MonsterHunter

When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will *yawn*. Huh? What? Oh, yeah, I’m awake. Just sort of dozed off for a minute. You know, deep down I never really believed the various explanations that the Man gave out for these periodic attacks of undead terror cells. You’ve got your Trioxin barrels that keep getting lost and busted open. Or there’s always some comet or meteor or other vague outer space situation that might have caused Joe Zombie to start fussin’ and fightin’. Then you’ve got your virus that some goofball scientist created and inadvertently let loose when he was too busy playing with his Bunsen burner. But I think that Day of the Dead 2: Contigium really hits the nail on the head in the realism department when they have the end of the world hinge 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. Though I was unable to locate any information on whether any of this movie’s alleged $9 million budget came from Thermos Brand Insulated Products, I can’t think of a movie that better showcased how great a product was since E.T. convinced America that friendly aliens preferred the peanut buttery taste of Reese’s Pieces over the boring chocolate of M&Ms. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands? Whatever. I guess me and my new alien pal will just have to wash our hands while you’re out running around with clean hands. And by yourself. Without supercool alien friends.

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. DOTD2: C is clearly calculated to hit that all important niche market of “people who should know better, but don’t.” You know who you are. You love your zombie movies. You want to see armies of the undead shambling around, taking over the world one set of intestines at a time. You want a scrappy band of survivors fighting for their lives, but you don’t mind if they all end up as zombie chow in the end - just so they give a good account of themselves for awhile. I know it. You know it. The makers of Contagium know it. And somehow they’ve come by the rights to the name of a real zombie movie.

Now, we’ve all seen high profile remakes and sequels to zombie movies we’ve actually heard of. But a sequel to Day of the Dead? A movie that gets released only on DVD? And in Germany months before its American DVD release? And featuring no one in front of or behind the camera that anyone has ever heard of? Come on, we all know better. The signs are all there. Is there anything other than the title that’s even whispering, “this will be a good movie” or even “mindless zombie fun?” No, I think the only voice I hear is screaming at the top of its lungs, “mammoth turd that came out sideways and left my ass in ruin for a week and a half!” And that’s not a voice I generally like to hear.

You know all this intuitively, but you’ll still have this zombie-like desire to seek it out and inflict it upon yourself like some sort of horror movie masochist. Though it may be in vain, I’m going to attempt to dissuade you from wasting either your money or the 90 minutes that would be better spent watching any other film with “Dead” in the title (except for maybe Dead Poet’s Society or Drop Dead Fred.)

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 your 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 or something 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. So let me get this straight. These vials survive a plane crash intact, but a Russian dork messes around with them for five seconds and Hell on Earth is unleashed?

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? Um, by the way, I’m not seeing what this has to do with Day Of The Dead yet. Wasn’t that about a bunch of military guys hiding from zombies and trying to train them in a missile silo? After the world had already be destroyed by the living dead? And here we’ve got a nut job with a Thermos?

Said 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 if one of the orderlies is a mean jerk who tries to rape a patient. I don’t care about the philosophical differences one doctor has with another doctor over how to treat the patients. I don’t care that one patient has an anger problem, one is suicidal, or that one has a fear of death or that two patients are dating each other or even that one guy likes Spaghetti Wednesday. 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. Huh? Zombies with ESP? Sure.

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 and somehow the two people and the doctor we’re supposed to care about (we don’t - if there was ever a chance we would, the cheesy narration by one of the characters where he ruminates on the nature of life, death and immortality ensures that we hate them and him most of all) break away from the other zombies to try and fight them for some reason.

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, sloooooow, 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.

© 2008 MonsterHunter