The October Zombie-Thon - Day 12: Night of the Dead
Posted by Trevor Snyder on 10.12.2008
Well, it's certainly not going to win any originality points in the title department, but how about the movie itself?
NIGHT OF THE DEAD (2006)
(Leben Tod)
Written & Directed by: Eric Forsberg
Country: USA
You know what I love? Video-box quotes with no attribution. If you've devoted as much of your life to watching crappy movies as I have, you've come across this before. Movies so lame that no critic in their right mind would ever have anything good to say about them, and so the filmmakers and/or distribution company simply throw some random praise on the box, put quotation marks around it, and hope no one will question where it came from. I suppose it's awfully dishonest, but it's also somewhat hard to care, given that real quotes from actual critics mean so little, anyway. Seriously, how often have you actually rented a movie simply because so-and-so from some newspaper said it's an "adrenaline-fueled thrill ride?"
Still, even if you agree that these quotes don't mean anything in the long run, it's impossible not to shake your head in disbelief at the one that graces the front cover of today's movie. According to the DVD case for Night of the Dead, it's "more shocking than Re-Animator." Wow, really? Of course, there's no indication of just who it is that actually said this. Personally, I doubt anyone ever uttered those words…except perhaps for writer/director Eric Forsberg. Or, I don't know…maybe it was his mom.
So, OK, suffice to say the box is full of shit. It probably won't astonish anyone to hear that this movie is nowhere-near the same league as a classic like Re-Animator. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its merits, either. Take the opening minutes, for instance, in which we meet Gabriel Schreklich (who looks remarkably like a live-action Mr. Toad), a crazed doctor who has invented a life-restoring agent, which he proceeds to test on a deceased frog. This leads to a brief but hilarious battle between the doctor and a zombie-frog. And if that isn't funny enough, minutes later we watch as Gabriel's wife and young daughter are accidentally run down and killed on the sidewalk outside their home. Now, granted, that doesn't sound very humorous, but considering it's one of the worst "mannequins substituted for real people" shots since Zombie Holocaust, it's actually quite the comedic masterpiece.
Anyway, the story then jumps ahead a few years, and a widowed Gabriel is continuing his controversial work at his own medical clinic, the "Institute for Life Extension." Gabriel has perfected his serum enough that it actually re-animates recently deceased people, albeit with the slight side-effect that they return with a craving for human flesh. Along with his now zombie-fied wife and daughter, Gabriel has a whole basement full of these ghouls. The movie seems to suggest that any patient who dies is being used in his experiments, which raises the question of why no one seems to notice that no one ever actually seems to come out of this clinic. You'd think by now people would be wise to something going on, and perhaps decide to drive those extra couple miles to the next hospital in town.
Gabriel is aided in his day-to-day medical activities by his nephew Peter, who lives in the facility with his beautiful, pregnant wife Anais (and yes, we do get a sex-scene with the pregnant girl, for those of you who are into that kind of thing). Neither is aware of Gabriel's experiments, although the wife certainly suspects something is up, considering that she is essentially being held prisoner in the building – although it's not clear why until the film's final moments. Before then, however, we have to sit through the usual zombie mayhem. Gabriel's creations eventually escape from the basement (surprise, surprise), and the young nephew and his wife are forced to fight through a gauntlet of ghouls in order to escape the building. This got me wondering, too…how could a large medical clinic have only one apparent exit? You have to imagine that wouldn't sit well with the Fire Marshall.
You can probably tell from my description that this is pretty clichéd stuff; the plot is a rather-obvious and lazy Re-Animator rip-off, and for the most part the movie seems to exist solely for the purpose of showing off a boat-load of gruesome gore effects. Unfortunately, the gore is more plentiful than it is impressive. If a movie is going to live-or-die by its FX work, as is clearly the case here, you would hope for some pretty remarkable moments of mayhem. But this is pretty much just a parade of repetitive, laughable carnage.
This concentration on blood-and-guts also means that many of the movie's more confusing elements are left unexplained. It's bad enough accepting that Gabriel's nephew hasn't noticed what he's really been up to all this time. But even beyond that, there are some big questions here. Why are Gabriel's wife and daughter still intelligent in their undead state, while the rest of the zombies are just mindless brutes? Why does Gabriel not tie-up the zombies, even though they try to attack him every-time he goes in the basement? And why is one of the female zombies able to jump around like a crazed gymnast? Actually, I'm pretty sure I know the answer to that one – cause it looks cool.
In all fairness, this movie isn't really all that terrible when stacked up against many other low-budget gore-fests. Not only is there some nice unintentional humor here and there, but things admittedly pick up in the last half-hour, with Peter forced to turn into a hardcore zombie slayer in order to battle his now undead uncle (spoiler alert!) and his "new species of humans." This leads to one of the funniest exchanges I've ever heard, when Peter confronts zombie-Gabriel:
Peter: "You're insane!"
Gabriel: "Yes…but who gives a shit?"
In the end, there's even a pretty nifty twist ending to cap the whole thing off. But, still, you can't judge a movie purely on the strength of its final act, and there's no ignoring that the movie is pretty darn boring up until that last half-hour. Undiscriminating gore-hounds might have some fun, and it's not a bad option when looking for a cheesy movie to throw in for some yuks with friends. But, at the end of the day, you'd probably be a lot better off just re-watching Re-Animator, which I've heard is "even more shocking than Night of the Dead!"
