Day Of The Dead: Bloodline (2018) - Movie Review

 

Spend long enough on a creative endeavour and before too long, it will start to reflect aspects of the one who created it. And oh boy, is that no truer than it is when dealing with the legendary zombie flicks of George A. Romero, who have themselves become cinematic zombies. Or rather straight-to-DVD zombies as, through a combination of head-scratching rights issues and just general money-grubbing idiocy, there have been a lot of unnecessary additions to that canon. Day Of The Dead serves as one of the more egregious examples, between the 2008 remake to the unofficial prequel to the original Contagium, both of which exist for little more than blindsiding the uninitiated. Surprisingly, though, the same cannot be said about this film… not entirely, at least.

It carries a lot of the hallmarks of the lower bar of zombie cinema: Gore that exists primarily to engage through sheer bloodshed, rather than being that extra spice to a film already worth watching, bland characters making fundamentally stupid decisions, showing self-preservation to be the first casualty of the zombie apocalypse, and barely enough plot to fill out an hour and a half.

This can get profoundly boring in way too many places, forcing the audience to side with not just stupid but occasionally monstrous characters, making human extinction feel like karma for such douchebaggery. Yeah, the original Day Of The Dead had its own hall-of-fame douchebag character with Rhodes, but at least he was engaging. Here, the closest we get is Miguel, who is just textbook hardnosed military leader.

To add further salt to the gaping neck wound, we have Sophie Skelton as the doctor-turned-hero-of-the-apocalypse Zoe. Her acting is mostly baseline acceptable, nothing worth raging about without getting hyperbolic… until the voice-over narration kicks in. In no uncertain terms, this has got to be the most uncomfortable, stilted, grating-on-the-eardrums narration I’ve ever covered on this blog. It borders on Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker levels of unwanted spine shiver response.

And yet, even with all that said, I’d still argue that this has more of a reason to exist than a vast majority of the non-Romero additions to the Living Dead canon. Why? Well, let’s look at what ties this, the original, the 2008 remake and Contagium together: They all depict aspects of humanity still existing within zombies. The original had Bub being taught ‘civility’, the remake had a soldier not biting people because he was a vegetarian as a human, and Contagium had so much retained humanity that it turned the whole thing into complete farce. But even with the mostly-bad reception of the films themselves, they all showed that some form of gentle humanity could survive zombification.

Cut to this film, where we get a much darker look at that idea. This film also has a zombie that shows signs of humanity, but it’s someone that no-one wants to see return, undead or otherwise: A sexually abusive stalker, one who victimised and traumatised Zoe as a human and became a begrudging asset as a zombie. This subtext of toxic masculinity surviving even after death, considering when this film came out, gives this a certain timely punch. It also allows Zoe the closest this film has to real character development, with the zombie apocalypse itself serving as a metaphor for her trauma.

So, yeah, this film isn’t that good. It’s still the kind of dumb zombie movie that isn’t even fun to sit through or riff with friends. But, faint praise incoming, it also has more of a reason to exist than an awful lot of wannabe-Romero flicks out there. It even has a touch of societal commentary that gave Romero’s zombies that added touch of smarts behind the terror. Is it worth sitting through the rest of the film to get to? Not really, but knowing what came before, this could’ve turned out one whole hell of a lot worse.