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There’s certainly some talent involved in this movie. The writer is responsible for the Final Destination films and the director for House and Warlock (among others.)

But after watching the movie, whatever small amount of talent involved must have been absent during this movie. Maybe the producers/director behind Day of the Dead 2: Contagium being involved messed up any chance this film had.

Like Contagium, this had absolutely nothing in common with the original Day of the Dead. Ok, that’s a small lie. There’s still a Captain Rhodes, a Sarah, a Logan and a military involvement. There’s also an homage or two to the original movie. But that’s it.
It’s further from Day of the Dead than the remake of Dawn… is to it’s original. In the case of Dawn… it’s a good thing. They took a premise and made it their own. And it worked. With Day, not even close. The very basic plot is fine, outbreak in town, military quarantines the town, zombies eat flesh. Nothing new, but doable. Unfortunately here, it isn’t done well at all.
This reimagined Day of the Dead has nothing in common with the reimagined Dawn of the Dead either, except the zombies aren’t slow and shambling.

Instead of following on from Dawn, this movie takes it back to the start of the outbreak. This is the town where the zombies originate. And what a lame way it is. You get the symptoms of a cold, and then your nose starts to bleed, and then you go into a trance, and(depending on what’s needed for the scene) a few seconds or a few minutes later, your eyes turn gray and you immediately rot and get covered in sores and are now a zombie. This method of turning does lead to one pretty cool (but highly illogical) scene when dozens of people simultaneously go into a trance. The infection then spreads in the normal zombie way. These zombies don’t follow the rules established in the previous “…Of The Dead” films. The closest would be the zombies in Snyder’s remake (as you’d expect) but these zombies are even more acrobatic. They act pretty much the same as Snyder’s zombies but at times they’ll leap from second story windows, they’ll crawl along the ceiling and walls. At other times they hide dead bodies in the closet to scare unsuspecting people, and one even plays dead to avoid being noticed.

And then there’s Bud. He’s a good zombie. He can be trusted in the car with you. He can even save the day. Why is this? you might ask. Well, it’s because he’s a vegetarian with a crush on Sarah, and the zombies seem to “retain something of who they are”. A fact that only seems relevent (or even present) when the story calls for it. All these things are introduced in the sloppiest ways. Sarah draws her gun, only to tell Bud that she never loads it (for reasons that remain unknown) which gives him the opportunity to tell here that he’s “a vegetarian by the way”

There’s other inconsistencies too. Some people get bit and turn right away, some turn later, some not at all. Some zombies have the ability to withstand blows to the head, some heads explode at seemingly the lightest touch. Bullets and fire also seem to have awesome head exploding capabilities.

On to the other important things. I’ve already mentioned the sloppy way of introducing key plot elements. That’s not the only problem the writing has. Some of the dialogue is terrible, and the standard lines (“Are you one of them”) you’d expect to hear in a zombie film are there. Only badly used. You don’t ask if someone is one of them after you let them into your secure hideout. Especially after you’ve seen first hand just how formidable ‘them’ are. You also shouldn’t try to be witty by sarcastically referencing an event in the movie you are following when you have terrible plot points galore.

There’s not a single person who really shines in the acting department. Ving Rhames was probably the best of the bunch, the rest were ok.
Mena Suvari delivered her lines well enough, but I didn’t believe her as a soldier. Nick Cannon plays a character who reminded me of L.J. from the Resident Evil sequels. Mike Epps was good for that role, Nick Cannon not so much.

And talking of Resident Evil, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if this was a script that didn’t make it as a sequel. As the movie progresses, it plays out more and more like an unofficial sequel, with the finale in an underground research facility packed with zombies.

With all that’s wrong with this movie, some good zombie carnage could possiblly have made this worthwhile. Unfortunately, the vast majority is badly done CG or rubbery prosthetics. Occasionally, one of the zombie headshots look good and there is some decent zombie makeup, but that’s about it.

As bad as it sounds, it’s far from the worst zombie movie, but it’s really hard to see where the 18 million dollars went.