Day of the Dead | |
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Directed by | Steve Miner |
Screenplay by | Jeffrey Reddick |
Based on | Day of the Dead by George A. Romero |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Patrick Cady |
Edited by | Nathan Easterling |
Music by | Tyler Bates |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | First Look Studios |
Release date |
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Running time | 86 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $18 million [1] |
Box office | $301,771 [2] |
Day of the Dead is a 2008 American horror film directed by Steve Miner and written by Jeffrey Reddick. It is a remake of George A. Romero's 1985 film of the same name, the third in Romero's Dead series, [3] and it is the first of two remakes of the original 1985 film; the other is Day of the Dead: Bloodline (2017). The film sees a virus outbreak that causes people to turn into violent zombie-like creatures, and stars Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, AnnaLynne McCord, Stark Sands, Matt Rippy, Pat Kilbane, Taylor Hoover, Christa Campbell, and Ving Rhames.
The project was principally shot in Bulgaria, with limited shooting in Los Angeles, California.
Day of the Dead was released direct-to-video on April 8, 2008, by First Look Studios. It was panned by critics.
Miners Trevor Bowman and Nina meet in an abandoned warehouse in Colorado. At the same time, military roadblocks seal the city off for a 24-hour quarantine exercise. Corporal Sarah Bowman leaves her barricade and drives with Private Bud Crain to visit her sick mother. There, Trevor and Nina reveal that the local populace were infected by an influenza-like virus and that their friend Kyle gushed blood from the nose that morning. Sarah and Bud head to Kyle's house to investigate and discover his parents' mauled corpses. She radioes Captain Rhodes about the situation and heads homeward to bring her family and Nina to the Medical Center.
As the CDC's Dr. Logan questions Sara in the crowded hospital, the infected become catatonic and reanimate as zombies. As carnage ensues, Nina and Trevor seek refuge at the local radio station, and Captain Rhodes is mauled. Dr. Logan, Sarah and Bud rush to a storage room, but Bud inadvertently drops the car keys before entering. Sarah and Bud resolve to reach the room Captain Rhodes was mauled in through the air ducts to retrieve his Humvee keys. When they land on the floor, Private Salazar appears. During their return to the storeroom, Rhodes rises to pursue them and bites Bud's hand as he replaces the ceiling grille. The group jumps from the window into the undead-infested parking lot. Dr. Logan deliberately pushes a woman toward a zombie and departs in a vehicle.
The remaining members set off in the Humvee. They stop at a gun store and restrain Bud with plastic wrist-ties inside the vehicle. Upon reentering, Bud has transformed. Sarah insists that he is harmless and should not get shot. Meanwhile, they hear Trevor over the radio and dash to his location. They collect the couple and attempt to exit the city but collide near the abandoned warehouse. They access an underground bunker and encounter Dr. Logan, who divulges his involvement in the government project under Dr. Engel. Engel intended to produce a bioweapon to paralyze enemy combatants by temporarily affecting their nervous system, but the virus mutated, zombifying the scientists. As the group traverses the bunker, Dr. Engel stealthily kills Logan. Zombies encircle Salazar and he sacrifices himself to enable Sarah to escape and reunite with Trevor and Nina. They find a bundle of gas cylinders and modify them into flamethrowers. While Sarah lures the zombie crowd, Dr. Engel descends from the ceiling and grabs her. When Bud shoots at him, Engel decapitates him. Sarah directs the undead to the cylinders, and they incinerate them. The group sets out in Dr. Logan's car, and as they proceed towards the distance, a zombie screams at the camera.
^* Sarah is referred to as Cross during the film, but she and her brother are listed as Bowman in the credits.
Reddick, who adapted the script from Romero's original concept, has stated that this film does not have any connection to Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (although Ving Rhames had also appeared in that film, but as a different character). He told ComingSoon.net: "It's going to be a separate movie...We wanted to pay homage to the original with the military and the scientists and the socially relevant stuff that George Romero always does, but we wanted to put a fresh spin on it." [4] Variety announced the project in July 2006, [5] and shooting ended on September 7, 2006, after six weeks in Sofia, Bulgaria. [6] Re-shoots took place in June 2007. [7]
First Look Pictures released it on DVD in the United States on April 8, 2008. [8]
The film was poorly received by both fans and critics. [9] Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 13% of 8 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 2.66/10. [10] Steve Barton of Dread Central rated it 2/5 stars and called it "dead on arrival". Barton called Cannon's performance offensively stereotypical. [11] Buz Wallick, also writing for Dread Central, rated it 1.5/5 stars and called it "an awful film with awful special features that will hopefully fade from memory in time". [12] Heather Seebach of Shock Till You Drop called it "cheap horror for indiscriminate genre fans" that "tiptoes on so-bad-it-is-funny territory". [13] Brian Orndorf of DVD Talk rated it 0/5 stars and called it "a vile, pathetic, slapdash motion picture". [8]
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film directed, photographed, and edited by George A. Romero, written by Romero and John Russo, produced by Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman, and starring Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea. The story follows seven people trapped in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, under assault by reanimated corpses. Although the flesh-eating monsters that appear in the film are referred to as "ghouls", they are credited with popularizing the modern portrayal of zombies in popular culture.
Day of the Dead is a 1985 American post-apocalyptic zombie horror film written and directed by George A. Romero, and produced by Richard P. Rubinstein. The third film in Romero's Night of the Living Dead series, it stars Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joseph Pilato, Jarlath Conroy and Richard Liberty as members of a group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse sheltering in an underground bunker in Florida, where they must determine the outcome of humanity's conflict with the undead horde. Romero described the film as a "tragedy about how a lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse even in this small little pie slice of society".
Dawn of the Dead is a 1978 zombie horror film written, directed, and edited by George A. Romero, and produced by Richard P. Rubinstein. An American-Italian international co-production, it is the second film in Romero's series of zombie films, and though it contains no characters or settings from the preceding film Night of the Living Dead (1968), it shows the larger-scale effects of a zombie apocalypse on society. In the film, a phenomenon of unidentified origin has caused the reanimation of the dead, who prey on human flesh. David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross star as survivors of the outbreak who barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall amid mass hysteria.
George Andrew Romero Jr. was an American-Canadian film director, writer, editor and actor. His Night of the Living Dead series of films about a zombie apocalypse began with the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) and is considered a major contributor to the image of the zombie in modern culture. Other films in the series include Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985).
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Living Dead, also informally known as Of The Dead is a blanket term for the loosely connected horror franchise that originated from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The film, written by George A. Romero and John A. Russo, primarily focuses on a group of people gathering at a farmhouse to survive from an onslaught of zombies in rural Pennsylvania. It is known to have inspired the modern interpretation of zombies as reanimated human corpses that feast on the flesh and/or brains of the living.
Night of the Living Dead 3D or Night of the Living DE3D is a 2006 horror film made in 3D. It is the second remake of the 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead. The first remake was released in 1990 and was directed by Tom Savini from a revised screenplay by George A. Romero. Unlike the first remake, no one involved with the original is involved with this version. The original film was never properly copyrighted, and so it has fallen into the public domain, making this remake possible with no permission from the original's creators.
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A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.
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Night of the Living Dead is a zombie horror media franchise created by George A. Romero beginning with the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, directed by Romero and cowritten with John A. Russo. The franchise predominantly centers on different groups of people attempting to survive during the outbreak and evolution of a zombie apocalypse. The latest installment of the series, Survival of the Dead, was released in 2009, with a sequel, Twilight of the Dead, in development. This would be the first film in the series not directed by George Romero, who died on July 16, 2017.
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