The Rising Dead follows the survivors of a downed plane heading for a bunker to ride out a world-wide zombie outbreak. An ex-special forces soldier, John Blake, is in charge of getting the first family (the first lady and her handicapped son Gabriel) to Guantanamo, Cuba where there is a bunker and a nuclear reactor to power it. Also among the group of survivors is a little 6 or 7 year old girl named Treasure. Two other women survived the crash, but landed away from the core group, Ariel and John’s Wife, Amber. They’ve crash landed in the jungle amidst some abandoned buildings and a ton of zombies.It’s now John’s personal mission to get as many survivors to the bunker as he can.
First off, the whole movie is horribly grainy, but this probably fudges the CGI Special Effects enough to make them look uniform. The CGI makes for a lot of the special effects with heads popping off, holes being blown through zombies and limbs and torsos being severed.
One of the zombies looked really good, the cemetery zombie. The rest of them looked like they were in black-face or something, but others looked like clowns ala the new Joker. Toward the end they start to be all gray rather than brown, with more blood, but they still don’t look good.
The beginning of the movie is chock full of people making glaringly stupid decisions that make you want them all to die. Like two adults leaving a 6 year old girl and a crippled teen alone in a collapsed building while they go off to burn dead zombie bodies. Or how the kids decide for some reason they should go looking for those adults in the exact opposite direction as they went to go burn the zombie bodies. Or how the first lady leaves the 6 year old alone in the collapsed building to go see if the special forces guy and her son are okay. It’s not like they made a base of operations out of this collapsed building, or had fortified in in any way or it had anything going for it over anywhere else. They just keep telling people to stay there, which they don’t, so they can go off and perform superfluous duties.
One scene shows a women fighting a severed arm. The arm crawls and drags inself by its fingers, but then the arm grabs her by the hair and pulls her along the floor, with no obvious means of locomotion.
In the middle of the movie, two of the characters decide to barricade themselves in a shabby house. One of them had to bust up the front door a little bit to get in. They have a 5 minute montage of them breaking apart cabinets and tables to board up the doors and windows. When they’re done they rest and one of them says “That should hold them for at least a little while”. A few minutes later, then zombies start coming in, through the front door that they didn’t bother to board up, through the windows they didn’t bother to board up and through the other doors they didn’t bother to board up. I don’t know what the hell they got done during that montage since the zombies didn’t even have to break anything to get in!
The last portion of the movie is the two characters roaming around a “labyrinth” trying to avoid zombies for an inordinate amount of time. Throughout this time, you don’t see any zombies, you just see them walking and walking and walking and changing direction and walking…forever! They decide that if they can lead the zombies into the “labyrinth” they can flood the corridor with propane (by turning various knobs on various pipes) and blow them up. Two things about this that got me: 1) The “labyrinth” is just a few weird walkways through an abandoned building. It reminded me of being a child, finding an abandoned building and pretending I was being chased by zombies, so I’d come up with an outlandish plan to kill them, like flooding the hallways with propane and blowing them up. 2) When they blew them up, they were hanging out on the roof to escape the explosions. I would think that if you were going to blow up some hallways, you’d blow up the whole building with it.
All of the sets on this film were just very abandoned buildings. They could have done some really great things with them, but it seems like they left them as they found them - all covered in leaves, foliage and trash. They could have souped them up or spent any amount of time doing something to them, but I guess that sort of time wasn’t in the budget. This is why I felt like I was playing pretend as a child. The characters told you what these places were supposed to be and you were expected to just believe them.
The acting was really bad. It was kind of funny watching the bad actors deliver the really bad dialog. There’s this voice over by the special forces guy who says he was a nuclear physicist as well. You’d think that a nuclear physicist would use colorful language or a few $5 words here and there, but no, the dialog sound like someone reading an elementary school level adventure novel…deadpan.
If The Rising Dead wasn’t so long it might fall into the “so bad, it’s good” category, but at 112 minutes and more than a few uselessly drawn out scenes, it gets a little tedious and boring. I don’t recommend it.
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