Night of the Living Dead: ReAnimation 3D
Alternative Titles: La nuit des morts vivants: Re-Animation
Director: Jeff Broadstreet
Year: 2012
Starring: Jeffery Combs, Andrew Divoff
Synopsis:
In this prequel to the 2006 cult hit, pyrophobic mortician Gerald Tovar, Jr. (ANDREW DIVOFF) inherits the family mortuary and accidentally exposes hundreds of uncremated bodies to toxic medical waste.
As the corpses re-animate, Gerald's inheritance-seeking younger brother, Harold (JEFFREY COMBS) unexpectedly shows up and stumbles upon Gerald trying to keep the zombie outbreak under control. Sibling rivalry gives way to madness as Harold discovers Gerald's dark secret the freshly exhumed and zombified corpse of their father.
Review:
Director Jeff Broadstreet (NIGHTMARE HOSTEL) returns with this prequel to his horrendous 2006 release NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D, only this time ditching Sid Haig and replacing him with Andrew Divoff from the WISHMASTER films as our lead character – Gerald Tovar Jr. In order to get the most, or indeed anything out of this movie, you need to check your brain at the door and ignore anything you know about Romero’s “…OF THE DEAD” films as despite the title, everything you previously learned or saw is pretty much irrelevant here.
In this version, Divoff plays a mortician who has inherited the business from his late father and is charged with cremating the bodies of those exposed to toxic medical waste quickly and discretely. However, before he knows it a backlog of corpses has built up and to further compound his problems he is soon visited by estranged brother Harold (Jeffery Combs; RE-ANIMATOR – in fine snivelling form) who is seeking to take control of the family estate by any means possible.
Although the film itself is a marked improvement in terms of both script and cinematography over the previous …LIVING DEAD 3D effort, credit to the director and also his writing partner Robert Valding there, it still leaves plenty to be desired as is evidenced by the poor pacing of the movie and the frequency in which the script degenerates into bland hackneyed conversation, stumbling along very much like the corpses in the film. Meanwhile the creative choices in some moments are just baffling, such as a zombie baby being kept in the office mini-fridge for seemingly no reason and the pseudo-psychedelic scene in which the mortuary assistants get stoned with a corpse, offering up a potential shock moment but as per usual failing to seize the opportunity and ending up just withering away in a non-event.
There are however some redeeming features, often through the odd immature joke or self-referential quoting such as Jeffery Comb’s character asking what kind of zombies they are before confirming their existence as “Romero zombies” and then going on to state government zombie cover ups with the locations and years of previous …OF THE DEAD films providing a nice little fanboy addition to the script which was most welcome especially considering the lack of deference shown previously.
Further positives of the film can be found in the Fx, a good mix of practical and CGI with heads exploding semi-frequently and quite graphically (but in some cases quite clearly a dummy, perhaps the budget didn’t run to these pick up shots), although as with everything in this film even when it gets certain parts right something bad isn’t so far behind. A strong example can be seen in the final third where Andrew Divoff knock’s the jaw off an incoming zombie, while the Fx here are fantastic and quite clear, the actual hitting motion is less realistic than a WWE wrestler who has never had acting lessons thereby reducing the impact and final thoughts of the sequence.
Talking of visuals, the look of the zombies themselves is actually quite well thought out. The older corpses display a slimy decaying texture on the whole while the fresher corpses, as expected merely show the marks of their unsuccessful struggle and it has to be said the Fx team are to be commended for their work on this movie.
Truthfully this is not the worse zombie movie I have ever seen, as fans of the genres we know there are some real stinkers out there, but the (generally) flat and pedestrian scripting leaves it far from being even a solid zombie movie despite the best efforts of two modern horror icons in front of the camera. Not to mention it has absolutely nothing to do with George A. Romero’s vision of the zombie uprising (bar the odd token reference) and as such is best left to only the connoisseurs of the genre to check out.
