Day of the Dead 2: Contigium really hits the nail on the head in the realism department since the end of the world hinges on a guy in an ugly shirt clutching a green Thermos. I mean, has any good ever come out of dudes who don’t know how to dress themselves wandering around with a Thermos?
And let’s just cut to the chase for a moment here, so that I can say without any reservation that Day of the Dead 2: Contagium is simply a great movie. For Thermos.
In order to fully comprehend the role that Thermos Brand Insulated Products play in DOTD2: C, a little history is in order. It was way back in 1892 that James Dewar first invented the technology that would later become known throughout the world as Thermos Brand Insulated Products.
Then in 1968 at a research facility in Pennsylvania, some special zombie research material was smuggled out in a green Thermos and was lost in a ravine nearby. Forty-seven years later, the Thermos is discovered and by God if James Dewar’s invention turns out to be the little vacuum flask that could! That sucker is still sealed up good and tight!
Well, once the Thermos Brand Insulated Products infomercial part of this movie is finished, things start going more sour than milk in a Thermos Brand Insulated Products knock-off made in Belize.
First of all, this movie has nothing to do with the first Day Of The Dead. In fact, the only relation it has to any of those Dead or Living Dead movies is that the prologue takes place in Pennsylvania in 1968. Because, you know, Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 and was set in Pennsylvania.
The movie though doesn’t even make good use of its prologue because it annoyingly chooses to reveal more of the backstory through some flashbacks later on in the movie. It might not have been so annoying if the backstory wasn’t so stupid and if the flashbacks actually revealed anything important to the current story.
Way back in 1968, a Russian spy plane crashes out west and the pilot and some mysterious vials are recovered and brought to the research facility.
No one knows what’s in the vials, but after questioning the Russian, the Americans leave him alone with the vials, he fiddles with them and they open up and some badly animated bubbles or gas come out and infect him. Next thing you know he’s biting a guy and the facility has to be blown up, but not before a green Thermos Brand Insulated Product with one of the vials inside gets dumped in a nearby ravine.
The best part of all this is that this is one of those movies that starts out stupid and gets progressively worse. Guess who finds the Thermos in the present day? A patient from the nearby mental hospital!
Nothing draws me into a story more than the trials and tribulations of crazy idiots. So you built your mental hospital right near the ruins of the research facility that got overrun by zombies? Were all the good ancient Indian burial grounds taken?
The Thermos is obviously opened and a group of patients and their doctor get exposed to the zombie gas. Of course this happens only after you’ve been watching this wretched movie for about four days.
I’m not sure what the boobs who made this were up to when they were busy detailing daily life at the mental hospital. Guess what? I don’t care! Your horrible movie is called Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, not One Flew Over the Freaking Cuckoo’s Nest!
But this movie is so bad that even as it bores you into having your own mental problems, like a big piece of movie roadkill, it actually gets stinkier and more bloated with its own lameness as it lays there.
Once our cast of uninteresting characters gets infected, they start to have peeling skin, puke black gunk up, and develop telepathy.
They can even feel each other’s pain and they also reflect each other’s wounds! Well, sometimes they do. The movie periodically forgets these various superpowers now and again.
There’s also some babble about an antidote and how the bad guy doctor knew all along about this, but so what? The antidote is never used, the doctor gets killed and the Thermos was lost for almost fifty years so why would the doctor have anything to do with this business?
Thanks to the long slow stretches in the middle of the movie this won’t even make it to that coveted “so bad it’s good” territory that seems to be awarded to crappy movies like some sort of consolation prize.
Simply put, I’m watching your movie to be entertained, not bored and lied to. If you’re going to go the trouble of acquiring the rights to the name of a movie, why don’t you at least make an attempt to do something that somewhat relates to it?
How much harder would it have been to come up with some ideas that didn’t make people gag just reading about them? What was the point in setting this at a mental hospital? Just so you can pad the movie with inane interaction with marginally crazy people?
And the addition to the zombie mythos involving a collective consciousness that was only sometimes collective? I’m going out on a limb and guess that the dude who came up with that was the same numbnuts that said “it would be really cool if this was set in a mental hospital because then we could, um, I don’t know what we could do with it, but I just know it would be cool!”
Pathetic on every level, the only attention this thing will get is solely because of its title which I’m sure the crass cash-in types behind this intended all along. The stupidity of it all will leave you reeling. But I may be getting myself a Thermos.
© 2011 MonsterHunter
