This pointless rehash of the Romero classic sees the original story retold as a modern-day Z-grade effort, replete with amateur night acting and Halloween masks. Yes, it really is that bad, and the biggest surprise is that cash-in king John Russo – a guy who's made an entire career from the fact that he wrote and produced the 1968 film - is nowhere to be seen.
The story diverges little from the original, except to introduce an extra, extraneous character – played by B-movie stalwart Sid Haig. The zombies are so ineffectual here and the gore so tame that two things happen: first, an extra villain is introduced to little end, and secondly, their origin has to be explained in depth. Both take away from the eerie impact of the Romero original, where the horror came from the fact that the world ended abruptly with the 'what if?' scenario of zombies arriving at your door.
The film's hook is the 3D, but anyone going in looking for guts and entrails flying out of the screen (a la the MY BLOODY VALENTINE remake and the latter FINAL DESTINATION movies) will be disappointed. A 3D spliff and subsequent smoke ring are all you're going to get (way to take advantage of the technology, huh?). Speaking of spliffs, the awful dialogue is loaded with stoner jokes and a far cry from the terse exchanges we all remember from Romero's classic.
The acting is terrible, aside from Haig, an actor who always seems to be enjoying himself (complete with ghoulish chuckle) in his recent B-movie outings. The story is so slim that at one stage we take a softcore detour to the barn, where a sex scene between two unappealing characters plays out in all its nude detail. Incredibly, the end result is a film that feels more dated and less grisly than the film that inspired it, made all those years ago; making me appreciate Romero all the more is the only thing this movie does right.
