George Romero returns again to zombie
territory, this time starting afresh with a brand new plot, that owes nothing to his previous "Dead" movies. In this,
a group of college students are making a horror film for a school media project, when reports come in that the dead
have started to come back to life and attack the living, and that everywhere is in chaos.
Unsure of what's really going on, they decide the best thing to do is abandon the college dorms and get home, and so the group, along with their drunken lecturer, head off in a camper van, as they try to avoid the undead and ensuing chaos going on around them in the larger populated areas, whilst they try to get back to their respective homes.
The entire film is shot POV style in a semi-documentary fashion supposedly from the footage from the students camcorders, who have decided to document the events going on around them, and this is where the problems with the film start. Whilst Romero's decision to film the movie this way was to try something "original", this overlooks the obvious fact that this style of film making has been done before, and indeed it just comes across as yet another "Blair Witch" type clone.
The other problem with the film is a distinct lack of action and no air of "impending doom" that was so prevalent in his earlier films, not to mention a distinct lack of zombies. I mean, when I go to see a zombie film, I expect to see a film about people battling zombies. Instead, what I got was 90mins of a group of kids sat around a camper van arguing, with the occasional zombie making an appearance. Plus, why was everywhere they went deserted? Where did everyone go?
The film does have one saving grace, in the form of a gung-ho Amish farmer, in a hilarious action packed scene in which we see him battling the undead with his trusty scythe and blowing them up with dynamite. In my opinion, this character steals the film and had more of the movie featured stuff like this in it, would have been a worthy film indeed. But as it is, scenes like this are too few and far between and overall, the film is just plain boring.
In summary, I think fans of Romero's earlier films will be very sorely disappointed with this one and as such I can only recommend this to die hard zombie film fans and Romero completists.
