Tag Archives: Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)

It should be no surprise that that Day of the Dead 2: Contagium  rings in as another Yellow Puss.  Probably it should be Red Blood.  I’ll tell you what I have to say about this film, but first please read these which I found under “Reception” on Wikipedia….

Peter Dendle called DOTD2 Contagium a “boring, transparent feature” that was “forgotten almost as soon as it was released”.

Steve Barton of Dread Central rated it 0/5 stars and wrote, “This is a sequel in name only, created solely to generate revenue from ill informed fans.” Contagium

Joseph Savitski of Beyond Hollywood wrote that the film “is not only an exercise in incompetence, but also a blatant attempt at false advertising.”

Dennis Prince of DVD Verdict wrote, “There is no warning too strong that would urge you to avoid this DVD at all costs.”

So what does BagpiperDon think of Contagium?

Bearing in mind that this film hand a whole whopping $1M budget in 2005 — that should already tell you that this is a nothing film.  It was confusing as to the significance in light of the 1985 “Day of the Dead” not to mention the “Day of the Dead” from 2008.  It seems like a film that wants to have a few good new ideas to the genre.  Also, it had the fun of being a simple, low-budget Z-film ….. but in the end… it’s a waste of time.

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Day of the Dead (2008)

This Day Of The Dead remake of George A. Romero’s original 1985 film could be a called a cross between 28 Days Later and the 2009 version of The Crazies. From the start the action ramps up, and 30 minutes in it stays constant — intense gore-fest. The zombies are high speed, a bit super-human, and the humans consist of recognizable actors beginning their careers — all with no gratuitous displays of possibly-future-famous-breasts (they’re nice, but it just gets old in zombie films). This piece showed me a few new things to z-films, and the story-line didn’t particularly take any leaps, however I did have a few beefs…

I thought it odd that upon the point an infected human turns into a zombie that they instantly fester sores and rotted skin.

I might be okay with the zombies having slightly super-human strength, but a Spiderman-like ability to stick to walls/ceilings was a over the top — if they’re going to do that, I would have preferred to see that they had the strength to dig their fingers in and hold-on.

Toward the end two survivors who where military broke into a civilian firearms store — there are a few problems with this…..

Usually gun stores are highly secure, you don’t just push the door open

I would have preferred that the film made the weapons realistic.  Civilian versions of military style weapons are only available in semi-automatic, not full-auto (semi-auto: you pull the trigger and the gun fires once, commonly &/or intentionally incorrectly called an ‘assault weapon’ / full-auto: the weapon continues to fire as long as you hold the trigger AKA a machine gun).

Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, I rate the remake of Day Of The Dead as Green Ooze and it was formerly on my Top 10 list.

How do you know your zombie film is cool? It features Ving Rhames!

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