Day of the Dead: Bloodline

Day of the Dead: Bloodline

Starring Sophie Skelton, Johnathon Schaech, Jeff Gum, Marcus Vanco

Directed by Hector Hernandez Vicens

The Story:
Zoe (Sophie Skelton) is a successful up-and-coming doctor, working on a patient named Max (Johnathon Schaech), who has a very unhealthy obsession with her.  His blood is unique, but before she could study it more, the dead rise again and the world is turned upside down.

Five years later, Zoe is now a doctor at a refugee camp, run by a military unit controlled by Miguel Salazar (Jeff Gum), whose brother Baca (Marcus Vanco) is in a relationship with Zoe.  The camp is heavily guarded at a military base, but when they go out on a medicine run, they end up at Zoe's old hospital.  Max - who's survived there for five years after being bitten - recognizes Zoe and sneaks his way to the compound, where he's captured and studied.  Zoe knows his blood can be the cure for the outbreak, even though he terrorized her when he was alive, she needs him reanimated in order to find a vaccine.

The Synopsis:
Very few filmmakers have been as revolutionary and transformative than George A. Romero, who took the term "zombie" into the mainstream with his low-budget classics "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," and "Day of the Dead."  Before he came around, zombies were relegated to the background of cinema, hardly used and even lesser recognized, but after his arrival, zombies broke out in a big way.  Through his visionary work, we now have films like "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland," and television series like "The Walking Dead" and "Z Nation."  When he passed away last year, the world lost a voice in horror cinema that will never be duplicated.

Romero's zombie works have been remade and reimagined several times through the decades, most of which to less-than-stellar success.  In fact, the only remake worthy of Romero came with Zack Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" in 2004, where he kept Romero's social commentary but added his own blend on the zombie genre by having them run instead of shuffle around like Romero did.  The film worked well on the terror level as well as the acting, and is still hailed today as one of the best remakes out there.  In 2008, a remake of "Day of the Dead" was released starring Nick Carter and Mena Suvari, and was a terrible misstep.  Now, director Hector Hernandez Vicens crafted another remake of "Day of the Dead," and while it's nothing close to Snyder's "Dawn," it's the second best Romero remake to be made.

The two sections Vicens held to Romero's classic vision lie in the setting and antagonist.  Like Romero, Vicens tells his story through the eyes of survivors of the zombie apocalypse who have taken shelter in a military base, controlled by a ragtag group of soldiers who try to protect them from the outside menace.  Also, like Romero, Vicens introduces us to his version of "Bub" in Max, a zombie who still retains knowledge of his old life and who is studied by Zoe in hopes of finding a cure.

Unfortunately, those are the only similarities to the Romero classic.  The remainder of the film is your general, generic zombie flare with the typical stock characters and events that have happened over and over again since Romero revolutionized the genre.  We get a cast of supporting characters who we know just enough about to somewhat care about their demise, but still don't care enough about it.  We refer to them as "that girl," or "that one person" because we can't remember their names, but remember their faces from a scene or two before.

The three main human characters are Zoe, Miguel, and Baca, and surprisingly they show less emotion and thought than the zombie Max.  Miguel - played by Jeff Gum - is your general run-of-the-mill lieutenant who rules with an iron fist and doesn't allow his command to be questioned, no matter how much it doesn't make sense (he parallels Romero's Lieutenant Rhodes, almost to a T, but Rhodes suffers a much more adequate fate).  Marcus Vanco plays Baca, Miguel's right hand man (also his brother), who also loves Zoe for some reason.  That's about all the motivation we get from him, as those are the only facets of his being that were developed at all.

Then there's Sophie Skelton, who plays our main protagonist, Zoe.  She's beautiful to look at (and strikes a surprisingly similar resemblance to Alicia Vikander), but she's nary given a script to work off of.  We're supposed to feel remorseful for her because she was almost raped by the human Max, and that event affected her even with her relationship with Baca, but she gives off an air of superiority and self-contentedness that's a total turnoff.  For a decent horror movie to work, we need to feel empathy and hope for our hero, but I often found myself wanting Max to just rip into her because her character was so insufferable.  If it wasn't for her quest to find a cure, she wouldn't have any redeeming qualities - but even that quest seemed more for herself than society, as she hardly batted an eye seeing her friends die for her quest, even while she was doing the most stupid things (on their medicine run, she separates herself from the group to get family pictures, but she doesn't tell anyone she's going off or asking at least one of them to watch her back, which caused the zombified Max to find her in the first place).

Surprisingly, it's Max's story that's the most alive.  Maybe it's because he was played by Johnathon Scheach, who has the most acting history than anyone in the cast.  When he was alive, Max was a sleaze-ball weirdo who etched Zoe's name on his arm and attempted to rape her, but we never find his motivation for his obsession with her.  When he's eaten by the undead, he somehow manages to retain his humanity in some sense and stay in the hospital for five years waiting for Zoe's return, but we never really know how any of that happened.  All we know is that Max's blood could be a cure for the disease, and Zoe now has to rely on the man who attempted to rape her to save mankind.  It's a strange story, and Schaech really gives a decent performance despite the handicap of being dead for most of it.

One great aspect the film carries for itself is in its makeup design, which resembles the classic Tom Savini of old.  Max, especially, has some stellar makeup work done to him, making him a terrifying figure to see as well as showing hints of humanity in the process.  It's a much more violent version of Romero's classic, with body parts, blood, and guts spewing everywhere, which is always a plus for gorehounds who value this type of film.  It's just the story that's weak, along with the stock characters.  Still, it's a very decent remake of a classic, one I'm sure Romero would've still been proud of.

The Summary:
Even though the film followed the typical tropes of the zombie genre, "Day of the Dead: Bloodline" is saved by its fantastic use of gore and makeup, setting itself apart from other drab Romero remakes and raising it to better levels - still not great, though.

The Score: C-