything was Jeffrey Combs who plays Harold Tovar who is the younger brother seeking money. It’s no where near his best performance but is just a master of horror doing his thing. After a second viewing of this film, Divoff isn’t bad in his role either. The problem is plagued with bad writing mostly. I also have trouble seeing him turn into Sid Haig for the next film. I don’t think they are close enough in age or looks.
I normally don’t mind references to other horror films, especially ones in the same genre. A bad part for this film is that they are trying to do what George A. Romero does and use tongue-in-cheek references, but this one makes them too obvious and they aren’t good. I will say that I did enjoy the references to both the 1968 and 1990 versions of Night of the Living Dead, along with Dawn of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead. I didn’t like zombie being referenced on the news as well as Harold knowing about them. The Sister Sara (Denice Duff) mocking Sarah Palin bit, which doesn’t fit as this film should be taking place before her or the Tea Party movement started.
The effects of the film are quite polarizing as well. I think the zombies move good and they also look solid. The blood in the film looks good as well. The problem though is that this is a 3D film, so they try to take advantage of that and it comes off cheesy at times. It makes some of the effects look really bad. The CGI wasn’t all that well done in my opinion. There was also a confusing scene where Cristie Forrest (Sarah Lieving), DyeAnne and Russell (Adam Chambers) are smoking marijuana in the embalming room. First I doubt someone like Cristie who is fresh from school and on her first day would do that in there. There is then a scene where she is hallucinating and it is revealed there was ecstasy laced in the weed. I don’t think that would cause that to happen. It was out of place.
There aren’t really any editing problems in that I noticed. The film does build tension, but with the poor writing I didn’t really care too much which is a shame. The score of the film wasn’t bad. It does fit what the film needed as well as the scenes.
The only redeeming quality was the zombies look good, they move slowly and I loved that they made spot on references to some of the best zombie films of all time. That definitely isn’t enough as this film was just flat out horrible. This film just violates some of the things that were done in the previous film while it does fit in at the end. The acting wasn’t very good, even from vets like Divoff and Combs. I did think the women in the film were easy on the eyes, even the gothic one. There are some good and bad effects in this film. With that said, I think this film is pretty below average in my opinion. There really isn’t even that much comedy, which could have helped the film. I would avoid this one.
My Rating: 3 out of 10