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STUDIO: First Look
MSRP: $24.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary Provided By Jeffrey Reddick, Steve Miner And Cast Members
An Internet Only Trailer
Alternate Ending
Previews
The Pitch
America hates George A. Romero.
The Humans
Ving Rhames, Mena Suvari, Michael Welch, Pat Kilbane and Nick Cannon
The Nutshell
Leadville, Colorado has just been hit with a strange virus. All around town, the dead are rising and committing poorly shot homicide. This alerts the National Guard, thus beginning the latest brain-dead horror romp. Steve Miner gets a weekend furlough from Director Jail to helm this repeat offense. There’s also a vegan zombie. That’s right, you can skip the rest of this shit now and head to the score.
The Lowdown
Day of the Dead: The Need to Feed follows in the footsteps of John Russo. Taking advantage of weak copyright law and the ability to abuse older contracts, this film is meant to be a loose homage to its namesake. The film starts in Leadville, Colorado. A couple of teens have contracted some strange disease, but that’s just foreshadowing.
Well, it would be foreshadowing if the answer didn’t come less than thirty seconds later. The Army has been using the town as part of a military exercise. The soldiers initiate a quarantine, as they try to understand why so many people seem to be getting nosebleeds. This leads into a quick SFX reel, as we watch the zombification process begin. You get infected, your nose bleeds, you go into a coma and then your skin peels off.
It’s hard to pinpoint where the film falls apart. Was it with the vegan zombie? Was it with the attempts to co-opt the original 1985 film without any of the social commentary? There’s more questions than answers with Steve Miner and Jeffrey Reddick’s work. That’s never a good thing with horror. Horror is one of those instant pleasure genres that demands clarity and quickness to be effective.
Day of the Dead: The Need to Feed is one of those bad ideas that got produced al-dente. That’s why you can’t take Horror seriously in America. It has lost its ability to stand as a genre and it’s becoming more of a dumping ground for old ideas and gross-out imagery. Sure, you can try and raise the supernatural influence of J-Horror. But, even Asian themes are destroyed once reaching the American Cinema. So, where does that leave us? Eagerly awaiting the next 2-D remake to bash.
The Package
Day of the Dead – The Need to Feed comes
to
Blu-Ray with a rather half-assed release. The A/V Quality is all over the damn place. Nighttime exteriors look like shit, as I spot more grain than I did on the Grindhouse Blu-Ray discs. Then, there’s the issue of back channel audio dropout. I thought the packaging said that the audio track was supposed to be TrueHD. If this is Dolby TrueHD, then I’m Donald Duck.
The special features are almost identical to the DVD release. You get the Miner commentary track, where the director doesn’t apologize nearly enough for this film. Then, there’s some bonus footage including an alternate ending. The redband trailer that was created for the internet tries to make something out of the festivities. But, it’s a failed effort.
I knew that this film was going to be a turd. But, I was willing to give Steve Miner a chance. The man used to be a pretty decent journeyman director/editor. That man has died. Forever Young was a long time ago.
