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Film: Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn
Year: 2015
Director: Zebediah De Soto
Writer: Warren Davis II, Zebediah De Soto and David Reuben Schwartz
Starring: Amanda Niles, Gus Malliarodakis and Danielle Harris
Review:
This is an animated remake to the classic Night of the Living Dead from 1968. The official synopsis is: A group of survivors trapped in a New York apartment fight to stay alive against legions of zombies. It takes it from the rural farm house that the original film takes place in and brings it to the city.
I have to lead of saying that Night of the Living Dead has a couple of remakes, some true to the original film with others having a slightly different take on it. This one would be the latter. This film updates it today and then puts it into a big city, instead of the isolation of being out in the country. I personally really like the updates and changes that made in that respect. This film brings back actors from the 1990’s version to voice the character they played, while also bringing in some actors from either horror films or other films from Romero’s film series. I also liked the slight changes made to the major events from the previous versions, making it feel like a remake, but also making it a film on its own.
Now the first major issue I had with this film though was that I had to watch it from YouTube and the version was ruined by a copyright of the person or persons who uploaded it, so it distorted the picture by having a brighter star right in the middle of the screen. I won’t hold this against the film, as it is not the filmmaker’s fault. The sound was also distorted, but until I see a cleaner version, I won’t hold it against the film either. This film is done in animation though so we don’t get the facial expression of the characters. I think this is important to acting, so the only sense of emotion is through the voice actors doing their best to convey it. I will give them credit that they did fine in this respect. Also being animation, it gives them freedom gore-wise, but they didn’t capitalize on it and the action is blocky as it is tougher than what real humans can do.
With that said this is a new and interesting take on Night of the Living Dead. I did enjoy this film for what it was, but would still prefer the original and the remake to this one. I think that the updated story and concept were great and would actually like to see a live action version of this in a big city to see what other concepts can be explored being around more zombies and less isolation. The voice actors did fine in their roles as I would say the limitations of the animation and lack of really exploring what could be done with it hurt this film more than anything. I also need to see a cleaner version of this film to really see how the colors and sound should be as well. If you like Night of the Living Dead, I would recommend giving this a shot to see another direction it could go. The film is just average though in my opinion.
My Rating: 5 out of 10