DAY OF THE DEAD: BLOODLINE (2018) **

This Day of the Dead isn’t really a sequel to Day of the Dead 2:  Contagium.  Nor is it a sequel to the 2008 Day of the Dead remake.  It almost plays like another remake of George A. Romero’s original Day of the Dead, with a few weird additions.  I’ve seen plenty of terrible DTV zombie movies in my time and as far as they go, you can do a whole lot worse.  It’s certainly better than Contagium or the 2008 remake.

The world is overrun by “rotters” (zombies).  Zoe (Sophie Skelton) is a scientist living in a military compound along with some soldiers and other assorted survivors.  While out on a supply run, she stumbles upon a rotter named Max (Jonathon Schaech), who used to stalk her when he was still human.  He follows the soldiers and sneaks into the compound to see Zoe (once a stalker, always a stalker).  Zoe captures him, chains him up, and performs experiments on him in hopes of creating a rotter vaccine.

The character of Max is sort of a variation on Bub from the original Day of the Dead.  Having him infatuated with the heroine makes this just different enough to prevent it from becoming yet another run-of-the-mill zombie movie.  (There’s a scene where Zoe lets him lick her in exchange for a blood sample.)  I’m not saying this ever comes close to being “good”.  Let’s face it.  This was never going to live up to the original, but it separates itself from Romero’s universe in enough ways to justify its existence.  Sure, there’s still all the scenes of soldiers collecting zombie specimens, the asshole in charge causing trouble with the heroine’s research (although no one could’ve been as big of an asshole as Joe Pilato’s Captain Rhodes), and the large-scale zombie breakout at the end you’d expect from a Day remake.  If you wanted to see those beats recreated yet again, you’re in luck.

The opening scene of the outbreak is kind of fun.  (Students partying in a morgue store their booze in the freezers where they keep the bodies.)  The zombie attacks are fairly bloody (there’s a lot of arterial spray) and the Hateful Eight inspired blood puking scene was appropriately juicy.  The early scenes in the compound, while inferior to the original, are at least tolerable.  Once Schaech gets loose and the zombies start attacking, the whole thing begins to slowly circle the drain.  From then on, it becomes one interchangeable scene of zombies biting humans after the other.  It gets repetitive quickly and the gore is too brief to really put it over the top.

I will say I’ve enjoyed seeing Schaech’s transformation from potential leading man in That Thing You Do to DTV vet.  He stars in stuff like this every chance he gets, and he almost always looks like he’s having fun doing it.  His very appearance in crap like this usually guarantees I’ll watch it at some point.