Day Of The Dead: The Need To Feed

Never trust a film "based” on something else. Yet another film that strives to capitalize on the infamy of George A. Romero’s Of The Dead franchise, The Need To Feed is so removed from its namesake that Romero’s distant link and the fact that it’s a zombie flick are the only unifying factors. This has nothing to do with Romero’s 1985 classic. The town of Leadville, Colorado has been overtaken by a mysterious illness, forcing the military to quarantine everyone. Regardless, the disease spreads, creating walking dead who feed on the flesh of the living. A small collective is surprisingly immune to the virus and must struggle to escape Leadville alive. If that summation seems brief, it’s still far more informative than what actually happens during the ensuing hour-and-a-half. Multiplying zeros achieves a greater result than the absolute lack of character development here. At the halfway point, one is still left guessing who’s who and what their importance is, let alone what their names are. Not that it matters much because there’s an absolute lack of decent dialogue, the actors presumably receiving one direction: act scared. Both plot and characters are forsaken to get into the "action,” a haphazard collection of corpses running about killing everything in bad CGI tradition. To that extent, even the zombies suffer a fate worse than un-death. Trapped in cliché, the film abuses the current trend of hyperactive zombies introduced by 28 Days Later, and since overused, having them performing ridiculous superhero antics such as climbing ceilings in an effort to create an eerie atmosphere. The end result is so impossible it only detracts from the overall intent of creating suspense or horror. Even the bonus features are sparse. A director/actor commentary is about as insightful as the film is innovative and there’s a reason the alternate ending was scrapped: it sucks. Diary Of The Dead may have been questionable at best but when compared to this steaming pile, it’s deserving of an Academy Award.