Bullet Points: Day of the Dead: Bloodline
Zombie movies are always hit or miss. They used to be reflections of society and whatnot and now they’re just opportunities to show zombies chewing on the fake innards of a few screaming actors. I can’t even remember the last zombie movie that felt fresh and original. With that in mind, I wasn’t entering this movie with the greatest of expectations.
Synopsis: A small group of military personnel and survivalists dwell in an underground bunker as they seek to find a cure in a world overrun by zombies.
- The beginning of the end: The zombie outbreak starts the movie off and we’re treated to a couple of decent bite scenes but nothing we haven’t seen before. We meet Zoe (Sophie Skelton) while she’s on the run from the craziness that ensues once the undead start running around and biting everyone. The movie quickly jumps back a few hours to see that Zoe is a med student and is involved in this thing even more than we know.
- Sorry Doc: It’s during a really lame looking party with all the medical students that one of the cadavers comes back and bites the hell out of a guy who is attempting to rape Zoe. It couldn’t have happened soon enough, either, because Max (Johnathon Schaech) is easily the weirdest dude ever and everyone just kind of accepts it because he has weird blood.
- 5 years later: The movie picks the story up five years later and Zoe is now a resident of some refugee/military compound. Everyone seems to be living pretty happily but the medicine is running out and Zoe finally gets her boyfriend and a few others to go a run into one of the abandoned towns. You know how these things go. They run into car trouble, find a bunch of hungry zombies, and then lose some people to the hordes. It all serves to drive a wedge between the members of the group and before long most of the people are either on team Zoe or team Miguel (Jeff Gum).
- Here comes Max: The death dash into town ends up bringing back the same rapey guy from earlier and now the townsfolk are in for a real mess thanks to Zoe. Max is some kind of Wonder Zombie. He has the stealthy movements of a ninja and is still able to think his way out of any of the traps they set for him. Doctor Zoe tries to come up with a bunch of good ideas to use Max’s blood to make antibodies but everything ends up getting more and more people dead. It’s a real bloodbath.
- Oh brother: Zoe is the educated, innocent girl who is trying to save the world while the Lt. is the hard-edged survivalist whose only goal is to protect the group at all cost. Zoe ends up getting half the compound killed seeking her medicine but is somehow looked at as heroic. If she hadn’t been so eager to get the antidote, she could have taken her time a bit and not rushed it to the point that her entire community was almost wiped out.
No matter how bad the zombie apocalypse might seem, there’s no way it’s worse than that George Romero movie with the home video camera:
- Based on this movie I would say that the leg is the most commonly eaten part of the human body by zombies.
- Parties in movies are always so lame. People don’t really act like that in real life. Everything is jacked up to 11, especially in the douche department.
- I don’t know what to think of the term “rotter”.
- 5 hour antibody. Trademark it.
The Verdict: I’ve probably seen close to one hundred zombie movies in my time. At one point I had a really serious collection going of zombie DVDs but I lost track of it at some point and haven’t bought once since. If I were still purchasing undead movies I probably wouldn’t buy this one. I’m not crazy about the original Day of the Dead and I don’t really believe this movie does anything better than that one did. Bloodline is full of one-dimensional characters who can barely even claim that right. Zoe pretty much ruins everyone around hers life. If you’re a die-hard fan of zombie movies then you might find some value here but you should probably just watch something else.
