We humans grow from our mistakes. It’s part of the process of being an adult to learn and improve as a person from past transgressions, to help prepare us for the next thing. For instance, after watching Day of the Dead: Bloodline, I learned to trust my gut instinct and not give showers of shit a chance to not be showers of shit.
Day of the Dead: Bloodline is the “reimagining” of Romero’s cult classic, minus any actual imagination. I’ve sat through some half-baked awfulness as a zombie movie fan, but Bloodline takes the undead biscuit. It’s not a question of how bad Bloodline is, it’s a question of which of the two Day of the Dead updates I would rather watch if I was being tortured in a gulag.
I honestly don’t know the answer to that. While Bloodline avoids the vehicular-minded spider zombies of the astonishingly bad 2008 “vision”, it’s terrible in so many other ways that I had to repeatedly step away from it to compose myself.
Things start off unconvincingly with the kind of editing and sound mixing that I would come to expect from a student film. The ADR is so bad and noticeable that it sounds like the actors were on aeroplanes in the midst of turbulence over Mount Kilimanjaro, or that they were just annoyed at being dragged back in to make the blot on their filmography even more pronounced.
The warning signs kept coming, but I kept persevering. Early on, as medical students are examining a corpse, you can plainly see the extra breathing as his stomach lifts up and down. It’s a pretty gratuitous shot because the cameraman makes an ordeal of panning over his dead body; not sure how the students or editors missed that one, but okay. What makes this even better is that he died because he had collapsed lungs and couldn’t breathe.
Things level out somewhat as our heroine, Zoe, meets her stalker to extract his blood. He is a bit weird and very murder-y, but it’s okay because his blood is extra special because reasons. To his credit, Johnathon Schaech gives his all to the role of Max and is the standout performer in what is otherwise a cast filled with people who just need their rent money.
Max is obsessed with Zoe, which leads him to forcing himself upon her in a morgue while a party is going on upstairs. Fear not, it’s undeadeus ex machina time: the cadaver from earlier is now a zombie and peckish for rapist. All hell breaks loose after that with so many squibs going off that there must have been package deal on Amazon.
With humanity in ruins, we return to a semblance of the Day of the Dead we know. In fairness to Bloodline, it does at least try to match the original scale Romero had in mind before he had to pare it down significantly to be a more intimate affair.
Stuff happens, actors wince their way through their lines, and then Max reappears to stalk Zoe as a member of the undead. Like Bub in the original movie, Max is an “evolved” zombie and retains some glimpses of humanity. Sadly, Max is more like a D&D joke than a feasible counterpart to Bub. Despite, you know, being a shambling, grunty mess of meat, he somehow manages to Sam Fisher his way into the complex and you can kind of guess where Bloodline goes from there. It’s just a mess.
After initially giving Bloodline a hard time, I regret ever thinking that it could turn out to just be mediocre — it couldn’t even manage that. Compared to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead as a concept seems to have had its day. Let it rest, and the spirit of Romero with it.
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